Why are we homeschooling?

First Communion

Homeschooling, presently, has gained quite a solid base following after many years of being frowned upon and misconstrued as a sort of deficient learning method. We clearly remember before how well-meaning friends and family members around us either giving us their blank stare of disbelief or an upfront unsolicited advice to bring our son to a traditional school whenever we told them that he is being home-schooled.  

Looking back, our home-school journey started with painful a family tragedy. Back in 2008, while we were living overseas, we lost our 22 month-old daughter. We were devastated. But with God’s healing and loving support of people around us, we slowly picked-up our broken hearts and discerned how to move forward with our eldest son Zek who was barely 4 years old at that time. Wanting to spend more time with him, intent in sharing our own and shared family values and for lack of any Catholic educational institution in our host country, we searched for options, found a few choices and ultimately decided to home-school our son.

We him enrolled into one of the pioneer-provider of home schooling in the Philippines, the Catholic Filipino Academy (www.catholicfilipinoacademy.com) from Pre-school up until Grade 6.

We had a great time learning lessons together, making it fun and creative. Despite living in a foreign land, Zek learned a lot about our Filipino culture specially our religious belief while taking advantage in learning other things around him. We use lots of Legos, game boards and materials that can be interactive to help us to have more fun in learning. Admittedly, making every lesson interesting to Zek was really a great challenge for us every time. He’s unending questions wore off our energy and our patience so we needed a lot of time out just to gain back our strength to finish our daily tasks. Praying together everyday is what makes us at peace together and helped us persevere.

Zek is more of a visual learner with an entertainment type of personality. We needed to prepare a lot of drawings, posters or visual aids for each topic and we did a lot of art works together that all our walls around the house are filled with hanging papers. We looked for his activities related to his lessons for the mastery of his skills. We visited museums, watched theater plays and frequented theme parks. We also enrolled him to a music class for he loves to sing. We also encouraged him to write about every event that he attended to or any outdoor activities he did into his blog site from www.zeksantos.ph to www.readyzekaim.blogspot.com for this is one of our way to keep track of his amazing journey in learning besides making his portfolio with his progress reports to be submitted quarterly.

My Lego Collections

After more than 7 years of homeschooling, we still ask the same question to ourselves every now and then especially during tough times teaching our eldest son. For now, he has started his Grade 7 in a traditional school because we feel he needed to learn and experience a real-world educational environment and to learn to deal with different kinds of people and situations too. We also decided to build our own house away from the city to improve our lingering health concerns like endless asthma attacks, sinusitis, rhinitis and the host of other pollution-related allergies.

Now that our youngest son Aim has turned 5 years old and is a preschooler, we are leaning towards independent home-schooling based on his learning pattern and do his lessons according to his interest. Aim is showing skills as an auditory learner and loves to read books. With God’s guidance, we will hopefully journey with him as well throughout his young learning life.

CFA Graduation Day

We are always thankful and grateful to God for all the amazing years of home schooling journey of our family.  After all, enjoying while working together with our kids is always a mutually learning experience we look forward to.

May God bless us all.

GTBB - Seven Years of Love

Grace To Be Born shelter celebrated its 7th year anniversary today, May 12, 2016. It started with a celebration of the Holy Mass in the morning and was followed by the open-house visits of its partners and donors, including celebrity husband and wife - Jimmy Alapag and LJ Moreno.

In behalf of Brgy. China, we visited the center to join them in their simple celebration. Our 2 sons - Zek and Aim have such a great time playing with the energetic toddlers while my wife and I did carry-hug duties to some sweet and sleepy infants ( Hi Carmela, Hi Troy, Hi Elise :) ).

An appetizing lunch meal buffet and refreshing sweets were prepared for the visitors before we finally headed home.

Congratulations to GTBB Shelter !
Our love and prayers for all of you.

Love is In the Air

Love is in the air!

Universally accepted is the fact that February is the month of love. Flowers from all sizes and colors bloom. Chocolates of all sizes and flavors abound. And restaurants are fully-booked for the romantic dinners of emancipated couples in love.

Undeniably, Valentines brings out the love amongst many of us.

On February 2, our small vacationing OFW community, Brgy. China, celebrated the month of love early in a more significant way and a more deeply profound experience without the commercial trappings of the season.

We visited Grace to be Born shelter, a half-way house for the unborn and their mothers. We brought a few baby needs for them and spent nearly two hours with these heavenly infants and toddlers playing, talking, hugging and carrying them. Tita Ester and her staffs were more than accommodating in replying to our queries and personal questions about the stories of most kids and how the center helps these kids get back to their mothers/families or to find foster or adoptive families to give the love they need as they grow up.

When we left, we were happy to be able to share love to these lovely kids but deep inside us, we felt more blessed because we felt God’s love playing with us, talking to us, hugging us and carrying our hearts.

Thanks to Chua family - Joel, Sally, Jojo and Mimi.

Thanks to Laca family - Choy, Pam and Gelo

Thanks to kuya Eric

God bless po.

Yuletide Cheers

Spearheaded by our Kuya Rommel, our annual MOP Christmas party for the less-fortunate children of Holy Spirit Parish in Malolos Bulacan, was celebrated in the afternoon of December 24.

Backed by the kind-hearts of EU3 Mobile for light, sounds and additional gifts, Maribon Catering for snacks and drinks, and the generous support of Brgy China for the give-away goodies and game prizes, more than 50 kids and their guardians enjoyed the party as everybody went home refreshed, entertained and blessed with gifts and good memories.

Kuya Rommel hosted the party and Ate Clarisse provided the fun games to everyone’s delight. The traditional games of Stop dance (with a new twist), Bring Me and Name That Tune brought the house down with endless laughter.

Everybody held their breath as the raffle draw for the top prize of Noche Buena grocery package was picked which was eventually won by the youngest kid in the crowd.

                         

As such we would like to sincerely give thanks those who helped our Christmas party this year another meaningful success to bring yuletide cheers to these children. Thanks to all members of our family circle and some friends for their cheerful support from cleaning the halls, preparing the venue, gift wrapping, children’s registration, organizing the kids during snacks and gift-giving.

God bless us all.