homeschooling

Get Real is a 6 week series collaborated by a handful of bloggers, inspired by Tonya (Plain and Joyful Living) and Adrie (Fields & Fire), to open up the wide abyss of realness. The realness that lies behind the pretty pictures and face value of each and every one of us. The realness that we all struggle with at times. Get Real is a little peek behind the scenes; talking about what different areas *really* look like in our life, while juggling our families, work, and personal needs. We would love to have you share in the comments. This week’s topic:

Education

I had begun researching homeschooling when my oldest was less than a year old. The whole concept of sending my baby away once she turned five just didn’t settle right with me. Just as I gave birth to her at a birth center to welcome her gently into this world, and practiced attachment parenting, homeschooling seemed like a natural extension to the connective bond we had begun to form together. She didn’t want to be away from me. I didn’t want her to be away from me. I just couldn’t imagine it any other way.

That first year homeschooling was a bit rough though…emotionally for me. When the time came, and everyone else I knew was sending off their kids off to kindergarten, I felt like I was doing something “wrong”. Even though the decision to home school made sense…I had this looming feeling as if I were going to get in trouble or something. Was it okay that my five year old was sleeping past eight fifteen? Did I need to be shuffling her out of bed at 7am and rush her to eat her breakfast just because that’s what most everyone else was doing?

As the years went by I started to feel more secure in myself and my children’s ability to be home schooled. The first big hurdle for me to get over, however, was letting go of other’s expectations of what they felt I should be doing.

Do my kids have desks? Do we sit down and do lessons for 6 hours Monday through Fridays? What subject matter does my six year old like best? My favorite was when people would ask my oldest what grade she was in, to which she would oddly stare back and say, “I am not in a grade. I am home schooled.” No, we don’t sit at desks and no, we do not do “school” for 6 hours a day…and no, we don’t even officially do school every day. Homeschooling finds a unique rhythm for each and every homeschooling family. That’s the novelty of it. It can look different for everyone and fit into wherever and however in your life. Sometimes we do school on the weekends, holidays, and get this…all summer long!

In my homeschooling approach, I really do not feel like there needs to be very much directed learning if any at all before second or third grade. I have witnessed all of my children naturally begin to tie their own shoes, learn to read and do basic math, etc. all by themselves. I always find it interesting when it comes time to do the third grade standardized tests. My children know all the material on the test. Why on earth would I waste their time (or mine) to drill them over and over again with the same boring information every single day, that they already know, when we could be using that time to explore the world around us and be busy learning new and exciting material? I feel like as a parent and an educator, it is my job to enable my children to be able to operate within the outside world on their own as well as expose them to limitless opportunities to learn educational material.

My second hurdle to get over was more of my own, which is… I am not a Waldorf homeschooling mom. I purchased two Waldorf inspired curriculum, which to look through, I loved. I just do not have the time to sit down with each child and do what it takes to home school them in a Waldorf fashion. It’s just not a reflection of me or where I am at in my life. I struggled for a long time over this thought because in a way I felt like I was saying, “I don’t have time to sit down with each of my kids one on one every day”. Or, that I loved it, but just didn’t feel like doing it or that my kids weren’t worth it. I felt pretty bad about feeling that way. It took me two years to move along past that.

Honestly, I love worksheets. I never thought I would say that, but that is what it has come to. The reality is that I have 5 kids. Thus far, I have always had a baby on my hip, and when I find myself free…my attention is usually already being demanded in some other way. I don’t have time to be as attentive with my younger children as I may have been able to do when my older two were little. But after getting over the feeling bad about it part, I have since realized that my older kids take the younger ones under their wings and have adventures of their own. I might find them busy tight rope walking, dreaming up circus acts, making mud pies and dirt castles, planning and planting their vegetable gardens, tending to farm animals, gathering bits of nature, sewing, finger knitting, videotaping their own dance videos, reading to each other, cleaning and doing chores, etc. My kids are together, enjoying each other 85% of the time.

My kids read every day. I believe that every child begins to read when they are truly ready. Kayla didn’t start fluently reading until she was 9. Bella started around 7. Hawthorn started around 5, but he still isn’t at the point where he wants to sit down and read a whole book all by himself. He is too busy playing, which is really what I feel 6 year old boys should be doing anyways. For the past two years I have been printing off worksheets from education.com for subjects across the board, especially for using to put into portfolios at the end of the year. For most of our home schooling we have a pretty loose look to things, however periodically I will get out the grade level materials and have every one run through what they “should” be able to do just to make sure.

Some of our current supplemental educational favorites are:

Education.com: Free worksheets for all subjects Pre-K through high school.

Khan Academy: “Learn almost anything for free”… a good place to go for 3^rd grade to adult.

Brain Pop: Offers a wide array of all subject matter for grades K-12^th. *They have a whole free section too, including a daily video.*

Math IXL: Math concepts broken down by grade level and topic Pre-K through 8^th, plus Algebra and Geometry.

Raz-Kids: Leveled online books; helps with reading fluency and comprehension K-6^th grade.

I did a few free trials of the above programs. I am going to have to say that I love math xl. Raz-kids is good too, but my kids got a little goofy with the recorded reading part. Brain Pop, like I mentioned, has a whole bunch of free stuff for all subjects, but I am thinking of getting the family access plan soon. Either way, I feel like as long as we can do a check in several months out of the year and make sure everyone is at or around where they “should” be grade level wise, I don’t sweat much about it anymore. Homeschooling is a just a way of life. It is just as much a lifestyle as it is educational. I love having my family together; watching the sibling bonds grow every year; I like being able to pick up and go if we want to go on a trip somewhere fun; I like being able to put together our portfolios at the end of the year and amaze myself with how much we accomplished in such a short time.

Some other resources we love are:

For beginning readers: Bob Books

Health: Growing, Growing Strong: A Whole Health Curriculum for Young Children, 2nd Edition

Native American Myths and History for the younger child: Keepers of the Earth

U.S. History for the older child: A Young People’s History of the United States

Science: Botany, Zoology, and Biology Coloring Books.

Math Manipulatives: Pattern Blocks and Developing Mathematics with Pattern Blocks, Grades K-5

Math Manipulatives: Unifix Cubes and Developing Mathematics with Unifix / Gr K-3

When looking through my photos from this past year, I tried to capture a little bit of everything that we do and consider educational; everything from inoculating shiitake mushroom logs at a local skill share meeting to catching injured birds and identifying them to worksheets and pen pal writing. Measuring and seeding the garden, cooking, drawing, creative writing, reading, science and nature, etc. I have a hard time labeling what type of home schoolers we are. I heavily identify with un schooling, but as I have mentioned before, I don’t like that term at all, because it signifies that something is lacking or not being done. I guess if I had to put a term on it, we make sure we are at grade level throughout the year by using worksheets and supplemental resources, but also leave most of our days wide open for a lot of child-led learning as well. That of course does not mean we do nothing, but instead, it means we do everything.

For more talk on education visit: Heather, Tonya, Melanie, Aubrey, Kyce, and Adrie.

So, I am thick in my adventures of decluttering and purging and packing. I tackle one section of the house, while the kids rip appart another. The funny thing that I am realizing, is that we have a whole lot of stuff that we do not need…much if it trash. Goodness. And we are simple people, in a very small house, who don’t have a lot. And still, each corner I go through…it goes something like this: two bags for Goodwill, a big bag of trash, and one box packed. As I go around and around, within this process…I am happy to see so much that we will not have to worry about toting with us on our move, or taking up any unwanted extra space in our new place! However, it gets me thinking, like most things do, about how much we hold on top that is completely unnecessary…very often without even knowing it!

On the homeschooling front, Kayla has just completed writing a summary on the story Gilgamesh that she read for her Mesopotamia studies. This is lots to celebrate in my book given the fact that she is dyslexic and struggles with things like this. We took it one chapter at a time and it is the first project she has been semi happily fully engaged with. I am really seeing the importance of the Waldorf idea that certain periods of time and topics align according to the age of the child. This year we are using some of the The Little Garden Flower curriculum and are really happy with it. Melisa gives a very concise outline for each year, month, week, and day…something I feel like I need at this point with four kids. Of course there are many times, when I just let it all go, but it’s good to have for reference, especially for the older kids (or rather to help me keep track).

We have been knowingly struggling with dyslexia for about 9 months now. Of course, Kayla has had it her whole life, but I never knew until semi recently…it just slipped on by. With it coming to my attention last spring, I mulled it over for awhile, until I sought out a suitable tutor for her to help her to cope with it. Over the past 9 months Kayla has improved by leaps and bounds, but one thing became very clear to me after a telephone conversation with her tutor the other night. That she is who she is. Kids with dyslexia just think differently; their brains work differently, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We can offer them some helpful tools to help them to understand reading and spelling a little better, but some things just will remain a struggle to them to some degree forever. This whole time I kept thinking that she needed to “get better”, and that I needed to “fix” the dyslexic part of her, but in reality, what I need to do more than ever is become her advocate and accept that this is a part of who she is, and that she will totally be fine. Maybe she won’t ever fit into a mold or into the correct testing level, but who cares. She will learn to compensate where it is needed in life. The funny thing is that my husband was a dyslexic child, and he still asks how to spell things and has a horrible time spelling, but he also has and runs his own business!

On the home front…things are falling apart more then ever. I guess I could look at it all as a big joke if I wanted to. Before we went up to visit our new home, our oil burner broke. This wasn’t too big of a deal, because we heat our house with a wood stove, but if we are gone, we at least keep the heat set on 50 degrees…now it’s kept at nothing. BUT, it also heats our hot water…so no hot water. When we got home, we figured out how to switch the water over to the hot water heater…and use the electric to heat our water. Well that worked for about two weeks. Last week, the hot water heater broke. No hot water…again. Jason tried to fix it, but really we would probablly just need to install a new one. Uggg! I think our house is playing tricks on us, but the thing is that we are only going to be here for another few weeks. Why would we spend a ton of money to put in a new oil burner or water heater?! So we’re not. We boil water on the stove to wash the dishes and go down to my mother-in-law’s house to shower every few days. Preferable…no. Do-able…yes. I’m going to laugh when I see the look on the realtor’s face who is going to help us short sale our house though. No ma’am, there’s no working heat, or hot water, and the house is infested with termites…could never afford to fix those things. Sigh. The good news is that we do not have to be living here during the short sale, and if it takes longer than 190 days to sell, we just walk away (in deed lieu of). So we will be in our new home within the next six weeks regardless of what this house does in the mean time…and we’ll have hot water and heat and somewhere safe to live. Yay!

Other then all of that, we need to get our taxes together and deal with the nitty gritty of the lesser enjoyable things in life… keep packing and purging… and planning for the exciting spring we are going to have…planning big gardens and geting our little homestead-to-be all set up. So busy! So exciting! No wonder it takes me a whole week to get a blog post together!