Why Homeschool?

This is something most of you will not understand.

But that's ok, I kind of enjoy living outside the box. And please read this post with a grain of salt. I don't assume this is best for everyone, I only know that this is what MY children need.

It all began with first grade...

It was fun for a few months. But that is a long time to be away from home each day. And a long time to sit still and behave. The socialization that I figured Rivka would go through in high school came much earlier than expected. Her life at school became more important than her siblings, than her parents. She was stressed and angry and lashed out at us constantly. People told me this was a normal transition for a first-grader, that she would pull through. But WHY does she need to go through this?

Then we moved and I realized that I didn't necessarily HAVE to send her to school. I had other options, possibly better ones. I started talking to my neighbors, reading books on the subject, praying VERY fervently and was amazed by what I learned.

1) You can actually do public school from home where they send you all the supplies and books you need and your child even has a teacher that you work with remotely. Its free and there is pretty much no prep-work, its more like helping your child with homework every day. You can go to K12.com to read more. But you have no control over the curriculum- the parent is not the teacher here.

2) Or you could enroll your child in a public charter school. There are optional classes your child can take one or two days a week, you get access to their extensive library of homeschooling resources, and you meet with a counselor every four weeks to track progress. Some charter schools are very regimented and strict about the curriculum you use, others place more trust in the parents and give you total freedom while still tracking progress. They also do state testing every year.

3) Or you can file an affidavit to form your own private school (it takes five minutes to do online), create or buy any curriculum you want, and be your own headmaster.

As for curriculum- there is so much out there its hard to decide!

Saxon Math books are awesome, they have one for each grade level, and I have fallen in love with the Spalding Method for teaching phonics and grammar. Everyone teaching children should read "The Writing Road to Reading". Not only should kids learn the sounds of the alphabet but the sounds of all of our common phonograms (oi, ou, ea, igh, eigh, au, etc.). It has helped Riv dramatically with reading.

But my favorite book on this subject of homeschooling- it seriously changed my life- is "The Core" by Leigh A. Bortins. Here are a few quotes...

"We put children in a situation where they are consistently molded to depend on their peers. Children are taught to value the other students more than their teachers, for at least their classmates follow them on the age-graded conveyor belt from class to class, year after year, whereas teachers come and go."

"..we seek special labels to justify our children's weaknesses so they can be given individual instruction that then tries to replicate the very family life we have removed them from. Psychologists and counselors are employed to provide a firm, nurturing, parental hand for struggling children because their parents have been told they are unqualified to fulfill this role."

" ..nowadays parents are led to believe that only professionals in a classroom situation know how to properly teach children."

"Schools fail to teach literacy because they are being asked to do impossible tasks, such as to socialize students. Family, places of worship, and communities are designed for socializing....schools should not be expected to replace the family or house of worship or community center. Typical school board reports often emphasize core values such as diversity, empathy, equality, innovativeness, and integrity over core skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic."

"Professionalized instruction has resulted in a large loss of literacy for both strong and dysfunctional families. In contrast, consider how successful one-room, community schoolhouses used to be. Our country had proficient literacy rates of over 90% when first grade children were in the same room as seventh-graders and children attended school for just a few months a year."

"It is time to restore the academic levels achieved by all schoolchildren in the United States before the 1950's when proficient literacy was universally expected as evidenced by the number of books purchased, the extensive vocabulary used in children's literature, and the number of complex ideas connected in a single lengthy sentence. People write as they think and speak. The popular writers of even the recent past like Thoreau, Alcott, and Douglas, are difficult to read by those of us taught to think in tweets."

"Before the 1950's one of the ways students were tested on their core knowledge was through recitations. They might recite a long poem like Longfellow's Hiawatha for literature, orally parse a compound-complex sentence, list a history timeline, chant a multiplication table, or sketch a continent and its main features. Students were expected to do this with just their brain as a reference tool. Somewhere along the way, professional education associations decided that facts could be looked up, and so there was no point in memorizing them. Critical thinking skills and experiential learning replaced memorization as the main focus of grammar school instruction.

Though critical thinking skills and experiential learning are very valuable, the education associations forgot two things: first, that students needed to memorize information so they would have something in their brain to critically think about or to compare to their experiences, and, second, that the brain needs to be intentionally trained in order to think well."

"..most students never fully engage with a topic if they use only textbooks. All the interesting questions have already been asked and answered for the student by someone else."

"We have rejected the historically successful model of rigorous, classical education in favor of entertainment and job training."

"Reading graded, compartmentalized, abridged information for a semester, then answering basic reading comprehension questions on multiple choice exams allowed one to pass through high school. Getting through seemed to be the object."

"When I began teaching my children, I realized that even though the world said I was educated, I found out I was only schooled."

"Parents even say they would die for one of their children, yet somehow they find it difficult to live with them."

The later chapters of this book are all about simple specific things YOU can do with your children in each of the subjects to truly educate them (and yourself!), whether you are their full-time teacher or not. It is a GREAT book. Probably the most useful thing I have ever read. (not counting the scriptures)