Archive for the ‘Homeschool Advice’ Category

For the early birds!

6 TIPS hunting

The early-birds are busy curriculum shopping for next year while the exhausted are saving that work for July!

Here are my tips for curriculum hunting:

1. If the curriculum is new to you, don’t buy a year’s worth all at once (unless it’s your usual math text book). See if you can borrow someone else’s for a month or purchase one level or one aspect of the program and test it. The worst thing you can do is make a big non-refundable year long investment in an untested product, only to feel obligated to slog through it (dragging unhappy kids along) all 10 months because you “spent so much money.”

2. Talk to your kids about your curriculum shopping. Get them involved. Bring them to the computer, read them descriptions, show them what the products look like. Kids have strong opinions about colors, fonts, paper textures, how the app works, what the philosophy is. You don’t want those strong opinions slapping you upside the head on the first day of school! And remember: they are the ones using it. So even if it totally appeals to you, that doesn’t mean it’s right for your child.

3. Purchase cool STUFF not just cool books. Kids love microscopes, binoculars, digital camcorders, digital hand held audio recorders, iPads, tablets, sewing machines, knitting needles, garden tools, watercolors, oils, an easel, sculpting clay, dress up clothes, pocket knives, sleds, bird feeders, tambourines, hammers, saws, shovels, walking sticks, beads, hand mixers, baking tins, finger puppets, globes, tea sets, canteens, umbrellas, graphing calculators, a compass, rulers, puzzles, blocks, new Lego sets, dominoes, recorders, bells and whistles, clipboards, new journals, new pens (try fountain!), music, and movies … You get the idea.

4. Understand the philosophy of the product, not just its goals or promises. Just because a product says it teaches a comprehensive view of American history doesn’t mean that the view it teaches is a fair-minded one. Just because a product says it teaches manipulative-based phonics to 6 year olds doesn’t mean it’s the right philosophy for your 6 year old. The philosophy needs to match your child’s aptitudes as well as your style of implementation. If you’re a “follow the inspiration” parent, a highly structured program will not likely be successful for you. And vice versa.

5. Understand your own philosophy of home education. You want to carry the thread all the way through your subject areas. It doesn’t work to go from one system to another, subject-to-subject. Make a list of your bottom lines (what you must have to feel successful at home with your kids). Then compare those to the curriculum choices you make. Don’t chase the “shiny new” just because it is shiny and new. Create a rhythm for your family that matches how you all actually live, not how you imagine you should be living.

6. It’s okay not to have all your books and decisions made before the year starts. In fact, experiment with feathering in subjects over the course of the first few months. Try using one product for a little while, then add a subject and another product. This is the key to success. Trying to do everything, all at once, from the first day, understanding all the practices, ideas, strategies, and plans can be exhausting and stressful to all.

Feel free to only do language arts for the first two weeks, to finish before lunch, to play all afternoon. You can add math, once LA is under control and everyone feels good. You can add history a few weeks later, once those two are humming along. This gives you time to select products, too, once you see what’s realistic for your family. That big DVD program might appeal in July, but by October, you see that your life is already really full and a simple math book is easier for you to manage. So give yourself room and space to think about what you use next year while the year is going, if that helps you.

What tips do you have? I’d love to hear them.

Image by Andy Wright (cc cropped, text added)

Posted in Homeschool Advice | 2 Comments »

It’s the Writer, Not the Writing

It's the Writer, Not the Writing

It’s tempting to see writing as something a person does, as assignments to complete, as skills to acquire for an academic or career purpose.

It’s tempting to evaluate the writing a person does as though it is a set of math problems—measurable, impersonal, external.

It’s tempting to push for completion, because the assignment or project has a due date or has to be done for the end-of-the-year evaluation.

The paradigm shift is this:

Writing is not like other subjects. Writing is closely related to the self, no matter what the content. Even mothers sending me email get nervous thinking I will read their questions, and wonder what I will make of them, because they are undressing their minds right in front of me. What will I see? How will I react?

How much more kids feel that way?

  • Take the “school definition” out of writing (beware of the ghost of public school past).
  • Focus on the “writer” more than the “writing.”
  • Tears mean the lesson is over for the day.
  • Partial work is valuable.
  • Progress happens through a series of attempts, not through wrestling a single project to the perfected finish.
  • Self-expression is a risk and needs you to treat it gently.
  • Support helps—and help is helpful (not damaging, not cheating, not short-cutting).

Academic formats require as much “soul investment” as fan fiction and diaries. You must be just as gentle and curious with an expository essay as you were with the story about your child’s pet gerbil.

Writers express what lives inside them. Writing is the form it is put in. Expression deserves respectful care. Mechanics deserve minimal care. Expression matters the most. Mechanics are marginally important.

Work on the two components (mechanics and expression) separately and teach your writer to take responsibility for editing mechanics and getting someone to help him or her see what he or she can’t see without a second set of eyes.

That’s it. That’s all the attention mechanics deserve. They do not make or break the essence of the writing. They merely punctuate it, so someone else can approximate the tone and meaning the writer intends.

Brave Writer not brave writing.

Learn More: The Difference Between Brave Writer and Other Programs

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Let’s do some math

Try again

There are 180 days in the school year.

There are 36 weeks.

You have X number of children at writing age.

If you were to do one passage of copywork per week per child, you would have this equation:

36 x X = ______

So if you have 3 children at writing age, the answer is:

36 x 3 = 108 passages of copywork that you have supervised, corrected, and supported.

If you have a child who works to complete a single passage in a week by writing parts of it 2 or 3 times a week, that child is now working on handwriting and copying:

1 child x 3 days of handwriting (1 copywork passage) x 36 weeks = 108 days of writing 36 passages

3 kids x 2 days of handwriting (1 copywork passage) x 36 weeks = 216 days of supervising 36 passages (per child) of copywork

Can you see why you fall short sometimes? Can you see why adding a day of dictation or phonics worksheets or one more day of copywork can feel impossible, even though the actual daily practice is only 5-15 minutes at a time?

The hardest thing to do in homeschool is to sustain a routine without giving up when you don’t feel you’ve “hit the optimal practice.” Just like you wouldn’t abandon your daily math work just because you missed a week or a few days, you can take a similar approach to copywork and dictation. Get to it, as often as you can, within the weekly framework. When you miss, don’t let that derail you into *not* doing it at all.

Come back to the routine and try again. It’s better to have supervised 20 copywork attempts than 5. It’s better to have returned to the practice after being away from it, than to abandon it all together. Over years of time, you’ll see fruit from copywork and dictation, even if there are some (many) weeks you don’t get to it.

Posted in Dictation and copywork, Homeschool Advice | Comments Off on Let’s do some math

Love who you are

Love who you are

Have you noticed how easy it is to wish away your chief personality features? Do you think to yourself, “I’m the wrong personality for my temperament”? You might wish for a clean, orderly home in your heart, but your personality style is relaxed Bohemian. Or you are the sort who keeps a ship-shape house, but wish you could relax when your kids make big creative messes.

Layered on top of the structured versus unstructured selves we bring to homeschool are our memories of school. We compare what we do at home (even when we don’t want to) to what we experienced as children. We react against it (“I’m not doing that!) or we we suffer because of it (“I’m not teaching my kids anything”).

The temptation to overhaul our essential selves is powerful. Advertising everywhere tells us we are one tweak away from being the fantasy person in our heads. We may be able to resist Botox or Coach purses, but the seductress for home educators is any “method” that results in effortless, joyful learning where parents and kids get along all the time.

We hop from one program to the next like frogs on lily pads forgetting to consider which personality is implementing the philosophy!

Let me let you in on a little secret.

There’s no one personality type that is better for homeschooling than another.

Let me drill down further.

There’s no one personality type that is better for parenting, loving, nurturing than another.

Every type has its marvelous strengths, and (darn it all) each type has its blind spots and liabilities.

What you and I need to do is to become self aware people—able to recognize when our personalities are creating the hum of happiness and productivity, and when they are sapping the energy from the room and causing pain.

It isn’t always better to have a messy or a neat house.

Sometimes waking up to a clear kitchen table, fluffed pillows, books easy to access, and a freshly vacuumed carpet is the most nurturing way to start the day. If, however, the process of getting there ended an art project or removed a Robin Hood fort still lingering in the minds of your kids as they went to bed, the same cleared space in the morning may now feel like robbery:

“Where did you put my art project?”

“Do I really have to get out all the blankets again for my fort?”

The question to ask yourself as you move through the day isn’t “How can I be more relaxed?” or “How can I be more productive?”

You want to ask yourself a single question:

“How can I best serve this moment?”

I remember when I went to graduate school, I had just begun our unschooling experiment. It was a study in contrasts. I was being educated by highly trained academics with lectures, a syllabus, reading schedule, essay assignments, and tests. My kids were free to explore the world without any hindrance.

Or so I thought.

Love who you are

What became apparent to me after a semester surprised me. I loved graduate school. It felt nurturing to have someone care enough to create lessons, to show me what I should read to get a full view of the subject, to dialog with me from a position of investment and knowledge. I liked having a plan and a schedule. I felt relief. I had studied the subject area for five years on my own, and now I felt this surge of strength that came from guidance and support.

Meanwhile, the structures I had used in homeschool were on hold. I wanted my kids to feel free to learn what they wanted, to investigate any topic to their hearts’ content. A couple of them took off! But two floundered. They felt (strangely enough) unloved. They wouldn’t have used that language but in hindsight that’s what it was. They felt connected to me when I took the time to plan their lessons and guide their education. They lost that connection when I gave them “freedom.”

I spent hours on unschooling lists learning how to create the context, how to support an unschooling lifestyle, how to foster and nurture a rich learning environment. I didn’t “abandon” my kids to doing whatever they wanted unsupervised. Nevertheless, two of my children missed planned lessons and a structure for learning. I understood this because I was having a parallel experience in grad school.

What becomes so difficult to tease apart as a home educator is the idealized vision of learning that dances in our heads like sugar plums and the very real home and family we have. Our job isn’t to be more organized or more relaxed, more structured or completely free of structure.

Our job is to serve the moment—to serve the needs of our families from within the framework of our delightful personalities.

We can do that best when we lean into our strengths.

If you’re an orderly person, create happy order. Avoid the temptation to require everyone to be like you. Resist your tendency to nag or to have your feelings hurt when the rest of your gang is unenthusiastic for kitchen duty or keeping tables cleared. Straighten, file, assemble check lists, keep the sink empty, make the beds, plan the day. Enthusiastically offer your talent for creating a clean, peaceful, orderly, neat space to the family as a gift.

If you’re a relaxed, go-with-the-flow mom, stop pummeling your personality. Your home is cozy, it’s alive with activity, and it supports messes without stress. Keep big containers nearby for quick clean-ups, make a loose routine to follow each day (rather than a schedule), allow your kids who need order to create systems to support you and the family. Smile.

Do not worry that you aren’t getting enough done in either system or style. Focus on this moment. What is happening right now? How can I help it become a good moment? Shall I ease up and let the mess grow? Shall I hunker down and clear the space so something new can be born? Are we getting along and growing?

Above all: no system saves you. You will eventually go back to being who you are. Your job is to be the best you, you can be. Be the you that creates love and learning, not the you that worries and frets or ignores and pretends away.

You can even say to your kids in a moment of frazzledness:

“You know me! I need everything cleaned up before I can think straight. Anyone willing to help me so we get the day off to a good start? My brain is about to fall out of my head when I see shoes scattered everywhere. Cookies to the helpers!”

Or

“You know me! I can’t put a week-long system together for the life of me. Let’s make a quick list for today of things we want to study and do, and then put them in an order. Who wants to make the list with me? If today feels good, we can do it again tomorrow. Let’s eat cookies while we discuss.”

See? The goal isn’t to “reform” who you are and how you are. The goal is to be the best of yourself that you can be, acknowledging that within your strengths and weaknesses is a real human being doing the best she can. Your kids want to help you and they want to be themselves too.

They’ll learn to love who they are in direct proportion

to how well you love who you are.

Go forth and love yourself.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Homeschool Advice, Julie's Life, On Being a Mother, Unschooling | 16 Comments »

How you say it is everything

How you say it is everythingWhen I speak at conferences, I like to talk about how to gain the goodwill of your children as you embark on the revision process. Here’s a snippet of what I share.

Remember when you went into labor (or if you adopted kids, remember the stories your mother and friends have told you)? Usually there’s quite a bit of emotion, physical pain, anxiety, and apprehension.

What if your husband or partner joined you during labor and said the following in a “take charge” (perhaps even coercive or condescending voice)?

“Sweetheart, I know this is scary and hard, but you have got to get a grip! Millions of women for thousands of years have given birth to babies. You’re no different. Now you get in there and have that baby. I don’t want to hear another word of complaint from you. I’ve got things to do and when I come back, I expect that baby to be here. Now get going.”

How would you feel? Would you be planning a call to the lawyer? Considering ways to short sheet the bed?

What if, instead, you heard these words, delivered in a sympathetic voice?

“Sweetheart, I know this is scary and hard. I see you are in pain. Millions of women for thousands of years have given birth to babies. They have all felt like you do right now. The baby will come. All you have to do is trust the process. I’ll be here, right by your side, holding your hand when it gets tough, distracting you when it helps. And I promise, at the end of this arduous process, there will be a baby so precious to us we’ll both declare that it was all worth it. No matter what, I’m here to support you.”

Which one do you want at your bedside? Husband A or Husband B?

Which type of parent do you think your children want when they embark on a writing project?

“Kids everywhere have to write and they all complain about it. That’s no excuse. I have things to do. Now you get in there and write three sentences. They had better be written by the time I get back! I don’t care that you hate writing. You just have to do it.”

or

“Kids everywhere have struggled to put pen to paper while thinking of things to write. You are just like them. It’s okay. I’ll be here with you, holding your hand, helping you think about what to say, how to say it, and reminding you of what you want to write so that you can get your wonderful thoughts out onto the page. We’ll do as much as we can today and take it up again tomorrow. I’m here to help. At the end, the writing product will be so worth it. You’ll see.”

Remember: don’t minimize pain or misinterpret it as laziness. Usually, the dawdling and whinging (love that word) is more about a lack of support in the process. Remind your child that the pain they feel is legitimate and natural, and that there are ways through the jungle to the other side. You are their companion for the journey, have tips and tricks to help, and that you don’t mind at all.

That’s a great place to start.

Image by wolfgangfoto

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