The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [47]
Try scheduling specific tasks for specific days. Instead of doing all the housework on a single day, spread out some of the tasks a bit: laundry on Monday, mowing the lawn on Tuesday, vacuuming on Wednesday, and bathrooms on Thursday. Or, just do everything often enough so that the whole house job only takes an hour or two once a week.
Most important of all: Lower your standards! If you’re feeling guilty because your house is only clean when you have friends (or your in-laws) coming over, stop and think about who your ideal spotless house is for. If the house is for you and your family to live in, you’ll eventually find your own balance between cleanliness and clutter. If you want a showplace, you might want to find an apartment you can all live in so you don’t get the house messed up.
CHAPTER SIX
The Primary Years: Reading, ’Riting, and ’Rithmetic
IT’S ONE OF the questions homeschoolers dread. People curious about homeschooling always ask it and always seem to suspect we’re trying to hide something when we can’t answer it very well: What’s a typical homeschooling day like?
The problem is that every day is different, and no day seems really typical to us. It’s the accumulation of days and activities and projects that make up the pattern of our learning. “Education” for us comes not in individual segments but in the aggregate of activities new and old, in combinations and imitation and recombinations and inventions. It’s too hard to single out any one day as representative of the entire process.
That said, I asked the question anyway, of a few dozen homeschooling friends and acquaintances, except that I broke it down into more manageable pieces: How do you homeschool? Do you use a purchased formal curriculum, are you a rabid unschooler, or are you somewhere in the vast territory between? Do you have set hours, are you flexible, or do you eschew formal lessons entirely? Who decides what’s to be learned? What resources do you use, where do you find them, and how do you use them? If you’re homeschooling more than one child, do you work with them together or separately? How does your learning/teaching style or your routine differ for each child, or does it? How much and in what ways has your homeschooling changed as your children have grown and matured?
Fortunately, most homeschoolers love to talk about what they do, and I had no lack of answers. This chapter, focusing on younger children, and the two following, on older children and on teens, will begin to give you a glimmer of what homeschooling life can be like. Take these firsthand accounts as examples of possibilities, not as models. No family will have quite the same needs and interests, but many will give you ideas you can adapt and use for yourselves. Also, keep in mind that few homeschooling families will conform exactly to the structures outlined in the last chapter; although one approach may predominate, bits and pieces of others will also be used.
For younger children—those to about nine or ten years old—the emphasis is usually on gaining the skills fundamental to further learning: reading and writing, computation, finding information, whether it be in books, on the Internet, or from individuals on a personal basis. Far more important than any specific subject matter is simply learning how to learn.
At these young ages, one of the biggest divisions among homeschoolers is that between those who believe in starting formal learning as early as possible and those who believe that formal learning is best delayed until the child is eight or ten or even older. Educators such as Glen Doman (How to Teach Your Baby to Read) suggest starting formal lessons with babies and toddlers, on the premise that very young children can learn far more quickly and capably than is usually expected of them and that to delay