My mother decided to homeschool my brother and sister after they
finished 5th grade. I was just about done with high
school by that point, but I remember being quite jealous.
However, I had wrong notions of homeschooling and imagined much
relaxation and little actual academic development. I am glad to
say my mother did a wonderful job and my sister is now an RN and my
brother works in Waste Water Management (we should all be very
thankful for those men and women, by the way). We made the
decision to homeschool our kids early on and I am glad we did.
It has been and still is quite an interesting endeavor, to say the
least. So here I write about five things that I have learned so
far in my two and a half years of homeschooling my two crazy and
wonderful children. I hope you will find them interesting and
perhaps helpful if you are also a homeschooling parent.
Kids really can learn more than we give them credit for
This has been the most fascinating fact for me personally so I
thought I would start with this point. When I think back on my own
school experience, the thread that runs through the whole event is
that you learn certain subjects only at certain ages and/or grade
levels. It has been exciting and challenging to force myself
out of that paradigm in regards to my own children. Let me give you
an example.
When I first began to teach Lexy, we worked on things one would
expect, such as recognizing letters, learning letter sounds and
counting. I started to wonder though, could she perhaps grasp
concepts that we just assume she can't learn because she is so
young? I saw no harm in attempting this. If she didn't
understand the concept, no problem, it could wait. So, I started to
show her, through hands-on physical examples, the difference between
nouns and verbs. I am amazed and proud to say that within a
couple weeks, she was correctly identifying words as nouns or verbs
and could give me her own examples of each. I was intrigued and
started to move on to slightly more nuanced concepts, like pronouns,
adjectives, and adverbs. We are currently working on verb
tenses and sentence types. She can now accurately diagram a
sentence, which I would never have thought a 5-year-old capable of
until now. She doesn't grasp all these concepts flawlessly, but
it is evident that she is understanding them and she only improves
the more we practice. This experience has shown me that kids
are inherently capable of learning more than we think. We need
to give them more credit and not be afraid to challenge them. This
does not mean, of course, that we ought to aggressively push kids too
quickly into concepts they are genuinely not ready for, but they
deserve the chance to show us whether or not they are ready, and they
can often handle more than I expected!
Flexibility is a wonderful benefit
When I first started homeschooling, I had it in my head that I NEEDED
to have the schooling done in the first part of the day, before
lunch. Why did I think this exactly? I am not entirely sure.
Well, I soon saw how often that just wasn't going to happen. However,
once I realized that it really was all right and not the end of the
world if we did some schoolwork at other points in the day, my life
became much less stressful. I have actually found that breaking
it up throughout the day sometimes leads to overall better attitudes
on the kids' part (note, I did say sometimes). It is exciting,
though, to have the freedom to work around the day's schedule and not
have the schooling aspect control the whole life of the family.
Physical activity is so helpful for my kids’ sanity and, by extension, mine
We have a swing, slide, teeter-totter, and small trampoline on our
porch. I have utilized all of those recreational objects in the
quest for knowledge. Sometimes we will go outside and they can
jump on the trampoline while they answer spelling or phonics
questions. We have also done games where, if they get a
question right or recite their memory work correctly, they get x
minutes on the slide or swing. It is just such a fun and
amusing way to let them get some energy out while not entirely
abandoning the pursuit of learning. I have even had games
where, if they did their work well, they would have the chance in
between problems to run down the hallway x number of times while
pretending to be a farm animal or vehicle of some kind. This
game lets them get energy out while having the added bonus of being
entertaining for me. That is a blessing, particularly in winter
when the porch is not as pleasant. 
The smallest change can sometimes make a huge difference
In order to illustrate this point, I have to give a bit of a
backstory. I work with Lexy and Jon on math by using various
shaped beads. I will, for example, put 10 in a bowl and then tell
them that I now want there to be 12, or only 5, etc. They then
either have to take a certain amount away from the bowl or add to it
from the pile. Well, just the other day, I told Lexy that this
time I was going to use a cereal bowl instead of the one we had
previously been using for our “bead math.” This literally
resulted in leaping and giggling. I have also changed up the
math game with magnets, which Jon in particular really enjoys.
Sometimes it doesn't take much, I just have to be willing to get out
of my rut and be a bit more inventive, which is good for all of us.
Competition is a great motivator
Lexy is not a fan of math. This is ironic, because she has a
fascination with astronomy (more on that in an upcoming post) and she
tells us on occasion that she wants to be an astronaut and go into
space. We keep telling her that she'll have to improve at math
in order to do that. Anyway, we started playing a math game,
where the child that answers the question first, gets a point. We
play to x number of points. Lexy clearly
knows more than she lets on, and it
comes out when the reward is beating her brother.
Homeschooling certainly has been challenging and, at times, downright
frustrating. But it has also been a lot of fun. I enjoy
watching my kids learn about the world and how it works. It is
exciting to be an integral part of their discovery and even on the
worst days (and their worst attitudes) I wouldn't change it.
I'd love to hear from my readers who homeschool or have in the past.
If you have things that you have learned from the experience, pass it
along. I love sharing homeschool stories and experiences.
