Our Great Homeschool Expreriment

• Sep. 12, 2007 - This you won't learn at school

Here is an old blog entry (from last year) but it had a good list of things that need to be learned in order to succeed, as he said, not just in business but in life. Interestingly, to me, most homeschoolers do teach their children these things. (OK, maybe I'm the only one that teaches #1.) Perhaps this is why homeschoolers, in general, do better when they get to college and out in the workforce. I wonder if I can apply for a gov't grant so I can study the issue...

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• Sep. 8, 2007 - Week One in the Can

No, not the trash can. This is an old movie making metaphor. It means we are done and were successful.

2 notes...

1) I find it fascinating how quickly DB2&3 become accustomed to something and demand it as part of their routine. 3 days into school and they are to do mazes, most definitely, while DB1 works on his copy work for penmanship. I'm going to run out of maze pages soon so I'll have to buy them a couple books at B&N tomorrow.

2) DB1 is much less a pain in the neck now that we have forced him to return to piano lessons and have given him more work to do around the house. Go figure.

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• Aug. 16, 2007 - Health Resource

I don't know about standards in other states. I am fortunate enough to live in one that has very little state control over homeschooling. But if you need a health curriculum I just came across this today. We may go ahead and use it next term when we have a bit extra time on our hands.

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• Aug. 10, 2007 - Back to Homeschool --Question 5

Today's question regards curriculum. This is my list of tested and essential curriculum. Not all of our books have been thoroughly tested yet but these two have AND I think they are the best.

1) Spell to Write and Read. I love this program. It is the most logical one I've seen. I used to think learning to read and write English was very confusing until I was led to this book. I like the way Wanda Sanseri has laid out a usable format for The Writing Road to Reading. I know I'm fortunate to be homeschooling now, after this program was produced, because even though I'm on board with WRR, I'm waaaaay too lazy to put it together myself.

2) Saxon Math, 1&3--These are the two we have used. A lot of people don't like these books because they are not simply workbooks you set in front of the kids while you go and make dinner. Others don't like them (like I foolishly thought when we were done with 1) because they seem to be dully repetitive and are nothing like the way we learned math--one subject, say addition, then you're done and move on to fractions, then you're done after that chapter and move on to something else.

After a year with Calvert Math I suddenly saw what Saxon was trying to do and how all of the other programs I had looked at were going to fail my son. Saxon builds on itself and continues to test the child's knowledge of previous learning so they do not lose it--which was the sad result of using a disjointed curriculum like Calvert. We will continue to use Saxon. The little kids love all the manipulative work of the younger grade books. It makes Math seem more like play. So it looks like it will be a success for everyone.

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• Aug. 9, 2007 - Back to Homeschool--Question 4

If I had only known...

I could write a four volume set on this topic. I think most honest homeschoolers could as well. As Randi pointed out in her entry, I have learned to not use what doesn't work. But I thought I'd give some specifics as to what I'd do differently now as opposed to how I thought it should be done then.

As I stated previously, homeschool is NOT!!!!! school at home. To that end I would have done the following our first year...

1) We would never have cracked a book (except the bible and the catechism).

2) We would have played at the park.

3) We would have done fun things like baking cakes & cookies

4) We would have bought a membership at the little zoo in Santa Ana that DB1 loved so much and we would have gone every Friday and rode the train and looked at the animals.

5) Finally, and most importantly, we would have followed DB1s lead and learned things he was interested in learning.

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• Aug. 8, 2007 - Back to Homeschool--Question 3

Today's question is "Getting out there...". Randi wants to know how we get our kids, well, for lack of a better word, socialized.

I, of course, hate the idea that "socialization" is important to our children on par with eating. So, I keep my children locked in their closets except when they are doing school work.

OK, now that I have that out of my system, I'll put together a quick (ha-ha) post about all the things my kids do and the benefits of doing them.

My children participate in a dizzying array of activities. They are on the go almost every day of the week. Sometimes they go but it is not to their activity, they simply go to get out of the house when another brother has a lesson. Sometimes they go just to watch the trains go by. :-) But, it cannot be said my kids stay home all the time.

We have ballet, tap, karate, ice skating, and Cadets during the school year. We also go to park days and try to have friends come with us. Our activities increase during the summer: Summer Intensives, various sports & drama camps. My oldest has been gone from home almost every day of the week since the last week of June. (He's had enough, btw, and still has two more weeks to go. lol)

I don't put my kids into these programs for socialization however. In fact, socialization is the one aspect that concerns me at these programs. Even at the church programs there are people of questionable character. DB1 learned his first swear word from another boy at Cadets, and there are kids at church who lie to him. But we can't keep him in a complete bubble, just teach him how to deal with it.

One by product of my children participating in extra-curricular activities is that they meet and befriend the lost. But, they do it in a controlled setting where the children are not in charge. For one hour (or two) a week they get to know other children in an environment that is very structured and there aren't ideologies being force fed to them. In this safe environment, even without me being there, they are able to stand. Why? Because I have them thoroughly "brainwashed" into the Christian way of thinking. ;-) In our home, we are not afraid to discuss opposing viewpoints. This is where it ought to be discussed so the children learn what we believe and how that affects our interactions with others. And that is the majority of their teaching, not just a few minutes each night before they go to bed, after a day long barrage of evolution, sex ed, and Heather has Two Mommies (or bad phonics & grammar & other things we oppose).

Being homeschooled does not mean removing yourself from the world around you, it means that you are prepared to meet the world around you and to be able to stand firm in your beliefs. Anyone who still believes the opposite has never bothered to educate themselves and holds to myths which, sadly, continue to be perpetuated by the media, NEA, and anti-homeschooling Christians.

You knew I'd end up on my soapbox some time this week, didn't you?

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• Aug. 7, 2007 - Back to Homeschool--Question 2

Today's question from i have to say is "How do you homeschool?".

I started out using classical education. I would have loved to have been instructed that way as a child and would have thrived. (Classical method in a military school, ah, the stuff of my dreams.) Unfortunately, I gave birth to a child who received some sort of recessive gene that caused him to be an artist. Artists and classical education don't make for a good mix, at least not the way we were doing it, so I've had to learn to be flexible and creative.

This year we are allowing DB1 a lot more say in how and what he is taught. He does understand the need for the basics (Phonics, Grammar, Math, and Latin--yes, Latin) so it is not difficult. But the teaching does not need to be "by the book." Sometimes, the book is wrong for him. He doesn't "do" busy work so we cut a lot of things out.

Some examples of how we are allowing him to chose his course of study are: 1) We allowed him to choose whether or not he would like to take his Latin online. He chose not to. Guess that means I'm going to continue to learn Latin. ;-) 2) He chose the subject he will study for science. 3) He requested to not have to write down all the word definitions they want in Shurley Grammar (busy work that could be presented in a better format, imo).

At this point there are some things we do that we like to do the "unschooling" way, there are others for which we use a more classical approach.

Then there's DB2. Age 5. A born classical learner. Yeah, this is going to be fun. :-D

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• Aug. 6, 2007 - Back to Homeschool--Question 1

In case you hadn't heard, Randi at i have to say..., is doing a "Back to Homeschool" thing this week. This is the sort of thing bloggers love, someone encouraging them to write about themselves. I, of course, couldn't resist.

First question: What led to your decision to homeschool?

I have visited this question often both in the blogosphere and here in the so-called real world so I'll just post the short version today.

Neither my husband nor I had very good experiences in public school. I'm fond of saying that I learned to hate school in Kindy. That was when my family went on a month-long vacation to visit my grandparents and the teachers gave me a cart full of work to have completed by my return. I had to work when my little brother was out enjoying the snow. I finished every last piece of paper only to return and discover the class hadn't done one weeks worth of the materials I was given and I had to redo everything. Almost nothing I did while on vacation counted. Before that time I loved school. To make sure I keep this short and to keep me off my soap-box let's just say it went down hill after that.

I learned about homeschooling when I was 16 and immediately knew it was for me. Unfortunately, when we finally got around to having kids it looked for a very long time that we would have only one. I had always envisioned homeschooling a large family and could not make our situation fit into what I thought homeschooling was supposed to be. I had never known anyone who had homeschooled only one so when DB1 was 3 we enrolled him in one of the best private schools in our county (I still wasn't about to send my kid off to public school). By the end of his first year at school we were surprised to discover we were pregnant with our second child.

Then, of course, our second had a birth defect. We learned far too much about germs while we were in the NICU with him and decided we really had no choice but to homeschool. Our son's health depended on it.

Here we are, 5 years and 2 more kids later, and as I look back I'm thankful that things have turned out as they have, but I also wish I hadn't been so terrified to homeschool an only child. Had I known then what I know, about the resources available and about what homeschooling really is (NOT just school at home) I think we would have made a much different decision in the beginning.

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• Aug. 3, 2007 - Yesterday's Learning

Yesterday we found this

in the sink.

I've seen these in both houses we've lived in but had never actually seen it moving. Usually they are just hanging on the walls, most often in the bathroom. It took us a while but we finally tracked down what it was. Turns out it's a household casebearer. Interestingly enough, I've never seen the moth, only the "baby."

Here are some interesting sites we found while looking for it.

http://www.whatsthatbug.com/index.html
http://www.projects.ex.ac.uk/bugclub/bugid.html
http://www.ento.csiro.au/index.html
http://www.ivyhall.district96.k12.il.us/4TH/KKHP/1INSECTS/bugmenu.html
http://bugguide.net/node/view/15740
http://www.abc.net.au/creaturefeatures/
http://pick5.pick.uga.edu/
http://strano16.interfree.it/home.htm
http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/iiin/taxonomy_menu/2
http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/index.html

Yes, it took us quite a while to find it. Apparently, most bug websites and guides do not have pictures of or searches for the larvae. We finally found it at that first site listed, "What's That Bug?"

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• Aug. 2, 2007 - Hey, y'all

I've decided to start a blog to use as a sort of homeschool journal. I hope to keep track of what we are learning so I can see better whether I'm accomplishing anything or not.

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