Category: Homeschooling

Prepare to Read…then Relax

Posted on by Suki
When my son was in first grade, he was in a mixed-grade classroom where the teacher worked within a progressive education model. (See alfiekohn.com for information on this.) She believed that in a rich educational environment, children didn’t need to be taught so much as experience a model of learning. Our son was a great achiever within this model. At age 6 when he entered the class, he wasn’t yet reading. I thought I’d done everything right: We’d read to him since he was tiny, he didn’t watch any TV, and because he was our first child and I thought I should, I even drilled letter sounds with him when he was in preschool.
Six weeks into first grade, he started reading. Not just Cat in the Hat. He started really reading…everything. When I complimented his teacher on how he’d improved, she said, “Oh, yes, reading, I haven’t really worked with him on that yet.” She trusted the environment, and the environment succeeded.
In other words, he was ready.
My daughter has a different story. She grew up in the same reading-rich environment, but her mother was a lot more tired and jaded! I hardly worked with her on reading, past learning the letters. Yet one day she started reading common signs on the highway, then she started to read signs on stores. She never read to us, but we started to notice that she was gleaning information that she could only get by reading. Pretty soon she started reading fluidly, at the age of four.
She was ready.
Imagine if my son, who now reads pretty much at an adult level, had been told that he was “behind” because he wasn’t reading anything by the end of kindergarten. (This is the kid who drove me CRAZY because no matter how often I pronounced the word “the” for him, he’d see it and say, “tuh-HUH” with this great effort!) In some school systems he would have been held back if he couldn’t read a list of sight words that some not-so-bright adult thought kids “should” be able to read at the end of kindergarten. What a waste of resources to hold back a completely normal, bright kid because he isn’t reading on someone else’s schedule!
Imagine my daughter in a standard classroom – what would the teacher do with her? One of the ways that teachers occupy kids who are already reading is to have them “help” the other kids. Since my daughter was never taught to read, I can imagine she’d find that exercise a bit strange. I know that when I was in public school, if I’d finished the work I was just left to my own devices.
I can promise you that this is NOT a winning strategy with my daughter!
The most literate countries in the world seldom require kids under seven to do any actual reading instruction. Our public schools, which are failing more miserably every year to produce solid readers and writers, are now cramming in reading earlier and earlier. Our testing system makes it clear that there is something “wrong” with a second-grader who doesn’t read.
Yet the fact is, except for when something really IS wrong (such as a learning disability), there is nothing wrong with our kids. Many of them (the “average” kid) learn to read between the ages of six and seven. But that doesn’t mean that ALL of them should or even can. Late readers shouldn’t be made to feel that something is wrong with them. Early readers are often ready for much more at a much younger age. That doesn’t mean they should have to sit around and wait for everyone else to catch up.
Education is a messy business that has nothing to do with a business model based on widgets. Teaching kids is an art, more akin to modern dance than selling cars. No real child is average. Teachers sigh with relief when they get a class that functions within the usual parameters, but that doesn’t happen that often. They’re always going to get the kindergarten non-readers like my son, and the kindergarten book-devourers like my daughter. Our system needs to be flexible and forgiving.
We need to relax a lot more and really pay attention to our children, giving them a rich environment in which we read with pleasure. We need to give them the time to appreciate the joy of using their mind’s eye instead of relying on video to create stories in their heads. We need to trust that they will learn, and let them be happy while they’re doing it.

Arachnid Gladiators

Posted on by Suki
So the other day I went into our hall bathroom and there was a spider in the sink. This isn’t uncommon in a house shaded by redwoods, and even less uncommon in November. It’s the month at all the local spiders seem to come to visit.
In years past, I would have washed it down the sink. But I have improved, I have become stronger, bigger (OK, only around the waist), and faster at catching live spiders in insect-viewing boxes! My daughter and I finished with Oceans and are now studying Insects (her choice) in our homeschool. I know that spiders aren’t insects (so does she!), but I thought it would be fun to put the spider in the magnifying insect viewer she got at her school library.
It was fun, but later that day when I found ANOTHER spider of the same sort in the same sink, it got even more interesting. We were on our way out of the house to art class, so we just caught the second spider in with the first. My daughter said that it was nice because the first spider was a boy (it was larger) and the second spider was a girl, and they could be mommy and daddy.
When I got home from dropping her at class, I wasn’t sure it was loving I was seeing. My suspicions were confirmed by the fact that the spider on the bottom of the spider pile had apparently lost a leg in the transaction. Oops.
It was Spider Gladiators, round 1! Some kids would have been upset, but my daughter, who plans to be a doctor, was fascinated. The next day we found another spider, this one of a different species. (Anyone know of a good California spiders identification website? I couldn’t figure out what they were.) The first ones were brown striped. The new one was a wet-looking, richer brown, about the same size as the smaller of the first two.
Our champion defended his title in Spider Gladiators, round 2! Now we had two dead spiders in the bottom of the viewer, and one rather satisfied victor. Today we found a dead fly (not dead for too long), and figured we’d see whether the spider would go for that. So we stuck it in, which was harder than it might seem. Our old guy is getting wily. He moves fast and when I tried to tap him into the bottom of the thing so I could open it up, he knew the drill and held on. Finally I slipped the fly in and closed it back up.
The report is, so far, that the spider is not interested. My daughter thought that perhaps it wouldn’t make any difference, because, she posited, bugs often get caught in spider webs and die long before the spider notices them. We’ll see.
She is hoping that the spider will like the dead fly, she tells me, because if it does and we can keep feeding it, we can keep it alive till her birthday. She is convinced that all her friends are going to want to see the carcasses of our pet spider’s victims!
Then she consider another possibility. We had read that her betta fish, Oktten, might enjoy catching live insects off the top of his tank.
We both know that spiders aren’t insects, but it might be fun to see who would be the victor in that fight…

The Reluctant Homeschooler

Posted on by Suki
It seems to me that families who homeschool can be defined by type. There is, of course, some overlap, and always those pesky exceptions. But for the most part, homeschoolers come in three flavors: religious, alternative, and last resort…
The religious homeschoolers are the best-known by non-homeschoolers. Most of them are Christian, most but not all tend toward conservative politics, and most share the conviction that homeschooling is a way to keep their children from being exposed to parts of the culture that they don’t like.
I actually relate to this group, not in a religious way, but because of my dislike of some parts of our culture that have asserted themselves at our schools. The cultural forces I’ve seen at work that I’d love to shield my children from are many, including: the premature sexualization of children, the violent media that children are exposed to that they then express to each other, the rigid sex/gender roles that serve to marginalize kids who don’t fit in, and the glorification of ignorance and the vilification of intellectuals, especially scientists. I don’t believe that we should shield our children from everything — that leads to children who will be unable to cope in the real world. Furthermore, I do believe that families can counteract a lot of what kids get at school just by having healthy family relationships and discussing what goes on. So this alone wouldn’t be enough to make me a homeschooler.
The “alternative” group is the group I have met the most of through homeschooling my daughter. They are generally well educated, often with a smidgeon or more of counter-culture tendencies. Sometimes they are not highly educated but just thoughtful people. They have looked at their options (often they can’t afford private schools that they might have considered), and they’ve decided that standard public schooling won’t work for their family, for their kids, or both. There seems to be a larger percentage of former teachers in this category than in the general school population. Also, these parents are more likely to have been homeschooled themselves.
I definitely feel that these homeschoolers are my kindred spirits, because ever since I started looking at schools for my son, five years ago, I knew that I wanted something different for him. I went to “good” public schools when I was a child, and I was hoping that I could offer him something better. I was chiefly concerned about the lack of creativity in our public schools now, the emphasis on testing, the dropping of non-core subjects like music, art, and physical education. On top of that, I wanted a positive social atmosphere, which seems to be lacking in so many schools.
But because of the variety of charter schools and private schools in our area that offered options, I didn’t consider homeschooling my son. I had a baby in the house when he entered kindergarten, and the overriding factor was how exhausted I was!
I have to admit that I’m a member of the last group, what someone I know calls “the reluctant homeschooler.” We came to homeschooling not because we were drawn to it as parents, but because our children dragged us kicking and screaming into it. Some of our children refused to go to school at all. Some wanted to go to school and quickly found that it wasn’t their cup of tea. Some tried desperately to stay in school, but just couldn’t handle it emotionally.
This third group is probably the most fluid in the homeschooling community. We might have one child in school and one child in homeschool. Or we might end up homeschooling only when it’s convenient. We might homeschool, then try school again. It’s hard, though, to move from homeschool back to school. Everyone I’ve talked to had regrets for one reason or another. Lots of families have to put their children back in school for financial or health reasons. Some families are committed to homeschooling only when there are no other options.
But some of this group become the strongest homeschoolers of all, the converts. I’ve heard at least two former-teacher homeschoolers say that now that they’ve homeschooled, they’re not sure they’d want to teach again… They don’t feel confident that they can reach so many children the way they reached one or two.
I’d like to say that I’m firmly in the homeschooling camp now, but I find myself still straddling the two worlds I’ve been in. On the one hand, my daughter is happier, learning more, and more in love with her school now that she doesn’t have to be there five days a week. On the other, these little moments that I steal time to write are like teasers for me. A little part of me keeps saying, Maybe next year… I know this makes me a bit of a homeschooling heretic, but it’s where I am now. Next year? I don’t know. Ask me then!

America’s Frontier

Posted on by Suki
We’re reading the entire “Little House” series to our six-year-old, who has adopted them like religion. Each time we finish a book, we ask, “Do you want to go on with the series or take a break?” Our son took a break sometime after the third move by the family, but our daughter is pushing on all the way through.
We’re now reading the last book, These Happy Golden Years, to her. It’s really been fascinating to read these books in a series and approach it with an adult’s point of view.
I wonder whether I’d read the books before I saw the TV series. We had a great shock recently when we got the DVD of the first season from Netflix. I was amazed how clean and simple the show was. My daughter was impressed by how they’d changed the story. “Why is this story all about Pa?” she asked. The books, you might remember, were in the third person. But very little happened outside of Laura’s vision. The stories were reported as if from her point of view all the time. And to add to my daughter’s indignation, she pointed out that Michael Landon was clean-shaven. “Where’s Pa’s whiskers?” she demanded.
The next time I asked our daughter if she wanted to see more of it, she said, “I’d rather read the books. They’re more real.” So that was the end of my trip down memory lane.
The Little House books are feminist in a nineteenth-century sort of way. Pa makes most of the decisions, but when Ma disagrees with him, he finds it convenient to change his mind. Of course, Ma never actually says she disagrees with him. She calmly points out the obvious, and lets Pa save face and make the decision himself.
Frankly, Pa’s decision-making is something we call into question. Think about this: Pa took off in a wagon with two little girls and a babe in arms, his wife, and a dog. Not even a girl dog so he could make sure to have more puppies when he needed them. Not another family that they could depend on. Nothing but a shadow of a trail through the prairie. Pa was truly, can I say it now?, reckless and lacking in common sense!
So then they camp out on the prairie for a while (I think this is Kansas of the future), and finally get scared back when the government says it won’t support them. Sort of reminds me of modern-day Israel. And the only reason they have survived to be able to retreat is that an African-American doctor, probably unable to practice in the state of his birth, comes and saves them all from fever’n’ague – malaria.
So they end up in Minnesota. It’s mighty cold in the winter, and occasionally locusts eat their crops, but there’s a lot going for it. A real town, a creek with trees, pretty much everything they need to survive on their own. But that Pa, he just can’t cotton to civilized life. Soon they’re off with the railroad to the Dakota Territory. That’s right: they could have had large tracts of land in Minnesota or Wisconsin (both centers of modern-day farming), but instead they chose South Dakota. Oh, Pa.
One of the reasons I like reading Little House to my daughter is that Laura is such a well-rounded girl character. She does bad things. She knows they’re bad while she’s doing them, and sometimes she even enjoys doing bad things! On the other hand, she knows that there are reasons for behaving well and badly, and her choices are made clear. I like that sometimes she just can’t bear not to say what’s on her mind.
The last two books show an amazing change in the lives of the Ingalls family and of all families, rural and city, across this country. All of a sudden they go from a sort of iron-age, make everything you need sort of lifestyle to depending on modern conveniences. It’s clear that Laura realized this in her depiction of the family, nearly starving and freezing to death in The Long Winter. Any other time, they would never have moved to a place with no wood for building houses and fueling their fire. No game to shoot when the family is running low on cultivated food. Really, there was no reason to live in De Smet, South Dakota at that time except for the train station there. They depended on that train and their fellow citizens for food and fuel, and the weather did them in.
It’s a fascinating picture of American life, chock full of food for thought.

The Homeschooling Attitude

Posted on by Suki
I was chatting with a bunch of other homeschooling moms and the words came out of my mouth before I realized that they were a true insight into our family. I said, “Even before we started homeschooling, we were a homeschooling family.” As with many things I say, I wasn’t completely clear on what I meant till most of the sentence had made its way out of my mouth!
What I meant by it is that we’ve never been the family that thinks you should pop out the kids and then ignore them, or the family that thinks learning is a chore and other people (teachers) should be in charge of it, or the family that eats dinner in front of our separate TVs.
We have always been the family that relishes new discoveries, that tries to turn daily life into interesting lessons, and that acknowledges that togetherness is worth the friction it necessarily causes. This is the homeschooling lifestyle.
From before our oldest could speak, we talked to him about pretty much everything. And, as one babysitter noted with surprise, we never spoke babytalk. This was not an unconscious decision. My husband cringes when he hears others speak to our kids like they are from some other species that can’t quite think right. And we both have a pat answer to people who ask us questions about our kids in their presence: “I don’t know — why don’t you ask them?”
I’ve noticed that I’m the parent in a classroom who talks to kids about things they’re interested in using words that they probably don’t yet understand. How else to get them to understand new words than use them in a conversation that they’re interested in? If a kid has discovered how cool gravity is, it’s no use trying to explain the concepts in babytalk. We just use the words that actually describe what’s happening.
Consequently, when our children talk, they use words that people aren’t used to hearing from people their size. When he was four, my son and I went to buy a terrarium. When the nice pet store employee asked him directly what he wanted to buy, he answered, “We’re looking for a terrarium for a fence lizard.” The employee was stunned: “He knows that word?” Well, of course! What else would you keep a fence lizard in?
My daughter recently went into a monologue with an adult where she explained all about resistors and how they worked. The adults on the receiving end often remark how “smart” our kids are. I don’t disagree, but that’s really not the point. Our kids are interested in things because we are. Just like they tell you in parenting class, you need to model the behavior.
The homeschooling family has made a conscious choice to model lifelong learning in their house. Homeschooled kids are dragged along to all sorts of situations that other kids aren’t, and it has a big effect on them. I brought my daughter to a dental appointment, which I’d never had to do when she was in school. My dentist had a great time showing her how he could put videos of the inside of my mouth up on a TV in the room. She was fascinated, well-behaved because she wasn’t told to sit in the corner. She became part of what was happening.
From an early age, our daughter had to go for very difficult yearly tests at Stanford Hospital. It was truly awful for us, but we always made it an event for her. We let her plan the day as much as possible. And when the procedure was happening we didn’t just tell her it would be over soon; we pointed out all the interesting parts of it that she could take part in (and be distracted by). Consequently, she has been saying since she was three that she wants to be a doctor, and anytime she gets a chance she learns about the human body and how it functions.
When I started her in homeschool last year, I was pleasantly surprised to find families who were all a variation on our theme. Not that we’re all alike – far from it! – but we all have the attitude that we are part of our children’s learning. So even if you aren’t homeschooling, you might just be a homeschooling family. Think about it…

Now available