We start today, and we are excited about it. I saw in another thread that WhyNot homeschools. Anyone want to share experiences?
I didn’t homeschool but my best friend does. My experience in interacting with her kids and their peers is that they are some of the brightest, respectful, well-rounded kids I’ve met. Exactly the opposite of what I expected. I was a huge proponent of public/private schools not necessarily for the education but for the social interaction. I expected the home schooled kids to be “backwards” but the result was just the opposite.
Good luck!
We have a bunch of friends who were homeschooled. They’re all better adjusted than we are. We’re hoping to be able to do it with our kids, finances allowing.
What type of homeschooling are you planning to do?
Paging dangermom!
Why are you doing it? Are you a qualified teacher?
There exist small homeschooling co-ops, you know. Maybe once a week, you and your kid go meet the other homeschooled kids in a classroom setting. They socialize, learn how classrooms work, and still get lessons from the parents. I don’t know if that’s common knowledge or not, but there it is…
why do people automatically assume “homeschooled=unsocialized?” Do you really think proper socialization requires cramming your kid in a stuffy classroom for 7 hours a day?
what value is this to someone who is homeschooled?
It’s good experience for college.
I think the “socialized” comments typically refer to dealing with a variety of kids, outside of your usual neighborhood and relatives. Ways you can meet more kids and learn how to deal with personal problems that come up can be helpful.
We homeschooled for a while. We found some drawbacks that I should point out:
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Many, if not most homeschoolers are in it for religious reasons. They don’t like the ‘secular humanist’ stance of state schools, and are very God-oriented. Of course, this varies with locale. However, if you’re not doing it for these reasons, and you’re in a smaller center, this can be a pain. Similarly, much of the available homeschooling material you can find in catalogs and online is very religious.
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Lots of homeschooled kids are well educated, decent, polite kids. Some are disturbingly shut off from society. They would probably be odd if they were in school, but homeschooling isn’t helping them much.
On the other hand, parts of it are great, but I’m sure lots of other people will tell you those bits. Good luck.
I homeschooled the Kiddo for 2nd and 3rd grades. We both loved it. We did not do it for religious reasons or because I didn’t want him in school. We did it because it was the best choice for my son at the time. He’d had a really rough year in first grade. He was behind in some subjects, and so far ahead in others that he was bored to death. The parish school he was in just didn’t have the means to cater to individual kids.
At the end of 3rd grade, he said he would like to try going back to school. He spend 4th and 5th grade at the local public. He transitioned back pretty smoothly and is not in his second year at charter prep school. He is doing well.
I think the most important thing is to remember that whatever sort of schooling your try, if it’s not working, don’t be afraid to try something else. I had one friend who started out homeschooling and felt like such a failure when it didn’t work for them. Turns out her kids are thriving in the small private school near their home.
Good luck and have fun!
I’ve got a 12 year old in the 9th grade who we have been home schooling for the last 4 years.
We do mostly unschooling where we just give her a lot of experiences and let her soak up the “3 Rs” as she goes.
We give her a standardized test every year and she consistently scores in the 90+ percentile on pretty much everything except math. She only comes in at around 60 for that but we think that probably is the result of a minor learning disability. She does the concepts at the 90 percentile but bombs when it comes to actually manipulating numbers.
Her main focus is the arts. She is in private lessons for drawing and music and she has had several leading roles in local theatrical productions geared towards kids. We are planning on getting her to some auditions for local theaters this year.
Our reasons for home schooling have a little to do with religion, we thought there was too much of it in the public schools. Mostly it was because she was bored silly where she was. In the 5th grade she had moved through all of the materials they had to offer at her school and when we went to a conference to ask, “now what?” we were essentially told she would just have to be “on hold” until she got to the jr high where they had more advanced stuff. They wanted her 6th grade year to be just wasted while she waited to go to another school.
We decided we could do a better job.
Anyway, if there is anything you’d like to know from someone who has been there, ask away.
I was homeschooled from 2nd to 12th grades and am 35 now. I’ll be happy to share or answer questions, but longer responses will have to come when I get home from work.
What Ferret Herder said. You need to know how classrooms operate for important things like college and unimportant things like understanding a classroom scene or reference on TV. And if your kids are never interacting with greater society, then they’re unsocialized by definition. Do you think I’m doing a disservice to anyone by mentioning these co-ops?
I don’t have children yet–I’m currently cooking our first–but I’ve thought a lot about homeschooling. I’ve found two major objections to it, and I’d be interested in hearing responses from people who were home schooled, or parents who home school. I don’t know that my objections are right, they’re just what I think right now:
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It’s healthy for kids to have a part of their life that doesn’t involve their parents. First because they need to learn to function in environments where nobody loves them that much, and second because they need the freedom from the need to please a parent.
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A public school, especially elementary, is a child’s one opportunity to meet people from different socioeconomic backgrounds and interact with them almost without any preconceived ideas about each other (which develop, in both parties, as they get older). While a public school isn’t going to have students that represent a complete social and cultural spectrum (of course), it’s bound to be a heck of a lot broader than any club or home schooling co-op.
I didn’t touch on this but I agree with what others have said.
My daughter is constantly complimented on how well she does in most any social situation.
She is around others, from babies to gray-beards and everything in between, on a daily basis. She is able to adjust her behavior to the environment she finds herself in.
It is the poor kids who are locked in a room with 20-30 other kids of the same age for hours at a time who end up with socialization issues.
Actually, my kids go to public charter schools, but I do a lot of homeschooling with them as well. Best of both worlds, now that they’re in decent schools. I’m far too lazy to homeschool entirely, to be honest. I know it would turn into a shambles of unschooling so un as to be insufficient. But we still work on “fun” side projects and give them the one on one academic attention they can’t get in school.
My goddaughters, who I’m very close to and lived next door to for many years, are my best experience with total homeschooling. One of them went to public school for kindergarten, homeschooled until junior year of high school and then went public again. Her younger sister was homeschooled until freshman year of high school. Going into public school was their choice, and both said they wanted to try it just to see what it was like (although I suspect in reality it was mostly the elder’s idea and the younger followed her like a lost puppy.)
Both were very active in one of our local homeschool groups and also had friends outside of their homeschool groups, and I saw no evidence of delay in their social development. When they went into public school, both testing into honors classes, one joined color guard, both did plays and such. Both had boyfriends and a gaggle of girlfriends within a month. The older graduated with over a 4.0 GPA, the other still has a year to go but so far is on the honor roll. In other words, they were more than prepared for “regular” school by their homeschooling experience. They both attended their homeschool groups events, including prom, as well as events at their school, and are still close with their homeschool friends.
The biggest challenge both of them faced was the inadequate explanation of concepts by teachers. Several times when they were new, they’d go ask a question of the teacher, who would give them a very superficial or test-related explanation. Once the teachers realized they were homeschooled kids, they adjusted their explanations to be more holistic, more “why” instead of “what to memorize for the test”, and things got better for them.
The second greatest challenge for the younger was learning to make friends and pursue her own interests, instead of being the elder’s shadow. It’s hard to say whether this problem existed because they were homeschooled together or if they would have had the same dynamic in public school. It’s a lesson they both needed to learn at some point in their development, anyhow, so I’m happy to say they’ve both adjusted to it pretty well.
The second greatest challenge for the elder has come now, in college, where the classes are just too simple for her. She’s upset that she’s covered all this stuff already but still has to sit in class and jump through hoops to get the credit. Again, given her intelligence and the honors classes she took in high school, probably not a problem related to homeschooling per se, but it may have exacerbated her impatience with “busy work”.
My favorite joking response to the socialization issue: “Oh, we practice socialization. Once a week I beat up my kid, demand his lunch money and lock him in the closet for an hour.” 
Honestly, school hours are probably the least social hours of a kid’s day, especially now that they’ve eliminated recess, reduced lunch to 15 minutes and you’re not allowed to talk in the hallways between classes. There are plenty of better ways to get socialization! Homeschool kids are only sheltered and unsocialized if that’s what their parents want them to be.
Absolutely.
Is it your contention that only public schools offer such an environment?
Nonsense.
You seem stuck on the idea that kids who are homeschooled are locked in a cupboard until they reach age 18. I suppose some of them are. Many are out in the world seeing other people of various backgrounds on a regular basis.
Maybe half of our home schooling takes place at home. that is one of the great pleasures of home schooling. The world is your laboratory.
this is why I love homeschooling threads. suddenly the entire world is made up of child psychologists.
it’s more like “people get stuck in the mindset that the way they grew up is the one true way.”
And you obviously didn’t pay attention to what I was actually saying. Please go back and re-read carefully. I am talking about a child interacting with a child of the same age, on an ongoing basis. I learned really a lot from the time spent with the kids from the mansions and the kids from the trailer park and the kids they bussed in from downtown and the kids from big families and the kids who went to the Catholic church. I learned all this because we were <i>both</i> kids at the time and didn’t know anything except to be open, honest and “real” with each other. By high school that kind of candid interaction was dead.
I wasn’t in those Catholic kids’ confirmation classes (or whatever it was they took). The trailer park kids weren’t in dance lessons with me. I wasn’t at the country club with the mansion kids. It’s a question of finding the best opportunity for the little buggers to figure each other out, before either one knows any better.
Thoughts? I mean, thoughtful thoughts?
What I’d like to know is how you find the time to teach your child. I’d love to be able to homeschool my future kids, but I’ve got to work. My fiancee isn’t fit to do so and would much rather have a job and leave education to the public system. What are the options for people like us?
Like me, you can do both public school and homeschooling in your off hours. It’s not an either-or proposition.
Or you join homeschool groups for some classes and do other work in your off hours. If your kid is older, highly motivated and good at keeping himself on task, there are lots of online courses (some for college credit that don’t care how old the student is) and curricula to keep him busy during the day when you’re at work. Or he works on homework or projects you assign while you’re at work. Or you let him veg out to video games all day and stay up late doing lessons with you, because, hey, he’s got nothing to be up early for, so he can sleep in!
But honestly, when they’re very small, homeschooling just isn’t that great an option for working parents, unless you hire a nanny who’s willing to do it while you work. When they’re very small, most parents prefer to do some sort of unschooling, even if they don’t call it that, and teach them stuff as it comes up, and you have to be around your kid a lot for that to work.