The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [56]
We’re quick to run for the encyclopedia if we see something on TV (or crawling around outside) that interests us. I’ve come to realize in recent years that learning really is something that happens all of the time and it is wrong to limit it to the “classroom.” The parent who won’t bother to help her child find the answer to a question simply because the answer isn’t “needed” right then is making a terrible mistake. When this is the approach used, learning becomes equated with school, and it seems inevitable that school becomes a bad word. In other words, we seem to be “doing school” at all hours of the day and night every day of the week.
Lisa and Greg live with their four kids in a good-size Alabama city. Sara, their oldest, twelve, attended a private kindergarten and third grade in a public school.
We go with the flow. Sara has always liked “structured” work—that is, working through a workbook or textbook. We have done some reports and some Konos units. My best friend did the whole nine yards, but we just picked over the activities and read and talked about things. I don’t give tests, nor do we grade work, except for math, where we used Saxon for three years. Right now we are pulling subjects together, like ancient Greece. I picked out a few books, a video, an art project, and called it a unit.
Sara has not been reading like I wish she would, but she has been doing the twelve- to thirteen-year-old thing: turning into a teenager and sleeping a lot. Believe it or not, the older she gets, the more structured we get.
Carol and Rick live in a California suburb. Rick is employed outside the home, and Carol runs a family day-care business in their home. Shauna, thirteen, is a preschool dropout, and Rosalie, ten, has always homeschooled. Because of several physical problems (cleft lip, intermittent deafness, corneal scarring), Rosalie homeschools through a local public school independent study program.
We are interest-driven 80 percent and structured 20 percent. The 20 percent structured is piano practice six days a week and “formal” math. We have used Spotlight on Math up through eighth grade level, and the Straightforward Math series for algebra. This algebra book is so good, I am enjoying this formerly dreaded subject. My text in school was all problems and no explanations. This one is mostly clear explanations and relevant examples, with ten to twenty problems interspersed. It is a vast improvement because this is the only subject so far that I worried about my ability to facilitate. Rick is my ace in the hole: He reviews all confusing sections with both Shauna and me, so we’re all on the same bus.
For reading, cooking, sewing, gardening, science, languages, history, and so on, we are interest driven, or learner led. Each girl has strong areas of long-standing interest, some of which overlap. Shauna began dance classes at not quite three. She has never taken even a summer off, by choice. She is now dancing en pointe in ballet and also does jazz and modern dance. It totals five hours of class a week now. She is also a very talented piano student and recently took a month off for the first time in five years.
Our rule is you can take whatever lessons you want from someone, but if we are paying for someone’s expertise, I want us to follow her suggestions or propose alternatives, not simply ignore her advice. This means piano lessons are completely optional, but if you take them, then you are agreeing to practice as the teacher recommends and to discuss problems with her. Failing to do the latter recently led to Shauna feeling burned out. Once she realized that she had been feeling increasingly pressured by what her teacher thought were honors (invitations to play in a Bach festival and a Beethoven recital), Shauna realized she had to voice her displeasure about taking on a more intense performance schedule. She is learning to practice the fine art of negotiation: being neither passive nor aggressive, but assertive. We are finding that Shauna’s at a bit of a crossroads, where