Home-schooling for Homesteaders

- The One-room Schoolhouse is Alive and Well

continued from page 2

by Sheri Dixon

Chapter Three - The "How" of Home-schooling

There are as many ways to home-school as there are home-schooling families.  And this is as it should be, because that’s the whole point.  If you want your child to have an education exactly like he/she’d get in public school, you’ll save a whole lot of time and money if you just enroll him/her and be done with it.  As stated before, they will most likely turn out just fine.

There are several general types of teaching styles used to home-school and I’ll briefly touch on each one.  A wise parent will change the style of teaching depending on the individual child’s needs. I know some home-schooling families who have all the styles going on at once with different children, and some who even have some in public school and some out - the main issue is not To Home-school or Not to Home-school, the main issue at all times should be, “Where/how will my child learn and grow the best at this particular time?”

Traditional home-schoolers have School at Home.  There is usually a designated school area or room that’s set up with desks or study areas for each child.  Lessons are taught basically the same as in "regular" schools.

Child Directed Learning is a little trickier.  Using this style, the parent takes what the child is already interested in and turns it into school.  Dinosaurs?  This of course encompasses Science, but also history, reading, math (dino story problems, reading really, really big numbers BC), and art.  Whole units are done up this way, and the materials you were going to teach anyway are cleverly disguised as your child's own ideas.

There are many "boxed" curriculums designed in the above two styles.  When we started our home-schooling adventure, we chose a curriculum that is modified Child Directed - there are pretty basic reading, math and language presentations, along with a lot of emphasis on music, science and art.  One thing I really like about it is that it’s set up in weekly lessons rather than daily lessons, giving me the freedom to type up my daily schedule according to my own work needs for the week - some days we will do more school than others.  I keep the typed schedules along with his finished workbooks for future reference as proof that we really are teaching him stuff. 

As we’ve gotten more comfortable with teaching, we’ve picked up books to add to our curriculum - science books, history books, poetry books, books on spiritualism.  We have lessons on our old upright piano.  We purchased and very much like Rosetta Stone Spanish.  With only one student, I can teach everything required from the curriculum AND our added materials in 4 mornings per week. 

There are three 12 week quarters to the printed work, so we school September-November and take all of December off, school January-March and take all of April off, and school May-July and take all of August off.  One of the many perks of this particular curriculum is that any time after the 4th grade, we may choose to go online with our schooling - he’ll be assigned a teacher who will be available to grade projects, give help and provide transcripts.  If he chooses to home-school through high school, he will receive an accredited diploma, and will be paired with a counselor in his senior year who will help him fill out college applications (if that’s where he wants to go), navigate through the SAT’s and apply for scholarships.  I’m a fan of all this extra help, since I’m pretty sure he’ll surpass me intellectually somewhere in the next 5 years.

Un-schoolers’ style is to not have a style... Life Is School.  This is generally too scary a concept for most new home-schoolers because you really need to take a Big Picture view of schooling, and make really good notes of everything you do during the course of each day, then review at the end of the week/month/year to make sure you’ve introduced everything that was age-appropriate.  Cooking together= Fractions and Chemistry.  Grocery shopping = Budgeting and Math.  Planting a garden = Biology and PhysEd.

Again, there are multitudinous variations of all of the above, including scary mutations on either end - the parent whose goal is to have their child enrolled in Harvard by the age of 12 and who pretty much spends that child’s childhood turning them into a miniature adult; the parent who is home-schooling to keep their child protected from the Evils of the World and whose child is terrified of anyone who smiles at them and says hello in the grocery store; the parent who believes that the child will learn what he/she needs to know just by living and sets no boundaries, no limits, gives no direction.... all crazy scary.

Chapter Four- What about Socialization???

This is the Battle Cry of the Public Schoolers.  How, they ask, will a home-schooled child learn to get along with others? To share? To behave in society?

Let’s look at this a moment.

In public school, children are segregated according to age.  They spend all day in the company of their peers, and maybe a year or two older or younger during recess and lunchtime.  And recess and lunchtime are the only times they will have for free play and interaction all day long.  The rest of the time is spent sitting still and being quiet.

When else in all of life does this occur?  In your own personal workplace, are workers separated by age?  At church, in our neighborhoods, ANYWHERE else in society???

I’m not saying that the answer is to keep your home-schooled children to themselves - far from it.

I am lucky enough to be a member of a small, close-knit home-school group.  By lucky, I don’t mean that I was lucky enough to find A home-school group, there are many groups out there in which to belong.  By lucky, I mean that this particular group is wildly diverse.  We have members who are home-schooling for all the reasons listed above, and here’s the cool part - it doesn’t matter to any of us WHY we are home-schooling - we are there to support each other. 

Although most of our members are Christians, some attend huge urban churches, some tiny rural family churches.  We have members who have children who are autistic and/or who have attention deficit disorder and would be put in the "special ed" classes at public school - these are not mentally challenged kids, mind you, they merely think differently and need to be taught in non-mainstream ways.

I am the token quasi-heathen-reincarnationist-Old-Hippiechick, and I am embraced along with everyone else.  We have members with "blended" families, members who have bi-racial families.  I love our group.

In any given week there will be a number of activities to partake of: field trips, classes, community service projects, 4-H group, soccer league.

My son recently had his birthday party and I was struck yet again that it WAS simpler to have birthday parties for my public school kids - in school you know all kids in your class.  Period.  You don’t know their siblings or other family members.  As home-schoolers we know entire families.  My eight year old son had children at his party from the age of 4 months to 12 years, girls and boys, moms and dads.

It was marvelous - not a gang of same aged boys, but a huge extended family gathering.

My son can go anywhere, relate and talk to anyone, of any age, anywhere.  He can go to a real restaurant, read a menu, order for himself and behave.  He can go on a museum tour and ask intelligent questions.  To me, this IS socialized - being comfortable and able to conduct himself in any segment of society at any given time and place.

We are so enjoying home-schooling, and it’s really been ideal for us in another way: my husband has faced some serious health challenges that have forced us to be away from home, more than not, for the last 9 months.  Instead of worrying about how we will split up the family (do I leave our son with friends who will get him to school, or leave my husband alone in a hospital 5 hours from home?), we pack up the schoolwork with our clothes, and hit the museums and sights in the Big City.

If at some point, our son expresses interest in enrolling in public school, and as long as our public school remains as safe and secure as a public school can be, off he’ll go - with the understanding that once enrolled, it’s a commitment, and he must stay in school at least till the end of that school year.  Again, the bottom line is encouraging the child to grow into a responsible adult and learn at his/her own pace, in his/her own manner.

The very essence of home-schooling is that we keep our children out of public school not because they will learn too MUCH about life and the world there, but because a school building cannot possibly contain all the wonders of life and the world - for that must be gotten on the fly, in the fields, museums, parks, caves, theaters, restaurants, festivals and planetariums.  From the tiny organisms in the earth beneath our feet to as far as the eye can see, to Infinity and Beyond.

If my child grows up realizing that what he learns in "school" is not the sum of what he needs to know, but the foundation to learn all there is to discover....

I will have succeeded as a parent, and a teacher.

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