This Friday’s Heart of the Matter meme is homeschooling tips and tricks.

Reading through some of the tips from other bloggers, I begin to realize how different we all are. I am definitely not the person to come to for scheduling and curriculum tips. We can’t even wake up at approximately the same time each day, much less start ’school’ at the crack of dawn. Reading some other homeschooler’s tips and their schedules from last week’s meme makes me feel like a slacker.

Anyway, here’s my tip: Desecrate an atlas

Buying an atlas to rip out all the pages has been one of my more inspired ideas. We bought a discounted (but still accurate) atlas and an oversized three ring scrapbooking binder. Each atlas page got ripped out (neatly) and put in a plastic sheet that was then placed in the binder. Every time we read a book, we find the atlas page where the story takes place, mark it, and add a page about the book, including  the place and historical period, into our customized atlas.

If a book goes into a lot of detail in one particular city, we print off a Google Map with the general area included, mark off as many landmarks as we can, and put it in our book in the most appropriate place.

We first tried this on a wall map, but found that places like England got lots of marks and became too squished. The ever-expanding atlas is much more functional, even though we can’t hang it on the wall.

It seems there’s a new online magazine for homeschoolers, “Heart of the Matter“, and they’re running a meme asking home schoolers to share a day in the life of their families.

I’m only homeschooling one five year old right now, and because he’s only five we take a pretty relaxed view of what goes on in a day. No day is typical for us, but this is what today was like….

Morning:

Woke up late after staying up a little too late last night. Had breakfast, made a HUGE pot of coffee, and started David on his Mathematical Reasoning book, while his dad and I got ready for a conference call. David worked while we explained to a client why we didn’t spend our Christmas holiday working on their stuff. The call lasted about an hour and a half, after which I checked on David’s progress and saw he’d finished a quarter of the book and covered sections on bar graphs, venn diagrams, and probability along with oodles of review pages.

Feeling guilty for leaving him to work on math for so long by himself, I teach him how to make paper chain people. He tries a few, and once he gets a chain he thinks he likes, he starts turning all the people in the chain into his favorite superheroes. So far he’s got Batman, Robin, and … Santa Claus. Ok, maybe not all superheroes.

Lunch time!

I go downstairs to make lunch. David follows me down and plays with his Crazy Fort in the living room while I cook up some food. I try to do dishes afterward to find out there’s no hot water. Sending Dad down to check it didn’t increase the water temperature at all, so I boiled water for the dishes while he called the repair man and argued that we really need hot water before next week.

After lunch, David practiced his piano. His last lesson was before Christmas so he’s been practicing the same songs for a long time. I think we’re both getting a little tired of them, though they’re sounding really good at this point.

I’ve still got piles of work to do, so David sits down and reads a few of the books we borrowed from the library. He reads out loud, and as long as I can follow with half an ear, I can help him with words he is having problems with from the context.

When he’s tired of reading, he goes back to his paper chain people and makes Superman before I pull him away to go to his piano lesson.

Evening

The piano lesson goes splendidly, and he’s got six new songs to practice for next week. At least the songs are getting a little more interesting now that he’s playing with both hands.

After his lesson, I start making supper while he sorts the recycling into the blue boxes. When he’s done with the blue boxes, he plays his RushHour game for a half an hour while I cook. After supper I take out the garbage and blue boxes and boil more water for dishes.

Once clean-up is done, we head back up to my office where he works on some more chain people while I work and we both listen to Alice in Wonderland. We’re listening to the version from kiddierecords.com this week. Last week we listened to a podcast version from Curiosoft. They are very, very different to listen to. Perhaps we’ll grab a third version from Audible next week.

Since the repair man isn’t coming to fix the hot water heater till tomorrow afternoon, there’s no bathtime tonight, so after brushing his teeth, David writes a line in his daily journal, gets is jammies on, and climbs in bed where I read him a few chapters from his latest book.

It’s another late bedtime, thereby dispelling any hopes I might have had of getting an early start tomorrow.

An interesting video clip from the Cato Institute. Neal McCluskey explains why the very institution that is supposed to unify causes so many arguments.

To illustrate, he quotes Lexington MA Superintendent of Schools Paul Ash as saying, “We couldn’t run a public school system if every parent who feels some topic is objectionable to them for moral or religious reasons decides their child should be removed.”

“In other words”, McCluskey says, “you can’t run a single system of education that upholds the rights and values of all those who pay for it.”

The video is about 12 minutes long, but a worthwhile listen:

Since we’ve gotten back from vacation, things have been very hectic. Just catching up on work has been a huge task, and the process of unpacking, and getting the house ready for winter are adding to the load.

So, David has been on his own for most of the last week. We’ve missed play dates, and I wasn’t even able to get him to his Beavers meeting yesterday.  He’s had no friends over for more than a week, and while he’s not complaining, I feel so guilty it’s driving me nuts.

I can’t figure out why a temporary glitch in the scheduling of our lives is giving me this much anxiety.

I’m not going to pretend to know both sides of the story here, but here’s the way the article outlines it…

1) Kids are/feel harassed at school
2) Mom complains to school but gets nowhere
3) Harassment escalates to the point where mom feels children are physically threatened
4) Mom pulls kids from school to homeschool
5) School says mom can’t adequately teach and files a complaint of educational neglect.

Now, maybe there’s something else happening here, but I have a hard time seeing this as anything close to educational neglect. Wasn’t she neglecting her children more when she kept them in school despite frequent bullying?

Technorati Tags: bullying, bullies, homeschool public_school

A a report on home schooling released today by The Fraser Institute should make you more confident in your ability to educate your children, even if you don’t have a university degree.

Home Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream (2nd edition) by Patrick Basham, John Merrifield, and Claudia R. Hepburn is a current survey of many peer-reviewed homeschooling studies that have been published recently. While true statistics are impossible to come by, a survey of all the existing data can be helpful to come to some general conclusions about the value and efficacy of home schooling.

The report covers the history and regulation of homeschooling, the growth of the movement, the socio-economic characteristics of homeschooling, academic successes, and socialization concerns related to homeschooling.

Some interesting stats in the report:

• Home schooling parents have above-average levels of education. 75% of homeschooling parents have studied beyond high school vs 56% nationwide
• 81% of homeschoolers are two-parent households vs 66% of American families with children
• Having at least one parent who is a certified teacher appears to have no significant effect on the achievement levels of home schooled students.
• Homeschooled children of university graduates perform significantly better than do children whose parents do not have a degree, BUT the educational achievement of the homeschooling parent has LESS impact than the educational achievement of the parents of public schooled kids.
  “…regardless of whether their mothers held a degree or did not complete high school, the [home schooled] children’s scores stayed between the 80th and 90th percentile. By contrast, in 8th grade math, public school students whose parents are college graduates score at the 63rd percentile, whereas students whose parents have less than a high school diploma score at the 28th percentile. Students taught at home by mothers who never finished high school scored a full 55 percentile points higher than public school students from families with comparable education levels.”
  
• Home schooled kids watch less television than their public school peers
• Home schooled students enjoy a life satisfaction score considerably above the score of their public school peers

Overall, nothing but good news. Home schoolers already know they’re making the right decision, but it doesn’t hurt to have a little encouragement from researchers now and then.

Watching the hockey game tonight, instead of the regular hollering and yelling at the Leafs to get in front of the net, and SHOOT for goodness sake!, this is what you would have heard in our living room…

“How many points do the Leafs have, David?”

“How many points does Ottawa have?”

“How many points have been scored altogether?”

“How many goals does Ottawa have to score to win the game?”

Not to mention the discussion of thirds when discussing periods, and the various reasons there might be intermissions between periods… like giving the players a chance to go to the bathroom… and the need for the television network to show advertising to show the game on TV.

What are we becoming, turning Canada’s sacred national sport into a learning experience, rather than the bloodthirsty team rivalry it ought to be?

Ann and Bob Smith are a devoutly religious couple who choose to homeschool their seven-year-old twins Susan and Sam. In accordance with their religious beliefs, they teach their children only religious doctrine, refusing to provide their children with a basic education in reading, writing and arithmetic.

Thus begins a lengthy article authored by Kimberly A. Yuracko from Northwestern University School of Law (available in PDF form here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1016778)

Of course, Ann and Bob Smith are simply a figment of Yuracko’s imagination. While some of the Christian homeschoolers I’ve become aware of are teaching some dubious stuff and calling it science, they are (at least from my experience) far more likely to follow a strict and challenging boxed curriculum than secular home schoolers.

Yuracko’s article is based on a few different premises I completely disagree with:
1) that parental control over children’s basic education flows from the state (rather than vice versa).
2) that a good education necessarily includes indoctrination in such liberal values as sex equality, gender role fluidity, multiculturalism, etc.
3) That the state’s obligation to ensure children receive the abstract values mentioned above in their educational regimen overrides the parent’s rights to transmit their own family/cultural values to their children.

Yuracko begins by asserting that homeschooling puts children in danger of not receiving a minimum education.

“Much has been written in the popular press about the superior academic achievement of homeschooled children. However, the widely-touted studies showing that homeschooled children outperform their public school peers deserve skepticism. They generally suffer from selection biases among homeschoolers and do not control for the family characteristics of the homeschooling and non-homeschooling families being compared. With only half of all states requiring standardized testing or evaluation of homeschooled students, and with poor enforcement of such requirements where they do exist, there is simply no good data on what and how much homeschooled students are learning.”

In a scientific journal the writer would be expected to establish, from the numbers that do exist, upper and lower boundaries in order to better estimate the true achievement of home schoolers in general. But this is a law article. We can just ignore the numbers, however inaccurate, that have been collected and proceed to anecdotal evidence.

“Anecdotal evidence suggests that at least some homeschooled children, by design or accident, may not be receiving even a basic minimum education. The fact that one cannot know for sure how rare such occurrences are is itself a problem. I contend in this Part that, as a matter of federal and state constitutional law, states may not permit such deprivation.”

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that at least some public schooled children, by design or accident, may not be receiving even a basic minimum education, but that’s another matter.

Lets look at the anecdotal evidence she cites in her footnotes. The first two anecdotes are quotes from unschooled teens that indicate that they spend most of their time doing things they like — dance and snowboarding, in these instances. This alone does not in any way indicate that those teens were unable to do other, more ‘educationally acceptable’ things.

My son, for instance, has spent most of his time in the last month building and enacting elaborate medieval battles with plastic knights and cardboard castles. While it doesn’t sound like he’s being thoroughly educated, he also happens to read at a third grade level and is starting second grade math, which is a tad better than his public-schooled age peers who have just begun senior kindergarten.

The other anecdotal evidences in her footnotes could more easily be described (and prosecuted) as child abuse. And as sad as it is that these things happen in ‘home schooling’ families, they no more indict home schooling than anecdotal evidence of molesting teachers and bullying peers indict public schools. And there is no need for further legislation to protect these children when the existing legislation, if applied and enforced, is fully adequate.

Let me just make this little analogy to illustrate why Yuracko’s argument doesn’t fly with me:

I don’t think I need to say more on this point.

Yuracko’s second issue with home schoolers is that homeschooling parents with peculiar beliefs may provide their sons with far better and more sophisticated educations than their daughters.

I have never heard of this particular problem occurring with home schoolers, and, perhaps aside from some self-enclosed religious circles, I don’t think it’s a common occurrence. Even among religious groups that set themselves apart– like FLDS, Amish or Old Order Mennonites– you’d be less likely to find undereducated HOMESCHOOLED girls than undereducated girls in a separate, group-run school system. The primary reason being that if the tradition of homeschooling is to be continued, the girls need an education sufficient to educate the next generation of patriarchs, lest illiterate girls produce illiterate sons and the whole sub-culture goes up in a social darwinian flame after a few generations.

And, to be honest, I don’t think I can see the benefit of the state forcing an Amish school to teach sexual equality. It would hardly prepare those children for the life they are most likely to live.

But this leads, I guess, to the next objection … that home schooled children might not be taught “liberal values” — or worse — that they be taught values considered anathema by the bulk of liberal society.

And as much as it might get me in trouble with my fellow secular home schoolers, I don’t think it’s wrong that fringe groups, or any group, educate their children with values outside the norm. After all, the values of any society are fluid and constantly changing. If certain groups wish to try to influence the direction of that evolution, I believe they should be free to do so, as long as the values they are promoting do not promote physical, actual harm to other people or property.

So, from my libertarian viewpoint, if they want to teach their own children that all non-Christians, gays, and left-handed people are going to hell, that’s fine with me. If they want to teach their kids that the earth is flat, that Jesus had a pet dinosaur, or that the earth was created two weeks ago, that’s fine with me too. While I believe all those things to be false, in most professions one’s belief in the shape of the earth or the origin of the universe are pretty irrelevant. I don’t care if my dentist believes in intelligent design. I don’t care if my accountant is a member of the flat earth society. I only care that they can do the jobs I need them to do.

But perhaps my belief that religious home schoolers should be given all the freedom they want to instill their particular Christian values to their children comes partly from the fact that as a Libertarian, my own values and political views are as anathema to the political mainstream as the values and views of Christianity.

Might sound like strange bedfellows, but I’d rather hang with a freedom loving Christian than an authoritarian ‘freethinker’ any day.

David went digging through the workbook shelf today and uncovered the AEP’s “The Complete Book of Our Solar System “. It’s a tough book to work through, with lots of copy work, but he kept at it for a lot longer than I anticipated. I have to admit that there’s a good variety of activities and puzzles, so that it seemed worth the effort to get through the more dull pages to get to the games or riddles.

After working through about 15 pages, we went outside and collected autumn colored leaves. We put them in his nature journal, then spent time identifying them with a leaf identification book I didn’t even know we had.

Then he decided it was craft time, so we made some monster  paper lanterns that turned out kind of cute.

Now it’s nearly nine o’clock, and I’ve still got a bundle of work to catch up on before I can get some sleep, so I sent David off to watch a few shows on TV before he heads to sleep. I hate to condone TV, but sometimes I need the solitude to pay the bills.

I still can’t believe how lucky I am to be able to watch him grow and learn. As much as it can be exhausting some days, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Beverly Hernandez from About Homeschool has asked for nominations for the seven wonders of the homeschooling world.

My first thoughts ran through John Holt and Susan Wise Bauer as possibilities, but then I figured out my #1 wonder, and it’s got to be the World Wide Web.

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