While I am not a huge fan of summer weather (I hate heat!), I do love hanging out outside all afternoon and well into the evening with the kids. Sometimes I wish I had the money for big trips far away, but when I sip on my drink and eat my steak and corn that my husband expertly grilled for me, I know that things really don’t get any better. I love watching the kids run and scream (who cares what the neighbors think?) through the pool, chasing each other with squirt guns. I love to watch the kids ride their bikes well into the night. I love to snuggle a kid, wet from the pool, in a towel while we watch go from “blue dark” to “black dark.”
Sometimes I wonder if I’m providing every experience a kid needs. I have friends who take their kids to far off places and always seem to have more money than I for movies every week and trips to Paris or Dublin or even Florida once a year. But I also know that they miss out on everyday experiences because they’re so busy working to pay for the new gadgets, the movies and the trips.
I may not always be happy that I can’t take my kids to go, go, go…but I am happy with my life and the choices I’ve made to be there for my kids all of the time. I wish everyone could feel so lucky!
“Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how.” -John Holt
I love this quote. It helps me when I think we’re not doing enough “homeschooler” things. The only problem I have with being a homeschooler is that I occasionally feel like I’m inadequate for the task. Sometimes I don’t want to try and make everything we do a “learning experience.” Then I remember, living and learning go hand in hand. That if I answer the questions my children have and if we look things up and discover things together – that’s learning. I don’t have to try and push and make them journal all of their experiences or create experiences just for them to learn things. We follow our curiosity and we follow our passions and eventually we learn what we want to do and what we don’t want to do.
A process of elimination. I tell my children frequently that they should explore and do things that interest them. “But what if I don’t like it?” my son asked. “Well, then, you can cross one more thing off the list of what you don’t want to do when you grow up.” Sometimes, I think, it’s important to explore things that you might have a small interest in if only to learn that you don’t like it. If you don’t explore it, though, then you’ll never know and you may find yourself always wondering…
“What Really Matters” by David Albert and Joyce Reed is a remarkable conversation between two homeschooling parents and advocates. Joyce Reed is a retired Associate Dean at Brown University and homeschooled her five children. David Albert is a writer and homeschooling father of two.
Reading through their experiences and thoughts on life learning is a breath of fresh air. This isn’t a book about how to teach your kids. It isn’t about which workbooks to buy and which curriculum to follow. It doesn’t give you a schedule, or worksheets or tell you that kids need a gold star at the end of each day.
Imagine you are a new homeschooling parent (or even an old one like me), and David and Joyce sit near you at a restaurant. They start to have this amazing conversation about homeschooling and what they did and what they think and you get to hear all of it (much to the annoyance of your partner sitting across from you). (more…)
As a kid, I loved workbooks. I loved workbooks in school and I loved the ones my mother bought me at the store. I also loved the activity books they sold around Christmas time. I loved to color the pages, do the word puzzles and answer the questions. It was something I was good at and I felt a sense of accomplishment at the end of each page. However, I have had a lifelong issue with seeking validation, perhaps related to my love of workbooks!
My boys don’t like workbooks. Not even a little. They don’t like activity books or workbooks. They think they’re silly and a waste of time. If I suggest getting out one of the expensive workbooks I purchased at the school supply store (a favorite place of mine), they sneer and hem and haw. They sigh heavily and bargain with me about how many pages they have to do before they can go back outside and play.
My oldest, who is now off on his own and no longer homeschooling, liked workbooks as a small child. Or maybe he didn’t and just learned that if he did them quick I’d get off his back! Either way, I thought for a long time that the only way to teach kids things was to get them a workbook. Weird, huh? Well, we live and learn. (more…)
Jack the Robot - a craft project not commanded by any curriculum or even by mom - just thought up on their own!
I think a lot of people get confused. I think a lot of people think that because my – or other people’s children – are unschooled it means that they aren’t educated. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Just because we don’t follow a set curriculum and do A,B,C,D before a child reaches a certain age, doesn’t mean they aren’t learning. They are learning all of the time. What’s great about it is that I’m not constantly “on them” to do this, that or the other thing.
I was worried for years that Liam couldn’t do his multiplication tables. He still can’t just reel them off to you like I learned how to in school. This infuriated me. We sat for hours with work books and flash cards. I even sent him to school half days so he could take advantage of a special education math program (he is slightly autistic). They couldn’t teach him his times tables either. I’ve done all kinds of programs – visual, auditory, picture-based. But if you ask Liam right now, what’s 4 times 3 – he won’t be able to tell you. (more…)
“How do you homeschool so many kids?” I get this question a lot, especially when we are all at the park in the middle of the day or we go to the store and the cashier predictably says, “Is today a day off from school?”
How do I do it? How do I raise, clean up after and homeschool so many kids and still find time during the day to write a bit? Well, some days it’s not easy. Some days, the days when I feel like I need to be in control of every little thing, I do get overwhelmed. But most days, we just live and do our stuff and it all works out.
I would describe ourselves as very unschooling, especially for the younger set. However, unlike a lot of unschooling families I do require that everyone help out a bit. Now, really, I do not have my kids working overtime doing chores. But one is responsible for the kitchen counters after dinner, one does the dishes, one helps clean up toys and other “stuff” that’s been gotten out throughout the day (art supplies, science experiments, baseball gloves), and on the weekends I try and get a little deep cleaning done. Very little. I have found that usually if I’m engaged in something whether it’s dishes or gardening, someone will always come along to help. Even the teenagers. My oldest daughter who is 16 and the only one of the kids who attends a “regular” school, picked up a flat and helped me plant seeds outside one beautiful spring day. When I’m hand digging a new row, one of the boys usually brings the wagon around and puts the sod in it and takes it to the compost pile (Liam usually does this with the lawn tractor!). (more…)
“It is almost a miracle that modern teaching methods have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry; for what this delicate little plant needs more than anything, besides stimulation, is freedom.” – Albert Einstein
I just love this quote. I have an interesting opportunity to compare my oldest, who is now 16, and my fifth child, Jack, who is almost 4. I was so concerned as a first time parent that my child be able to do everything. I made sure that he knew his letters by the age of 3 – he was reading by four, knew his numbers, could write his name, etc., etc. I admit it, particularly in his younger years, I pushed and pushed. Mostly because he just seemed so smart that I felt if I didn’t I was neglecting my duty as his mother.
I try to give myself a break on Saturdays and instead of coding web pages or marketing or writing new articles or book chapters, just explore what others are writing and doing out there on the Internet. Here are five sites that I found today that were new to me and that I thoroughly enjoyed. Hope you like them too:
“In an effort to increase the public drumbeat for criminalizing
homeschooling, a memo has been distributed containing the top 10
reasons why public schooling is better than homeschooling. Here is an
excerpt from that memo:
1. Most parents were educated in the under funded public school system,
and so are not smart enough to homeschool their own children.
2. Children who receive one-on-one homeschooling will learn more than
others, giving them an unfair advantage in the marketplace. This is
undemocratic.
3. How can children learn to defend themselves unless they have to fight
off bullies on a daily basis?
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