Raising Maine

Homeschool parents get the question, "How do you do it?" almost every time they mention that they "do it" at all. What I don't think most people realize is that none of us really homeschools entirely the same way... and that, I have come believe, is absolutely the best part of choosing not to school in a traditional school.

The moment when homeschool parents realize that there are many educational roads to take is a liberating one. For me, it was the moment when I looked at my kids and, with a firm knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses and how they learn, I decided that it was the learning and the love of learning that was important... not the recreation of traditional school at my kitchen table.

When I first started homeschooling, I put a lot of pressure on myself and the boys to have what really amounted to school-at-home. I wanted to have lots of what we in the education world call "products" and "assessments." I wanted traditional ways of measuring my kids growth. You know... percentages on worksheets and rubrics and all of that sort of thing.

I've learned so much about teaching from getting out of the public school classroom in order to teach my boys. First and foremost, I have learned that there are so many more ways to evaluate mastery. It's not always important to have a big ol' test at the end of a unit. Likewise, if a kids already show mastery of spelling or vocabulary lists, then it is an exercise in frustration to have them copy and define those words "just because." (In our case, we use the dictionary a lot and read, read, read and discuss words in context instead.) And you know what? Very often an art project, a conversation, a homemade map or even the expression of great joy over learning something new is as good if not better for evaluating performance. It feels uncomfortable at first, but sometimes a personal journal notation in the kids' planner (where I keep notes on their homeschool activities and progress) is a better indicator than, say, knowing that they got an 80% on a five question quiz. Education is about growth, and the journey is a much more personal one than we can ever analyze with a statistic.

I've learned, too, that the major problem with schooling is the lockstep approach. At home we can take our time when a subject is difficult (long division was the one frustration in Aaron's otherwise happy journey through math), we can wait for readiness rather than beating a dead horse, and we can SKIP some topics altogether if my kids have already shown mastery. I know, for instance, that Robby, my 2nd grader, can read and follow complex instructions because he has read and memorized the "cheats" for every one of his X-Box games. It's not that he plays X-Box in lieu of other educational activities, but I don't have to have him bubble in Scantron test items to know that this is a subject on which we do not need to dwell.

We've always enjoyed audio books when we are on the road, and this year we're continuing our world history lessons (Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer) via audio text. The boys read along from the print test as the CD plays as we go from place to place. We stop the audio from time to time to play "Q & A" and to discuss what we've learned. This week we (and I include myself here, because I learn and re-learn with the kids almost daily) were learning about Islam. They learned about Mohamed, the importance and location of Mecca and Medina and the Five Pillars of Islam. You know your second grader is "getting it" when, upon hearing that Baghdad was founded by the Caliph Abu Ja'far Al-Mansur, he interrupts the reading to say, "Oh! That is the area of the Fertile Crescent, isn't it?" (I love how he says this... "Crescent" always comes out as "Crezzent") He's mostly an auditory-sequential kind of learner which means that, if he reads it or hears it, he usually remembers it well. I'll still follow up with documentaries from Netflix and some map study, but the kids love that they aren't stuck at a desk all of the time.

Time management for ME is always an issue, and I've started something new this year with my boys that is so far proving to be an excellent way to balance our homeschool time. Aaron is starting pre-Algebra this year, and although I'm pretty good with math, I wanted him to have clear instruction from a math teacher... so, in addition to his normal math work (Singapore), he is doing math with Yourteacher.com, a self-paced course with a video component, examples to work through (with immediate video-teacher explanation), independent exercises, quizzes, and even PSAT strategies. We got a great discount by buying with the Homeschool Buyers Co-op (http://www.homeschoolbuyersco-op.org) a site that allows homeschoolers to buy in groups in order to get discounts on educational curriculum.

I also have both boys signed up for Time4Learning... an online curriculum that pretty much covers all subjects (reading, writing, language arts, math, social studies and science). It's not their core curriculum, but it allows me to be one-on-one accessible with one while the other is on the computer.

Both of these online learning sites provide me with statistical feedback on their progress... because, although I don't always feel that I need the percentages to know what they know, I will a clear record of what they've mastered for their end-of-year portfolio review.

So... all of this along with swimming and doing two PE courses with the elementary school, piano lessons, 4H and a homeschool geography course that I've volunteered to teach.

More and more, I'm thinking that we should rename our decision to "Homeschool." I now understand what I didn't almost four years ago -- the decision of many homeschoolers before us to call themselves "Outschoolers" or "Self-Learners." There are just so many ways to learn... and often those ways have nothing to do with school at all.