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Reschedule, Refocus, Regroup

March 10, 2006 by Leave a Comment

I am convinced that the first thing dogs learn in Puppy School is how to get leaves and grass to stick to their tummies while they are outdoors and then how to sneak back indoors with those leaves and shake them off. Extra points if they can do it just after you have vacuumed. No matter how much time I have just spent cleaning the carpet, as soon as the dog makes one pass through the house, my progress seems non-existent. I pick up the leaves and bits of grass. I adapt and keep making progress.

Remember that time you were running late for an appointment, and you discovered a road closure between Point A (your house) and Point B (your destination)? Whether the closure was due to a street repair crew or a traffic accident, it still caused you to change your route and find an acceptable detour to help you reach your destination by your deadline. You had to adapt to keep making progress.

How many times could your baby be counted on to spit up all over your clothing just as you were going out the door (usually on your way to church)? Now, a little spitty-ness is to be expected, but I am talking about a major drenching. Back inside for a quick change. Adapt and keep making progress.

Today you find yourself mid-way through your homeschool year, perhaps even close enough to the end of the year that you can see The Finish Line coming in to view. However, just like the leaves scattered on the clean carpet, just like the roadblock when you were running late, just like the need to make a complete wardrobe change, you have obstacles hindering your progress. Your schedule has gotten completely out of whack, and you desperately need to get it back in whack. It is time for some serious mid-year rescheduling. You need to adapt so that you can keep making progress.

Each fall, I would lay out my plan of action for the coming school year, detailing which pages of which books should be done by which days. [See Guilt-Free Lesson Plans and Scheduling] I always seemed to be very ambitious at the beginning of each year, so much so that I scheduled way too many things for my students to actually complete. Each spring, I would revise my plan, reconciling it with the reality that had taken place over the past few months. Some years, the plan was revamped more than once. Illnesses happened, tragedies occurred, and difficult lesson concepts played havoc with the best-laid plans. My mid-year rescheduling time would remove the burden of over-commitment from my students and make their assignment charts look do-able again. I recalculated the number of pages to be completed for each day and adjusted our charts accordingly. Some subjects were finished early, giving my students extra time in their schedules for the subjects in which they were lagging behind. We adapted in order to keep making progress.

As I did, you planned your year’s work with the best of intentions, but you could not foresee the things that would prevent your students from completing that work. You have all done the best you could under the circumstances. Even if you have a student who has been flat-out lazy and neglected his work, heaping guilt on him will not be a strong motivator for progress. Cut back his assigned schedule to an amount that he can reasonably accomplish and help him gain a foothold on success. Once he has tasted the victory of a finished job, he will see things differently. So-called “lazy” students or those who do not work “up to their potential” usually suffer from the curse of perfectionism: I can’t get it right, so why bother trying? I know; I used to be one of them. Scaling back assignments to a manageable level or reducing projects to bite-sized tasks can make a huge difference in whether or not a student succeeds. [See Learning to Walk — Seen as a New Lesson] You need to adapt so that he can keep making progress.

It can be very helpful to sit down with your students and discuss what projects they are enjoying the most, what they would like to continue doing, and what they would like to drop. There may be some half-completed projects on your schedule that no one really cares about anymore. Perhaps the lesson has already been learned and dedicating further time to a certain project is pointless. You may decide to speed through the current section to allow yourselves to spend extra time on an upcoming set of lessons. Maybe an activity can take the place of several lessons, allowing you to skip over a portion of the planned bookwork while still learning the concepts. You will want to identify the most important tasks, lessons, or books so that you can focus on finishing them. You may decide to carry a subject over a few weeks into the summer to keep it from being too burdensome to finish on the same timetable as the other schoolwork. You need to adapt so that you can keep making progress.

We also began to prune back our social commitments each time the calendar promised that spring was approaching. We wanted to focus on our lessons and tie up all those loose ends to finish the year instead of running around to boring club meetings or uninteresting field trips. We reprioritized, rescheduled, refocused, and regrouped. We dropped out of activities if they had become more pain than gain. We did it all Guilt-Free, knowing that we were ranking things according to our own priorities, not anyone else’s. We adapted so that we could keep making progress.

I have a favorite line from a movie that I have quoted to my students when encouraging them to persevere in the face of a difficult task. The movie, Heartbreak Ridge, is hardly commendable because of its abhorrent, R-rated language, but the message of the film is nonetheless very inspirational. Clint Eastwood portrays a no-nonsense Marine sergeant, doing his best to turn raw recruits into something The Corps can depend on. The line I quote is his anthem throughout the film, “Improvise! Adapt! Overcome!” He continually changes the rules on his platoon, forcing them to think, to improvise, to adapt, to overcome, to succeed. When they find themselves isolated in the midst of a fierce battle, it is his bizarre training methods that enable them to survive and emerge victorious. Their ability to adapt allowed them to keep making progress.

As you sense the end of this school year sneaking up on you, take some time to evaluate your progress and revise your plans. Pinpoint the things that are most important and work toward completing them. You wrote your schedule: Guilt-Free Homeschooling allows you to change your schedule. A re-tooled battle plan can bring a tremendous boost of adrenalin to sagging students and a tired teacher. You need to adapt so that you can keep making progress.

Filed Under: Doing Your "Best", Encouragement for Parents, Encouraging Your Student, Homeschool How-To's, Scheduling

The Value of Supplemental Activities

March 2, 2006 by 1 Comment

A friend recently posed an intriguing question to a group of homeschooling moms: “If money were no object, what would you purchase first for your homeschool?” The usual wish-list items came out: specific curriculum choices, books, more books, shelves for all the books, rooms just for school stuff, and books. However, I was the most surprised by reading a spontaneous part of my own answer: “For us, it wasn’t the curriculum itself that ‘made’ homeschooling — it was the extra-curricular activities and supplemental things we did that we remember most and learned the most from.” It was an aspect of homeschooling that I had never truly pondered before, at least not in so many words. I have often suggested various activities to help struggling students bridge the learning styles gap with assorted curricula, but suddenly I was seeing activities as The Most Important Part of any homeschooling experience.

It is not the curriculum itself that matters most; it is what you do with the program and what you do besides the program that will make all the difference in your homeschooling endeavor. Supplemental activities can turn a mediocre program into an educational experience far better than the most renowned program on the market. The activities you choose can be tailored to your child’s individual needs and interests, whereas a boxed program must be universally applicable.

Some programs are better than others, but that still goes only so far. My regular readers already know how much I loved Miquon Math for grades 1-3, but the suggested activities were what really drove the concepts home. Practice away from the workbooks and playing and experimenting with Cuisenaire rods are what solidified the knowledge that was presented in the books. Saxon Math effectively used real-life examples through word problems to teach the students how to set up a formula. (Once they have the formula, any math student can solve the formula.) Our supplemental activities for Saxon math included applying the formulas to more areas of real life: relating fractions to pies and candy bars, doubling recipes for practice using fractions, calculating the areas, perimeters, and angles for home improvement projects, and applying the mathematics of probabilities to everyday situations in my students’ lives. When my daughter had trouble understanding probability from the textbook example of red marbles and blue marbles, I changed the problem to fit her teddy bear collection. Suddenly, her favorite white polar bear stood out in marked contrast to the other bears, and the chances of selecting him at random from a pile of stuffed bears was more easily understood.

We played a great deal with construction toys, but we always built something, even if our projects were not elaborate architectural models. We never stacked the bricks just for the sake of stacking bricks. Instructions for Erector Set models or K’nex figures were a launching pad for our imaginations as we challenged ourselves to combine patterns or build bigger or better designs. Real life usually requires you to have some type of plan, so our activities always had a basic plan as well. We dared to dream, and we learned through the trying, whether we succeeded or not.

We are all familiar with the jokes about students who put a book underneath their pillows, hoping to absorb information by osmosis while they slept. We smile and laugh, knowing that there is no possible way for that to happen, but many times we urge a child to “read the book,” expecting him to absorb all the information in that manner. If the child is adept at visual learning, it may happen, but so much more knowledge and understanding can be gained through the addition of a few supplemental activities. Activities break down the barriers of learning styles, making it possible to teach your child in the way he learns best, no matter what curriculum you are using.

When I took a college chemistry course, I worked industriously at memorizing vast quantities of information. They were only meaningless words to me, but I forced myself to memorize them so that I could reproduce them on test papers. However, through working in the chemistry lab, experimenting with the acids, bases, minerals, and gases, I began to understand the concepts behind those words. I had read the book, and I had learned the facts, but I did not gain understanding until I got into a supplemental activity. Watching bubbles form in a beaker of water as electrodes forced the hydrogen and oxygen molecules to separate made the atomic bonding process straightforward and uncomplicated. It was right there in front of me. I could watch it happen. I collected bubbles of the two gases in separate test tubes and proved their identities with another test. A similar experiment electroplated a nickel coin with the copper from a penny. The diagrams my professor scribbled on the chalkboard became stop-motion animations of the molecular breakdown process. He showed me through symbols and arrows the explanation for what I saw forming in the beaker. It was not sleight-of-hand illusion; it was science taking place at my fingertips. It was not something I could learn sufficiently from merely reading a book. I had read about the process, but actually doing it made the reading portions of my lesson obsolete.

Supplemental activities do not have to be expensive or use fancy materials. Many wonderful, educational activities can be obtained from the simple things you already have around the house.
* Read aloud and discuss plot lines, characters, and what-do-you-think-will-happen-next.
* Play with art and craft materials, even if you have no natural artistic ability whatsoever. If you have difficulty drawing, get off the paper and try “sculpting” with Play-Doh — maybe you are more of a three-dimensional thinker.
* Draw diagrams, even if you have no natural artistic ability whatsoever. The simple chalkboard illustrations that have helped me gain understanding were not artistic or even dimensionally accurate, but I still learned and understood.
* Use manipulatives: hands-on learning aids, whether they are homemade flash cards, things for counting and sorting, or a clock-face made from a paper plate and cardboard “hands.” If it helps your student understand a concept, it is worth your time, trouble, and expense.
* Build models. Who cares if popsicles sticks do not resemble quality building materials? I bought my students a small package of pre-notched “popsicle” sticks (think miniature, flat Lincoln Logs) in the craft department of Wal-Mart. They never looked like much when we built things with them, but the knowledge gained from the process of fitting them together was irreplaceable.
* Do experiments. A vinegar and baking soda reaction is fascinating to someone who has never watched it before. Woodburning with nothing more than a magnifying glass and the sun is another unforgettable experience (especially when you stop paying attention to where you have the light focused and your leg suddenly gets hot).
* Play games. Children sometimes balk at spending more time studying their lessons, but have you ever had a child turn down the chance to play a game? Any game using money is math; many games require forethought and strategy, and all games teach sportsmanship. Get together with other homeschooling families and share your favorite games with each other.
* Invent a new game: take a concept that your students need work on and invent a new game for practicing that concept. Make the pieces yourself or borrow them from other games and write all the necessary rules for some real-life problem-solving experience. I dare you to try it.
* Take on hosting a group project (even if it is nothing more than a Monopoly marathon) and enlist your students to help you plan and execute it. We learned much more from preparing large-scale events than we ever could have learned from merely participating in them. My daughter first ventured into administrative duties when we tackled an event that combined several homeschool support groups. The skills she developed then still serve her today in retail management.
* GO see things and DO stuff: zoos, museums, libraries, etc. A “family pass” will often be usable at more than one location. We purchased a season-long family pass to a small local zoo, only to find that it also entitled us to free admission to a much larger zoo in another city an easy day-trip away. Our pass also included other zoos, history museums, art museums, and science museums for a full year. For a little more than the standard admission for one family visit, we were able to take in multiple wonderful experiences. Another amazing surprise for me was how fascinating unfamiliar libraries were to my children. We dropped by the public library in another city and ended up spending hours exploring it and seeing how its features differed from our local library. Whether you take an extended, educational, family vacation or just walk around your neighborhood noticing the architectural differences, it can be a memorable learning experience.

Anything that takes place outside of the textbooks or outside of the house is always memorable. If I were to ask my children to name their “Top 10 Favorite Things” from our homeschooling days, none of their responses would include the textbooks we used. Their “Top 1,000” list would barely touch on textbooks. Let me say this again: it is not the curriculum itself that matters the most. It is what you do with the program and what you do besides the program that will make all the difference in your homeschooling experience.

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Auditory Learning, Curriculum Choices, Encouragement for Parents, Homeschool How-To's, Homeschooling as a Lifestyle, Kinesthetic Learning, Learning Outside the Books, Tactile Learning

Surviving the First Year of Homeschooling after Leaving Public School

January 10, 2006 by 3 Comments

I understand your frustration. We began homeschooling after our older child had spent several years in public school (our younger child spent only Kindergarten in The System). We felt strongly that God was leading us to take responsibility for our children’s education, but we had a difficult time finding adequate support from other homeschoolers. Most of the other homeschooling families we knew at that time had been educating their own children from the beginning and had never experienced the trauma of feeling that public school had failed them. Parents often write to me, seeking encouragement and advice in surviving this transition from public school to homeschool. I know exactly what they mean. It is a completely foreign situation, somewhat like starting over from the beginning, but with students who cannot afford to lose any ground.

Children who undergo this change from public school to homeschool will experience abrupt (but not disastrous) changes in environment, teaching styles, and learning situations. These changes will usually affect behavioral changes in the child — sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

The environmental changes may put the child on an emotional roller coaster. If he had difficulties at public school or did not enjoy that experience, he may be relieved to be away from that setting. At the same time, he may miss some of his acquaintances or the reliable routine of scheduled activities. Enjoying school, not enjoying school; missing the other students, not missing the other students; excitement, depression; up, down — most children do not have the maturity to effectively cope with the emotions they will experience through this process without help and hugs from their understanding parents.

If the student is eager to adapt to homeschooling, the teaching parent will not have much difficulty during the transition phase. However, some students are not in agreement with a parental decision to leave the public school and view the change as something to rebel against. In this case, their behavior may become uncooperative and stubborn and include what I call the “Limp Spine Syndrome,” that tendency for a child’s entire body to go completely limp whenever you urge him to pick up a pencil. The simplest assignments may drag on and on, and work that the child could easily have accomplished within a few minutes’ time may stretch out to last an entire day. If the child had formerly been an attentive student in the public classroom, he may just be dawdling at his work in an effort to substitute Mom’s companionship for the classmates he is missing, or he may be seeing this extended class time as a way to monopolize Mom’s time, keeping her from completing other household tasks, and thereby punishing her for taking him away from his former friends and associates. Students who are used to having homework assigned to be done later may not immediately grasp the concept of doing their work during class time. A casual discussion of expectations between teaching-parent and student may clear up many misunderstandings and motivate the child with the promise of free-time activities once the schoolwork has been completed.

Since this new arrangement is homeschooling, not school at home, it will undeniably be different from what the student had been used to. The style of teaching necessary for a roomful of children is not at all suitable for just a few students. At the same time, the learning skills used in the large group setting are not the same skills necessary for the more self-directed format of homeschooling. Another common cause of disinterested learners is lesson presentation in a manner that does not appeal to the child’s learning style: giving oral explanations to a student who learns best through building 3-D models, or assigning a student to read a chapter of history when he would rather participate in a reenactment.

Spend some one-on-one time with your child, endeavoring to learn what things he is interested in and how he would prefer to study them, and then tailor a few lessons specifically towards those areas. Topical Index: Learning Outside the Books contains ideas for lessons that will be more appealing than the average dry textbook. If your reluctant student is interested in guns and soldiers, rent a few factual war movies (look for older movies that do not require the modern cautions against adult scenes or foul language) and watch them together, followed with brief discussions of various scenes or characters. If he is car crazy, challenge him to research comparisons on new models or prototypes. Find his areas of personal interest and focus on those. It can make a tremendous difference in his level of motivation and create a valuable bond between the two of you at the same time. (Mom is letting me study this?) Remember, education was taking place long before the first textbook was ever written. [Also see Topical Index: Learning Styles.]

Teaching and learning are difficult enough with only a few subjects — there is no reason to complicate matters by tackling too many subjects at once. When neither your student nor you as teacher has had any experience at homeschooling, allow yourselves plenty of time to adapt to this new routine before worrying about covering all the bases. A student who cannot read well cannot fully grasp history. A student who has not mastered handwriting will find creative writing to be needlessly tedious. Get the basics covered well first, and then other academic subjects may be added in later. [Depending on the ages of your students, you may be able to adapt some ideas from Start with Reading, Handwriting, & Arithmetic, and Save the Rest for Later.]

A parent recently mentioned to me that her student had previously been given prescription medication to compensate for a learning disability while in public school, but he did not seem to have a need for the medication at home. The child also seemed to be struggling with that inconsistency — why was the medicine needed for learning at school, but it is not needed for learning at home? Let me bluntly say that I feel public schools have become much too liberal in assigning “disability” labels, and children are being over-medicated, sometimes needlessly medicated. I do not discount the possibility of children with legitimate problems in learning, but I also think medication should not be the first choice in conquering those problems.

If you are struggling with homeschooling, be encouraged — the first year is always the toughest. Remind yourself that you have chosen to homeschool your children for very important reasons. There is a definite adjustment period involved in switching from public school to homeschooling, and that period can last at least a year. If you are currently in the critical transition stage between public schools and homeschooling, I suggest you browse through my Indexes for a larger dose of encouragement. I will list a few past articles here for you to start with:
Questions from a First-time Homeschooler
Homeschooling Is Hard Work
Do the Best Job You Can, and Pray for God to Clean Up the Rest
What Didn’t Work for Today Can Be Changed for Tomorrow
Homeschooling an Only Child
Meatball Education: Filling in the Potholes of Public School
Spoken Destinies and Learned Behaviors
Are We Homeschooling or Schooling at Home?

Filed Under: Behavior, Deciding to Homeschool, Encouragement for Parents, Homeschool How-To's, Leaving Public School

Start with Reading, Handwriting, & Arithmetic, and Save the Rest for Later

January 4, 2006 by Leave a Comment

If you are just beginning your homeschool journey with a Kindergarten student, you may be wondering how much to teach him (or her; I use “him” generically). Many Moms who are eager to homeschool are busily planning lessons far in advance for elaborate historical reenactments or highly involved scientific experiments. I have often advocated that families just beginning to homeschool their wee ones should focus on just the “Three R’s” of reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic without worrying about supplemental subjects until the mid-elementary years. Incredulous teacher-moms let a gasp escape from their open mouths and ask me if I am serious. I am.

I am also assuming that you have not allowed the past five or so years to slip by in silent inactivity. I am assuming that you have read books to your child, colored pictures with your child, sung songs, made crafts, played with puzzles, gone shopping and baked cookies together, and had all manner of delightful experiences together. You have most likely already taught your child how to count to 10, print his name, tie his shoes, sing the ABC song, and identify the colors in a box of eight crayons. You taught these skills without even thinking about it being “formal education.”

Now that you are ready to tackle “school,” you may find yourself wondering if history should come in chronological or geographical order. I say wait on the history. Wait on the geography and the science, too. Wait until at least fourth grade before introducing these more complex subjects. Your child needs to have a foundation of learning skills to build his education upon. Those learning skills are what you need to teach first — now.

Reading
Teach the ABC’s, if your child does not already know them. Teach your child the sounds made by each letter, not merely the letter “names.” For example, the letter “H” makes a “hah” sound, which is not really apparent when you simply call it by its name. Once your student knows the basic sounds made by each letter, he can understand how to string those sounds together to form simple words. Phonics lessons (free, downloadable lessons are linked here) can help you start with a simple order and progress in a manner that is not confusing to your child. Small, short-vowel words are the typical starting point, since they have no silent letters or other complicated rules. After your child has begun to read simple, short-vowel words, he will be able to comprehend the complexities of silent letters, consonant blends, and diphthongs (the new sounds made by combining consonants, such as “th” and “sh”).

Do not over-simplify learning to read (from your child’s perspective, it is difficult), and do not become frustrated if your child does not catch on immediately. You have probably been reading for at least fifteen years, so you have likely forgotten what a stressful experience it can be if rushed. Take it slowly, allowing plenty of time for your student to grasp each step, and encourage him for each accomplishment. The confidence you instill at this stage will serve your child well as he tries to read each new word, page, chapter, and book. Readers are made, not born. A child who becomes discouraged while learning to read is not likely to become a bookworm. A few children are eager to learn to read at four years of age, but also a few children (most often boys) may have difficulty grasping the concepts until age seven, eight, or nine. If your child does not respond well, put the lessons aside and wait a couple of days, a couple of weeks, or a couple of months, then try again. When you teach at a pace which allows the student to fully understand each component before moving on, the student who is ready to learn will show quick results. (Remind yourself that one of the reasons why you chose to homeschool was this exact one of working at your student’s pace, not forcing your student to comply with a scheduled academic calendar.)

Once your child begins reading, continue to expand his reading ability through advanced phonics studies and vocabulary-building exercises. This is a good time to introduce the dictionary for any unfamiliar words he finds in his reading material. I preferred to teach this by example, looking up a word with my students at my side, showing them the entry, and briefly explaining it. After a few repeats of that, I switched to asking them to get the dictionary for me, and before long, they were flipping through its pages, racing to be the first to find the word. Handling the large dictionary was a privilege that instilled in my students a fondness and longing for the secrets of knowledge it held. I did not want them to view “look it up” as a punishment, so I made sure they saw me using the dictionary often for personal reference. (I also kept the dictionary on a bookshelf in the kitchen, since that was where we usually were when a question arose, and it helped to remove the stigma that can accompany large, imposing reference books.)

Encourage your young reader to explore a variety of subjects through reading and let trips to the library become adventures in exploration, but hold off on the formal lessons in other areas until he has a firm grasp on the basics of reading, handwriting, and arithmetic, usually around fourth grade. Allowing your student to read as much as he wants on a subject will only whet his appetite for more information, providing you with an eager student who is already learning how to teach himself.

Handwriting
Along with visual recognition of letters comes the child’s natural attempts to reproduce them, but do not expect shaky fingers to produce beautiful calligraphy with the first try. As with any other life-skill, practice is necessary to develop excellence. Once again, discouragement can be a confidence-killer, but the wise parent will praise every legitimate attempt to train those fine-motor muscles to accomplish this new task.

When my children were in public Kindergarten, it was a common practice of their educational establishment to have “mentors” visit from the older classrooms. Students from the third or fourth grades were paired with the youngest learners for the purpose of being scribes: the younger student dictated a story while the older student wrote it down. While that works well in theory, I felt it did not work well in practice; most adults cannot write (or even type) as quickly as someone can dictate. The activity was intended to link reading skills with handwriting skills, but often limited the imagination of the younger child’s mind to the note-taking ability of the older student and resulted in a story that the Kindergartner could not read for himself. I heard many youngsters proudly proclaim to their parents, “I wrote this story!” When the enthused parents asked, “What does it say?” the confused authors had to admit, “I don’t know,” because they could not read the words that had been written for them.

In my opinion, beginning students should have opportunities to practice handwriting that do not involve creating stories… yet. We allow children to learn to read each letter/sound before we teach them to string those letters/sounds together to be read as words. We teach them to put those words together into short, easy-to-read sentences before we assign entire books for reading. We provide them with many beginner books before we offer them their first chapter book to read. I think the same system should be applied to handwriting — copying many letters, and then words, and finally simple sentences to gain mastery of the physical skill of handwriting — before the brain-exercise of creative writing is added into the mix.

I remember taking one of my favorite storybooks as a child and copying word after word, sentence after sentence, page after page into my Big Chief tablet. It was not assigned homework; it was my own idea, in order to practice this new skill called handwriting. Thinking up an original story requires an entirely different set of skills than the ones needed to put that story onto paper. Attempting too many new skills at once can leave the student muddled in confusion.

Arithmetic
Children need to have a solid understanding of number concepts before adding and subtracting will make sense to them. Most adults can quickly recognize the amount of money represented by an assortment of coins, but few five-year-olds have achieved that ability. Your Kindergartner will benefit from much practice in counting and sorting, learning to associate digits with their values. Once the basic concepts of 1-10 are mastered, the average child is ready to understand eleven, twelve, and so on, and the foundation is laid for understanding our numbering system based on units of ten. Carrying, borrowing, and even decimals are merely extensions of the basic unit of ten. Addition and subtraction are easily mastered by the child who fully understands number values.

Continuing practice and expanding the skill levels in each of these areas will fill the majority of your homeschool day. Obviously, the child working on these skills does not need to spend hours and hours at them each day. Most public school kindergartens operate for 2 1/2 to 3 hours each day, and large portions of that time are spent in recess, bathroom breaks, learning to stand in line, being reprimanded for talking out of turn, and the other necessities of large-group crowd control. It is common for a five-year-old child to complete a full day of homeschool classes in under an hour, and that time can be divided up into smaller blocks throughout the day, depending on the child’s attention span and the other needs of the household (for example, if Mom’s attention must be shared with an infant sibling).

No one would consider building a house by starting with the roof: the foundation must come first. So it is with education: learning to read is the foundation for education. That base must be securely in place before other things are attached to it. Reading is the visual recognition of language; handwriting is the physical application of that language. Understanding the values represented by numbers and using them to count are the equivalents of understanding the sounds represented by letters and using those letters to form words. Patiently wait until your child is reading fluently to add other formal academic studies, such as history, geography, and science. Help your child develop a love of reading first, and then let the pleasure of reading lead him into other areas. And, by all means, please continue to read books to your child, color pictures with your child, sing songs, make crafts, play with puzzles, go shopping and bake cookies together, and have all manner of delightful experiences together.

Filed Under: Deciding to Homeschool, Encouragement for Parents, Homeschool How-To's, Math, Phonics, Reading, Scheduling, Writing

Questions from a First-time Homeschooler

December 1, 2005 by 1 Comment

I recently received an email from a new-to-homeschooling mom, asking several questions and expressing her anxiety over the first year of educating her children at home. Due to a glitch in the email system, her letter arrived with an incomplete email address, preventing me from answering her personally. Since her questions and comments (listed below in bold type) are of such general interest, allow me to answer them here in a more public forum and thereby share my advice, encouragement, and links to related articles with others who may need them also.

Dear Jane Doe,
What you referred to as the anxiety-producing elements of homeschooling are exactly the same as what I refer to as the guilt-producing aspects. My initial reaction to any homeschooling dilemma I encountered was certainly anxiety, followed quickly by guilt if and when I neglected to address the problem. I am convinced that each and every homeschooling parent deals with these feelings from time to time (which is why this website exists!). Please do not feel that you are alone; we have all been there.

You asked how to avoid the thoughts that intrude on your daily routine. I wish I knew. However, while I do not know how to prevent the thoughts from entering one’s head, I can recommend some ways I dealt with the thoughts once they occurred:
— I ignored them.
— I reminded myself of why we chose to do what we were doing.
— I made a list of our reasons for homeschooling and referred to it often.
— I talked to other homeschooling parents, and we encouraged each other.

What if I miss something?
Many new homeschooling families wonder if they are covering enough material, if they are doing enough activities, or if they are missing some important areas altogether. My advice is to take on this project of homeschooling in the same way you would take on any other project: make a plan, and then follow it. Begin by planning how to cover the academic basics: language & grammar, mathematics, science, history. Include the areas that are important to your family’s values: Bible, manners, sex education (from your family’s point of view). Add a few independent living skills as the opportunities arise: cooking, laundry, money management, home repair, auto maintenance. Balance it all out with your students’ areas of personal interests: music, sports, art, drama, animal care. Once you have taught your student how to teach himself through reading and research, you can turn him loose to learn any other supplemental things his little heart desires.

Obviously, a Kindergarten student does not need the same aggressive academic program that a high school student needs. Beginners and early elementary students need to master reading, handwriting, counting, adding, and subtracting before they can fully understand the concepts of history, geography, and science (subjects which can wait to be introduced until 4th grade). [See Where Do I Begin? and Too Much, Too Fast = Burnout]

What if the public school students are ahead in something?
Focus on what your student is doing and what your student needs help in. Your student may be ahead in some areas and behind in others, but it also may not matter very much in the grand scheme of things. (By the time they began high school, my students were ahead of their peers in mathematics and public speaking skills, but far behind their public-schooled peers in foul language and sexual promiscuity.) Back when we were all first-time parents, we were told not to worry about whose child rolled over first, whose child crawled first, or whose child got the first tooth. We were told that by the time they all were fifteen years old, no one would be able to tell which child did what first. The same applies to homeschooling: once our children reach their forties, no one will know (or care) at what age they first learned to use punctuation.

When my child misbehaves, is it because we are homeschooling?
It might be; but it might not be. If your child is objecting to pursuing education at home, behavior issues may occur. It may also be attributed to lesson plans that are not suited to your child’s style of learning. For example, if you are presenting a lesson on volume by merely asking your child to read the explanation in the math book, but your child would learn better by stacking and counting sugar cubes, the child just may not be “getting it” and is acting out his frustration. Another time the child may be bored because the material is too simple and would benefit from moving on to more advanced lessons. [See Learning Styles and Kids Will Be Kids]

What if they grow up to resent my homeschooling them?
Resentment can come from many sources. Immature people (regardless of age) resent anyone’s attempts to influence them. An immature child may temporarily resent being pulled away from what he or she considers to be social contacts of major importance. With maturity will come the realization that Mom and Dad knew best and did what they felt they had to do.

Some may point out that not every family claiming to “homeschool” is doing an adequate job. In the worst cases, I have to say that students can be truant from homeschooling as well as truant from public schooling, but both cases are more likely to be the result of parental neglect than educational neglect. In such situations, the lack of parental involvement will be resented more than the lack of schooling. [See “Parent” Is a Verb]

I know I should relax… I don’t want constant worry to ruin the experience.
Are you doing the best job that you can do at this time? Are you trying to learn what you can do to improve upon your weaknesses? That is all anyone can ask of you. Take one step at a time, handle one task at a time, and tackle one day at a time. You and your children are in this experience together — work together as a team and discover new things together. No one is ever too old to learn something new: education is a life-long process. As you focus on the experiences themselves, you will begin to realize how much your children (and you) are learning, instead of worrying about what your students are possibly missing. [See Do the Best Job You Can…]

I feel that God has called me to do this and that He wouldn’t ask me to do it and then not help me.
Very true. What God asks us to do, He also equips us to do. Now trust Him that He still knows what He is doing.

Every homeschooler I have ever spoken with has gone through the same thoughts of guilt or anxiety at some point in time. Some of us are able to overcome our feelings of inadequacy quickly, and others of us take a little longer and need more encouragement. Reach out to other homeschoolers you know and share your experiences with them. Chances are good that you will find that they have gone through the exact same emotions. However, a positive byproduct of sharing is that you will learn from each other, and you both may come away with some new techniques to try or some new ideas for activities and lessons. You may even decide to get your students together for group activities or field trips.

When I reached my second September as a homeschooling parent, I began to feel better about what I was doing. I had gone through this process at least once before, and I began to feel like a “veteran.” The longer I homeschooled my children, the more experience I had to fall back on, and the more I knew about my students and the ways in which they learned. I have said before that the first year of homeschooling is often the most difficult because it is entirely uncharted territory, both for the teacher and for the students. Do not give up too quickly. Be encouraged — your worst days may already be behind you.

[For further information on this topic, see Surviving the First Year of Homeschooling after Leaving Public School.]

Filed Under: Deciding to Homeschool, Encouragement for Parents, Homeschool How-To's

Homeschooling the Neighborhood

September 16, 2005 by Leave a Comment

In my state it is not legal for me to officially homeschool children who are not members of my immediate family. However, we did sometimes include neighborhood playmates in our activities, particularly in the summertime when “just another day to play” can tend to be somewhat boring. We did not always do formal lessons through the summer, but we did incorporate fascinating, fun, and educational activities into the relaxed playtime of summer.

Summer was a time when I could devote more of my time to planning or preparing a study or activity for later use. I found that I could also give something a “test run” by trying it out on the kiddies — if they enjoyed a taste of it, chances are they would enjoy a more in-depth look during the school year, and perhaps even the children in our larger co-op group would be interested in it, too. So what do you do when your own children are not quite enough for the activity you would like to try out? Let the neighbors join in. Several times, I prepared a fun, yet interesting and educational activity for my own children to do on a boring summer day, only to find that their neighborhood friends were just as interested in breaking the monotony of swinging and bicycling.

Such was the case when I did extensive research and calculations to examine exactly what size an effective solar-system model should be. I have seen many of the science-fair-type of planetary exhibits made from Styrofoam balls, assorted fruits, or sports balls, but I had always felt that I was not seeing an accurate portrayal from those. While my children were spending their summertime swinging, roller-blading, or just relaxing with a novel, I was delightedly poring over scientific facts and punching furiously at my calculator — a welcome change for me from the usual Mom-fare of laundry and dishes. When I finally trooped outside with my notebook of figures, a large measuring tape, and crude signposts mounted on popsicle sticks, my participants were not merely my own offspring, but their eager friends as well, who jumped at the chance to be included in measuring our lawn and placing the markers for each planet’s orbit. Never was one of my summer projects met with an “I already learned that at school” or a “This is vacation — I don’t want to learn anything” response from the children who were not my regular students. Whenever we needed some extra “classmates” for our learning games, there were always ready and eager volunteers.

One day I prepared the “geeWhiz Quiz” for my children, intending it to double as both a math activity and a scavenger hunt. I also secretly hoped that their time spent searching through the game closet would spur some interest in long-forgotten table games and interest them in playing a few of those again. I explained the process of the activity to them while a friend from the neighborhood was present. She seemed deeply disappointed that I expected my children to do this activity later, after she would have returned home. I quickly copied another worksheet for her, and all three children happily spent the entire afternoon in arithmetical computations. My anticipated bonus also paid off: the trio did find several games that piqued their interest, and they kept themselves occupied for many days afterwards.

We often filled our front sidewalk with an extensive Dr. Seuss universe in colored chalk drawings or an ever-expanding circus train overflowing with acrobatic clowns and exotic animals (each new helper got to add his own train car). Our favorite cartoon book illustrations were faithfully copied over and over and over in sidewalk chalk creations. A cleansing overnight rain never brought disappointment, but instead it meant a clean slate for tomorrow. Time after time, the neighborhood children would see us sitting in the middle of the sidewalk and rapidly migrate to our front yard, picking up bits of chalk and asking what parts they could add to the growing mural. My children were not lacking in social contacts with age-mates, and they learned valuable lessons in teamwork and the sharing of ideas as well as supplies.

Being the only homeschool family in your area does not necessarily mean you will not have contacts with other students. We had many opportunities to share educational experiences with public and private school students who were eager to join us in doing things our way. The neighborhood parents knew they could expect our fun activities to have an educational benefit, and their children never seemed to mind it either.

Filed Under: Activity Ideas, Homeschool How-To's, Kinesthetic Learning, Learning Outside the Books, Math

A New Approach to Spelling-Word Lists

September 6, 2005 by Leave a Comment

I despise the way spelling is taught. I managed to get through the spelling workbooks that I had in school only because I was a word puzzle aficionado. When it came time to teach spelling to my own children, I became terribly frustrated. They did not instantly share my fascination for words or word puzzles. In fact, they found spelling workbooks to be very confusing and incredibly boring.

I remember spending hours as an early reader compiling my own lists of rhyming words and noticing that foot and boot appeared the same, but did not sound the same, which generated more lists. Writing all the possible combinations of certain sounds led me to a deep understanding of phonics rules and their applications. Exploration of prefixes and suffixes took me even further.

The public school method of test and retest used in the books we tried simply did not teach how to spell. Over the years, we abandoned the workbook pages and came up with our own methods for a spelling class. I emphasized prefixes, suffixes, Greek and Latin roots, and spelling patterns. Too often, the published spelling curricula grouped together words with nothing in common, ignoring the obvious patterns to be found.

I think that focusing on those patterns is an excellent way to learn spelling. Public school teachers have been told repeatedly in their college training classes that there are too many exceptions to too few rules. I disagree. I found a marvelous book called The ABC’s and All Their Tricks, which shows the patterns, the words sharing those patterns, and explains the origins of those patterns. It is a wonderful reference work — which finally explained to me how “w” can be used as a vowel.

Your lists of words can follow phonics rules or come from pre-prepared lists, such as the weekly lists found in spelling workbooks or from grade-level-specific lists. Another possibility for the avid reader is to compile his own list of unfamiliar words from his regular reading. Encourage your student to look up those words in the dictionary for origin, meaning, and pronunciation, and then incorporate them into your own customized spelling and vocabulary study program. My son expanded his own vocabulary by routinely browsing through the dictionary looking for new words.

My personal preference for learning a list of words would be to print out the chosen list (the time period for learning the words should be based upon your student’s ability) and post it in a prominent place where it will be seen multiple times throughout each day. Study the spelling patterns and then use repeated observation to cement the correct spelling into the brain. The student can use those words as the basis for exploring various art mediums: alphabet rubber stamps, calligraphy pens, or paper collage (cut and paste letters from newspapers and magazines). Bring out the letter tiles and cards from various table games and assemble all of the words from the current spelling list. If you have students who share my love of word puzzles (bless them!), challenge them to create their own puzzles — making the puzzles will teach much more than simply solving a puzzle will.

Daily observation can teach much more than we realize. Frank Gilbreth, the real-life father of Cheaper by the Dozen fame (stick with the book or 1950’s movie), painted information on the bathroom walls for his children to absorb while they performed their daily bathing and brushing rituals. After completing Morse code charts, Dad painted silly coded messages in various places around the house, fully expecting his children to translate them — and they did.

Repetition and drill by themselves are painfully boring, but when used creatively can become an enjoyable way to learn without wasting endless hours in rote memorization. Use what you have around your house and come up with clever new ways for your students to study the words they are learning.

Filed Under: Auditory Learning, Homeschool How-To's, Learning Outside the Books, Phonics, Reading, Spelling, Tactile Learning, Visual Learning
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