Homeschool Checkpoint 1

Reality check...this is a lot of work!

The last post I wrote was about our decision to start homeschooling, and I haven't had time to write anything else since then!  One thing I quickly discovered about homeschooling is that it's truly a full time job!

I thought I'd do a check in for 2 reasons.  1. People have been sending me messages asking how it's going and 2. the state tells me to keep a portfolio that shows what we are working on or have done, and I thought this would be a good way to keep a secondary 'online' portfolio of sorts.

We started school on the same day the public schools started, (mid August).  We are also part of Classical Conversations as well, (a coo-op of sorts), but that didn't start until later in the month.  I homeschooled Grace for the second part of last year, but adding Grant this year was a new thing.  I was a little nervous about having two to educate, but it turns out I was needlessly worried.  It's actually been easier than I thought, and a lot more fun to have two in our homeschool 'class'.

 Every Monday is spent at Classical Conversations from 9am-3pm.  The other 4 days a week we are at home. Each of those 4 school days at home has two parts. The first is our non CC curriculum.  Both kids have their own individualized Math, Science and Language Arts curriculum.  They also both have grade leveled spelling programs.  On top of those things Grace also does a 4th grade geography/history curriculum, and typing.  Together they both do a full Latin curriculum, but since they are both new to Latin, they both use the same texts and workbooks which allows me to lead Latin for both of them at the same time. I do math, science, and Language arts/Spelling with them everyday.  We do Latin twice a week. 

I work with them individually on their grade level subjects.  It works out well because I finish math with one, send them off with math work, then do math with the next.  Then I switch and do English and spelling, and then science.  While one is working with me, the other is working on an assignment that goes with the lesson I just did with them one on one.  We come together for Latin.  The only thing Grace does totally independently, is history and geography, (and also typing).  Her history curriculum is set up with a reading assignment and then questions and essays that go with it.  We talk about the lesson once she has read it, and I use the Teacher's guide to lead her through a discussion, but for the most part, that subject is independent, (which is great prep for high school courses and college classes).

We start school around 9 each morning and it takes us until about 12:15 to get through those core subjects.  After a lunch break we come back together and do memory work together.  Memory work is the core part of Classical Conversations.  Each week they have something to memorize in Math, Latin, Science, English, History, the history timeline, and Geography. All ages memorize the same things each week, but they are grouped by ages into regular looking classes.  Older kids can go deeper into things than younger kids, but they all are learning the same core material.  Grace also does a full English grammar/writing curriculum in CC, which is totally separate from the memory work and her other Language arts curriculum,  so in actuality she has 2 English programs. (YAY ENGLISH!)  The memory work in CC changes each week.  For really little students, memorization is enough.  For older kids, you can add some context.  After lunch we practice our memory work for the current week and then review some previous weeks.  This takes about 30 mins.

 

After that we pick one of our CC memory work subjects, (Such as history) and learn more about it together.  Sometimes we watch a documentary, or we read a play from that time period.  For science, we look up the topic, read about it, and maybe do a sketch of what we are learning about, (like a conifer seed) etc.  It's not our core curriculum for any of the subjects, but we can often incorporate into our core.  For instance, we learned about the Age of Imperialism in CC a couple of weeks ago, and it flowed right into what Grace was learning about Great Britain in her core history. Sometimes we can even incorporate CC things into art concepts.  When we are at CC all day on Mondays they also do a fine arts class, music class, science experiment, and map work.  At home I try to incorporate the music and art that they are learning into other things.  If we are learning about symmetry in fine arts, then I will have them integrate that into a drawing of something historically related.  We also use some art curriculum that is tutorial based and teaches art concepts such as perspective, use of different materials, etc.

We are usually finished each day by 3.  I use after school hours for the P.E. requirement. Right now Grace is in a Basketball league, and we also will be starting a 2 hour a week swimming class soon. I feel like P.E. is the one area where it's easier to sign them up for structured classes instead of just trying to do it at home, (music too). They get music instruction at CC, but we will be joining an orchestra group next year to start learning violing.  Overall it's amazing how much more you can accomplish outside of a traditional school setting.  We just don't have the lost time between classes, recess, and other things, so we can speed right along.  By the end of the day they are tired though, and ready for a break, (me too)!

I have seen some really awesome progress, especially in math and language arts.  It has been a great journey so far. 

Pro's and Cons I've found for homeschooling at this point are:

Pro's
1. Academically I can go a lot deeper with them at home.  I know we are doing more rigorous work then what they'd get at school, not because school is inferior, but because I just have that flexibility.

2.They are well rested (this is actually kind of huge).  When I know they are really tired I let them sleep later and just adjust our day accordingly.  I know that everyone has to learn to get up and get going in the real world, but the American Academy of Pediatrics is always telling us that sleep is important for kids, so I let them.  I don't know if it's anecdotal or not, but they haven't gotten the normal numerous colds that the school year usually brings.  We are still around a lot of kids all the time, so I'm thinking getting enough sleep might actually be making their immune systems more effective.

3. They are learning a foreign language, which is awesome.

4. They are progressing faster than they would at school.  This is especially true in math.  I've discovered that math levels mean nothing.  If a 7 year old has already memorized the multiplication tables he can start division.  I am totally ignoring the grade level markings on math curriculum.  You logically should progress to the next step in math when you are ready.  So, Grant is halfway through the 2nd grade math book even though he is only technically in 1st grade.  At first this freaked me out, now I don't care.

5. You can slow down a concept until they perfect it, which actually helps them progress faster.  Last year Grace didn't have her multiplication totally mastered when I pulled her.  I slowed her back down until she could get there.  Slowing her down gave her confidence.  Once she mastered it, she sped through division so fast that I blinked and she had gotten it.  We went through that part faster than she would have at school and are now ahead again.  This only happened because I was first able to slow her down.

6. The kids have no stress.  They love getting up and going to 'school'.  They love their school day at CC on Mondays. They have the best of both worlds.  They get a day with a teacher who isn't me on Mondays,  a class full of friends who they have to get along with.  And recess, lunch together etc.  The rest of the week they just get to focus on their work without worrying about anything else.  So far, they are loving it.

CONS:
1. THIS IS A LOT OF WORK

2. I haven't figured out the happy medium of letting them do fun things like field trips.  I know how much I can get accomplished in a day and it seems like a waste of a day academically to go out and do something with them.  But this is misleading because we should be taking advantage of this perk..sometimes. I plan to give them a little breathing room soon.  This is just me being paranoid and making sure we are getting it 'all done'.  There are so many cool home school activities happening around here and I need to participate in those more. 

3. Non Homeschool people constantly quiz your kids to see if they are 'learning anything', which is the most annoying thing ever.  Would you ask a regular public school kid to recite the multiplication tables for you out of the blue?  How about just shooting random spelling words at them?  No?  Then why do people do it to homeschooled kids?  It's annoying and I feel like people are constantly wondering how far behind my kids are falling.  I'm trying to start letting these things roll off my back, without getting upset.

4.You can't get lazy.  I don't get to have a day where I say, "I don't feel like being your teacher today." I have to stay on top of what we are doing to make sure I'm prepared to keep giving them what they need. which goes back to the number 1 CON:  THIS IS A LOT OF WORK

5. PAPER.  SO MUCH PAPER.  I AM DROWNING IN PAPER THINGS.  Worksheets, art projects, papers, drawing, etc etc.  IT IS EVERYWHERE.  I can't just send it home with them because, THEY ARE ALREADY HOME.

6. THIS IS A LOT OF WORK  ;)

I'd like to do a review of Classical Conversations in the next few weeks too.  Especially how that day is laid out, and the Essentials of Grammar and Writing class that Grace is a part of.  It's a really interesting program and there is a lot to discuss about it.

But that's all from me today.  Because, I'm tired.  And I have a lot of paper to stuff into quickly diminishing hiding places.


I'm going to include a few pictures of things they've been working on, and a video showing us doing some memory work.

I think we are getting the hang of this homeschool thing! Would I do it all over again?  Right now my answer is ABSOLUTELY!

 Grace has been doing a lot of diagramming and parsing in English.  She loves diagramming!

 Grace Science

Grace Geography/History, currently learning about the Opium Wars.

 Grant is learning about different properties and states of matter in Science.

 We continue to learn new Latin nouns in this first unit.  We will be learning some verb conjugations next.

 Grace spelling. 

 Grace Math

 An example of CC Memory Work

It's Possible We've Gone off the Deep End

Depending on how you know us, what I’m about to tell you may shock you.  You’ll either think we’re crazy or maybe you’ll think we’ve seen the light.  Maybe you will just be confused because you have no frame of reference for the crazy thing we’ve done.  That’s okay.  I’d have thought the same thing as little as 4 or 5 months ago.

Before I get into this I want our close friends and family to just remember one thing.  For the most part, I know that you trust us.  I know that you think that we generally have it together and, up to this point, that we haven’t screwed our kids up too much.  (If the previous statements don’t apply to you and you think we are screwed up, and our kids are too, well then, you’ll have more ammunition in a moment). I want you to remember the fact that you think of us as competent individuals before you let your mind roam into the “THEY’VE FALLEN OFF THE DEEP END” zone. Give us the benefit of the doubt. 

Deep Breath

About a week before spring break we initiated stage one of a two stage process which is going to dramatically alter our family lifestyle.  We pulled our middle child from public school, (3^rd grade).  Stage two will be complete at the end of this school year when our youngest graduates from Kindergarten.  He won’t be going back in the fall.

We aren’t doing private school.  We are homeschooling.  Yes, it’s true.

But why would we do such a thing?  How could we make this decision….did we think it through? How can we possibly provide every aspect of a complete education at home?  What about socialization?  How can we be more effective than trained, certified teachers?

I’m going to answer these one by one, because I think this will accomplish two things.  1. I won’t have to keep answering the same questions over and over, and 2. I want you all to know that we are taking this seriously.  I also want everyone to know that I’m not looking to convert anyone else, or, to go on a rant in which I tell you all that public schools are horrible and that you are a bad parent if you don’t educate your kids the same way I do.  I’ve encountered attitudes like that and they bother me.  So here we go.

1.       WHY WOULD WE DO SUCH A THING?

Well, that’s a complicated question.  Part of it is that we’ve watched our oldest navigate the waters of public school for the last 10 years.  He’s done great!  In fact, he’s staying where he is.  And we believe that’s a good thing.  However, we have also watched a lot of things happening in the schools he’s attended which have worried us.  Some of the things he has encountered are great and some not great, and looking to the future, we think that with personality differences in our kids the other two might not handle some of those not so great things as well.  We aren’t running away from the not so great things, but rather weighing them against the negatives of other choices available.  Once we weighed them all, the negatives of other options seemed less numerous.  No education option is perfect.  And we don’t think it’s fair to say that there won’t be downsides to what have chosen.  But we will face them as they come, and make other choices if we decide it’s necessary.  What are the negatives within the public schools?  Well, our answers might not apply to where you live, or, maybe they don’t even apply to your child even if they exist in your schools.  So, it doesn’t really matter if I list them all our or not.  We can also say, with relative certainty that after studying lots of different models of education that our younger kids have learning styles that seem better suited to things like the Classical Model, or Charlotte Mason Model, which allows kids to learn in smaller environments.  This allows the child to quickly move ahead in curriculum if need be, or, focus on a skill in a more vigorous way until it is fully mastered.  We’ll touch on this whole ‘different model’ thing in a bit.

2.       DID WE THINK THIS DECISION THROUGH?

We can say that we have absolutely thought this through.  We both poured over research, academic journals, and published studies.  In addition to that we browsed literally dozens of web forums in which parents talked about the pros and cons of pulling their kids out of school and how it worked out for them.  We tried our best to shuffle through, and weed out, propaganda that was either blindly pro homeschooling or anti homeschooling.   If you’re wondering, there is no shortage of inflammatory articles or rants on both sides of the issue.  What we found was this; homeschooled kids, in general, have a lot of academic success.  When parents home school with structure, they are actually more likely to have higher success than kids who go to public school.  The trend continues through college.  Does this mean we think our kids wouldn’t have had the same success in school?  No.  We are engaged with our kids and their educations, and honestly, we’d help them succeed no matter where they were.  But, with that being said, we also recognize that we have the ability to do MORE outside of a traditional model of education……we have no restrictions. And when your kids are bright and capable and you suddenly see the possibilities available when those restrictions are removed, it gets kind of exciting.  So yes, we have thought this through.  If you’re interested in some of the research we based our decisions on I will post a selection of them here:

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cehsedaddiss/38/

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02732173.2014.895640#.VR3GWmw5DIU

http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/543

http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ893891

3.       HOW CAN WE POSSIBLY PROVIDE A COMPLETE EDUCATION AT HOME?

This is a great question.  One I would have asked 6 months ago.  The answer is simple.  You, yourself, all by yourself cannot.  Or, in other words, homeschooling, the way WE are doing it.  Is not isolated.  We are not trying to do all of it all by ourselves.  Which brings in one of the first big negatives of homeschooling.  It can be pricey.  I recognize that some are able to do it very economically by writing their own lessons etc., but that’s not the way we are opting to do it.  We have bought complete curriculums for almost every subject.   And by complete, we mean complete.  They are structured with a script to lead every single lesson.  Really well done and easy to teach.  As the kids get older the curriculum changes.  However, we have also joined an organization for next year called Classical Conversations which is a pretty cool thing.  I’m not going to explain the whole thing here, but you can visit their website if you want to learn more.  Basically, we are following a “Classical” education model.  This means the emphasis is on core subjects, (Math, Language Arts, Science, History, Art, Music and Latin).  It’s a holistic model in which it all kind of connects together.  For instance, in history this week we learned about Richard 1 of England and the Crusades, while in Art we learned about icons and illuminated manuscripts…they all go together seamlessly.  With Classical Conversations we are guided through a very rigorous and structured outline for each subject each year in cycles that rotate.  Classical Conversations has different age levels all the way through high school, during which time the kids start doing both their regular school work as well as dual college credit.  The classical model follows the Trivium of education which is the Grammar Stage, Dialectic Stage and Rhetoric stage.  It’s really interesting and I encourage you to research it if you’re interested.  But back to the question.  We are pretty evenly equipped with backgrounds…one of us with science/math and the other with English/Lit/History.  Our degrees will be very helpful although I don’t think they are absolutely necessary to homeschool.  A private music teacher is giving a music/voice/and piano lessons to both the kids once a week.  Special home school PE classes are available in our city during school days, as well as art classes, dance classes, orchestra, sports teams and pretty much any elective or club you’d find in a public school.  When you homeschool you have to pay for these out of pocket, but there are a ton of options available.  And honestly, it would be easy for a homeschooled child to be OVER scheduled in my opinion because there is just the potential to sign up for too many extra things.  But that’s a good problem to have going into the next question…

4.       THE ‘S’ WORD….SOCIALIZATION

Ahhh….I am very guilty of muttering this about homeschoolers…”they are going to be weird and unsocialized..”  I admit it, I thought it.  You are probably thinking it too.  Luckily, the research shows that this fear is absolutely, 100 percent, unfounded.  Are there some weird homeschoolers?  Oh yeah.  Are there some weird kids in public school?  Oh yeah. 

The truth is, the kind of socialization that we think our kids need to have to be normal isn’t actually always found in a public school.  But it can be.  It can also be found in a homeschool, and in the classes, clubs and groups that homeschoolers join.  Research shows that a huge majority of homeschoolers test psychologically normal in all the categories that pertain to friendships, peer relationships and social settings. In addition to that, homeschooled kids are more comfortable socializing with a wide variety of people and ages.   In fact, some of the articles I quoted above show that homeschooled kids are more likely to be involved in social clubs, civic groups and even more likely to vote as adults.  I’m not sure why this is, unless it’s because they are more likely to be exposed to these kinds of things as kids because of super-involved parents. Rest assured, if I see my kids turning into strange hermits who prefer talking to the cat instead of humans I will re-evaluate things.  Ha!  In all seriousness though…the research right now shows that kids who come out of public school are increasingly likely to carry emotional baggage that follows them well into adulthood.  Not every kid…but some.  And that baggage affects their earning potential, their higher education level, their relationships and a host of other non-savory things later in life.  I’m not saying it’s every kid, or that MY kids would have had that happen….but if we’re looking at the possibility of kids turning out weird from homeschooling than I have to point out that there’s an equal or possibly higher chance that they’d come out of public school screwed up.  So I think we can agree that this worry is pretty much negated by the alternate negative possibilities of other options.

5.       HOW CAN WE DO A BETTER JOB THAN TRAINED, CERTIFIED TEACHERS.

Well we probably couldn’t if we were comparing apples to apples.  If I was standing in front of a class of 20 kids for 7 hours each day I would definitely fail miserably compared to a certified teacher.  They studied the philosophy of how to teach kids in a traditional classroom.  Luckily, I’m not teaching in a traditional classroom.  Actually, what I’m doing isn’t even really the same thing.  Basically it boils down to being a private tutor.  I think we can all agree that there’s a huge difference between being a tutor and a teacher.  A tutor sits with one student, one on one, and only focuses on them.  There is a reason why monarchs and royalty in the ‘old days’ hired private tutors for their royal offspring.  Tutors work.  Most of those articles I listed above touch on this.  Homeschooled kids don’t have high academic test scores because their parents are geniuses who teach with superhuman skill.  It’s because their entire education comes through private tutoring which we KNOW, 100 percent, without a doubt, is superior to any other kind of teaching method.  But it’s clearly not a feasible model for public schools to follow.  They can’t hire a tutor for every kid.  Imagine what that would cost.  However, what do schools do when a child is struggling?  They send them to a resource teacher who does what?  One on one tutoring.  In most traditional school models tutoring is reserved for kids who need extra help.  But imagine if your entire education had consisted of one on one tutoring?  Imagine how much more you could excel in those areas that you excel at? Imagine how much more you could excel in areas you struggle?  Homeschooling is really one on one private tutoring.  When it’s done in a structured way with awesome curriculum it gets really amazing results.  So no, I couldn’t teach as well as a trained, certified teacher.  But luckily, I’m not teaching a class full of kids.  I’m tutoring two kids, one on one.

In closing, I just want to say how excited and happy we are to give this a go.  The kid we’ve already pulled out is just flying through her work.  She is loving Latin and is already translating and writing full sentences and conjugating numerous verbs.  She has discussed and memorized classic poetry, studied feudalism, the crusades, the fall of the Roman Empire and poured over the amazing notebooks that Leonardo da Vinci left behind.  I’ve already seen her master topics in math that she told me she hated and didn’t ‘get’, and we are diagramming complex sentences and learning about science in a way that is much more hands on than she could have ever experienced in a regular classroom.  Next year when we go to stage 2 and start with Classical Conversations we will have one regular school day a week, field trips, and tons of opportunities to connect with peers and experts who are all available to make homeschooling so much more accessible and feasible than it has been in the past.  It’s also important to add that there is more than one way to homeschool.  I’m sure we would be considered HIGHLY structured.  Some people are probably a lot less structured than us.  I don’t want anyone to think I’m saying our way is the only way…it just fits us best.

And, if at some point we think a different choice would be better for our kids we will do that with no reservation.  We’ve only got them for a little while, and while we’ve got them we’ll do our best to make that time count, wherever that may lead us.

So that’s it in a nutshell.  We are homeschooling.  And don’t fret, we’ve got this.   (I think).  ;)