This is the time of year for back-to-school conversations among homeschooling moms.
It’s So Good to Be Home
Home education is not about replicating a schoolroom in the home. It is about tutoring kids at home and finding ways to light their fires so they want to learn and develop their own talents.
This is your chance to help lift your kids up to become who God made them to be. Let them develop their own hobbies — excluding Bomb-making 101 of course! If they do Scouts or 4-H, give them the freedom to choose which badges to pursue or projects to try. This is how God is calling them and helping them discern their vocations.
The best experiences we’ve had as homeschoolers haven’t come from a workbook. They come from watching the kids try something we never would have chosen and seeing them blossom.
Whether it’s photography, pine derby cars, or cooking, there’s nothing like being with an excited and exciting kid who is loving a project. As we mentor them and help them when needed, we get the real blessing of homeschooling: the chance to be who we are — a family. We are learning side-by-side and building relationships to last a lifetime. With love firmly secured, everything else falls into place.
Mary Biever is a homeschooling mother of two who publishes encouragement articles and runs Encouragement Workshops For Today's Families.
This article was adapted from one of her columns.
Ready? Set? Go!
“Have you started?”
“Next week.”
“Next month.”
“Never until after Labor Day.”
“My kids’ books aren’t in yet.”
“Two kids this week, another next.”
It’s time to hit those back-to-school sales. Stock up on school supplies. Grab the loss leaders. If they have fun art supplies, snatch some now, hide them, and use them for Christmas. If we need school scissors, they will always be Fiskars' brand because they cut better. Let the kids choose some fun stuff — maybe a folder or notebook with a neat picture they like.
Our family joke is that I always buy two value-packs of red pens. They wait to see how long it will take before I lose them all. Yes, all of last year’s pens have now been sucked into the black hole called my desk or that mystery slot somewhere in the house where all writing utensils seem to land and are never seen again. I’m the only one in the house who writes with red pens because I like red. But now they say that correcting children’s’ papers in red ink harms self-esteem and they sell value-packs of purple pens instead. Whatever.
The first day back to school doesn’t have to be an all-bells-and-whistles kind of stressor. This year, we start with one subject the first day. We make sure it’s OK and the next day, we add another. This continues until the kids are in all their new subjects.
A kicker for us this year is we added a co-op day a week and have a new series for one kid’s science, one new math series, and our first attempt at formal literature. It will be a learning curve for us all. We will master one before adding the next.
When my son began a phonics program years ago, I was overwhelmed with three kinds of flashcards, a script, and daily lessons. We began that program three weeks before starting the rest of school, so I could figure out how it worked without wanting to pop a Valium every 10 minutes. It’s easier to break a new horse when the corral isn’t full of other ones.
I like to start earlier because our Augusts are often too hot to enjoy outdoor play. If we do school now, then we can take breaks on fall days and go apple-picking. Also, an early start gives us a chance to get into a school routine before after school activities and co-ops start.
We’re in idealistic best-of-all-possible-school-years mode. I set my ideal goals of what to complete by Christmas. In the kids’ seatwork subjects (language, penmanship, spelling, and math), I divide the book in half and tell them that when they reach that halfway point, they can start their Christmas break in that subject.
Of course, mastery of the material is more important than completion of a workbook. However, a long-term goal is to raise self-starters who develop internal discipline. This gives them a taste of that now. Of course, there are limits — the kids can’t do five pages of penmanship in a single day. However, they can do a page on Saturday if they want. They just have to show it to me so I can check it and sign off it’s OK (with my ego-crushing red pen). It usually takes only one experience of doing a subject right up to Christmas Eve for a child to learn the next year to manage time better.
We’re trying something new with our seventh-grade daughter. In the past, she’s had daily assignments. This year I’m giving her a weekly assignment list. She knows to complete the list. Anything not finished by end of school on Friday will be done on Saturday. I hope this helps her build self-discipline.
Ordered Flexibility Is the Key
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a veteran teacher was about holiday schooling. She said to write off teaching any new concepts from Thanksgiving to Christmas — it’s a time for review. Kids are up late, they are out of their routines, and new concepts introduced in this time-frame will be a total bust.
My goal with the kids is to reach those midway points soon after Thanksgiving so we can enjoy Christmas as a family. Our family gets busy with Christmas choir rehearsals and performances. Two years ago, as the kids completed a choir rehearsal that went until after 9:00PM on a school night, I overheard another mother tell her fourth-grader, “When we get home, you have to study for tomorrow’s science test for at least an hour before you go to bed.” The girl wasn’t going to make it into bed until probably 11:00PM and was expected to function well all day at school the following day.
When we got to our car, I told my daughter, “You can sleep in tomorrow morning.” Our December school is a time to close the books and check Christmas stuff out of the library. We do crafts, make Christmas decorations, and find a new angle for a Christmas unit study. The kids still read and practice reading aloud. We try new Christmas recipes that the kids select from Christmas cookbooks.
You can retool methods if something doesn’t work well. I have purchased what I thought was a “perfect” book or series and realized within two to three days that it will never work with my family. That’s OK.
Develop two school-day strategies: Plan A and Plan B. Plan A days are days when you have no interruptions. Plan B days are days when illness, doctors' appointments, and broken plumbing disrupt life. On Plan B days, we do the basics. If you have the strategy in place before those bad days happen, it will ease your mind and relieve your guilt. Remember there are Plan C days, when nothing works, and your goal is to go to bed at the end of the day, get up the following morning, and start all over again. Plan C days can and will happen to us all.
When beginning your school year, let your friends and family know. Carve out a no-phone-call time-block. Let the answering machine pick up calls during that time so your kids get all of your attention. This is especially important in early homeschool years, when extended family members may think you’re “just” homeschooling and can drop anything any time.
When you’re the teacher, you make the decisions. If a math lesson is chock-full of problems your child can already do, it is OK to tell them to just do the odd or even problems. (Just make sure they do enough to build computation skills.) When you look at a lesson in a book and an exercise looks like busy-work your kids will hate, with no educational value, it is OK to skip it. And it’s OK to customize assignments for your children’s interests.
