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.

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.

Just a little rant after a hot and humid day… we “homeschool” our four kids (I put homeschool in quotes because it is more like an umbrella school; the kids learn at home and are tested every week in a group setting with other kids in the organization). My husband works at a job along with a few teachers’ husbands– and boy, do they criticize! I don’t know what it is– for some reason these guys just feel the desperate need to point out stuff like a news story that a homeschooler shot somebody, or that a homeschooler is behind in studies, or that a homeschooler wants to return to public schooling. They NEVER mention it when a public school student shoots people, or a public school student flunks his grade again, or when a public school student is caught with drugs or DWI. We all know this happens more frequently with public school kids than homeschoolers, but for some reason, we homeschoolers always have to feel on the defensive.

The other day, it happened again. While at work, my husband was getting the barrage of questions of “when” my eldest daughter would “graduate.” She’s actually a year ahead in her studies (and these are college level studies, too), but to these idiots, she’s 18 and should be out of school now. “Looks like somebody dropped the ball!” they accuse. My husband is too gracious to shoot out a nasty remark, like I would. Grrr. He has to work with these jerks, so he’s nice; but I don’t. But the lousy thing is these jerks never say anything like this in front of me. The bigots. Don’t these people have enough to do trying to fix their own social problems without criticizing us that we aren’t raising our kids the way they think we ought to? Grrr.

And while I’m ranting, you want to know what really stings? We pay for THEIR kids’ education (through our property taxes) and then we also have to pay for our OWN kids’ education (through tuition). We get no tax breaks and are essentially funding their kids and their teachers, and then they turn around and criticize us every chance they get.

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.