The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [53]
My husband and I work together on what are important things to emphasize—the kids still do as they please. I try to have them all do quiet work at the same time. We try to involve as many as possible in games and chores and activities, but everyone needs individual time, too.
Linda and Brad live in Hawaii with their three children (twelve, nine, and five). Linda is an at-home parent, who is also active in a state and island homeschool support group; Brad is a physician. They decided to homeschool when their first child was six months old.
We are definitely way over on the unschooling end of the spectrum. We don’t use a package and are not connected with any sort of school. We don’t have set hours or formal lessons except for Suzuki violin lessons that Katy requested earlier in the year. She was offered music lessons before but didn’t have any interest until then. She and I started lessons, and because we were playing, first Robert and recently Emily requested violins so they could play.
This year a sort of routine has arisen around the outside lessons. Tuesday: family violin lessons followed by grocery shopping and errands. Wednesday: art class and library day. Thursday: homeschool park day twice a month. In previous years we didn’t have any regular schedule, so this is new for us, but I decided the routine was helpful so the other days could be “free” days.
Occasionally there are other classes or field trips arranged by us or offered in the community—for example, a six-week American Sign Language class I arranged for some homeschool friends at the request of my oldest, or a two-week intensive course in “Animation for Young People” at the local university during the summer.
Otherwise, the rest of our learning is quite informal. The children spend large blocks of time working on things independently—reading, drawing, making all sorts of things, writing stories, writing to pen pals, sewing, using the computer, playing piano, and engaging in all sorts of imaginative play with dolls, little figures, pretend restaurant, and so on. These are initiated by the children and frequently carried out with only minimal help from me. Katy and Em learned to read without any formal instruction.
There are also times when I work with them directly. They ask for math all the time, so I try to come up with appropriate math games that they love. We like math (and Grandpa is a retired math teacher), so we have lots of books on math. In the last year or so, we got some math workbooks (Key Curriculum), which we use very flexibly. The children also ask for help or feedback on their writing or help with a particular project. I suggest activities, resources, and projects I think they might be interested in, but it’s up to the children to decide what actually looks good.
Finding resources is the fun part. I usually consult them before buying materials, but I bring home lots of library books that look interesting to me even if they wouldn’t pick them out themselves. Some of these they find are more interesting than they thought, and others are returned unread or read only by me. That’s fine with us.
One thing that’s changed is that I’m no longer averse to using curriculum materials like the occasional workbook or textbook. In the past I wouldn’t even have considered them. Don’t get me wrong: I still think there are far too many bad ones and problems with too heavy a dose of even the good ones, but now I will use them if they meet a specific need, and then we still use them very flexibly. I believe you have to see what’s called for in each individual situation rather than think there is one best way to do things, whether it is using workbooks or rejecting them. Of course, this sounds obvious, but there are all too many people stuck in their thinking about this.
Linda highlights a common stumbling block for many homeschoolers who start with a particular philosophy