When we started homeschooling, we did so midway through the school year, after moving from Georgia to Texas. My son had been in first grade at a terrific Catholic elementary school and we’d been very pleased, but something was tugging at me to give homeschooling a try. We decided we could go for the rest of the school year and see how things went, and decide one year at a time if we would continue.
3.5 years later, we’re still at it, and as I look back on those first few weeks there is one piece of advice I’m forever grateful for. My wise, thoughtful, unschooling friend told me quite firmly: DON’T BUY ANYTHING.
And she was right.
Pennies image courtesy of Kevin Rosseel at Morguefile.com.
Don’t buy anything. Especially if you are transitioning from traditional school, don’t knock yourself out trying to replicate that experience. I had a hard enough time convincing my then-6-year-old that I really was competent to teach first grade math. If I’d attempted to make it Just Like School, Only Closer To the Kitchen, I think we’d have crashed and burned.
Don’t buy anything. Force yourself to discover what resources are available in your community free of charge. The virtues of the library cannot be overemphasized, and if you’re lucky enough to have an online catalog that allows you to place books on hold from the comfort of your desk, do so. Check out ten nonfiction and five fiction books every time you go. Leave them around where your kids can devour them. You may be even luckier to have a parent resource center funded by your local school district. Your local college has art shows and recitals. Your parks system has ongoing programs. If you’re out in the boonies, you have room to roam free.
Don’t buy anything. Don’t assume that the $98 set of automated flash cards is going to teach your kid Spanish. Don’t spend five weeks clicking and flipping through catalogs to find the perfect reading curriculum. Don’t go to IKEA….well, no, go to IKEA, but don’t buy a $299 desk for your kid to sit at. And if you go to Office Max, well, all bets are off.
Now, of course, we do buy some things. We buy math books, and notebooks, and really good books for general reading and enjoyment. We have nice paints, blank books, and art pencils, and someday Mother is going to remember where she stashed them back in November or whenever it was that we went to the craft store. We occasionally pick up basic supplies for a science experiment. And we do use bits and pieces of other curriculum and workbooks. But, essentially, aside from the math books, most of that is nonessential-but-helpful. I think the choice to not invest hundreds of dollars in curriculum freed us to look at homeschooling in a more creative way and to also relax a bit about our own approach. And I also feel very strongly that it’s equally unnecessary to invest a ton of money in supplemental materials for your kids if they’re in traditional school. So much can be gained from just cultivating a love of reading.
But if what works for YOU is to create a very structured environment, or to use a packaged curriculum that your kids really respond to – that’s great, too! Really, it’s about giving yourself space to figure out what’s going to be the best fit for your family and for you as the leader of said family’s education. For me, if I’m going to spend money, I’d rather spend it outsourcing things like art lessons or science classes instead of $500 worth of books we have to go through in a specific order at a specific time. But again, that’s me.
I’m curious: what’s the best piece of homeschooling advice YOU ever received?
The best advice I ever got was: find a homeschool group. There was nothing that could ever surpass the wisdom, advice, hand-me-downs and emotional support I received from my old homeschool group.
Well I could have used this advice last week, I just spend tons of money on curriculum!!!!
But you are right! I also think the kids enjoy it more when theyuse their surroundings to learn! We are incorporating a library day this year, reading is the best gift you can give to your child.
Set aside some time every week when someone else is watching the children, and use that time however is necessary to make your teaching time more sane. For me that includes the trips to the library, some planning/recordkeeping/preparation, and a couple of hours alone in a busy coffeeshop where I can think clearly.
Obviously I am going to be biased towards advice which encourages me to spend time alone in coffeeshops, but I really do think it’s good general advice. Take care of yourself first so you can take care of your children. Teach yourself first, and get that mind in order, so that you can turn around and teach them.
advice- start EVERYTHING with prayer (but short and sweet)
I try not to buy a lot- but I do buy LOTS of colored pencils and watercolors right about now- the prices are amazing!
Don’t buy anything is my advice to catechists as well. This year we aren’t buying any of the usual: no paper, pencils, pens, markers, craft stuff; no textbook; no workbook. I expect to spend for probably 15 single-sheet handouts of fine art over the year, and that’s it.
My own experience has been that buying things is almost always a way of procrastinating. “I’m preparing our lessons for the year by spending three hours reading curriculum reviews and making an Amazon wish list.” And then it all just collects dust.
“Give it two years before you evaluate whether the whole experiment is a failure or not.” This was official advice, in fact, from the director of the umbrella school we belonged to when we lived in Tennessee. And in hindsight, I think it’s really brilliant — regard the first two years as probation, because they’re likely to be bumpy. Ours certainly were, our first year especially, as we transitioned a 9-year-old and a 5-year-old out of school-school into homeschool, and made a transatlantic move, and had a baby to keep our manic toddler company. If I’d had to evaluate our success six months in . . . whew. I hate to think. After nine years, with the oldest in college, I finally feel somewhat less tentative about it all.
“Don’t buy anything” is good, too, for sure, as is, “If your child has been in school, he/she will need a period of time in which to de-school.” I really didn’t want to believe this one going in, but was quickly forced to confront reality. Yes. The experts are not lying. If your child has been in school, he/she will need a period of time in which to de-school, and it is pointless to try to fight this need with books and schedules and your own cozy visions of Latin recitation by the fireside at night. Our quality of life improved dramatically when I dropped all of that and just read aloud, non-stop, for about six months.
Sally
Best advice: allow one month of homeschooling (de-schooling) for every year spent in school.
Advice I’d give now: Remember that they ARE GETTING ENOUGH… it’s like nursing a baby – you can’t measure what’s consumed like you can with a bottle, but if the baby is growing, the baby is doing fine. Same idea with homeschooling. If the children’s minds are growing, they are doing fine. They’ll grow at their own rate, and they’ll be the same people, whether or not they are in school. The difference is that you get to help them along, and you can see what works and make changes, which a classroom teacher cannot.
I’ve only been homeschooling for a week but I find myself worrying that my kids aren’t getting enough. What if they go back to school next year and they’re behind in math and writing and grammar and …? Science is about the only thing I feel good about. We’re done with everything in 3-4 hours, and I feel guilty that I didn’t do enough in a day. I know we’ll adjust- guess we’re all “unschooling,” “deschooling” or whatever you want to call it.
I don’t know how old your kids are, but in hindsight, I’d say that the only thing to be mindful about, of the things you listed, is math, particularly if there is a strong possibility that your kids will be back in school. And math, in the elementary years, is not *that* hard to keep abreast of. We’ve gotten lots of mileage out of those basic Schoolzone workbooks (which you can get at places like Wal-Mart and Staples), many of which come with interactive CD-ROM thingies, which my kids have enjoyed. My first son, who’s doing Algebra 2 in 9th grade, just to give you some perspective, learned all his basic facts and operations doing either Schoolzone interactive activities or online math games in grades K-3. My current 3rd and 4th graders do a combination of “living” math (Life of Fred read-alouds and mental math during our “Morning Basket” time) and basic, boring, but fill-the-bill MCP Math workbooks for skills practice. Simple and uncomplicated, but keeps us essentially in the grade-level game. My own goals are more long-range — readiness for algebra by Grade 8, however we get there — but at the back of my mind is the notion that if something happened to me or our family situation, and we couldn’t keep homeschooling, I’d want them to be able to transition to school without a huge amount of extra angst or remediation. Daily practice — 20-30 minutes at this stage, for my almost-9 and 10-year-olds — seems sufficient to keep them where they need to be. If I needed to unschool the rest of our day, or if we were traveling, or whatever, the math workbooks would be the only thing I’d keep/bring along. And if the kids were younger, I wouldn’t even do that — we’d just count things, practice adding and subtracting in our heads, and so forth, as real life presented opportunities. And I’d read Life of Fred, because it’s just fantastic. I wish we’d had Fred when my olders were young!
If you’re reading aloud a lot, and your kids are reading, then I really would not worry about writing and grammar. It takes all of five minutes to establish, for example, what constitutes a complete sentence, and a reading child will pretty much have internalized this, as well as other conventions of good written English. In our more unschooly/deschooly days we played a lot of Mad Libs, which my kids adored and which taught the basic parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, plus concepts like plurals, proper nouns, etc). Copywork is an infinitely useful daily ritual for us — my kids keep fairly informal copybooks (ie, they’re not beautiful keepsakes, just composition books) in which they copy poems, psalms, short prose passages from their reading, and so on, and my experience has been that they transition more or less seamlessly from daily copying to independent writing, without my teaching them anything overtly. My 9th grader went almost overnight from being the kind of writer who agonized over squeezing out a sentence to this person who produced, seemingly effortlessly, paragraphs of adult-sounding prose. (this magic transition happened around the age of 12 — girls tend to flip that switch a little earlier). So far, I have one child who’s an English major at UD; this 9th grader who last year took an upper-division, writing-intensive history class at the college where my husband teaches and did well; a 10-year-old who resists writing anything assigned but keeps a personal journal in which he, rather surprisingly, has written full paragraphs of perfectly passable English; and an 8-year-old who’s getting there. If they had to go to school tomorrow, they might balk at doing assigned, busywork kinds of writing, but I have no doubt that they *could* do it.
I do understand those worries — I certainly had them in the beginning, and sometimes, nine years later, I still do. But Meg’s analogy to breastfeeding is brilliant and apt, I think. No, you can’t measure it. And from feeding to feeding, you may not be able to see the baby grow. But over time, you realize that he’s not only growing but flourishing.
I’m going to think about that all day!
Dorian, while I agree that browsing, conference-attending, and shopping can be a form of procrastination, it can also be a necessary part of your preparation! I spent more than three hours this summer doing just what you described–getting recommendations, reading reviews, going to our local conference and purchasing books. I’ve been trying to craft a program that’s very unlike what I’ve done up till now, for two of my children with special issues: OCD/ anxiety and dyslexia. I delight in acquiring school goods–but it doesn’t stop there. I wish it would stop there some years. This year I’m particularly nervous about putting my hand to the plow. I’m thinking of C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves…..researching and gathering school materials is like the dive that gets you into the pool; but once you’re in, swimming, not diving, is the thing.
I am also considering homeschooling my kids starting the coming year. I need articles like these to give me the heads up on what I should do and what I should expect because I’m a little scared about the whole transitioning thing.