Monday, October 6, 2014

Homeschooling: Why it's Awesome!


Homeschooling: Why it’s Awesome! 
First Things First
Is everyone decided? Is everyone ready to be part of the journey?



Homeschooling is the greatest journey my daughter and I took together. After 12 years of learning (for us both), I am able to condense our success and tips to this little blog. These are the notes from a talk I gave in March of this year~

Enjoy!

Remember…
1. Just like starting a family, homeschooling is not an accessory—you don’t just add it to your “plate”. Home life is now all about family + homeschooling.
2. Do the research, take notes, review those notes, and make lists.
3. Keep track of everything you do! People you talk to (with dates), paperwork, and your calendar (from year to year). Also, keep notes you make regarding your children’s performances and all their work—save this bounty of paperwork until they are in college.
4. When you are homeschooling everything counts; cooking & gardening with mom, sewing and doing household chores or repairs, going to the market and budgeting, car maintenance, church obligations or volunteer work, working out or joining the track team, art lessons, math or geography clubs, museum visits, and science groups…the list is endless.


5. Join a homeschool group or co-op. This is a wonderful way to seek out like-minded adult friends for parents and children of different ages for the kiddies. They also provide educational field trips, classes, and plain, old fun outings—squelching the naysayers who believe homeschooling is isolating. Each group is unique to the parents involved; check out a few before deciding who to go with, or join a few! The support system works wonders for those times parents feel they are lacking.
6. Know your state guidelines—what you must teach to comply and how often and when. Each state is different.
7. Inform the town you live in of your intent to homeschool.
8. Consider joining HSLDA (Home School Legal Defense). It was the peace of mind I needed to feel safe during a scary patch of homeschooling history. I look at it like insurance. It is $120 per year and it’s cheap compared to the worry or troubles some experience without this service.


Information from their website follows—visit their site for more detailed information.


http://www.hslda.org/default.aspx

Your Decision is made, what do you do about a curriculum?

Take your time and choose wisely—it can make or break your enjoyment level of teaching…
1. Do you want to use good, old-fashioned books and notebooks with a smattering of computer work as needed? Or, do you prefer all online teaching, workload, and tracking?
2. Do you want a curriculum-selling educational company to keep transcripts? 
3. Is it important the curriculum be (only) Christian/God based?
4. Are you comfortable culling together different sources to create a complete curriculum geared to your child/children?
5. Does unschooling appeal to you?

Plan your style of teaching and create the atmosphere that works for you and your family: kitchen table/counter for math and home economics and the living room floor for reading and yoga, maybe off to the local park to run around and then enjoy painting (on canvas) the world around you.



Common Questions:
How do single parents or working parents expect to homeschool?
How do you plan vacations?
How do you count the 180 days necessary—do you really “school” that many days?
How do you afford the costs of curricula for the children year after year and extra-curricular activities?
How do I fit everything in each day and still do what I have to for my family?
What if I don’t know how to teach something or I get stumped and can’t move forward?
What if my child is unmotivated?
What if I don’t get along with my child? What if homeschooling makes it worse?

The answer to most of these questions (for me) is prayerfulness. A constant dialogue with God certainly helped me to make the correct decisions and allowed me to move in the right direction. 

You teach when you are able and allow the child to work independently as often as possible, especially as they get older. A homeschool child doesn’t need the busy work they assign in school.
Once he/she gets it—move on! Don’t go over the same lessons just because they are in the lesson plan. Homeschoolers tend to move ahead quickly. They are also (usually) better-rounded students because they are privy to constant learning opportunities.

Yes, count the days…180 by law. Easily done when the occasional Sunday is added to the week or a school vacation day is used to continue homeschool studies. The drab winter holiday day spent lazing about won’t be missed if it is used instead to be ahead school days and allow for early dismissal during the month of May or June. That may take some convincing in January, but the point will be proven when they are swimming in June instead of finishing up the school year. I also employed year-round schooling, this allowed for days off whenever we wanted without fear of being behind in studies.
When short on funds, buy used online or swap with others (homeschool groups help here). Sharing curricula or gathering lesson plans and resources online are other options. Public school systems are required to provide curricula to homeschoolers who ask for it. Homeschoolers are also permitted to attend school activities as desired. Research the rights and responsibilities of this perk if it interests you. There are guidelines.
Just as you plan your child’s lesson plans, you must plan your days to fit in the housework, cooking, errands, work/job, and driving around--and do it without being grumpy; not easy for anyone, day after day. You have to remember that you can’t do everything! You have to prioritize—make lists—nix what doesn’t work for you or your family. Cooking can be part of school, as can the responsibility of vacuuming or caring for pets. How you handle your day will teach your children how to handle theirs…right into adulthood. They learn by example, first.



When you don’t know a subject well enough to teach it, and the instructions in the book aren’t teaching you enough to do it with your student, employ dads, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, homeschool group, tutors, the mailman…
Seek and yea shall find. There are people and websites to get you through it.

When children are unmotivated, a short break with a redirection to another task or subject may do the trick; other times, there may be a reason requiring some digging on your part to pull the reason out of the child. Often times, a fear of failure or boredom can cause a child to procrastinate or outright refuse to continue working.

It’s hard to imagine wanting to homeschool a child you don’t get along with, but if this is the case, the other parent or other dedicated adult must be available to tag-team teach if homeschooling this child is that important to you or to him/her.

What is unschooling? (Per Pat Farenga)
“This is also known as interest driven, child-led, natural, organic, eclectic, or self-directed learning. Lately, the term "unschooling" has come to be associated with the type of homeschooling that doesn't use a fixed curriculum. When pressed, I define unschooling as allowing children as much freedom to learn in the world, as their parents can comfortably bear. The advantage of this method is that it doesn't require you, the parent, to become someone else, i.e. a professional teacher pouring knowledge into child-vessels on a planned basis. Instead you live and learn together, pursuing questions and interests as they arise and using conventional schooling on an "on demand" basis, if at all. This is the way we learn before going to school and the way we learn when we leave school and enter the world of work. So, for instance, a young child's interest in hot rods can lead him to a study of how the engine works (science), how and when the car was built (history and business), who built and designed the car (biography), etc. Certainly these interests can lead to reading texts, taking courses, or doing projects, but the important difference is that these activities were chosen and engaged in freely by the learner. They were not dictated to the learner through curricular mandate to be done at a specific time and place, though parents with a more hands-on approach to unschooling certainly can influence and guide their children's choices.

Unschooling, for lack of a better term (until people start to accept living as part and parcel of learning), is the natural way to learn. However, this does not mean unschoolers do not take traditional classes or use curricular materials when the student, or parents and children together, decide that this is how they want to do it. Learning to read or do quadratic equations are not "natural" processes, but unschoolers nonetheless learn them when it makes sense to them to do so, not because they have reached a certain age or are compelled to do so by arbitrary authority. Therefore it isn't unusual to find unschoolers who are barely eight-years-old studying astronomy or who are ten-years-old and just learning to read.”



RI-Based Homeschool Groups:


Notable Homeschooling Authors:
John Holt
John Taylor Gatto
Mary Griffith
Mary Pride

Enjoy the sun, the trees, the grass, the flowers, the fresh air, the birds, and even the squirrels (little garden bandits they are)...all the world has to offer...that is your classroom.