Is Homeschooling For You by Jennifer Streeter

Quick: Can you guess the number one reason that parents home-school their children? Bad school systems? Religious dilemmas? Non-conformists children? Truthfully, there are as many reasons to educate a child at home as there are home-educated children. In 2003, 1.1 million students were taught at home by their parents instead of attending an organized school. That’s a 29% increase since 1999. In medical families, moving children from school to school is often required. Home schooling can offer many advantages, but it poses new challenges to the family as well. MDFamily’s own Jennifer Streeter gives an inside view on the process.

Once parents decide to bring their child home from public or private school, they may find themselves in unfamiliar territory. It is not as difficult as it might seem. Often, the main problem is that the concept of home education in our culture is foreign. Families don’t have any frame of reference to build upon. That can be challenging and frustrating.

The first hurdle to overcome is finding like-minded individuals. Even before deciding upon method, curriculum and schedules, it is important to build a support network. As with any other part of life there are going to be bad days, mistakes made, and apprehension over choices. It helps to have an understanding shoulder to cry on. It’s also important to have a few voices of experience” that can give constructive criticism and good suggestions on various decisions or problems faced.

Getting Started

Almost every state in the United States has a statewide homeschool support group. Often these groups have their own internet sites or Yahoo message boards. A Google search with the name of the state and the term “homeschool” should produce at least one desired result. The following websites offer links to numerous support groups and/or homeschool families listed by geographical location:

http://www.home-school.com/groups/

http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/weblinks/support.htm

http://www.homeschoolmedia.net/register/index.phtml

http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs/listlist.html

Remember, in order to get support you have to be pro-active. Contact your state homeschool organization. Send emails to those you find who homeschool your area. Attend your state’s homeschool conference(s). Start showing up for various local homeschool activities advertised on group websites and message boards. You’ll be surprised at the size of our community!

Define your Style

As you build your support network, it will become apparent that some homeschool parents share your approach (or intended approach) to the process of home education and others do not. It’s a good idea to read, read, read about various educational methods in order to clarify your academic goals. It might be helpful to consider the underlying reasons your family has decided to homeschool. For some, the aim is primarily academic improvement. For these families, a structured and rigorous educational method might be just the thing. Other parents find that their child seems to do best in a less-regimented environment. There are very well planned methods for this type of learning process as well. Still, others choose to homeschool for religious reasons and they are quite able to find an appropriate method to suit their goals.

The ability to tailor an educational program to your child is the greatest strength of homeschooling. Although there are major defined types of home education methods, not every family can be pigeonholed into one. Rather than being black and white absolutes these methods are fluid and can be blended together to form many unique combinations of homeschool environments. You can find descriptions of many established homeschooling styles at http://www.homeschool.com/Approaches/default.asp. Once you’ve chosen a method (or several) for your family, it will be easier to identify local home education support groups and curriculums. Keep in mind that your views regarding education might evolve over time and with experience. Sometimes parents begin their child’s home education with one method in mind and find that another method becomes more accessible and/or useful over time.

Finding Materials

Now that you have your support network and a style of home education, it’s time to go to work. How? That depends upon the method of home education chosen. With an internet charter school, the school will choose the curriculum in advance. With classical, school-at-home, and unit studies methods, numerous catalogs are available with a seemingly limitless amount of texts, workbooks, audio/visual supplies and manipulatives for sale. Unschoolers will find that “the world is their classroom” as this method involves literally using everything within reach as a learning tool. Here are some catalogs that are worth exploring:

http://www.rainbowresource.com/index.php Rainbow Resource offers a gargantuan free print catalog with every imaginable resource, workbook, text, and manipulative listed. At almost 1000 pages it is a massive print catalog that could be daunting to tackle if it was not so well organized and indexed. The distributors do a superb job of offering extensive “reviews” of every single product offered which adds significantly to the number of pages in the print catalog. The prices are quite good, too! It’s definitely worth having around.

http://www.evan-moor.com/catalog/index.asp Evan-Moor Publishers provide free print catalogs with highly traditional workbooks. This is an excellent resource for those who need a more structured learning environment or desire a more structured approach for a particular subject.

http://www.veritaspress.com/store/home.asp Veritas Press is geared towards those who subscribe to the classical home education approach for religious reasons. It is a Protestant Christian oriented catalog.

http://www.saxonpublishers.com/ Saxon math is very popular among homeschool families of almost all methods. Not for everyone, but worth looking into.

Additionally, well-known companies such as LEGO, McGraw-Hill, and Usborne offer catalogs for homeschoolers. A quick Google search of these companies will produce catalog results.

How Our Homeschool Family Works

Friends often ask me exactly how I go about the home education of my children. I offer my own experience as a reference point. It is not the correct series of choices for everyone. And, indeed, it may be only the best set of choices for my specific family. That’s the beauty of home education: You pick and choose what is best for your child(ren) and your particular situation!

I have five children altogether ranging in age from 9 to 2 months. We have, as parents, chosen to educate our children ourselves for many reasons including academic, religious, and lifestyle issues. Specifically we feel our children benefit the most from highly individualized instruction allowing them to accelerate or slow down to fit their learning abilities and progression. We feel that our children should be exposed to the “real world” as much as possible to help them grow into the types of adults that thrive in all social environments. Recognizing that public schools, with their very artificial environments, do not provide any semblance of “real world” social interaction, we have decided that our children learn how to be adults by being around adults as well as by being in parent-supervised social interactions with children of all age-groups and abilities. We generally have a focused learning time every weekday morning. My children zip through the subjects of Math, Spelling, Grammar, and Writing in about an hour and a half. Now that the older three can read easily and well on their own, I simply provide good, challenging books for them to read and make sure we have a “quiet time” at some point during the day where they MUST choose a book and read for a set length of time. My 3 year old is just beginning the road to reading. I spend about fifteen minutes per day per child when I am helping them learn to read fluently. My husband handles teaching science to the kids once per week. As they get older the amount of time spent on science will gradually increase. Geography and history are the subjects that we’re still playing around with in our schedule. Many of our reading books are history books; we are doing Ancient History now. Eventually, we will add devoted piano and Spanish practice time to our schedule. With all this, I will still not be spending more than two to three hours per weekday on dedicated homeschooling.

Roughly speaking, our morning schedule goes like this:

• Wake up
• Eat breakfast
• Brush teeth and get dressed
• Schoolwork!
• Lunch

Our afternoons are then free for “quiet time” (reading), extracurricular activities, playing, housework, errands, and napping (on occasion – usually coinciding with “quiet time”). About every couple of weeks I have a day where nothing constructive seems to happen. I used to stress about this but I’ve found that these decompression” days are highly necessary and will not delay my children’s educational progression.

How do I come up with what to teach my children? Here’;s what I do:

1) Determine which subjects will be taught to each child. As they progress I will add more subjects. My eldest child will have a logic program added to his curriculum next year. His two younger siblings will wait two more years before being formally introduced to that subject matter. Currently these are the subjects I cover: Math, Reading, Writing (both handwriting practice and actual writing practice), Grammar, Spelling, History, Geography, and Science.

2) After determining the subjects for each child I decide what level to teach each child in each category. I handle History by going in a four-year cycle: Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance/Age of Discovery, and Modern. Science is similarly handled in a cyclical manner: Biology, Earth Sciences, Chemistry, and Physics.

3) Finally, I search through catalogs of material for exactly what I need. I know the subject matter and the level to be covered for each child and this allows me to “zero-in” on appropriate materials. There is such an incredibly overwhelming amount of curriculum material available to homeschoolers; I have found it necessary to narrow-down what I am looking for in order to prevent wasting money on materials that will not be used and/or are not necessary.

Once I have my materials in hand, I decide how to get through what seems like a mountain of schoolwork for one “school year”. Here’s what I do. I decide how many weeks we will spend on an “official” school year. It’s helpful to have the calendar handy to schedule holidays and travel periods. I also try to build in some lazy days/weeks for sanity’s sake. I take each workbook/text/whatever for each subject and divide it appropriately by the number of weeks in the “school year”. I make a note on the cover of each workbook with the number of pages that have to be done per week. Then, I can easily figure out about how many pages we need to cover per weekday. I copy and organize each child’s assignments for the week in advance. When the week is done, I file away all the work they have done for my own record keeping and legal requirements. All together, this preparation takes about 3 hours a week.

While my record keeping is organized the truth is that our days are not highly organized. There are days when we never get out of our pajamas and that’s just fine. There are days when we schedule something for the morning and have to play “catch-up” in the afternoon with “school work” and that’s just fine, too! The key for me is organization with flexibility. Any of this is subject to change at any time depending upon the needs of my children or myself. As someone who values her independence and who has some incredibly independent learners for children this flexibility is a great gift!

Is it Legal?

Finally, there is the age-old question of, “But, is it legal?” The answer is a resounding, “Yes!” Home education is legal in all of the fifty states. Some states have more rigorous legal requirements than others but homeschooling families thrive in all areas of the United States. Usually state homeschool groups will provide an online list of legal requirements. State-specific legal requirements for home education can also be found here at these sites.

http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/directory/Legalities.htm

http://www.nhen.org/leginfo/state_list.asp

http://www.hslda.org/laws/default.asp

If you think home education might work for your family, don’t let a lack of knowledge stop you. With a bit of research almost all questions and concerns on this subject can easily be answered. When faced with what seems to be a huge undertaking keep in mind the following anecdote, “The way to eat an entire elephant is one bite at a time!”