I never thought I'd take on homeschooling. I'd decided long ago that I wouldn't do it. I worried too much about my daughter's social skills, despite many homeschooling parents sharing how they met that challenge. I figured I could do it, too, but I didn't think I could do it enough.

But, because of my finances, I had to take on homeschooling my daughter. She won't be 5 until next month, so she can't enter (free) kindergarten. I can't afford the preschools, so I'm homeschooling her.

The first thing I had to do was get past my anxiety over being able to do this. I don't have a college degree. I don't have any special training. But since my daughter's preschooling was either this or nothing, I'd HAVE to do it. Fear or no fear.

The next thing I had to do was educate myself on how to go about doing this. I scoured the Internet, checking Web sites and downloading worksheets specifically for preschoolers. I came up with a "curriculum" and decided not to spend more than 4 hours a day homeschooling my child.

Bonus: It could be ANY PART of the day. My daughter and I are not morning people (we're both night owls LOL), so we could start school at 10 a.m., if we wanted to.

Today, though, on her first day, we started at 5 p.m. I worried about this, but that worry disappeared after only 30 minutes passed of schooling.

Wait a minute. Just THIRTY MINUTES??

Yup.

And we did all the subjects, too. English, reading, math, art and "chorus." (I'm going to include science on Tuesdays and Thursdays.) She'd already had "P.E." with me earlier when we played ball, AND she played with her friend for several hours, as well. So I thought that was enough.

I didn't stretch out each subject. With English, for example, we're working on one letter a week, and today's lesson had her tracing a capital "a" and lowercase "a." (When I asked her to write a little "a" on a sheet of paper, she smiled then wrote a tiny capital "a." The goof.) She had trouble drawing the little "a" by herself, without the worksheets, but with gentle coaxing and practicing, even asking "do you want to see how I draw the little a?" then showing her exactly how to draw it, she finally managed to draw it herself. Throughout the lesson, I had to mentally repeat a mantra from one homeschooling article I'd read online: "Be patient!"

When I felt she had completed that lesson to satisfaction, learning and practicing, we moved on to art then math. During the math lesson, I asked her to verbally count to ten. Now, I may be deaf, but I happened to notice when she missed "six" during her counting. From there, we had chorus and "story time." We talked about how "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" was different in the song and book, and when I asked her how she would make the story different, she said she would put in a princess and an orange fire-breathing dragon. (I wondered how the star fit in with all of this.) We talked about how other songs were different from the way they were told in storybooks, and I asked her which she liked better.

The thing is, she doesn't call me "mom" when I'm schooling her. She calls me "teacher." That definitely makes me smile. In a way, all parents are teachers to their children, but actually being called "teacher" when acting in this capacity really touched me in a way I hadn't expected. It made me feel that maybe I'd be able to find it within me to do this job pretty well after all.