Category: Homeschooling

How do we get by? Homeschooling families talk about how to make ends meet

Posted on by Suki

From the outside, homeschooling sometimes seems like a luxury to families who think they can’t afford to have one spouse “not working.” But homeschooling families say that no matter what their finances or their family structure, they find a way to make it work.

Probably the commonest scenario is that the primary homeschooler has to cut her (or his) work down to part-time. Substitute teacher Maricela Sandoval did just that, and she loves the flexibility.

“I enjoy my job because if we decide it’s a beautiful day to go to the beach, we go,” Maricela explains. “I don’t have to call off work.  I just don’t take any assignments for that day.  Yes, I don’t get paid, but sometimes that doesn’t compare to family time.”

Other homeschooling parents might run a business out of their homes that they can do when the kids are busy. Or they might offer a homeschooling related service, such as teaching or childcare.

Homeschooling mom Jaime Smith moonlights as G3 instructor Headmistress Guinevere at the online homeschooling academy she created at first to fulfill the needs of her daughter and her friends (see OnlineG3.com). At this point, Jaime admits, “If I added up all the hours I would probably frighten myself!”

Some parents are able to share the homeschooling and the work, which can lead to a rich homeschooling life for the parents and kids alike.

“We both work about 75% of a job, allowing us to each have time to homeschool the kids and all of us to have family time together,” says high school and college instructor Jennifer Henderson. “We are tied to the school calendar, which is often disappointing, but we know how fortunate we are to have the jobs that we do.”

Other careers that work on shifts, such as nursing, can work well with homeschooling, as do careers that can be done at unusual hours, such as bookkeeping.

Henderson points out that when you can do some of your work off-site, the bits of time when your kids are occupied can be used to chip away at work. “We are able to do a lot of the work at night, while we are watching the kids take classes, or in small chunks of time throughout the day as the kids allow.”

Homeschoolers are also ingenious about finding cheap and free ways to educate their kids. Aside from the obvious – the public library, the Internet – there are all those ways you can avoid buying expensive curriculum by making it up yourself.

“99% of my son’s schooling is done via TV, Xbox 360, and the Internet,” says Carrie Courter, a single mom who started homeschooling her teenage son this year. “I’m forever recording programs that we’ll both find interesting, and we watch some of them together, pausing to discuss things, look things up on the Internet, etc.  Usually most games have something in them that is historical.  So he researches to see if it’s accurate or not.  He started this on his own, but what he’s learned is mind-boggling to me.”

Local parks can be a free or cheap way to learn as well. “We went to Joshua Tree National Park,” Sandoval remembers. “This activity cost only $15 for admission into the park and entertained us all day, not including gas.”

Previous editions of The California HomeSchooler have included lists of free services provided by your public libraries. Book clubs, math clubs, and drama clubs can all bring homeschoolers together while costing  literally nothing. If three homeschooling families get together and share their skills, homeschooling can be enriching and allow the parents to have some time off for making money or recharging their homeschooling drive.

“We also try to take advantage of freebie activities like going to the museum on free days or  discounted rates to zoos or amusement parks,” Sandoval adds. “In addition, I try to take advantage of activities with other homeschooling families whenever possible.”

Homeschoolers show that the key to getting by is being creative with what you’ve got… and remembering to enjoy it.

This article was originally published in The California HomeSchooler.

Getting ready for life

Posted on by Suki

My kids’ homeschool program is putting on their annual play this week. It’s a lot of work. One by one, kids and adults are melting down. At our house, we haven’t done much in the way of academics this week. I ask my daughter to do math and she says she needs to make a sign for the teacher’s director’s chair. I throw up my hands and make muffins.

It’s the lot of the homeschooler always to second-guess her performance as a teacher of her children. We all accept that someone with a degree can walk into a classroom and teach the children of strangers, but we question whether a mom who’s known her kids her whole life, who is, herself, a well-educated person, can really do a good job.

And in weeks like this, it’s very easy to start wondering: Am I doing the right thing? Are my kids learning anything?

And then I remembered the lessons I learned when my son was at a parent-participation charter school. This is a great school. They get great test scores, if you care about such things. The teachers are dedicated, the parents passionate.

But if you’ve never taught in elementary school before, getting involved in a school on a regular basis can be a real eye-opener. There were so many things I hadn’t remembered from my own schooling.

First was the amount of time spent transitioning from one activity to another. Frankly, if schools could just do one thing all day, they’d get a whole lot more done. But every time you need kids to open a book, change positions in the room, or — god forbid — move to another location on the school campus, you lose enormous amounts of time. When I started working at the school, I was used to the self-employed life. When the kids were gone, I would work with intense concentration. But when I was “working” at school, I felt a whole lot more like a shepherd than a teacher.

Next was the amount of class time spent on what teacher training calls “classroom management.” You know, Johnny just can’t stop talking and it keeps disrupting the class and how is the teacher going to deal with this? This is one part of school that I know my son detested. Some days I’d pick him up and say, “How was school today?” and he’d reply, “Well, it would have been OK but we had to have yet another class meeting about so-and-so’s behavior.” In my day, they used to just send them to the principal’s office. That may have not solved anything for the kid, but it sure did make the teacher’s job easier!

Another thing I hadn’t considered as a student myself was the amount of time I spent “learning” things I already knew. Part of what I’ve learned in my research about gifted kids is that most enter school already having mastered most of what is taught in the first few years of elementary school. That’s a lot of waiting! And even many children who aren’t particularly ahead are going to master some tasks and then have to wait for the others to catch up. This waiting game, for an academically inclined child, probably takes up a good 75% of the time at school actually spent on academics (which you can see from the previous two paragraphs is much less than you might assume).

Finally, there’s everything else that school is about. Like the school play! I remember some teacher of my son’s remarking to me one day, “Oh, I don’t expect we’ll actually get much educating done this week. The kids are too excited.” Teachers learn how to coast through days and sometimes weeks when other goals eclipse their daily attempts to keep to the standards. Field trips, performances, visits by notable people — all sorts of things can send a classroom into a fever of preparation. Yes, in these testing-happy days, these sorts of weeks are perhaps less common in many schools. But still, they are an integral part of the educational experience.

What teachers know, and what homeschoolers like me who second-guess themselves on a daily basis try to remind ourselves, is that these times are also times of learning. In fact, many teachers will tell you that all the other stuff — learning math skills, working on phonics, memorizing the parts of a plant — would come to nothing without these distractions. The distractions are the punctuation in a paragraph, the scenery in a nature film — not just the icing but the very stuff that makes the cake a cake!

Kids learn to sound out words and then practice reading, but it’s the school play that brings it all together and makes reading important. Kids do a worksheet on the parts of a fish but helping a scientist on a fieldtrip dissect a ten-foot squid on a picnic table is what makes it real. Learning the names of the planets is all well and fine, but it’s the day that a real astronaut comes to his school and talks about what it feels like to be weightless that sends a young boy on his path to science.

So what are we doing this week? Not much of anything. This morning my daughter and I worked in the garden and made muffins for the cast of the play. We did a little math, too, but who knows if it’s going to stick? My son, well, I’m not really sure that he did anything you might call academics today.

But what we are doing this week is intense preparation for the sort of learning that makes it all stick. The goal of a performance in front of our families is what is making everything else real, important, and worth slogging through. No, we’re not doing much of anything this week. Just getting ready for life.

Whatever you do, make sure not to have fun!

Posted on by Suki

My kids attend a public school homeschool program. Though homeschoolers have a variety of choices (including homeschooling independently or joining a public charter program), I have been very happy with our hybrid choice. I don’t have anything against public schools as a concept. I think they used to be a fundamental part of the community and a place where people from different parts of the community came together.

These days, though, things are changing. Do you know that many public schools have “closed” campuses? No public meetings, no parents or kids who attend other schools. In fact, some campuses are even closed to the parents of the kids who do attend that school. Things have gotten a little crazy out there.

The craziness that has had our homeschool program buzzing this school year is the new set of playground rules issued from on high. Our program, in which kids attend a few hours a week for classes, enrichment, and community events, shares the playground with traditional public schools. So we share a playground with schools that, shall we say, have a rather different view of childhood than homeschoolers generally have.

Think back to your playground years, and remember what you found most fun. Keep that image in your mind, because chances are it’s gone now.

Did you like playing tag? No running on the playground now. Yes, that’s right, No Running.

Did you like (as I did) climbing up the slide the wrong way? Forget about it. Antisocial behavior that may cause bodily harm.

Did you like mixing with other kids you didn’t see in your regular classroom? Verboten. Our kids have scheduled times on the playground.

Did your school’s playground function as a community playground during the summer and weekends? Very likely it doesn’t anymore. Ours has chain link fence around it.

I will grant that all of the outlawed activities can sometimes cause problems. Sometimes there are conflicts. Sometimes there are even broken bones. But in my view, the playground was a place where real learning took place. Outside of the regimented classroom, kids could really learn how to negotiate the world. They had to deal with bigger kids. They had to deal with the annoying kid who thought it was funny to go up the slide backwards. Yes, it is a bit of a hassle for adults to have to deal with kids having problems, but isn’t that what we signed up for?

I think it all comes down to our culture wanting to assert complete control. And I understand the impetus. Many of us (myself included) grew up with the problems that stemmed from unmonitored playgrounds and rough play. We grew up, had kids, and wanted to make sure that the bad things that happened to us never happened to our kids.

But I think we’ve gone a little too far. According to NPR, the research says we have gone too far.  As the New York Times profiled recently, some parents are starting to rebel by simply letting their kids play.

I’m seeing this sort of parental rebellion happening more and more. Though the overprotective parents still have their kids dancing to Wii, the rest of us are fomenting revolution. We’ll sheepishly admit to each other that we’re the only parents on the block who let our kids go outside when we are inside. We have climbing structures without regulation padding underneath. We let our children climb trees! We have them make dolls rather than buying the latest commercial tie-in toy.

It’s refreshing. It may, of course, result in some skinned knees, arguments, and maybe a broken bone. But the kids are learning and they’re happy.

Life: It’s not without its hazards!

Feminist inspirations

Posted on by Suki

I have off and on been working on an article about the irony of being a feminist homeschooler. It’s a little bit like being a gay marine, but so far, no one has tried to stop me from telling my troops, eh, kids what my feelings are. I’m guessing they’ve figured it out.

One of the ways I love to teach is through stories, whether they are stories of my own or stories we listen to. And it’s not always a question of listening to stories that I “agree” with — my kids and I have had some fascinating discussions about books that I or they didn’t like.

However, I love it when a novel comes along that does it all: It teaches, it inspires, it creates a new world that we’ve never seen before.

Some time back, I got a recommendation for The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate for my list of good books for gifted pre-teen readers. (Click here to see that article.) This book is exactly what I was looking for: An inspiring story about a child just the right age, a deep story without simplistic moralizing and easy fixes, a book with subject matter that gave us reason to learn and grow as we listen. You can think of it as a more modern Little Women, but with lots of brothers!

Calpurnia is a girl living in rural Texas just before the turn of the twentieth century. She is twelve, and at the beginning of the book, she seems like a pretty happy child. She is interested in nature, and her oldest brother, seeing her interest, gives her a notebook. This simple act sets off a storm in Callie’s life.

First, she realizes how little she knows. Next, she acts in order to learn more. But as often happens with knowledge, a little bit can bring a lot of unhappiness.

Callie has an awakening. The good side of the awakening is her realization that her fascination with studying the natural world has a name: she is a scientist. The bad side of her awakening is that she is in the process of being initiated into what everyone assumes she will do with her life: wife and motherhood. The first realization elates her; the second dashes her to pieces.

As a result of hearing this book in our car every day, my eight-year-old daughter was interested in reading Darwin’s Origin of Species. And coincidental with hearing this book, my son and I are reading a biography of Darwin. Origin of Species is way over my daughter’s head. It’s doubtful that we’ll finish it. However, I love how her interest in this book was piqued by fiction. In The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, this book is vilified by many. That attracted my daughter. If I’d suggested reading this book to her, there would have been no reason for her to be interested, no structure to plug it into. But a good narrative can create meaning for learning. It creates the chair to set the knowledge in.

Similarly, my son might have been interested enough in a biography of Darwin since we were studying DNA and cell biology, but the narrative of the story made him curious. He is noticing a lot more about the historical context than my daughter, and between paragraphs read from the biography he inserts observations and questions.

But most meaningful to me (whether or not my kids know it) is the feminist content of the story. Callie is clearly a scientist. Taking care of children is not her calling (in fact, at one point she pays a brother to do the babysitting she is supposed to be doing so that she can go down to do scientific research at the river with her grandfather). The point of feminism is that we all — men and women — should be able to follow our calling. We should be scientists, if that’s where our passions take us. Or we should care for children and know that this is the way we are making our mark in the world.

It’s this last point I come back to when I consider the irony of my homeschooling life. Although I don’t remember any time when I was adamantly against having children, I never felt that having children was a calling. But now that I not only have decided to have them, but also to be responsible for their education, I call up that part of feminism that I think is most powerful: each and every job that a person does well is important, and if that job is childcare, that’s fine. And if that job is being an astronaut, that’s fine, too. The astronaut needs someone to care for children. The one caring for children needs the astronaut to provide inspiring narrative for the deeds of humankind.

We’re all connected, and nothing we do–if it’s something we are called to do and if it adds something positive to the web of human existence–is worthless. So when I feel like I’m wasting my time I remember: this is what feminists worked for. I have the choice, and I’m making it. And my children are learning that they have the choice, too.

More math stories

Posted on by Suki

NOTE: This post has been updated by a new, consolidated post and list of Math Stories which you can find here.

I wrote a blog a while back about math stories, then turned it into an article, which ran in the California Homeschooler magazine.

I’ve gotten a lot of great comments on this article. (Aside: Post comments on my blog, please! It’s so lonely in here. People are always e-mailing me or sending comments via Facebook, but I’d love you-all to talk to each other on my blog…) It’s great to know that others are interested in this subject.

Correspondent Dodi sent me this list, which I thought I should pass on:

Just read your article in the HSC magazine.  I, too, looked for math taught through stories for my daughter (now in 7th grade) and kept a list of favs.  I thought I’d share them with you.  They don’t all fit your exact criteria, but I thought they were all delightful and worth recommending.

  • Grandfather Tang
  • Little Numbers and Pictures that Show Just How Little They Are
  • Big Numbers and Pictures that Show Just How Big They Are
  • Sir Cumference and the First Round Table
  • I Can Count the Petals of a Flower by John and Stacy Wahl
  • Doorbell Rang, The
  • Sea Squares
  • Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar by Anno, Mitsumasa
  • One Grain of Rice
  • Each Orange Had Eight Slices
  • A Remainder of One by Elinor Pinczes (div.)
  • Amanda Bean’s Amazing Dream (mult.)
  • My Full Moon is Square (mult., squares)
  • One Hundred Hungry Ants (div.)
  • The King’s Commissioners by Aileen Friedman (mult.)

Enjoy! My daughter and I are presently having great fun with Geometry for Every Kid. Though that’s not a math story, it was the Sir Cumference books that got her excited about geometry, so there you go.

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