The Long
Term Perspective in Home Schooling
How To
Really Enjoy and Succeed at Home Schooling
By Lori Crank
September has come. We have accumulated books and supplies and
are ready to start another year of school. During the first few
weeks of school, everyone feels a sense of accomplishment. Then
the trials begin. Someone is sick, other family needs require
attention, one of the children just doesn't seem to be able to
keep up with the schedule. What do I do now? How will I ever get
it all done? Will there be any time for them to study other
things that they would like to learn?
This is a common problem with home schoolers. It springs from our
preconceived ideas of what school should be like, based on our
own school experiences. I am going to suggest that you try to
erase all of your preconceived ideas of what school should be and
look at your home schooling from a different perspective.
We would all agree that each child should know how to read,
write, and do arithmetic. We would also agree that there is a lot
of factual information a child should learn (though we might not
agree on all the specifics). One of our biggest problems is that
we go by an arbitrary set of standards produced by
"educators" who do not know or care about our
individual children.
With home schooling, we have the unique opportunity to tailor
make our child's curriculum to meet his specific needs. We can
look at our child's strengths and weaknesses and determine how
and when it is best to meet those needs. Not all children are
ready to learn the same things at the same age. Sometimes it is
even best to leave off certain subjects that are really not of
interest to the child and will not be that useful to him in later
life.
I found the more I relaxed and became flexible in our home
schooling, the more the children enjoyed learning and the more
they learned. One of the biggest challenges that we face is our
shortsightedness. We tend to look at what is accomplished day to
day instead of looking at home schooling from a long-term
perspective.
When we started home schooling all that I could see were all the
textbooks that the correspondence school had sent us and the time
frame that they had given us to complete them. I do not do well
under pressure. I was in a panic for most of that first year. The
real problem was not the work that needed to be done but my
perspective on education in general. I needed to get out of the
public school mindset and look to God to show me how to educate
these children He had given us.
David and I sat down after that first stressful year and totally
zero based. We decided that we really needed to look at education
as a long-term process and not just a year to year set of goals.
What knowledge did we want to impart to our children before they
left home? What were each child's interests, strengths and
weaknesses? .
We looked through the different subjects traditionally taught in
school and tried to put together a program that would reach the
goal of a well-educated child without the stress and hassles that
I had experienced the year before. We also wanted to teach the
children to be independent learners. We discovered a lot of
needless repetition of subjects. How many times do you really
need to cover English grammar, history, or science? Is there not
a better way to approach these subjects and keep the child's
interest?
We decided to cover English grammar once in depth in the later
years. We did this with all four together, when they were in
junior high and high school. They had learned most of the grammar
rules through writing but now learned all the terminology and
logic of it. Spelling was another subject that was covered
through writing - the place it is actually used. And we found,
the more the children read, the better their spelling. So why
teach spelling as a separate subject? In the first eight grades
we looked at history and science as subjects to be covered
through the whole book approach. By this, I mean we read science
and history books as the child had interest. Then when they
reached high school we covered each of the separate subjects
once. We found that their reading had given them a good grounding
in each of these subjects. Our literature program begun in the
primary grades continued on through high school.
Once we had the traditional school subjects taken care of, we
could then focus more of our time in other areas, such as life
skills and other areas of interest. We tried to stay away from
using outside teachers as much as possible. The cost, the time
away from the family, and the commuting time were some of the top
reasons for this. Since they had been taught to learn
independently from an early age, they were able to learn things
on their own that we were not competent to teach. And sometimes
when more personal instruction was needed, God would bring along
a friend to assist.
Once we started looking at the long-term opportunities of home
schooling, our life as a family began to revolve around each
other and the total education of the children. We began to look
at all of life as a learning opportunity. This meant that nothing
was a real disturbance to our learning. When family needs had to
take priority, we were able to keep schooling as well as address
the problems at hand. Since we used mainly whole books, the
children's school could go with us wherever we went. A sick
grandmother allowed us to learn compassion as well as
selflessness in with our regular school subjects. Again this is
all part of educating the whole child.
Now that we have finished home schooling the older four, I can
look back and see the rewards that come with taking the long-term
view and preparing a child for life. We hope to do the same, and
even better, with the younger two.
Volume 1 Issue 3: September / October 2000, © Unless The Lord ... Magazine
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