Writing : teaching how to.

Teaching children to write must be fun, for both the parent and the child. The following quote from Professor David Elkind's book Miseducation explains why :

An abiding sense of attachment and a healthy sense of trust are fundamental to later healthy interpersonal relationships. A child who has learned to attach to and trust a parent has the basis for later attaching to and trusting friends and eventually a mate. But attachment and trust are also critical to learning. Freud recognized this fact when he argued that the "transference" (the patient's attachment to and trust in the therapist) is critical to the patient's readiness to change (learn) and profit from therapy. In the same way, many children learn to read in part because they are attached to and trust parents who are readers and who reward the child's progress in reading. As Dr. Spock says:

"Before they begin formal schooling, children can be strongly motivated to learn to read if they have parents who read to them. As they become intellectually capable of discriminating letter shapes, they may ask the names and sounds of letters. They will want to go to school unless alienated by bad experiences."

 Engaging in unnecessary cold interactions with infants in order to teach them some tricks such as recognizing words, pictures, or numbers from flash cards is miseducation. The child is put at risk for an impaired attachment and sense of mistrust. And because attachment is critical to later learning, the parent who engages an infant in cold interactions with the aim of giving the child an edge in academics may be doing just the opposite.

 Little children need to do lots of drawing to learn pencil skills before they can begin the trickier task of writing letters. However, please, please, please if you use colouring books don't insist that they have to colour in in the lines. This only stifles creativity, art is often very political and not necessarily neat. Putting up Alphabets on children's walls and magnet letters on the fridge is a good idea. Writing their name whilst playing, and telling them the letters of their name as you write helps them to grasp the idea that these shapes mean something.  And of course reading lots of books to them ( I read to my children every day - even into their late teens, and we still read together as a family). After some trial and error I found that using blackline masters of letters where the children can either trace over the letters or draw inside the lines of the letters (we are not doing art here, we are learning how to control a pencil) worked well. They just need lots of repetition and eventually they begin to remember what each letter is. I used a phonics approach to reading, i.e. A is for apple, B is for ball etc. I didn't teach them A = aye, B = bee until later. However, this could be done together. I would spend no longer than a few minutes teaching the child, then leave them to their own devices. Some of my children loved to laboriously spend hours on projects, such as drawing, and the others were happy to have the basics and then move on to another interest.

 

Homeschooling schedule

How does one homeschool and have a schedule? Not only does one have to homeschool the children but there are all of the normal household duties to be performed also. The house has to be cleaned, shopping to be done, bills, banking, business to be done, doctors appointments, gardening, house repairs, cars to be serviced and repaired etc. etc. etc. When children are small they can't be left at home and so the homeschooling mum has to take the children with her on all of these many chores.

I am going to discuss in this post how I managed to homeschool, successfully in my opinion, and have a schedule, but I am first going to give a brief history of the evolution of my homeschooling methods to a style that suited me, and the children.

When I first started homeschooling I began with school text books and we sat down every morning to do 'school'. It wasn't long before I found that homeschooling using school text books was exhausting, for me, and totally irrelevant for my son and so I switched to a more natural learning style of homeschooling by following my son's interests and facilitating those interests - i.e child led learning. That year I received two visits from moderators, the second being very negative (I later received a letter from a moderator, from another district, telling me that the Education Department had instructed moderators to get all homeschooled children back into school, thus explaining the negative visit).  Following the second (or negative) visit from the moderator, I tried homeschooling my way and the way that I felt that the Department wanted me to homeschool. I then went into a period of extreme guilt, frustration, fear, anxiety and exhaustion as I was doing neither method very well and I felt completely at a loss as to how to go about homeschooling and try and run a house and care for two pre-school children. It was then that I realised that I had to homeschool MY way and that I just couldn't please everyone, with the Department being the last on the list of those to please. These were MY kids and they were going to be raised learning about the things that our family valued and not what the state values. (I have a degree in cultural heritage, in which I studied the psychology of society and how our imaginations are worked on to make us believe that we belong to a state, nation, empire etc. which I will discuss in further blogs)

So how did I develop a schedule that worked for me?

I tended towards having a major theme that we studied for a year. The example that I will use here is one year's theme with my daughter. Together we started an ebay business. We would go to auctions and bid on and buy items that we then sold on ebay. We would go to the auction previews and tick off the items that we thought would be interesting to buy. Then we would go home and research the items to see how much the same, or similar, items sold for in the past. We researched how to tell fakes, how things such as Millifiori paperweights were made. We learnt about glass, china, Wembley ware, Carlton Ware, enamel ware etc. etc. etc. (She has a fabulous Crinoline Lady china, and hand painted Australian bone china collection now). We then would go to the auction and bid on the items that we thought that we could make a profit on. Then we would come home and list the items on ebay, providing descriptions, photos, price, postage, packaging etc. etc. etc. We also bought items form op shops that we resold and sometimes we bought things that were on sale in the stores and sold for a profit on ebay.

We had many themes over the years including Galileo, which turned into time (if you think time is simple, think again) which turned into light and heat. We had a year on law, the difference between law and rules, we looked at laws that pirates had, and then the kids made up rules of their bedrooms. What we found was that none of these subjects are as simple as they look and they became fascinating journeys of discovery. So these themes could be worked on quite naturally throughout the year.


We also had a weekly schedule. The children also attended Art classes once a week, recorder classes once a week, sign language classes once a week, table tennis classes once a week, jungle gym once a week, and then a monthly schedule in which I conducted a history walk, once a month we weeded Ellis Brook, and once a month we went to the Zoo.

This schedule, I found, left lots of room to attend to all of those 'other' things that us mums and dads have to do.

Charlotte Mason, Galileo and gravity.

GALILEO AND GRAVITY
Galileo also proved that objects of different weights would fall at the same speed and dropped two objects of differing weights from the top of the Tower of Pisa, they landed on the earth at the same time. I have posted some links to videos showing Galileo's experiment. Charlotte's philosophy was to immerse children in the subject of biographies being read.

Charlotte Mason, Galileo and the Pendulum

GALILEO AND THE PENDULUM
While reading about Galileo's life we learnt that Galileo was bored in church one day and he began observing a very large incense burner swinging from side to side. He started timing the incense burner with his pulse. We did some experiments using string and a piece of plasticine, and then timed the swings of the string changing the distance of the plasticine up and down the string. This experiment can be found at http://www.experiment-resources.com/pendulum-experiment.html .

Charlotte Mason

Charlotte Mason

I used a mixture of Charlotte Mason and Natural Learning when I homeschooled my children.

I used Charlotte's ideas in reading whole books, in reading living books, in reading biographies of artists, scientists, musicians, and then learning the science, music, art along with the book that we were reading.

For example when we read the biography of Galileo. Not only did we learn the science of Galileo but we also learnt about the political climate. Galileo's era was before the Age of Enlightenment and the Church was very powerful. Galileo was imprisoned by the Catholic Church for saying that the world revolved around the sun. And so rather than just learning that the world revolves around the sun, as schools teach, we learnt the history and the clash between Galileo and the Church that went along with coming to an understanding of that science.

Mind you that fact is stated in the Bible at Isaiah 40:22 There is One who is dwelling above the circle of the earth. . .

Homeschooling Answers to Questions

When I was homeschooling we would get the usual questions, below are some answers that I used.

If we were at the shopping centre and were asked "Why aren't your kids at school?" I would say that it's a pupil free day.

When my children were asked what year they were in they would answer 2010 (whatever the calendar year was).

When asked about socialisation I would say that I was raised on a farm and socialised with my family, grandparents, working men, shearing contractors etc. and I consider myself socialised.

OR

I would ask what social skills could a six year old teach my children and then say that social skills are learnt from adults who teach young children.

Do they have to have a curriculum? I would answer that I was aware of what my children were really interested in and then follow their interests...they were learning what was relevant to them. I would tell them that I was using a Maths Book and realised that the Maths in the book had absolutely no relevance to my children's lives at that time, so I got rid of the book and we would learn the maths needed to pursue/facilitate their current interests.

Homeschooling. Why?

I home schooled three children for fifteen years. One of the things that I was told that I should know - and be able to tell anyone who asked - was why I choose to homeschool. To be honest I had no one real idea except that I knew that it would work. Personally I think that a lot of mental energy can be wasted in trying to work out a reason why for the purposes of making a defense to those who ask why we homeschool. When I see parents with children in school uniform I don't ask them to justify why they send their children to school, I don't have an issue with home schooling so therefore, if others do have an issue with homeschooling, I see that as their issue not mine so I don't think that I have to defend my choice to homeschool.

So, why did I homeschool? Now that I have finished homeschooling I know the answer. I was sent to boarding school and never lived with my family again after the age of 12. I reacted against this by not sending my kids to school at all. However, there is much more to it than that.

I went to a small country town school and I remember in my first few months there that there were several girls bullying another girl in the sandpit. They were poking her with sticks and calling her names. I had never witnessed anything so horrifying before in all my life. The girls that were bullying were 'pretty' girls. The sort that we would call the popular girls. I made a decision there and then that I did not want to belong to their group. I have never belonged to the 'popular' groups ever because of that decision. A decision that I only became aware of recently. So, I homeschooled because I didn't want to belong to the popular (hegemonic) group. That's where I am comfortable.


'I went back to that school two years ago (after a twenty five year absence) when I was writing my final history essay at Uni. I felt sick to my stomache as it was not a place that I had any fond memories of. There was the spot where the sandpit was. The school had not changed very much at all. After visiting the school I went and read the school records in the Battye Library. It was while I was reading these records that I realised why I disliked that school so much. The school was praised for its plant nursery that it started. My memories of the nursery were of just standing around while teachers were organising things. I don't recall actually doing anything in there. The school was praised for having a brass band. I wasn't in the band, I sat and watched the band. I realised that the school was all about the teachers orgainsing impressive looking projects, which involved very few students, to get a pat on the head from the Department, it wasn't about the kids. So, I homeschooled so that my kids wouldn't be bored out of their brains sitting around doing almost nothing all day.

When I read the school report (previously mentioned) I realised that I had female teachers for my first two years at school and male teachers every other year. I felt as though not one teacher, other than my grade one teacher, Miss Small, knew that I even existed. I think that I was in a state of depression my whole primary school life - or that's how I remember it. So, I homeschooled because my kids would get individual attention every day of their school lives from someone who was deeply interested in THEM as individuals.

When I went to boarding school - finally (I longed to go to boarding school) - there were a number of girls there who had grown up on stations up north, they hadn't been to 'school' : they were schooled through school of the air. They were so incredibly confident and talented, they were fresh and happy, they amazed me with their real sense of self worth. I thought at the time that it was because they hadn't been beaten down by the school system. They weren't burnt out. They weren't compared to the others in their class, they hadn't been pointed out as a failure or success, they could just be themselves. Their parents could hear every word the teacher said to them - so the teacher was accountable. So, I homeschooled because I wanted my children to have that same confidence, happiness and self belief.

Do we have to justify to others why we homeschool? Do we have to have some down pat answer? I don't think so. The reason why I/we homeschool is complex and deep, we can analyse the reasons why as we go through our lives, and probably still come up with many more reasons as we get older, but it is for our own individual reasons and we need to use our mental energy for our kids, not for outsiders who have issues with homeschooling.