I was chatting on a workboxes homeschooling group, having one of those conversations where a mom asks if we all think she may be overloading her exasperated kids with “too much work” (the answer is invariably “yes” in these conversations, in case you’re curious). A lot of times, I find those conversations very exhausting, because they’re about the mom wanting strategies to be able to force her kid to do a lot more boring, tedious stuff, and then doing a lot of flailing because no one gives her any and instead tells her to relax and consider chucking, like, everything. Fortunately, in this case, it wasn’t like that, but had been initiated by a very well-meaning and thoughtful mom whose 7yo was getting frustrated despite the mom’s very best efforts, and she was looking to make the day more enjoyable for the family, a good goal to have imho . During the conversation, she said their school day was lasting over 6 hours, and I said:

Just so you can see a different perspective: That’s over an hour longer than my son’s average workbox day – and he’s in the SIXTH GRADE, and he studies 2 foreign languages, practices 2 musical instruments, reads poetry, Shakespeare, Hymns, logic, Bible devotional, art history, music theory, medieval history, united states geography, literature and astronomy.

Another mom then asked me some questions about how it’s possible to organize my son’s time with the boxes (we don’t call them workboxes, just boxes) in such a way that it takes “so little time.” I think four hours is a lot of time! I thought I would repost my detailed response here. Italics were her questions, the rest is my response. It’s been a good talk, with the other mom asking a lot of good questions that made me think a lot and helped me clarify my own values some more, so hopefully this is helpful to someone. This is an ongoing dialogue, so there will be follow-ups with people’s questions in future posts, but feel free to ask your own! (Some of you longtime readers may notice we’ve changed a lot since starting this school year and are no longer using Ambleside Online’s recommendations. My son is still really interested in the Middle Ages, though, so he asked me to buy a few of the WinterPromise resources to learn more about the Middle Ages. More on this change at a later date!) A few of my answers have been proofread and/or expanded upon from the conversation where it was necessary for greater clarity.

My 6th grader does three subjects at a co-op (one is no homework), plus French, flute, history, and science at home, and it’s really hard for me to schedule all her subjects. Would you mind sharing a sample weekly schedule?

I don’t mind at all

The last few months, we have settled into a comfortable, flexible routine, where we get a much earlier start in the day than we used to. But we are both early morning lallygaggers and I work nights, so we get started later than most families. Typically my son starts his boxes between 10AM and 11AM, we break half an hour for lunch somewhere in there, and we’re done with the boxes by 2:30 or 3:30, depending on what we are doing. We then go out and do errands, or go to the park for a playdate, or other outings or sometimes we just chill out and goof off on the Internet, watch TV, play video games, build robots, or whatever else he’ll feel like doing. I try to schedule all doctor’s appointments for this time, too.

I will say that we don’t do any co-ops (my kid hates them) and I try to keep our field trip type outings for the weekend. We don’t do more than 2 field trips with our local homeschooling groups per month and it’s ONLY if my son seems excited about it, for example, the trip to see a Norman Rockwell exhibit next month. We have a lot of cool weekend and night time outings, but I’m a single mom and have to work, and there are only so many hours in the day! He has a park date weekly and a youth group twice a week at night, and sometimes a playdate with a friend, and that’s about it during the weekdays.

These are things which are not in the boxes, that he either does of his own free will and doesn’t want me to organize for him, or we do together as a family every day:

• Computer programming/Internet surfing/ video game design
• TV. We both like TV a lot and I won’t apologize for that. I’ve written several posts about why I love it and think it’s awesome. I don’t restrict TV in any way, but I do watch things with Shorty and talk about things we watch. Shorty is currently really into marathons of Everybody Hates Chris reruns
• Afternoon walk, weather permitting, approx a mile and a half a day, for exercise and fresh air and chatting and sometimes Shorty likes to take our digital camera and take pictures of our walks and post them on his Facebook (he’s got a great eye for photography!!);
• Instrument practice (guitar and piano) 10-15 min each, though he sometimes will spend hours in the afternoon practicing on his own;
• Morning Bible devotionals and daily Bible reading, which Shorty has requested we do before anything else;
• Bedtime literature. He says he’s too old to call it a bedtime story. *g* Sometimes he reads it out loud, sometimes I do, sometimes we switch off. Currently reading The King’s Fifth by Scott O’Dell, in concurrence with our study of the middle ages. It’s pretty awesome!!

These are the boxes we do daily:

• Latin, Shorty’s pet subject #1 – Getting Started With Latin has turned out to be a big hit;
• Math – typically two worksheets;
• Wordly Wise vocabulary, Book 5 – pet subject #2;
• Some kind of history reading. We have many books on the Middle Ages,  so sometimes we have more than one history reading – reading from the “spine” or main book (currently The Kingfisher’s Atlas of the Medieval World) and then a second book about the subject, usually very brief on each count. We’re talking no more than 2-3 pages, unless he wants to keep reading.
• Geography/ map drawing, pet subject #3.
• Poetry – we just read 1 poem a day from a Walter de la Mare poem book. We don’t discuss it too much or analyze it. We just read it for fun.

These are the boxes we do 2-3 times per week, as our schedule and his mood permits:

• Spanish – We are native speakers, and live in Little Havana, so our focus is vocabulary expansion so that Shorty can communicate with locals more easily;
• Astronomy: short reading, plus occasional notebooking/games – that would be a 2nd box;
• Some kind of history-related project, lapbook or activity – currently we are alternating between a project from The Days of Knights and Dames and lapbooking about knights and castles;
• Christian studies – we did a wonderful Advent study during Christmas that Shorty absolutely fell in love with, and he’s been reading A Little Pilgrim’s Progress;
• Tangrams, which my kid loves, but not too often or he gets tired of them!

These are the subjects we do once per week:

• Nature walks with nature studies,
• Guitar lesson;
• Piano lesson;
• Logic – having great fun with The Fallacy Detective;
• Hymn study with the book and CD, Then Sings My Soul;
• Shakespeare – usually a couple of pages from a “Tales from Shakespeare” book;
• Biography. Currently Diane Stanley’s Joan of Arc. Shorty really loves and gets into biographies and we are discussing organizing a study of inventors and industrial-revolution people (his other favorite historical era) when he finishes his current stuff;
• Grammar – one weekly exercise from Simply Grammar by Karen Andreola for my little budding wordsmith;
• Reading out loud from the McGuffey 3rd Eclectic Reader – he has great dramatic flair

These are the things we only do every other week:

• Juggling, a popular medieval pastime which he’s always wanted to learn anyway;
• Art History OR Composer studies – We alternate between the two. One week we do one, the other week, we do the other. Shorty really gets excited about these, though, so I’m looking to see about doing this more often. Currenttly we are listening to a lot of Edvard Grieg and Sibelius, and leafing through my huge Norman Rockwell book, whose realism in illustration Shorty admires and envies. Fortunately, there is a traveling exhibit of his work right in town!

I’d love to see how you approach scheduling so many topics.

I have my little weekly workbox grid that I made. Because I like to plan for the whole year vs. little-by-little planning, even if I inevitably end up changing a million things as we go along, I printed out 36 of those, one for each week of the “school year,” which is all I have to keep track of for record-keeping purposes, though we do cool stuff almost every day all year long. I put subject dividers between each 12 - twelve weeks in a term, which our private umbrella school requires us to track. 180 days.

I am not married to this schedule in any way.  It is a list of possibilities for the day and nothing more.

I then take each resource and divide it up. If it’s a book, I divide its pages by 180, if it’s something we want to take all year to do. For example, the Latin curriculum he wanted has only 120 lessons. So we figured out that he needs to do about 3-4 lessons per week to finish it by the end of the year. So I go through the 36 weeks and put “Latin lesson #whatever” 3 or 4 times per week all year, until I get to 120. If it’s a shorter book, for example, we are reading the book Medieval Medicine and the Plague which has only 12 chapters, each about 2 pages long, I put it once per week for one term. Or I could put it once every 3 weeks all year, or whatever else had suited us.

NOTE: You do NOT have to plan things out for a whole year. You can divide the resource this way above, or you can plan one or two weeks ahead and not pre-determine how much you’re going to do. Then you’d just write “Legos” or “art/craft” or “Read such and such book.”

I do not feel the need to tell my son what to do all day long. My son has explicitly asked for help organizing his time and attention between his many interests, so I divide it up for him, but of course, if he wants to work ahead or postpone something one day, we do.

Sometimes I have a set amount to cover in a set amount of time. For The King’s Fifth, the novel we are reading right now, which has 31 chapters, I did not want to take months to read it, because we both lose interest and start to find it tedious when that happens, so I decided we’d read one chapter per day, which was 6 weeks if we read one chapter on a weekend. So I put in the “notes” section of my planner for week 1: “The King’s Fifth, Ch 1-5″. And then I put a checkmark as we read them, so I can at least tell where we are if I lose the bookmark. LOL!

FIRST, I do this with what he wants do every day. I fill in all the workboxes all year for those – labor intensive up-front, but saves me tons of time over the year.

THEN, I do this with the things he only wants do a few times a week.

FINALLY I plug in the ones he only does once a week or every other week. I just stick them wherever there’s an empty box!

I try to leave at least one empty box per day for spontaneous projects or for things he didn’t get to the day before or whatever. But it’s not necessary because the stuff we’re doing IS fun for him. If it’s not something he’s enjoying, I chuck it and we try something else or drop it. We have very few “schooly” things in there. I am constantly introducing new and interesting things, and I try to pay very close attention to what my son responds well to and what he doesn’t. I feel the materials should serve the child, not vice versa. I don’t understand why I see so many moms try a curriculum, notice it tanks with the kid, and conclude there’s something wrong with the KID! And then post, “How can I make my kid want to do this thing he hates that I think he should do anyway?” To me this is a backwards approach to education.

I’m guessing you don’t do everything, every day, but how do you decide what you don’t really need to do on a daily basis when so many things like music and foreign language need constant practice?

Some of it, as you saw above, decides itself. It is very obvious that Simply Grammar, with its 39 in-depth lessons, cannot be done every day and fits better as a weekly visitation. A lot of my notions, I got from Charlotte Mason, who really believed in child-gentle interest-whetting vs. a proscribed set of information delivered in a prescribed manner. This is also why we study hymns and Shakespeare, and only once a week. That was her recommendation and we tried it and it seems to work for Shorty. The rest, I take my cue from my son. I don’t think anyone NEEDS to do geography five times a week (or ever, really), but since my kid is endlessly fascinated by maps and state trivia, and thinks it’s great fun, we do.

Also, *I* don’t decide this. We decide it together. If he wanted to read Shakespeare every day, we would. And we only read it once a week because he asks me to read it. I think for him it’s like a little radio play. LOL, as in, ”This week on SHAKESPEARE’S DRAMATIC SOAP OPERA…”

And I realize this goes against conventional wisdom, but I don’t think a foreign language needs daily practice to master, and music practice is something my son is expected to do on his own. We are both musicians, so this isn’t really something he needs a reminder about; it’s just his great passion that he’s currently pursuing. We listen to, talk about and play music all day. I don’t think a child should be forced to play an instrument if s/he doesn’t want to. If s/he wants to play one, I would just be very frank about what’s required. “People who don’t practice the piano every day stink at piano. If you do practice every day, in a very short amount of time, you will be totally awesome at it. It’s up to you what you wanna be!” My son knows I’m honest and that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to music, so I only had to tell him this once!

I think when a child trusts you to respect his comfort zones, they trust your opinions a lot more, instead of finding them suspect and wondering if you’re trying to con him into doing something you think he should be doing, whether he hates it or not.

Do you do homework after dinner or some other trick to be done for the afternoon more quickly?

Nooooo. We do no homework. We are anti-homework! LOL! Once the boxes are done, either just before or just after lunch, his time is totally unscheduled, except that it is convenient for both of us if he showers while I’m making dinner. Otherwise, he does whatever he wants with his time. Basically, the workboxes are just a way for me to help him structure his time. He finds this helpful and encouraging. I am by nature a very UNSTRUCTURED person with a good internal clock, but he’s the opposite, he likes to plot out every minute of his time and has asked me to help him do this, so while it’s more controlling of his time than I would prefer, I need to acknowledge that his preferences are  not my preferences and I use the workboxes to help him in this way.

My son has a large workspace he likes very much because it is a very business-y roll top desk that he says “makes him feel like an executive.” LOL.  I sit next to him and let him do his thing while I work on mylaptop, unless he needs me for something, but if I see he’s taking forever on one box, I will use humor to check in with him (“EARTH TO ELI, DO YOU COPY?!” ) Sometimes this is enough to get him back on task. Sometimes he’ll then say he’s struggling and needs help. Sometimes he’ll say “Mom, I reeeeeeeally don’t feel like doing this today” and that is okay because I also am not always in the mood to do something every day. The homeschool police will not arrest us if we chuck a worksheet… or a whole workbook!

Obviously I’m a very laidback parent/ person/ homeschooler. When I say my son’s time is unscheduled except for the boxes, I mean it is totally unscheduled. I put no limits on any activity. He is allowed to watch TV, play video games, listen to music, chat with his friends/grandma on Facebook, or WHATEVER as much as he wants. I am right there actively engaging him in what he does, of course, but I am very much about not controlling every waking minute of a kid’s life. I think this is why workboxing and homeschooling is so low-stress for me and my kid. We just do whatever makes us happy, and don’t do whatever doesn’t. So far, so good!

We live in the inner city, though we have a small yard. Proof that you can do nature studies even if you don’t live in the country.  

Posted via email from hi, i’m andie.

What we watch doesn’t always reflect my values, but when it doesn’t, I talk about it with him or mention it briefly with him, and sometimes he asks me to expound, so that’s lead to a lot of good discussions about how our values differ from the world’s. And watching “American Idol” tryouts together is a joy for four generations of my family every year.

Posted via email from hi, i’m andie.

Today we had a long productive day in which we did very little that looked like schoolwork.  

Initially we were going to buy a pomelo. This thing basically looked like a ginormous grapefruit. I’ve never seen anything like it – it was bigger than my head! The Wikipedia link says that they tend to be between 2 and 4 lbs., but this one was closer to 7!  They sound like they’d be tasty, but I wasn’t about to spend $9 on one piece of fruit, so we decided to just look it up online and buy our second choices. There were quite a few to pick from, because our local Publix has a pretty awesome produce section, but ultimately, he picked a persimmon and I picked a pomegranate. They’re waiting on our table to be discovred tomorrow morning. And maybe, maybe be eaten.

And a couple of other versions we didn’t like as much.

Posted via email from hi, i’m andie.

Posted via email from hi, i’m andie.

Shorty has fine motor delays, and one of the fun ways I’ve found that help him work on them is books and activities from Klutz. I’ve been a big fan of their inexpensive, kid-friendly kits for years. They seem to have stuff tailored for every interest, ability level and age. No, I’m not getting paid to say this

Here is a picture of him threatening to grab my nose with it. LOL.  Next on our agenda is their Potholder making kit.  The nice people at Klutz had the foresight to anticipate the usual “But that’s for GIRLS!!!!!” drama from Shorty and put a little boy on the back cover Somehow I don’t think he’ll be QUITE as enthusiastic about that one, but hey, these are valuable life skills here!

Posted via email from hi, i’m andie.

I recently was confronted with a question by a first-time homeschooling mom, who just pulled her son out of public school and intends to begin homeschooling him in the fall. The question is one that, as an experienced homeschooler, I think is almost too broad to answer, but at the same time, is intuitive for first-time homeschoolers who don’t necessarily know where to start: “What’s the best curriculum to buy for my child?”

Since there are folks reading this journal who are either curious about homeschooling or leaning towards doing so themselves, I am going to repost my response. It is linktastic. Hopefully someone can find it helpful.

***

If you’re like me and you tend to second-guess yourself, I really recommend HomeschoolReviews as a good reference. It is an online forum where hundreds of homeschoolers have posted their reviews of pretty much any curriculum out there. I thought it was tremendously helpful in choosing what we picked for my son.

Last year, we went with WinterPromise – http://www.winterpromise.com – for science, art and history, and Rod and Staff – http://www.rodandstaffbooks.com – for language arts and math – and we couldn’t be happier, but this will be our sixth year homeschooling, and it will be the first time that we’ve used the same curriculum two years in a row, so that should tell you something.

There is no one-size-fits-all response. The truth is, the best homeschool curriculum is the one that your child enjoys, is best suited to his learning style (I recommend the book Discovering Your Child’s Learning Style – it has been invaluable in this regard) and also what is best suited to your TEACHING style. If you hate doing it day after day, your child won’t love learning it either. To some degree, it is a bit of trial and error, but sites like HomeschoolReviews help you to at least rule out what you would definitely hate.

Unlike traditional classrooms, there are a bunch of different ways to homeschool. This list is in no way meant to be exhaustive, but here are just a few of the more widely used approaches and some useful links off the top of my head.

Links and Resources This Way!

First, two things that made me laugh today: What the Buck’s review of the Disney Channel’s Camp Rock (he has many more highly accurate and equally funny take-downs of films and TV shows here) and this temporary to-do list tattoo, for those of us who have ever written things to remember on our palms. Which is all of us, am I right?

I have been giving a lot of thought this year to letting go of the concept of school in me and Shorty’s homeschool and aiming, instead, for just an “educational environment.” How very unschooling of me, I know, even though I am not an unschooler and in fact have strong critiques of many common unschooler claims ((a post for another day, I’m afraid). But I digress.

For the first couple of years of homeschooling, I would say the first 3, I did “school at home” because it was all I knew, and having had formal training in early childhood pedagogy, it was all I could conceive as a model for small children learning. Teacher at the front, children sitting primly at a desk with open textbooks whose material matched whatever was being written on the board. It was familiar. From my many lengthy discussions with my dear friends at my local park group, this is a common starting point, ESPECIALLY if you have a formal background in education. It’s all you know.

Around Shorty’s first grade, I discovered The Well-Trained Mind. I devoured it and, being a compulsive list-maker, I promptly and proudly mapped out the next, oh, eight or nine years of my kid’s education. This was partly because a classical education such as is outlined in the WTM is the ULTIMATE school-at-home experience, with the loftiest ideaIs and the most robust scope. It is a very popular text and academic outline for homeschoolers, probably for the same reason that school-at-home is the first thing we all try. I think for a new homeschooling parent looking for validation and structure and the promise of an excellent education for their children, the WTM is very impressive.

Unfortunately, I had not yet grasped the full scope of Shorty’s learning difficulties, or the fact that most little boys and many little girls at age 6 (or 7… or 8… or…) do not have the capacity or attention span to sit still and quietly learn Latin and recite poetry for 5 hours a day. Shorty found The Story of the World, the WTM’s history text for that grade level, mystifying and bizarre and totally inaccessible, and thanks to his auditory processing issues, asking him to narrate anything was an exercise in total frustration. He can EASILY do all those things now at age 10, but it was just too mature for him four years ago, frankly. Honestly, I don’t know ANY six-year-old with the attention span to sit through a four-page, pictureless chapter about ancient Mesopotamia so I don’t even know how realistic the WTM’s educational goals are, but the point is, Shorty was a square peg being shoved into the WTM’s triangle hole. So while I still like some of their ideals and reading lists and still use some of their recommended materials, I, shall we say, aimed to loosen up.

Yet third grade was our most disastrous, I think. I wanted Shorty to do something more fun and more structured than our previous three years, which had been kind of a mish-mash free-for-all of workbooks and library books and half-abandoned curriculum. To me, Alpha Omega’s Switched-On Schoolhouse looked perfect. It was relatively cheap (we got all five subjects off eBay for something like $150), it kept records and “grades” for me, and it was computer-based, which meant it HAD to be fun (right? right??? umm…) so it seemed ideal and for a few months, it was. But it was also extremely dry and repetitive and sucked all the fun out of learning. One subject, “history,” which was not history at all, but more like a lame, surreal overview of American agricultural social studies, was abandoned within weeks and replaced by Story of the World Vol 2, which by then Shorty was mature enough to both understand and read on his own.

And it was still SCHOOL AT HOME, except the computer was the teacher and the screen was the chalkboard. It also indulged Shorty’s “producer personality,” which he definitely got from his mom. He likes to COMPLETE CHECKLISTS. It doesn’t matter how much he actually retains from the tasks, so long as they are done and can be CHECKED OFF. I call this our “Ta-da! tendency,” as in, “Ta-da, I am done, end of story!” Ergo, I am pretty sure he didn’t learn a single thing the whole year. Learning to tailor an educational environment to a specific individual’s strengths and weaknesses will involve a great many instances of trial and error, so I try to forgive myself by telling myself that we still had another 10 years to make up for it, and he definitely has made great strides this year.

This year I discovered Charlotte Mason’s child-friendly , gentle, Montessori-like, yet comprehensive ideas and fell in love. To me, it seems to be the best of both worlds of a broad, classical education and interest-led learning and I read everything I could on the subject. Shortly thereafter, I discovered WinterPromise, an AWESOME Charlotte Mason style curriculum, which is what we used for science, nature studies, narration, literature, history, poetry, art and lots and lots of hands-on stuff this year.

BOY HOWDY, has it been a hit. Shorty’s attitude toward learning has done a radical about-face. Shorty no longer considers any of the WinterPromise stuff “school” – he will say things like “When we get done with school [meaning math and penmanship] can we do more WinterPromise stuff?” and it amazes me how much he has retained. We look forward to doing more of the same for next year and if it goes as well as it went this year, we’ll stick with this curriculum through at least junior high.

We are also happy with our language arts choice (the WTM’s rec, actually) and it would take us a bit longer to finally find a math level and program that Shorty could work with which ended up being the math curriculum from the same publisher, only he is a year behind, thanks to not having learned anything with Switched-On Schoolhouse. (Ugh). Rod and Staff is a Mennonite (read: Amish) publishing company, and their texts are very quaint, and definitely Christian, but so generic as to only be offensive if you are completely secular (i.e., if you cannot deal with “Math is the language of the universe… because God made the universe and God is a god of order and loveliness.”) The Amish angle is annoying to more cosmopolitan homeschoolers, but Shorty and I find it entertaining when the word problems are like, “Prudence and her 11 brothers and sisters each milked 6 cows…” Hee! They are actually very Charlotte Mason-ish too. More review for kids who need it, less review for kids who don’t, gentle approach, etc. His rote math skills have lept forward by leaps and bounds. He is already a strong speller and studies grammar and vocabulary on his own (word geekery… it is genetic, aye) so their light language arts curriculum with an emphasis on composition skills is perfect for him. Again with the “tailoring the educational experience to the individual” thing.

We plan to keep going with this same combo next year, adding in some formal health studies, typing, and French. Maybe more art and music appreciation.

And yet, our homeschool doesn’t look very much like a classroom anymore. We don’t do anything that Shorty doesn’t enjoy. We have academics whenever we have a few hours to spare in the day, whether that be in the morning, after lunch, right before judo/scouts/ whatever, right before bed. Any and all attempts to create a structured daily schedule for me, a work-at-home single parent, and Shorty, a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants budding artist and visionary have failed utterly. We “do school” on the floor, on the couch, walking around outside, driving around in the car, whatever. Though I think this has been the most educationally rich year for Shorty, I am no longer even comfortable calling it “doing school.” I just say “Let’s do some book stuff!” and let him pick the order. He is older now and he has a lot more say in what he does now, and since I want to encourage independent learning, a lot of it consists of giving him a to-read list, with the expectation that everything he has read will be narrated back to me either in writing or orally, to make sure he has read and understood the material.

The homeschooling community has a fond saying that “the world is our classroom!” I understand the sentiment behind it. We can use the whole world as a resource for learning. But this has sat poorer and poorer with me the longer I homeschool. I don’t want the world to be my child’s classroom. I don’t like classrooms anymore! For many kids, classrooms delineate where the learning starts AND stops. I will never forget my friend C’s anecdote about the time when, for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, her kids and her spent a weekend reading about MLK,Jr. and watching his “I have a dream” speech on YouTube and just generally getting all caught up in the excitement about learning about this amazing man’s life. Then the traditionally-schooled neighbor children came over to play, and when C’s kids excitedly rushed them over to the computer to watch the YouTube stuff, the neighbor kids were all “UGH, NO, that’s SCHOOL STUFF, and today is our DAY OFF.” Sad but understandable, all around.

Or to name a less tragic example, the time when my kid saw all the neighbor kids coming home on the last day of school 2 years ago, and they were all whooping and leaping for joy. “What are you so happy about?” he asked one child, who exclaimed, “We don’t have any more school until AUGUST!” Shorty solemnly turned to me and whispered, “Boy, going to school must be HORRIBLE.” Heeeeeee.

To me, that is the difference between my educational goals and institutional school. I do not want my child to just think of learning as a chore he has to endure ten months out of the year 8 hours a day. I want him to feel like he has the capacity to learn anything he wants, to indulge any curiosity that strikes his fancy. I don’t want him to feel like the world is a classroom. But I guess “The world is our encyclopedia or possibly library or like a living Google or something!” doesn’t have quite the same ring.

And so it is that this year, we have finally bid adieu to what I hope is the last remaining remnant of a school background. We have agreed that since we don’t get any schoolwork done from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day anyway, we are going to continue to do “book stuff” all through the summer (this is not drudgery if your kid thinks this is FUN, e.g., Shorty has already gleefully filled my Netflix queue with History Channel documentaries we previously thought we wouldn’t have time to watch) and our “summer vacation” will be late November through January, so our “school year” will be January through October. We’ll see how this works out with us intending to move across the country next summer.

I guess we’ll do what we always do – learn to cross that bridge when we get to it.

Yes, I do realize the irony of titling a post about whether or not a formal language arts curriculum is necessary with a quote from Hamlet, thankyouverymuch. 

Today we tried the first lesson from Rod & Staff’s Building With Diligence grammar and writing textbook for the fourth grade.  I’m not sure why we did so, to be honest. I just thought I’d give it a try.  With all the reading and the cursive handwriting program we’re doing this year already,  and factoring in the fact that DS9 is an excellent speller and intuitively good at grammar and syntax, I was going to forgo a formal language arts program this year. I figured, why fix what’s not broken?

However, after giving it some more thought, I think I’ve decided I’m going to work gently through the R&S book at his pace, just because I would like to do more formal writing and language arts courses next year from Florida Virtual School and don’t want the concept of formal composition to be totally alien to him.  R&S also has fun stuff like sentence diagramming, which my little visual-kinesthetic-spatial learner will get a big kick out of.  I’m going to go at his pace and we’re going to do the exercises as time permits. It is a lot of writing and some of the assignments, I feel, are excessive, so we’re just going to wing it – do some of them orally, do only half the questions, etc. But as it stands right now, we DON’T do any copywork, so I think it will be useful to have some part of our homeschool in which DS9 has to formally plot out sentences and, eventually, paragraphs and essays.

I’m also going to have him working through a basic spelling work book, Spelling Skills: Grade 4. I’m thinking we’ll do possibly 2 to 4 pages once per week. I’m thinking Friday, since that’s our low-key day. I never thought DS9 was really “the workbook type,” but recently he has expressed to me that he enjoys workbooks, particularly colorful ones, and these are colorful. I have the math workbook from the same publisher, but that, unlike the spelling workbook, is way too flimsy to be used as a primary text. It’s good for drill and review only.

I’ve also fallen belatedly in love with StarFall.  It is a completely free online phonics and reading curriculum for toddlers on up to 3rd or 4th grade, and it’s absolutely beautiful.  I wish I’d listened to people and used this web site 2 or 3 years ago when people first started recommending it to me.  The curriculum looks excellent and complete.  Unfortunately, even its highest level is a bit below my kiddo’s level at this point, but it still has some useful things, like introduction to drama, and has some great starting points for composer studies and artist studies that I may be using soon.  It also has some fun, stress-free grammar games for my guy, so I may still be able to squeeze some use out of this web site yet. But for those of you with littler people – I really encourage you to check it out. It is a FANTASTIC free resource.

I have been very torn on the issue of language arts, to be quite honest. I know there are people whose kids have gone on to graduate from Ivy League colleges who don’t believe in teaching ANY formal language arts – just basic phonics, basic punctuation rules, lots of copywork (which doesn’t work for my dysgraphic kiddo), individualized spelling lists based on “problem words,” and dictation.  Vocabulary and grammatical sensibilities develop simply by having the child read a lot of quality literature.  The child, it is said, absorbs grammar, spelling and syntax rules the way s/he originally learned language in the first place - by “osmosis,” i.e., seeing and hearing functional, quality use of the language and then intuiting its technical rules.  

It sounds like common sense, and I wish I could trust this process. I know that the reason that DS9 is such a good speller and so good at grammar is because he reads so much. I do think that if I were self-disciplined enough to do the dictation and copywork consistently, I wouldn’t need the R&S book or the spelling workbook. But I’m not, so I do.  Also, again, I do believe that knowing how to construct a formal sentence, paragraph, and eventually, an essay are useful things if the child wants to continue formal academics at the collegiate level, so instead of forgoing a language arts curriculum altogether, I’m just going to attempt to introduce these concepts in a gentle, child-paced, child-friendly way.

In that vein, I need to post my yearly “Assigned Independent Multi-Cultural Reading List” for the year like I do every year, but I’ll leave that for a separate post. Suffice it to say, DS9 is reading through an excellent abridged version of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and when asked to narrate today’s chapter, he talked nonstop for 20 minutes. I guess that one’s a hit!

Click to read more about our curriculum experiences so far…