For beginners

I meet families every fall who are just beginning home educating. When the family has chosen to home educate from the start and the child has never been in a public or private school, the first steps are fairly clear. Learning to read is the most important task in those early years of home education, along with the basic math and counting skills. For the content subjects like science and social studies, often field trips followed up with related library books, or simple nature studies and basic geography are all that's needed. There's no old habits to break or remedial learning to think about.

However when there are children who have been in school, there are more challenges. Choosing curriculum depends on the skills already in place. Thankfully, most math programs have on-line placement tests that clarify which program is appropriate. If there are serious academic challenges, there needs to be a focus on identifying the problem and fixing it. Even for a teenager, if the phonics skills haven't been taught there may be reading challenges that necessitate reviewing the most basic skills. If the mental arithmetic skills are not in place, they need to be learned before continuing on with algebra.

Beyond the academics, there is also the change in thinking about what school means. At home, the student is not learning to pass the test or trying to keep up with the rest of the class. The student is learning to actually know the subject, to acquire skills that equip them to understand what they read and to meld those skills into abilities that will enable them to do their life work, both in employment and in fulfilling their God-given role in the world. We are not just about completing the book, we need to be focussed on growing, changing and becoming better at all the things we are already good at. Learning is challenging, interesting, fun, sometimes difficult, but finally satisfying and enriching. Communicating that to our children is one of the greatest goals and challenges of home education.

The other part of my fall

Fall has always been about back to school, whether it's the back to school of home education, or of sending one or more of my children to college, and the start up of all the activities that follow the school year.

For me, it is also about starting the other half of my home education activity. For fourteen years, i have been a home education facilitator, working with families to help them plan their own families' home education programs. I count myself very fortunate to be able to be a support and encouragement to other families. By far the greatest part of my work consist of affirming choices and convictions parents already hold in regard to their children's learning. Sometimes more direction is needed. Very rarely a family just is not achieving what they should be, and they need help with setting up structure and consistency.

I have met such a diverse set of people, each with a unique story that led them to home education, each motivated by the earnest wish to give their children the education they need. I have seen an incredibly varied set of approaches to the task of home education, and I have seen remarkable success across that whole range. I have seen enormous pride in the growth and success of each child, and in the awareness by moms who have been the driving force behind that.

Next week, I begin again to make fall visits to families I have known for years, and to some I am just meeting. I look forward to all that I will learn as I sit down at kitchen tables to talk about the learning that takes place around those tables. It's a great blessing to me. I hope that I can be a blessing to them.

Post-secondary update

I updated the paragraph at the top of the page, and one part of it deserves an explanation. It did say that our third child is studying Engineering which was his plan when summer began. However, his week of engineering introductory classes convinced him that the structure of the program (and the competency of some of the instructors) were not a good fit for him. By the end of the week, which was a pre-semester session required for all first year engineering students, he knew he wanted to pursue other options. He is now enrolled in a Bachelor of Science program, with a math and physics major. He may refine his studies further to do a combined Arts and Science degree in Philosophy and Math.

It was interesting to watch him work through his options and change direction this fall. He has become a discerning consumer of his educational choices, and knows how to seek out new options as he better understands what he would like to learn and how to get those classes.

Unfortunately, registering late for classes meant that he has a very unbalanced work load-three math classes and a physics class mean a lot of homework. 26 pages last weekend of math solutions! He's wearing out pencil leads fast these days!

Poetry

One of the books we're enjoying particularly this year is All the Small Poems by Valerie Worth. It's part of the Sonlight Core 5 package, a book I had never heard before. It's a compilation of four books previously printed separately. Each poem is short, descriptive and straightforward in style, mostly about nature.

The Sonlight approach to poetry is simple, just reading each poem, talking a bit about the imagery or the thought expressed and then re-reading it. It's a lovely way to approach a poem as a reader rather than the typical pick it to bits method many of us were subjected to. I have done the same ort of thing before with other poetry, and enjoyed studying poems with all of our children.

Some people ask why we should bother to read poetry. Poetry and good literature of other types is the expression of deep human emotion, the response of the soul to beauty, to love, to pain, to all manner of human experience. It's important that our children ponder these things, that they know that they too will experience times when feelings are too much for them to put into words, and that others have had the same thoughts and feelings, and struggled to express them, and moved on stronger because they could express them.

There are lines of poems that lurk in my mind, ready to pop out when I need them. "Glory be to God for dappled things" is there when I see a scene of beauty (Gerard Manley Hopkins; Pied Beauty). I remember "I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep" when I see winter trees (Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening). Spring makes me remember "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/ is hung with bloom along the bough" (A. E. Housman). Memories of my mom are tied to the poetry she read me, especially childhood favorites like Wynken, Blynken and Nod.

I encourage parents to include poetry in their routines of home education. It can be simple, and it will be memorable.

(A great book for older children and teens is the Dover Press book 100 Best-Loved Poems, edited by Philip Smith. It sells for about $2.50 so you can easily buy a coopy for each child, and there are enough great poems for a couple of years of occasional reading.)

One month done

The start of the school year always results in the same challenges: how to do all the things I've been doing all summer long and add to that the educational, extra-curricular and family activities that resume. Apparently, blogging was one of the things I set aside so that we could get going on the other priorities.

I am really enjoying the Sonlight core 5 curriculum Hannah and I are working through. The geography program is great, well-thought out and user friendly. She has been able to do most of it independently. We're off to a good start with Math, although I'm "behind" if one only considers the lesson numbers. Hannah thinks of herself as bad at math so I'm keeping close tabs on each lesson and stepping in with questions to break down the steps of each problem whenever she feels stuck. We're on schedule with reading, both the books she's reading independently and the ones I'm reading to her. And we are now back to the habit of home education, so that both of us are ready to begin every morning after breakfast.

The challenges I'm still working on: We have no specific science program this year, so we need to pursue interesting topics as they arise. That takes a different kind of focus since it can interfere with the schedule I've worked to establish. And household stuff (laundry, vacuuming, general clutter control) always takes a secondary role until the schedule is better in place. This fall that's even more challenging since I really do need to get exercise several times a week, and I often need a nap!

There were moments in the days after my heart attack when I wondered if I could manage to continue home educating. I am really thankful that it is working, that I can keep up with the challenges and carry on with my conviction that each of my children have the individualized education that they need. It's been a good month.

Reason #2

When people ask us why we chose to home educate our children, it's hard to pin it down to just one or two reasons. I think most of the really big choices in our lives are like that; there are so many reasons for the major decisions that it can be difficult to sum them up in just a sentence or two.

When I think back to the days when I was first thinking about school for our children, I know tha tI really wasn't thinking about the faith issues that are such a common reason for home educating even though our Christian faith is fundamental to every aspect of ourlives. I wasn't really looking at the intellectual reasons either, or the social issues of school. I was watching two small children learning together, and loving the sweetness of their interaction, and knowing that sending the older one to school would cut that short.

The primary reason then for keeping our chidlren home was to allow them to continue to be each other's closest friend, to watch big sister teach little brother and learn from him as well, and to enjoy the shared experience of taking them together on nature walks and museum trips and various other excursions, adding in the next lttle brother as he grew and caught up to them.

We hear so much about sibling rivalry and so little about brotherly love. We tried as parents to foster a sense that each child is a gift to the entire family, that siblings are the most constant people in our lives since we outlive our parents and move away from our classmates, but maintain that sibling connection for a lifetime. Our children now consider each other to be close friends, and watching that is such a blessing to us as their parents. One of the gifts of home education to be sure!

Some Better Reasons to Home School-#1

I just got home from St Albert's Not-Back-to-School picnic, attended by at least 15 families and about forty children(maybe more-it's hard to count a moving herd). It was a lovely hot afternoon, at a park with a huge playgound and a natural area for the kids to wander through.

I've walked past the local school during recess and watched children there. Usually, it's chaotic, loud, jarring. And if I stop to watch, so often there's a child on the the schoolyard who doesn't look happy, who isn't included in the fun, or who is even being hurt by the things that are going on.

Our children today playing in the park were all having fun. They were making new friends, they were exploring the playground together, they were helping the littler children. There were some tears troubles because children do fall, or accidentally hurt each other, or break a rule and face a consequence, but the overall atmosphere was so peaceful and contented. It was a lovely way to begin our fall, to watch children being happy and being nice! I really believe that attitude is one of the hidden benefits of home education, not related at all to any of the academic issues, but so important to the quality of our children's characters, so valuable for our society.