Am I weird? I consider the study of languages to be in the “Art” category. When I think of art, I think not only of crayons and watercolors, but dance and music and patterns and the ways humans express themselves in communication. So I classify our language courses as “art.”

The kids have excellent language skills. Like I’ve stated before, our homeschool/umbrella school has high standards. Part of their excellent spelling, grammar, and reading comprehension abilities stem from them writing ten verses of the Bible in their notebook and reading those verses aloud, four days a week. I’ve talked about how this simple little activity, done regularly, encourages advanced reading skills, speaking skills, and handwriting skills. All children, no matter their age, do this course. We call it the “Verses” course.

The kids are encouraged to speak and write well, using proper grammar and spelling. They memorize grammar and spelling rules. (I hear this is no longer mandatory in public schools, to their detriment). They have spelling tests and grammar tests and must diagram sentences. They write paragraphs, essays, reports, and term papers. They do a ton of writing. They even do oral reports. I’d like them to be better orators; I feel we need to emphasize the “classical” education that children in this country used to receive before John Dewey’s “student-based” education system spawned in the early 1900s.

So anyway, we use the Abeka system (distributed by our church school organization), and I also give the kids books that I that we that they find appealing. hee.

The really neat thing about homeschooling is that you don’t need to be an “expert” to teach anything. The books handle a lot of the teaching. Of course in the beginning, kids, especially the younger ones, need a lot of visual help (counting real pennies, handling real rocks, etc); so books are an important tool, but not the only one. However, once the kids reach 6th or 7th grade, you can give them a book and they can comprehend what it says to do. I’m still amazed that my 15-year old daughter was able to merely sit down, read through her Algebra book, and fly through the thing with very little help from my husband. (And she A-ced it, too).

You can tell from the photos that I prefer the older textbooks for subjects like writing, reading, and history. I think the older stuff makes the kids work harder, and isn’t as “emotionally-based” as the newer stuff, which is filled with fluff. I just love Abeka.

We have several very basic language books for the kids to go through at their leisure. The only language I’ve been pushing them toward is Greek. They can follow their own interests with other subjects.

Art is not a difficult subject. In elementary grades, it’s mostly crafts. Older students will probably want to branch out more, into more independent genres. Drawing cartoons is a favorite of kids, it seems. It’s what my two boys just love to do.

My husband and I are “into” music, so it is natural that the kids are, too. Abeka has some really nice elementary-grade music theory books, but doesn’t offer much for older students. I have found the David Carr Glover piano and piano theory books to be excellent.

My husband uses his old college music textbooks (they are reprinted and available at Amazon) for lessons for the older kids.

We also offer them sheet music for their own independent playing. Once the kids know how to read notes, everything is up from there. All four kids play beautifully (piano and guitar). They have advanced to where now they are writing their own music They’ve also learned how to use music-mixing software on the computer and are creating their own CDs. I love it when education WORKS– just give the kids the basics, some tools, and off they go!

I couldn’t say it any better than Christine at the Best Homeschool Place. She gives 13 reasons why homeschooling is best.

1. Spending Time With Your Family - at a time when there are more and more gadgets to make our life “easier”, these gadgets also take a lot of our time away from other things. The computer, video games, cell phones, Ipods, and the television, all are distractions. With homeschooling you have more time to spend with your children, no matter how many other distractions are around

2. Setting Your Own Schedule - You never have to worry about your children missing any school days to go on vacation. When you’re homeschooling, even vacation time is school time!

3. Parental Influence over Peer Pressure - With over-crowded classrooms being a huge problem throughout the united states, it’s no wonder our children are more influenced by other kids than their own parents. With homeschooling, the parents have the most influence over our kids.

4. Nurturing a Love of Learning - as a parent homeschooling your children, you can see what their interests are, and adapt their lessons accordingly, which inspires them to learn and instills a love of learning. No worries of an intelligent child getting bored in class, or a child having difficulties being left behind.

Go see more, it’s brief and very readable.

My favorite reasons are morality, nurturing a love for learning, an excellent education, and encouraging family closeness. She gave 13 GREAT reasons! I thought it was well written and worth passing on.

One of the best things about homeschooling is that there are no limits to your creativity. Moms are especially creative creatures. We are always looking for ideas and ways to encourage learning, no matter what the activity.

With that said– here’s a really cool podcast series about Health for kids! There’s audio and video, and the site is very, very classy! It’s the blog by WholeFoodsMarket.com. I am very, very impressed. This is a great site to have your kids– especially your teens– sit down and peruse. The podcasts emphasize healthy eating and thrifty living. Even if you don’t homeschool, this is a great site to visit! It has links to recipes, articles on genetically engineered foods, seafood sustainability, and even has a little grocery store where you can purchase foods and spices!

It’s like Home Ec all in one. Plus, it encourages healthy eating and healthy lifestyles. I like the pdf files– there are some good ones on substitutes (like what to use in place of store-bought toothpaste) and a great post about oral health care.

I can’t rave about the site enough! Quit reading now! Go and see it, and get those kids healthier!

WARNING! Lengthy article ahead about homeschooling! lol

Well we’re gearing up for another school year here. Like I’ve said before, I homeschool, but it’s a unique homeschool. Our church has a small group of administrators that distribute curricula, give tests, and (best of all) handle all the administrative paperwork. We pay tuition to cover these expenses. We parents teach the children at home, grade all their bookwork, and ensure that the children do well on their tests. The standards are extremely high and the children have been receiving an exceptional education. This type of schooling is not exactly private schooling, and it’s not exactly homeschooling. The term I have heard is “umbrella” school. Parents teach the material and enforce the discipline, administrators regulate the curriculum and distribute and record tests and progress. It’s the best of both worlds. But I call it “homeschool” just because it’s easier for others to understand the concept; very few people know what “umbrella” schools are and I tire of explaining it to every nosy person at the supermarket, lol.

We parents also regulate music, art, and languages. The umbrella school handles the curriculum for topics concerning mathematics, grammar, science, and etc. In elementary grades, books on art and music theory are designated. However, once a student reaches 7th grade, the pursuit of electives materials is up to the parent. Music is mandatory, but the curriculum and/or instruction is up to parents. Same with high school art or other electives.

Elementary school grades are pretty cut and dry. There are a lot of resources available for the lower grades. I use the Abeka books system and absolutely LOVE it. We’d tried the ACE system and that was so lame it wasn’t funny. ACE is too easy, too dumbed-down, and doesn’t emphasize history and science like the Abeka books do. I like Abeka because it has more of a thematic feel to it– it’s orderly, the questions can be tough, and the tests are not direct repeats of the book questions (shame on you, ACE!!).

As for high school, once you’ve got elementary school under your belt, high school is a BREEZE. The kids are pretty much independent workers by age 13. The real fun part is watching your children develop likes and dislikes and interests in certain topics. The child’s personality really starts to come out. If you’ve been strictly disciplining during those early years, the student absolutely shines by grade 8.

I’ll give you a glimpse into our little world of curricula. I’ve tried a lot of books and various programs. I’ll share some of the neat books I’ve found, books that have helped the kids in their development. I am a history/art/language buff, and my husband is a science/music/math buff, so our kids have a terrific advantage right from the start, by working off their parents’ interests. I know not all families are like so fittingly blended, but homeschool is still Number One for education, no matter the style of the parents. Parents just have this keen perceptive about their kids. And the home, with it’s simple tools is well able to teach a child. You don’t need a science lab filled with beakers and pulse oximeters to educate your kid! Homeschooling is easy!

I think the primary reason homeschooling has been so successful in educating a child is because there is a built-in, vested interest in the parent to encourage hard work and self-discipline. These elements are missing from public education. Education isn’t about how many facts a brain can hold, how much trivia or data a person retains. True education is the ability to receive knowledge and APPLY that knowledge. There is a big, black hole of nothingness when it comes to public schools with this concept, because public schools cannot enforce the application of knowledge and critical thinking; they can only dump facts into the kids’ heads. So that’s why I believe that homeschooling is superior to public schooling, even with parents who have only a basic education. Like me. I graduated high school and was a “B” student.

Anyway, my husband and I have been “around the block” with books for the kids. I’ll share a few of the best ones in future posts.

My daughter Injane made a video, about the missions to the Auca Indians of Ecuador. It brought tears to my eyes. She plays guitar and sings the song in the video, too.

And to think that InJane didn’t even know her way around a computer last year! (She kept saying she had no interest in it). Now she is making videos and music… I’d better think about getting a computer with more ram and a better processor!

I’m finally going to begin what I’ve promised I’d begin– a series of posts about our homeschooling routine and our resources. The hardest thing about homeschooling is getting started. I know a lot of young moms and dads are completely baffled about how to begin, and the thought of educating their children is terrifying. But I believe in you– you can do it!

As I’ve stated very clearly before, reading is the most essential element of education. Reading is much, much more than looking at letters and words. Reading comprehension is absolutely crucial. You can read more about my reading philosophy by clicking the link in my sidebar. I am 100% in favor of phonics when it comes to reading education. Two of the best books I have seen are Let’s Get Ready For Kindergarten and Let’s Get Ready For First Grade. These books are available by Cedar Valley Publishing. They cover more than teaching reading– they are a condensed summary of the first two years of education. Educators (and to you homeschooling parents– that means YOU) can use them as a scope and sequence for the basics, for what the child should be learning that year (colors, numbers, etc for Kindergarten; subtraction, geometric shapes, etc for First Grade). I like these books a lot, and wish I’d had them for my own children when they were young.

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Let’s Get Ready For Kindergarten addresses the basic curriculum for kindergarten. You could even use it for preschoolers. The book is extremely durable (laminated thick cardboard pages). I love the bright colors and very clear illustrations. This book covers the alphabet, colors, basic shapes, numbers and counting, money, opposites, seasons, weather, telling time, the calendar, and more. Each page is very basic- you should develop your own activities based on what is addressed in the book. For example, there’s a page about the different seasons of the year. What you can do is– throughout the year– start a notebook and fill it with words, pictures, and leaves throughout the seasons. My kids had a three-ring binder that we filled with the leaves of spring, the weather we saw during the spring season, and the birds and bugs we noticed. We looked up the different kinds of leaves and birds in the encyclopedia and drew pictures of them, and wrote their names in the notebook. We did this for spring, summer, autumn, and winter. This fulfilled the requirements for science (noticing weather patterns and collecting leaves), for language (by using the encyclopedia and watching mommy write letters), for art (drawing the birds and flowers), and more. Let’s Get Ready For Kindergarten will not teach your child for you, but will give you the tools and basic information you need to know what to teach the child. And because the pages and the book in general are durable, the child can flip through the book himself, too.

Let’s Get Ready For First Grade is similar, and advances to the next step of development. Now that the child has learned numbers and letters, the child can advance to learning basic addition and subtraction, and learning the phonetic alphabet. I love that these books emphasize phonics for reading. This book addresses things like vowels, consonants, punctuation, compound words, ordinals, graphs, solar system, money, measurement, shapes, and government structure. You can really get creative with this. For example, print a picture of the Supreme Court building, and allow the child to find the different shapes that form the building (the columns are rectangles, the pediment is a triangle, etc). The child can trace the shape and color them. As he colors, you can explain what the Supreme Court does. This fulfills requirements for art (coloring), spacial skills and geometry (finding and drawing shapes) and civics (government function). Let’s Get Ready For First Grade takes the very basics of what is necessary for First Grade (or sooner, if you want to get ahead), and you can go from there. The only limit is your own creativity!

In the next few posts, I’ll talk about other helpful books and offer tips on what worked for us. Homeschooling is very fluid and flexible. People have asked me how on earth I find the time to do everything that I do. I can only answer that homeschooling is a lifestyle– you find out ways to educate your child with everything you say and do. It grows on you, too. In the beginning of homeschooling, structure is very important. The child must have a set time to work and a set time to play. The child must accomplish goals and he must realize from the start whether he is accomplishing them correctly. Expect to spend a lot of time with the child for the first 4 to 5 years of homeschooling. After that, however, the successful discipline really shows and the homeschooling child becomes independent and responsible much quicker then the public-schooled child.

I’ve been very blessed with four wonderful children who read like university students (and one like a college professor). They have been very good and proficient readers from the very beginning of homeschool lessons. It helps that both the Husband and I are voracious readers. However, good reading skills are not “talents” that are ingrafted into one’s DNA like eye-color. Every person who is able to read can learn to read well. I just thought I’d jot a few things down that I have discovered through my own experiences that make for good reading.

I’ve sectioned off my two checklists into two categories: the first one is “quick fix” for moms who have older kids or established anti-readers in the house; the second list is an “early development” list that contains tips for getting off on the right foot. You may not agree with everything in these lists, but a) they’ve worked well for my four, and b) it’s good entertainment at the very least. Shall we begin?

The Quick Fix:

1. Throw out your television.

2. If you just cannot bear to throw out the TV, exercise extreme self-discipline and severely restrict its use. If a kid has to choose between Bugs Bunny cartoons or Pilgrim’s Progress, what do you think they are going to choose?

3. Fill your house with books. Good books! I’m sorry, but Sweet Valley High and Harry Potter are not good books. Those books are entertaining (we call those kinds of books “junk” books as in “junk” food). Yeah, everyone needs a break and likes to read just for entertainment. But don’t offer your kid junk books on a regular basis, or he will become what I call a “Reader’s Digest” reader– he’ll be barely literate, only enough to read road signs and more junk. Writing research papers and disseminating legal documents and arbitration will be very, very hard for the kid when he grows up. I do notice that libraries, like candy stores, fill their lower shelves with the tastiest and emptiest trash. Beware of the Candy Man! At the end of this post you can take a peek at some things my own kids have read and have loved.

4. Approve everything your child reads. Yes, it can be done.

5. Start a new tradition– have your child write out ten verses of the Bible and read them aloud a few times a week. Stand back and watch some amazing things happen– your kids will be better readers, spellers, orators, be better behaved, and get wise for eternal life! See more detail about this in the next list #3.

The Early Development:

1. Read to your kids, yeah, just like all the cute commercials tell you. But here’s the clincher– read to yourself. Kids learn by example. If you are a reader, they are readers. It just happens.

2. Stubbornly refuse to teach your kid the “Look Say” method. Here’s a funny little story: as a kid, I was a voracious reader. I mean, really. By Third Grade, I was reading high school level books. The elementary school didn’t know what to do with me, so I was allowed to join the Sixth Grade class for their reading sessions when my Third Grade class had theirs. And even then I was far beyond their Sixth Grade level. Why? I had learned phonics before Kindergarten; and my very first year in school had been at a different school which still adhered to the Classical method of education. (My family had moved when I was halfway through Kindergarten, but my English teacher uncle encouraged me to continue my reading in the Classical method). The new school I attended implemented the “Look Say” method, and their pupils were dunces. These poor kids were so stilted in their reading skills and comprehension because the school system has adopted the fad of the “Look Say” method. After forty years of this drivel, some school systems are returning to phonics now.

So, anyway, when I was in Third Grade, I was teaching Sixth Graders to read, and was giving them spelling tests. Really! And thus, because I’d worked with schoolteachers at a very early age, I came to have solid ideas (aka “opinions”) about certain reading methods, and all by the time I was eight years old.

I remember at that age being stunned one day when my younger brothers came home with the most idiotic book I’d ever seen: Dick and Jane. My brothers loved it (had lots of pictures). Earlier, I had attempted to teach my brothers the phonics method (my mother gave me a nickel per lesson), but the schools literally enforced the “Look Say” method. My brothers do not read nearly as well I do to this day.

“Look Say” is now being attributed to the problems associated with dyslexia. This method uses images and the shapes of words to teach reading. Therefore, the student must memorize thousands of images (”eat” looks like the shape of a boot, etc). It is barbaric.

Adversely, phonics teaches students that symbols have meaning, which is how the brain is hard-wired. I consider it debasing to all elements of learning to use the “Look Say” method, because it requires image cognizance and a cumbersome heap of memorizing. This kooky method trains the young brain to have image-based thinking, when reading is really comprehensive-based. “Look Say” greatly reduces reading cognizance and comprehension.

3. Read the Bible. The Bible was once the premier textbook in public schools. As a matter of fact, when President Thomas Jefferson was also serving as president of the Washington, DC, public school board, he said the only two necessary books for students were the Bible and Watts hymnal. The Bible is an amazing collection of literature, poetry, prose, history, and not to mention, the instruction manual for moral living and eternal salvation. Just being exposed to the Bible has made my kids excellent readers, spellers, and thinkers.

4. Have your child write out a portion of Bible verses and read them aloud to you every day. I know I had this under the Quick Fix list, but it is something very helpful when you are beginning. Your kid will benefit, believe me.

5. Finally, cultivate a true love for reading from the start. Buy books, discuss books with your spouse, share books, and have a family time of reading together. Videos, DVDs, computer games, X-Boxes and such distract from reading, and, if your child is suffering under the “Look Say” method at school, furthers the damage by making the child image-cognizant instead of word/symbol-cognizant. Ever since my kids were little, movies and computer use have been regulated and strictly enforced. It has benefitted them greatly.

Well, there’s my handy-dandy list of the 10 R’s– the 10 reading tips! They’ve worked for me! It sounds like a lot of work, and it is. Excellent reading habits and skills take some time to cultivate, but the benefits are very much worth it. Every additional skill a child learns hinges on his ability to read and to comprehend what he is reading. This is so important that it bears repeating– the child cannot fully develop in other areas of his education without comprehending what he reads. This takes time and effort, but it is worth it!

Remember Helen Keller? Her teacher persevered for months, trying to get that girl to understand– to comprehend– the things in her world. Helen just couldn’t catch on at first, and she even grew more frustrated for a time. Yet once that trickle of water got flowing, and once Helen realized what that water was and what symbols represented that water, understanding flooded her like a rushing river. It unlocked her mind and enabled her to not only communicate with the world, but comprehend the world.

After the age of 10 or 11, I am against the use of fiction books for reading. Read more about my views on it in this post here. When the kids were young, we did read fiction from time to time– however, the language had to be slightly “advanced.” That is, I stuck with the more classical fiction books and I also tried to give books that were slightly advanced in its language level than where my child was currently at.

Here are some of the books we have discovered and love. Some are fiction, some are non-fiction, and some are non-fiction but read like fiction (those are so much fun!) I am sure you can get these at your local library or at Amazon.com or ChristianBookDistributors. I have not organized the books by age, simply because all the kids have found them readable. The links take you to to Amazon.com, where they are available, although your local library probably has most of them.

Why Don’t You Get a Horse, Sam Adams?, by Jean Fritz
Shh! We’re Writing the Constitution by Jean Fritz
Martha Speaks (Sandpiper Paperbacks)by Susan Meddaugh
Stuart Little by E.B. White
Aaron and the Green Mountain Boys Patricia Lee Gauch
Emmett’s Pig by Mary Solz
And Then What Happened, Paul Revere? (Paperstar) by Jean Fritz
The Swiss Family Robinson Johann Weiss
Little Bear’s outdoor adventure guide for the all-American boy by Richard Wheeler
Bread and Jam for Frances by Lillian Hoban
Daniel Boone: Frontier Legend (Historical American Biographies) by Pat McCarthy
Black Beauty Anna Sewell
The Bulletproof George Washington by David Barton
A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael by Elisabeth Elliot
Gladys Aylward: The Adventure of a Lifetime by Janet and Geoff Benge
Amy Carmichael: Rescuer of Precious Gems by Janet and Geoff Benge
Eric Liddell: Something Greater Than Gold by Janet and Geoff Benge
Little Pilgrims Progress by Helen L. Taylor
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution by C. Brian Kelly
The Childhood of Famous Americans series (literally hundreds of books from the 50’s and 60’s– my library has them all. They are outstanding! Here’s Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator of them).
The Little House Collection Box Set Laura Ingalls Wilder
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel DeFoe
Heidi (Children’s Classics) by Johanna Spyri
The Beginner’s Bible: Timeless Children’s Stories by Keren Henley
George Washington the Christian by William Johnson
Jesus Freaks: Martyrs: Stories of Those Who Stood for Jesus: The Ultimate Jesus Freaks by Voice of the Martyrs and DC Talk
Extreme Devotion: The Voice of the Martyrs Voice of Martyrs
Into All the World: Four Stories of Pioneer Missionaries by Vance Christie
The Heavenly Man: The Remarkable True Story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun by Brother Yun and Paul Hattaway
Lives of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence by B.J. Lossing
The Penguins Are Coming! by R.L. Penney
Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion
No Roses for Harry! by Gene Zion
Harry and the Lady Next Door by Gene Zion
A Children’s Companion Guide to America’s History: History and Government by Catherine Millard
Smithsonian Presidents and First Ladies by James Barber and Amy Pastan
Meet George Washington by Joan Heilbroner

I am by nature an extremely organized person. This can be good and bad. It’s good when I have assignments or goals. It’s bad when I’m working with less organized people, lol. Lots of sparks fly from time to time.

Honestly, I don’t know how “unorganized” people homeschool. I’d go to bed every night in terror, hoping that my work done by the “seat of my pants” worked. I’m too high-strung for such dangerous living! Plus I have this terrible propensity of throwing away papers. I really don’t know how it happens, but for some reason, I’m always throwing away papers we really need to keep, like insurance documents, receipts, etc…. sigh. So I have a few boxes where I toss EVERYTHING in now, according to subject.

OK, so anyway, I have a very, very, VERY organized desk. I actually have two of them (one for school and one for my writing jobs). This is the desk where we establish our homeschooling “base.” To prevent clutter (and me losing paperwork), I keep the desk stripped bare, save for the current lessons and current books on which we are working. Other books and notebooks (like textbooks, score keys, etc) are stored on a bookshelf. When a child finishes a book, I put the expired lessons on the bookshelf and take out the new ones, and put it in its proper shelf on my desk.

This is a wild looking desk, I know. The base is a very old teacher’s desk we acquired from an old school building. It’s HUGE and it weighs a ton. It takes two men or three of us girls to move the thing. The top is a plywood box that my husband made. I drew up the plans of what I thought I needed, and he constructed it. It is the best organizer I’ve ever had.

I’ll be posting more about our curriculum and actual routine, but right now I just wanted to give curious onlookers an idea of how things look. You can see slots in the desk. These things hold the kids’ notebooks (they do not write in workbooks, they write their answers in spiral notebooks– this saves money), their charts (we keep track of exactly when they work and what they work on), journals (we have food/physical activity journals and music journals), and their Bible verses notebooks (more on that in a second). In these slots, I also store printed-out answer keys, extra printer paper, and extra notebooks.

I also have Goofy– my mascot– on the shelf. :) Everything has a particular place so that if it goes missing or undone, I know about it immediately. The kids fill in their own journals– for example, they must practice a musical instrument or work in music theory at least 30 minutes a day, four days a week. So in their music journal, they write down exactly what they have worked on, and for how long. I’ll be blogging about the books we use for such purposes in future posts. I think we’ve now got this thing all down to a science, lol.

About Bible verses. My pastor came up with a brilliant idea: he has the children write ten verses from the New Testament four times a week, in their best handwriting. Then, the children must read these verses aloud to a parent. It is AMAZING at how well-educated my kids have become from this. They have large portions of the Bible memorized and understand the doctrines. This requirement also fulfills: handwriting skills, oral-reading skills, spelling, grammar, and literate sentence structure. And because it is a discipline and because it is the Word of God, it is helping the children with their character and reasoning skills, too. My kids are all excellent spellers, readers, writers, and they all have scholarly skills in the understanding of the scriptures. I highly recommend this for any homeschooling parent.

Now about textbooks. We use the Abeka books, but have supplemented their education with a wide variety of books, DVDs, computer software, and field trips. Homeschooling is, essentially, our life right now. We have a structure upon which we homeschool– a philosophy of education, if you will. It is heavily based on reading and on history. Everything springs out of that, really. We do not read fiction books anymore. I think my youngest, who is now 11, read his last fiction book last summer. Why am I against fiction books? Well, why read fiction when there are so many interesting and edifying non-fiction books to read? The problem is that public schools and libraries are filled to the ceiling with mind-melting drivel that does nothing to educate the young.

Now before you think I am some kind of dictator— I am!!! Muahahahahahah! OK, ahem, well… my kids HAVE read fiction. Actually, for the first five years of schooling, I allowed fiction books. I’ve usually stuck to the classics (Black Beauty, Flat Stanley, Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, which are non-fiction books but read as fiction). And if my kids want to read a fiction book today, they may after it is approved. But they really don’t want to anymore. Why read about weird stuff like sorcery or talking mice, when the adventures of Daniel Boone (written by the man himself) and the exploits of missionaries (like John Wesley and Hudson Taylor and Elisabeth Elliot) are so much more compelling (not to mention character-building)? Garbage in, garbage out, I say. To us, homeschooling isn’t a means to an end, it is the journey of life itself. I am being homeschooled as I homeschool. It’s a way of life.

More later…

My eldest daughter graduates in a few weeks. She’s been “homeschooled” her entire life. I guess this officially makes me a veteran homeschooler! Wow, that time went fast. :| Only three more to go…

Some folks ask me about our schooling techniques, etc. Of all the blogging I do, I really don’t blog much about homeschool. I’m not sure why. I guess it just doesn’t interest me enough. Now, if you had caught me 10 years ago, I was CRAZY about homeschooling; I might have blogged about it then. But now, it’s just another segment of our lives, kind of like washing the dishes or working in the gardens. Our homeschool has settled into a routine, and there aren’t too many exciting (read: disastrous) events to detail. Perhaps when something becomes so effortless and organized, you know you’re doing OK.

Well, I’ll just blog about it a little. No pressure; I’ll just chit-chat about our routine, why we do it, what works for us, etc. Hopefully you parents who homeschool will find something useful. I’ll break it up in a number of posts, to retain readability.

My husband and I decided to school our kids ourselves because we both realized the corruption of public schools and were wary of the social engineering of modern education. We’d read a lot of books and also remembered a lot of our own experiences. There was NO WAY we were going to send our children, day after day, to be indoctrinated into secular humanism, the fallacies of evolution, values clarification, and “health” classes (euphemism for Perversion 101). Public school was very stressful for me as a kid; I desperately wanted to learn, but school was so socialized that the consuming issues were your hairstyle, boyfriends, and the latest acne treatment. I wanted something different for my kids.

For the first few years, we sent the kids to a private school in the church. It was a classroom environment, but it lacked the one-on-one education. And the curriculum (ACE) was terrible. Eventually, the school organization was completely revised, and we opted for something called an “umbrella school.” Basically, we pay tuition for an administrator to maintain all records and tests scores, but we parents teach the children and supervise their work at home. I think it’s the best of both worlds, actually. I do no administrative work, but I get to work with the kids. We have assigned books, so I don’t even need to worry about the curriculum. We dumped the lousy ACE and have had good success with Abeka. We have purchased the books from the tuition monies, and we share the books among us, so the financial burden is decreased. (The children do not write in the workbooks; rather, they write their answers in notebooks).

The children are tested every week by the administrator. They must score an 85% average or better, per subject, or else they repeat the book. This helps us maintain a schedule and standards, and encourages accountability among us. I have stricter standards, where I expect my children to get 90% or better on their tests. On the harder subjects, such as Algebra, I am pleased with 85%; but in history, science, and language, there is no excuse for them to score below 90%. We work very hard at home and I will not tolerate slackness. Now, everybody has a bad day or week, so we are very flexible. That’s what makes homeschooling so successful- the parents are well aware of the child’s abilities and therefore expects the child to meet certain goals. There is no “dumbing down” in my home. Some criticize that I am too militant, but tell me, how many moms have Ivy League professors practically knocking on your doors, hoping your kids attend their schools? My kids are well-educated and very self-disciplined, and it shows in their demeanor and communications.

Well, I gave the body of why we homeschool, and of our general philosophy. I’ll talk more about our routine, our organizational habits, and other tidbits in posts to come.