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By Root 317 0

or methodology in mind. Whatever your approach, it’s important to keep your focus on your children and what works best for them, whether it fits into that favored methodology or not. No matter how inventive and persistent we are in trying to apply our favored techniques, our children can always equal that invention and persistence in resisting what does not work for them. It’s far easier and far more effective to tailor your tools and techniques to your child than to try to force your child to adapt to unsuitable tools.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Middle Years: Exploring the World

DURING THE “MIDDLE” years—from nine or ten through twelve—children begin to explore subject areas in more depth. Most kids have got reading figured out, and they’re eagerly investigating a wide variety of subjects. Many homeschooling parents alternate between pride and dismay as their kids quickly outrun prepared lessons or their parents’ own knowledge. Their amazement at their kids’ enthusiasm and abilities is often equaled by exhaustion and a sense of helplessness as they ponder trying to keep up with the voracious learners their kids have become.

This is also the age at which kids may begin to focus on one or two intense interests, often to the exclusion of other activities if allowed. Even with the most formal, structured approach to homeschooling, most kids will have time to develop and explore interests and hobbies in great depth. Many who do so might never have found the time to even discover such intense interests under the normal load of work and activities demanded by conventional schooling.

Kids at this stage also begin to think about career possibilities and about specific things they will need to know to become competent adults. Many opt to develop specific skills to reach longer-term goals: The child interested in engineering focuses on math skills she will need. The budding entrepreneur tackles marketing basics. The would-be artist concentrates on building his technical art skills or digs into the computer tools becoming necessary today. Even some of the most informal unschoolers begin to take more formal approaches to learning.

But we’re still talking about kids here. Even the most serious kid will not be constantly focused on long-term goals, and those goals can change from year to year or even month to month. This can be disconcerting to the parent whose ambitious dancer suddenly discovers a passion for architecture, but the process of learning about and exploring a few subjects in depth is worthwhile in itself; figuring out what you are definitely not interested in is just as valuable as finding your real interests. Looking back as adults, it’s easy for most of us to see the value of digging into a few topics in depth—for many of us, that kind of exploration could have saved us several semesters of college-level work or even years in less-than-satisfying jobs.

School-at-Home

Trudy and Tony homeschool their three children: Anthony (eleven), Rachel (ten), and Sariah (five).

There is so much we want to learn, we do not know when to quit! We start at 8:30 in the morning and if no one gets carried away, we usually quit around 2:30. (But somebody always gets carried away.)

We use several different curriculums. Language arts for the fourth and sixth graders is Alpha Omega, but if they can test out of a book, they do not have to do it. For our kindergartner, we’re using McGuffey and a very expensive Macmillan curriculum I purchased years ago when I taught preschool. It’s great, but it’s really too expensive to buy for just one person.

For math, we use Saxon and Alpha Omega, and for science and social studies, we use Konos. We do the Konos all together, and I really like that. On a lot of the Konos topics, the Internet has been very helpful. The kids are writing reports on birds right now. The local library has just one book on each of these birds (the California condor and the purple marten), but the Internet has tons of information.

For Spanish, we use whatever our local library has or trade lessons with someone