Educate Me About Homeschooling

In My Humble Opinion
1

Mrs. Ivorybill and I had to make a difficult choice (deal with the Devil was not considered, btw):

  1. Keep the older two kids in private elementary school and either (a) give up medical care or (2) give up eating.

  2. Sell the house, move across town, buy a smaller house, and free up $$ to pay the increased tuition. Bonus: We could afford medical care and food, too.

  3. Hi, Opal (if we still do that anymore).

  4. Have Mrs. Ivorybill go back to work and put the 4 yo and 2 yo in preschool and daycare and the oldest two could stay in their school.

  5. Put the older two kids in the New Orleans public school system. (Ha!)

  6. Homeschool.

We chose #6.

We’ve been doing a significant amount of research and have contacted some homeschool groups in our area. Being middle-of-the-road folks, we’re not sure we’re going to fit in with the fundamentalist Christian group nor the hippie-ish “Unschoolers.” However, we do need to make sure we fill in the state’s paperwork accurately, and they can help with that.

The older kids will still do scouts, soccer, gymnastics, swim team, choir, and Sunday school, so they’ll have plenty of interaction with their peer group. (For those of you who worry that we’re pushing the kids too hard, these activities don’t all occur simultaneously throughout the year - - soccer ends, swimming starts with no overlap, for example - - so they have plenty of unstructured “kid-time.”)

While we’ll welcome any and all comments, tips, suggestions, sympathies, condolences, etc., what would be most helpful would be recommendations/opinions about various curricula. FWIW, our oldest with be in the equivalent of 4th grade; the younger will be in 1st.

Thanks!

2

Well, we’ve been considering homeschooling, and so I’ve been doing a lot of reading up too. I haven’t got any tips, because I’m totally inexperienced, but I do live in an area with a lot of homeschoolers of various flavors. It isn’t necessary to be a fundamentalist or an unschooler in order to find a few people to talk with here, so I feel kind of lucky.

So far the most helpful books I’ve found have been:
The survivor’s guide to homeschooling, which I can’t find on Amazon but it should be in your library…
Real-life homeschooling, which showed me the variety of people who do this
The well-trained mind, which seems to be THE book for classical homeschoolers and which contains a lot of curriculum information. If we do this, I plan to follow this type of curriculum, but the book lays out a very intensive course of study, and I gather that very few people find it feasible to follow it completely. I don’t actually plan to have my kids study Latin from 3rd grade on up, but I really like the way everything is laid out and fits together, and also how they deal with religion and with logic.

I, too, would like any comments or tips, and would be interested in anything you find helpful. So let me know how it goes!

3

Hi, from a homeschooled kid!

I am an only child. My parents and I started homeschooling halfway through 8th grade, after moving to a rural county with unbelievably bad schools. They say that they knew something had to be done when I started coming home and crying every day, depressed. I am a very curious person (no, not in the “odd” way … well, maybe) and love to learn, so it worked well for me.

Anyways, I have one very specific recommendation: Saxon math books. I never really liked math. But by gum, I understood what I was doing, and why, when I hit calculus in college. Because I had a good foundation from that math curriculum, I was able to develop a true love for mathematics in those college calc courses. Now I’m in graduate school (Ph.D track, full fellowship) in biostatistics after getting my B.S. in math (bio minor). Of course kids vary in their levels of understanding, but I can say (yes, with 95% certainty) that using that curriculum will take your child’s understanding as far as it can go. Your child will not just be floating through their future maths, whether it’s basic calc or advanced topology, on a half-fast base of knowledge.

Pardon the enthusiasm, but looking back, Saxon was probably the best part of our home curriculum, and definitely what kicked me ahead into what I love.

Best of luck to you both!

4

My older two kids are homeschooled (ages 12 and 15). We intend to start homeschooling our youngest at first grade level. Our 12-year-old has school online at childu.com We would do the older one the same way, but it only goes through 7th grade. This site offers all the required courses, as well as some non-required ones. The cost is $20.00 per month (per child, I think), which is comparable to what you would pay for Alpha Omega LifePac curriculum (which is what our oldest uses). Our problem so far with homeschool curriculum is that we have yet to find high-school level secular science. We are not Christian (we are Baha’i), and the Alpha Omega teaches creationism, not evolution, so we have to supplement.

I highly recommend homeschooling. My email addy is in my profile. Feel free to email me if you’d like.

5

It is extremely difficult to find packaged curriculums that don’t cater to a Christian perspective. I tend to stay away from packaged curriculums in any case. In fact, my biggest recommendation would be NOT to buy anything at first. Do a lot of reading, get books from the library, and take your time researching what “fits” for your family. Besides, most “packages” do not improve upon the typical public school offering and assume your child is at one constant level in all subjects.

For science, check out www.singaporemath.com They offer math and science from a non-religious perspective. My 9-year-old really enjoys the math series.

My 12-year-old reads my college biology text, and in fact, you can probably get a good used college science book online or at a campus book store. I also bought a few books from Borders books that contain several experiments and sonlight curriculum sells a nice microscope, though their science is hard to take seriously because it discusses creationism.

I also pull together studies from various online sites, that even while Christian in name, offer very extensive and high-quality suggestions. My two favorites are http://amblesideonline.homestead.com/ a Charlotte Mason based curriculum that is all free of charge(the women who put this together are amazing), and http://www.classicalhomeschooling.org/contents.html

I am particularly pleased with the classical homeschooling site’s recommendation of the videotext algebra.

There is also a good unit study approach called TRISMS. I believe they have a yahoo group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TRISMS/

Good luck, and remember, there is no one right way to home school. Find your path, take your time, and most of all read!

6

We homeschooled for three years under Louisiana’s option of registering students under the “private school” option. Here is the LINK if you’d like to explore that option for yourself. We enjoyed the additional freedom the private school option affords you in planning your curriculum and school day.

I highly agree and second Becky’s recommendation of the Saxon math curriculum. Our children are now very strong in math, with a deep comprehension of facts and formulas and knowing when and how to apply them. Our children reentered private school this year and were on solid ground in all of their subjects, but most especially math. They love it thanks to Saxon’s approach.

Another excellent resource is Scholastic . We registered with them as a school and received great prices on a wide variety of books. They offer Usborne , the Narnia books, as well as their own line of historical children’s diary’s such as Dear America and My Name is America .

We chose not to go with a pre-packaged curriculum because we felt it important that our children be able to work at their own level and pace. Surprisingly, once our kids got excited about homeschooling - they choose a faster pace than anything we would have outlined for them, spending days studying the life cycle of a crawfish, or researching the history whatever subject they were interested in.

We feel strongly about our kids having a true love of reading and math. With those two skills - they can learn anything they ever set their sights on.

Good Luck in your homeschooling journey - we loved it!

7

I was not home schooled, but many of my closest friends were…
Half of them were part of the Christian homeschool in town while the other were part of the more hippie home school. A lot of my friends say that it was hard to always be in such a small group of people, especially as they got older–and the friends from the Christian school regret the fact that they never got to be good friends with non-Christian types until they made it to community college. On the other hand, they never had to experience the hell that is middle school (or high school) and have not gone through much of the torment and pain that the rest of us had to. One thing to remember, if you are going to be homeschooling your kids, you will have to put in a lot more time and energy yourself…which is a good thing if you have the time and energy. My best friend, who’s parents were not around most of the day, said that he spent every homeschool day of his life learning from daytime TV (which is probably not any better than the public education system out here in California). He’s actually a really smart guy who knows more trivial information (thanks to the Discovery Channel, I guess)!. Good luck with this, your kids are lucky, really… I wish that my parents had put so much thought and energy into my early education!

8

Of course the choice is yours, but I wouldn’t rule out public schools. I went to schools that were downright terrible. They were improverished, poorly regarded and sometimes violent. But everyone I know who went to school with me and then entered the world of college (which is full of rich people) wouldn’t trade their experiences for the world. We were exposed to problems and diversity that made us better equipted to handle life in the wider world. There was also a bit of utopian aspect to my particular schools- everyone was so poor that there was no point to having much class or race based discrimination. Nobody laughed when you wore a thrift store dress to the prom. We all just did the best with what we had. From the outside, you’d see a school that parents would run away from, but from the inside you’d see dedicated teachers and a diverse array of students that with the help of caring parents (which are really the biggest factor in a kids’ education) could become great students and an asset to their community.

9

I think the biggest thing to remember about homeschooling–since I was homeschooled, from fourth grade through highschool–is that just because you are making a bigger investment in your kids’ education doesn’t mean you get to expect bigger returns. A lot of parents, mine included, seem to think that b/c they put in so much, they are owed millionaire genuises. (Not that this is exclusive to homeschooling parents, but it does seem to be a particular obsession.)

Your only goal should be a happy, educated, well-adjusted kid; any more than that and you are no longer in it for the kids. You’re in it for you, and your ego, and what you think your kids should become, vs. who they are and what they want to be.

And if this sounds bitter, it isn’t. Really. :smiley: It’s just that it’s only natural to assume, after awhile, that your kids are going to owe you for all that time and effort and sacrifice, in ways that “other peoples’ kids” aren’t.

So make sure you’re in it for the right reasons. And that those reasons have nothing to do with you.

10

Mine is only five and we are definitely home schooling. What made up our minds is that after looking at the grade school curriculum for our state we found out that she has pretty much already finished the first grade curriculum on her own. (She reads at a first grade level, does addition & subtraction, knows her address, city state & country, etc.) And she won’t be legally eligible for even Kindergarten for another six months. Who knows where she’ll be a year and a half from now when they would let her into first grade?

We are definitely not “hippies” but we are seriously considering un-schooling. We looked at all of the options when we were making the decision and found out that un-schooling is basically how she got where she is. All un-schooling really says is that learning does not require sitting in a little desk for a prescribed period of time every day. Instead everything you do from house repairs to vacations becomes part of the educational process. There is still some standard instruction done but it is done when the child is likely to be receptive to it. Judging from the behavior of our little sponge so far getting her into a receptive mood for instruction seems to require little more than talking about a subject. She immediately wants to know more. With un-schooling when this happens we go together and find out more.

As far as suggestions go I recommend either buying a top notch set of encyclopedia or subscribing to an online edition. You are going to need a source for correct answers in subjects that your kids know more about than you do. I think nothing will undermine your effort to homeschool more than if the kids can’t count on you to be able to find the answer to pretty much any question.

11

Be careful with this approach.

I know a family who took this approach. The result? A twelve year old who couldn’t read. Whenever asked, the parents said “Oh, he’ll learn when he’s ready.”

I, for one, don’t consider that any sort of schooling. In fact, I consider that pretty damn close to child abuse.

I’ll now bow out of this thread. My experiences with home schooled kids are limited, but every damn one of them has been cheated out of an education as far as I could see. Granted, I know that not ALL homeschooled kids are like that, but I just have too much trouble getting that 12 year old out of my head.

12

Well they took some approach but not the one I am talking about. They neglected a whole branch of learning regardless of what the child wanted to study. The whole point of un-schooling is to keep the child interested and then make sure they have the tools to pursue it. The folks you are talking about didn’t do that at all. They withheld teh most important tool of all. They were very bad teachers for their child. The answer to that is to not be a bad teacher. It is not to throw out an entire method of instruction.

13

One of the reasons we selected Alpha Omega LifePac for our oldest is that you buy each subject individually. Thus, she can have 10th grade math and 12th grade language, or whatever combo suits her best. Now, however, we have enrolled her in two college courses (community college) for the summer. We’ll see how that goes. calliope, I will definitely check out your math/scinece link later today. For now, my middle child needs the computer so she can "go to school’. :slight_smile:

14

Wow, wow, thanks, thanks, and wow! This is why I like the SDMB so much. I greatly appreciate the detailed and thoughtful answers as well as the links.

genie, the books look great. I’ll look into the library and see if they’re there; if not, off to the bookstore.

Becky, thanks for the heads-up about Saxon. Sounds like it’s worth pursuing. Good luck in grad school - - I’m living proof that you don’t need to be overly smart to get a Ph.D. (forest policy for me) but rather doggedly persistent.

norinew, thanks for the curriculum info. I’ll be in touch later today/tomorrow with an email.

Calliope, those links are fantastic. We’ll definitely be doing trial and error (hopefully less of the latter) but realize that this will take adjustments on all sides.

Adoptamom_II, thanks for your links as well, and for the tip on using the school registration as a way to get discounts on materials. Our kids have gotten beyond the fear of the unknown and are proposing their own integrated science and history projects (with field trips, of course). I think that they’ll set a pretty fast pace once we get going.

Laurasia, the potential for isolation was and major factor in our decision and continues to be a concern. We’re lucky in that there are some particularly good sports leagues here that draw from all over town, so we feel that if we make an effort to socialize with potential friends we’ll expand the social circle accordingly. FWIW, my wife and I were both socailly awkward in elementary school which caused its usual amount of pain; something we’re hoping we can minimize (but not totally eliminate) for our kids.

even sven, we’d gladly and seriously consider public schools, but you’ll have to have a picture of the conditions here to understand why it’s not a real option: the school system here is one of the worst in Louisiana and Louisiana is one of the worst in the U.S. There’s been almost 40 years of mismanagement and neglect and petty patronage which has yielded a system where the janitors often make more than the principals (through unionized overtime contracts). Many of the schools cannot provide toilet paper w/o asking parents to help with fund-raising. A friend of ours who started out teaching in the system arrived to find that other than desks, her kindergarten classroom was empty. No books. No rugs. Peeling dingy paint. No supplies (paper, crayons, glue, scissors, bulletin board material). Nothing. Everything she needed had to either come out of her paycheck or from the parents. She didn’t stay long. I agree that kids should overcome some trials and adversity to strenghthen their characters; I just don’t think that 9 and 6 year-olds should have to contend with the conditions we have here right now.

Audrey: trust me. If one of my children turned out to be a bartender, and made/showed me how to make the types of drinks you suggested in the “Ask the Bartender” thread, I’d die a happy, but liverless, man. :smiley: We’re definitely of the mind to give the kids the foundation blocks they need to pursue their own dreams, whatever those may be. If those dreams include spelling bees and Mensa, so be it. If not, no worries/hassles from us.

Degrance, we’ve not ruled out the Unschoolers, we just have a hunch that we’re not going to have a whole lot in common with the members other than that we’re homeschooling. We’ll keep an open mind, though, and dust off the Childcraft encyclopedia set that hasn’t seen much use in a while.

Athena, we’ve some friends who are “homeschooling” but as the mother is busy, it’s disorganized. Her oldest are great readers, but poor in math and science since the kids largely pursue their own interests as long as they’re quiet during the day. Given that we’ve seen some of the pitfalls of this approach, we’re going to pay close attention to organizing and goal-setting so that the kids don’t miss out.

Again, thanks to all. I, for one, am getting more confident and comfortable with our decision. The kids seem to like the idea, too.

15

Athena, with the current whole language approach to reading many children aren’t learning to read until 12 years old or so. MY niece couldn’t read because of that approach until my sister shelled out the cash for “huked on foniks.” However, there is no excuse for someone being homeschooled not being able to read.

My best friend just started home schooling his daughter. He is a “househusband” so his wife works and he teaches. Currently their daughter is age appropriate to 6th grade. They are going the route that focuses on her strengths. She is very good at writing and tests around the college level according to her previous school. However, she is awful at math and may be around the 3rd grade level.

With homeschooling she is finally catching up with the math. Neither parent is good with upper division styled math (from algebra on) and really need help when teaching it. They found some books (Math Magic for one, I think) that break it down for them now so they can teach it to their daughter better later.

The big thing with homeschooling is that the subjects that you are weak in will likely be the subjects the child is weak in unless you can somehow supplement it. I would suggest finding a few other homeschooling parents and hope that their strengths are where you are weak and trade off teaching in those subjects.

As for my friends daughter, she is age appropriate to 6th grade; however, she is currently taking some college level classes. Equestrian Etiquette (she is an expert horse rider and takes care of horses at her grandmother’s farm) and Freshmen English. At this rate, she could either have or be very close to having a bachelor’s degree by the time she is 18. Where they are located (Kentucky) pays for kids to take college degrees, if they qualify to take the classes, if they are being homeschooled. Louisiana may do that too.

16

I’m a fairly big hippie who is skeptical but curious about the concept of un-schooling (and de-schooling). I’m having trouble finding information about what it is. Do you have any spare links handy?

17

Good thread. Mr. Lissar and I are planning on homeschooling when we have kids. We have a lot of friends who were homeschooled, and we both wish that we’d had that option. I’ve just started reading about curricula and approaches, and it’s very interesting. I think we’d fall somewhere in between the Christian and unschooling types.

One of our homeschooled friends (currently in university) said she thought one of the biggest weaknesses in her education was being allowed too much choice- she chose horsetraining over practically everything else, and now has pretty bad spelling and math skills.

The question is moot for the next few years, but I’m keeping my eyes open for tips.

18

I know several public school teachers who homeschool. Interesting…

Don’t rule out private school, though. Many of them will only charge what you can afford to pay. You may have to volunteer at the school, though.

19

The headmaster and admissions director at the school we are leaving offered us the chance to receive some financial aid. This didn’t sit well with us since we felt that other kids’ mommies were going to have to work to subsidize our tuition so that our kids’ mommy could stay home until the littles are older. Plus, there are some kids on financial aid there who would be trapped in the public schools if their parents couldn’t get help. Mrs. Ivorybill and I both think that it would be better for those kids to get the aid before folks like us do.

20

Sugaree, I think the biggest un-schooling name is John Holt. He wrote several books back in the 60’s and 70’s, and they ought to be in your library. He’s very well known.

These people http://www.holtgws.com/ are continuing in that vein. There was a publication called Growing without schooling which has recently ceased, but you ought to be able to find back issues somewhere.

Other unchooling favorites include:
*Home education magazine*
The teenage liberation handbook, by Grace Llewellyn
The unschooling handbook, by Mary Griffith

I haven’t read any of these yet, except for one Holt book, so I can’t say how good they are.