I received the following comment after yesterday’s post:

>>this is interesting to me. i have always wanted to homeschool but it a very foreign idea for my dh. i am surprised to hear that your main plans for the year are reading and playing games. if my dh ever agreed to homeschool, he would want me to have serious academic plans. how do you explain your approach to someone like my dh, who i’d describe as interested but skeptical.<<

What I wrote about was my summer plans, not my official homeschooling schedule.  My homeschooling schedule is a bit more structured.  However, this question brings up a perception about education that I’d like to address.

What if my homeschooling plans were to basically read with my kids and play games?  I feel very, very confident that they’d get an amazing education and have a wonderful quality of life.  Why?  There are a few things to consider, but right now I’ll just address the primary issue of how children learn.

Children are natural learners – the desire to explore and understand the world around them is an inherent part of who they are.   This is unfortunately a quality that is usually suppressed once they are in the school system; it’s not cool to be interested in knowledge and the school structure seems almost designed to make children disinterested in learning for its own sake.  Their understanding of what knowledge is morphs into the hugely limiting idea that it’s what your teacher tells you in the course of a classroom lesson.  Kids learn to keep quiet rather than ask questions and be engaged, to waste as much of the teacher’s time as possible and find creative ways to waste their own time during the lesson.  (I’m remembering the endless lists some classmates would make during high school classes- for example, all the songs they could think of  was one list – I remember being motioned to and the list pointed at so I could add my suggestions.  To the teacher it looks like you’re writing notes.:))  When it comes time for a test, they scurry to study, spit back the information they learn and then promptly forget it all again – unless a person finds value in information, he doesn’t have reason to remember it.

This is why teachers are usually so delighted to have homeschooled kids in their classes, and why colleges have a preference for homeschooled students – because they haven’t developed this apathy towards learning.  They’ve maintained the  inquisitive and interested way of looking at the world that all children start off with and it’s a pleasure to teach people who want to learn.

All people learn much more when they’re engaged and having fun.  This is why I’m not a fan of structured curriculum that is divorced from a child’s interests.  Without interest on the child’s part, his retention of the material is going to be quite poor.   Games are a wonderful way to spend time with your child, or for them to spend time with their siblings or friends – and for them to learn lots in the meantime!  We have a lot of math type games in our home, and I’ve found this a wonderful way to integrate learning lots of mathematical concepts.  (I’ll write more about this in a different post if there’s interest.)  Ditto with word games – there’s plenty that can be learned by playing games.  My kids spelling got lots better when they started playing Bananagrams often!

What about reading?  Reading with children is not only a great opportunity to snuggle up on a couch together for an enjoyable shared story.   Enjoying time together with your children is so valuable in a number of ways – and did you know that there’s a tremendous benefit to children academically when they feel connected to the parent who is homeschooling them?  Kids learn more and learn better when they’re with someone they feel safe with and cared about.  But setting that aside, reading is a phenomenal way to learn just about anything!  Where is knowledge?  In books.

You can read all sorts of things together, fiction and non fiction. I’ve read lots of historical fiction with my kids and they’ve learned lots of history.  You can read fictional books like A Wrinkle in Time that explore scientific concepts.  Nowadays we have so many beautifully illustrated non-fiction books on just about every topic.  My four year old’s current favorite book is Sefer Yonah/Book of Jonah.  I’ve read it a few times in just the last week!  (This is the actual biblical version, with child-friendly illustrations.)  I read it with explanations of the commentaries and questions of my own sprinkled in, and and he’s soaking in much more than if I formally sat him down at an older age and lectured at him and had him fill out worksheets.

Of course, kids can read on their own as well.  I limit ‘twaddle’, the fluffy mind numbing low quality pulp fiction, because it’s like candy.  Okay in small amounts but sickening if it’s your main diet.  Once you provide your children with good quality literature, you’re giving them a regular opportunity to soak in good language usage/structure/grammar, not to mention the many thought provoking ideas they can contemplate.

Kids will want to do things on their own in addition to this.  They aren’t going to sit around on their hands after playing and reading looking at the celing!   What kind of things will children who are interested in the world do?   Something will stimulate their interest and they’ll ask, “Can we do a project?  Build something?  Plant something?  Do science experiments?  Play an instrument?”  As they get older they often look for more structured ways of learning things on their own.  And the beauty of this learning is that it’s meaningful to them.

Does this make sense?  Feel free to ask more questions if there’s a point that wasn’t clear!

Avivah

Today was the last day of school for all of kids ages 12 and down, and dd16 finished 12th grade over a week ago, so as of now we have just one child left in school – ds14, who has a different school schedule than the other kids.  The kids who finished today came home with report cards and certificates of good behavior and workbooks/activities for the summer, and I keep thinking how happy I am that we’ve completed this stage in our lives and are moving on to homeschooling!

As positively as I feel about the summer, I know that the transition period won’t necessarily be easy.  This is more of a concern to me right now since for the last week and a half I’ve been really wiped out and exhausted.  Transitions require more of an investment of parental time and energy than when things are running according to routine, and I’m going to have to make a very conscious effort to get to sleep earlier so that I can do what I need to do!

Dd16 will be running a two week day camp for young boys beginning tomorrow.  It’s ironic that here in Karmiel, far from a bastion of English speakers, that all of the families sending are English speakers so the camp will be in English!  She offered to take ds4 and ds5 for free, but we settled on me paying a discounted price, since it will be more work for her and I don’t want her to do it without any gain.  It’s a small group of nice kids and especially with dd running it, I know the boys will enjoy it.  Particularly for ds4, it will be special since he’s used to being home with me.

Dd12 and ds7 both asked me to send them to the camps their schools are running.  I told dd12 I was open to it but we needed to discuss it, and that discussion hasn’t yet happened.  (Updated to add – she asked me about this at 7:45 the next morning.  I told her I wasn’t comfortable registering at the last minute like this, but if she wanted to take care of the registration on her own, it was fine with me.  So she did and will be in camp for the next two weeks.  :))  As far as ds7, I think he needs to deschool and I’m not the slightest bit interested in sending him to camp.  He was telling me about his day in school, including the fifth grader who told ds7 to give ds11 the message that he hates him, and then the boy kicked ds7.  Then he got kicked by a seventh grader not long afterwards.  I pointed out that it didn’t seem camp would be much fun if the same group of older kids were there.  The kids are careful not to do this when teachers around since there’s no tolerance for this kind of behavior, but it makes unsupervised school time unsafe for kids.

Ds7 is a great example of a student who has everything going for him – he’s the top student in his class (and unfortunately knows that- I’ve always avoided this kind of comparison, preferring to focus on each person doing his best), is friendly, great at sports, and students and teachers really like him.  He’s the kind of kid who shines in school, but even so there’s a tension and unhappiness that we’ve all noticed in him.  If I’m seeing this in a boy who is excelling by all accounts, what’s it like for the kids who aren’t successful in school?  I’m looking forward to the restoration of his natural easy going nature as he unwinds inside.  I spoke to another mother of a large family, and she told me all her kids are uptight and unpleasant by the end of the school year – they start to get back to themselves after some vacation time.  I wonder how many people think about how this kind of tension affects their children’s personality development long term?

Last year, I was really looking forward to summer vacation, and then gave birth a day after it began.  That was followed by time in the NICU, daily trips back and forth to the hospital, then followed by constant doctor visits.  And before I knew it, the summer was over and the kids were back to school, and I hadn’t had a chance to be with them in the way I had hoped.  I’m looking forward to this summer being different. My plans are very low key – mostly to take them to local parks, read books and play games with them.  As boring as that sounds, I think it’s just what we all need – time to relax and spend time together as a family.

Avivah

I have some homeschooling related questions that I’d like to answer, one of which is, how do I propose to help my children integrate socially in this culture if they aren’t going to be in school?  It’s a good question and I’ll address it in a different post!  Right now I’ll share about a related point – the perceived importance of a child having a lot of friends and of being popular.

My feeling about this is that being popular is highly overrated and doesn’t correlate well to future success in life.  I was delighted to recently read the delightfully titled, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth – Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School – by Alexandra Robbins.  Ms. Robbins is a researcher who interviewed high school students and teachers all over the US and shares the results of her extensive research with readers.

What is Quirk Theory?  “Many of the differences that cause a student to be excluded in school are the identical traits or real-world skills that others will value, love, respect, or find compelling about that person in adulthood and outside of the school setting.”

In this book, she tracks seven different students who are all struggling with the social situation they are locked into at school (the loner, the gamer, the new girl, the popular girl, the nerd, the weirdo, the geek).  She writes about the dynamic of groupthink, in which the actions and thoughts of students are pressed into socially acceptable molds. Not only does this affect students, but there’s something about the school atmosphere in which the teachers are also affected by these values.

Unfortunately, popular people are often not nice people, a concept in the book that I was discussing with the older kids at dinner last night.  Read this book if you want to understand this more, but in short, popular people build themselves up by pushing others down. So they become popular not because of their wonderful personalities that shine through and attract people, but because they are powerful and know how to manipulate the social dynamics in their favor.  They need to keep others down to keep their power.  As soon as I started talking about this, ds14 (who is popular and also nice to people – a number of mothers in the US commented to me about how unusual this combination of qualities was) exclaimed, “I know!  There’s this kid I know who’s really popular,  but no one really likes him.  I wonder sometimes if he has any friends because when he wasn’t around, all the kids talked badly about him.”

She writes about how important it is for society to have people who are creative, free thinkers, willing to stand for what they believe in and more – all qualities that are suppressed and cause people to be marginalized in high school.

As a parent of a daughter who will be homeschooled for eighth grade next year, I’ve done a lot of thinking about high school for her – what are the benefits and what are the disadvantages.  This book isn’t about homeschooling at all, but after reading it, I thought to myself that she makes a very, very strong case for homeschooling your children in high school, allowing them to bypass the pettiness of the social scene and have a healthier and more accurate self-image, while being able to spend their time doing things that are meaningful to them.

Whether you have kids who are in high school or not, homeschooling or not, this book is a very engaging and entertaining read.  I was happy to have stumbled onto as part of my ebook library selection, which allowed me to read it on my Kindle.

Avivah

I love using games as a learning tool for children.  Parents of young children too often get caught up in curriculum and formalized teaching, but you can do just as much and more by playing with them.  And fortunately, it’s so easy to find ways to turn learning activities into games!

Our experience for seven children so far is that they’ve all learned to read without being officially taught.  While I don’t sit down to teach them to read, that doesn’t mean that I don’t care about literacy.  I read with my kids regularly, and I also look for fun ways for them to play with letters and words.  Kids can pick up letters and sounds in this way pretty easily without much effort on your part – ds7 began reading English on his own when he was six, though his focus in school was on learning Hebrew (and his Hebrew reading is impressively fast and accurate).  Once kids know the sounds letters make, they can start to decode words on their own.  There are games on the market that can make this easy, but it’s not really that hard to do on your own if you look for ways to make it fun.

I started off using some flashcards for ds4 to match up but then saw that it was a little above his ability – it would be perfect for ds5, though.  (I used a basic flashcard set that I had but you can make your own cards for this.)  The idea was to match each letter with a card that has a word and picture that started with that letter.  I lined the cards facing up, and he had to put the letter on top of the picture.  The amount of cards you use depends on your child’s age.  You can also use the cards as a matching game, turning all the cards face down and then making a match with the letter and the word that starts with that letter.    Ds5 loves matching games and you can use the basic format for a lot of variations.

Back to ds4.  He was doing the cards with me but it didn’t seem fun for him and if it’s not fun, it’s missing the point!  Then I remembered about these plastic ABC letters with flashcards that someone gave me last year – I used to have the game in the US but never used it! I adapted the activity for something better suited for ds4 and he enjoyed himself a lot.

Basically, I lined up the plastic letters on the floor, then arranged the cards in three piles – one pile had words with four letters, one had three letter words and the last one had two letter words.

On the back of each card is a word with an illustration.  I showed him how the plastic letters could be matched up with the word and sat next to him while he did the first couple of cards.  I showed him the different kinds of cards and let him choose which ones he wanted to use – he chose the picture cards.  After he got the hang of it, I went into the kitchen to make some lunch while he continued playing on his own.

When playing with kids, remember to keep it fun and keep it unpressured.  As soon as your child wants to stop, stop.  When they’re interested, they’re primed for learning. When they are ready to move on, there’s no academic gain in pushing them. This is one reason why kids in school learn so little relative to the time spent there – for much of their time, they aren’t motivated or engaged.  To adapt a well known saying: You can lead a child to the lesson but you can’t make them learn!

Fortunately, by using games instead of workbook style lessons, you can skyrocket the learning while getting around the resistance – this is particular valuable with kids who think learning is a chore.  This isn’t our issue – our kids routinely play learning games at their own initiative, even those that are overtly academic (eg Greek and Latin roots).  But part of that is how we present the games – as fun.  We aren’t trying to ‘sneak’ learning in.  We think learning is fun and games are fun, and there’s only a gain for everyone when children think of learning and fun as synonymous.

Avivah

It’s been interesting to have the kids in school and learn that they’re strong math students.  I don’t push my kids to be academic superstars by any means; I’m pretty relaxed in general in my approach.  My goal is that they have solid skills in a few key areas, one of which is math and we do this by systematically working through the program of our choice.

We’ve used Singapore math with great success through the elementary years, and they have this in Israel as well (as I was pleasantly surprised to learn when I saw it on the book list from a school ds7 interviewed at last year).  We had tried Saxon before then and it’s a good solid program, but it wasn’t what we needed for the elementary years.

For high school, we’ve used a number of things (to be more accurate, my oldest who was the guinea pig got to try a number of things).  When I’m evaluating math programs, I’m looking for something that can be used as a self-teaching text and will result in a student who has a strong grasp of the skills being covered (assuming the effort is put in by the student). I don’t want my older kids waiting around for me to be available to explain something to them, particularly since as they get higher up in math I need more time to figure things out myself before explaining it to them.  There are lots of great programs out there and everything we used was good; it’s just a question of finding what works for your family.

We started with New Elementary Math, Singapore’s program for post elementary students and that didn’t go well.  Then we went on to Teaching Textbooks, which initially I was happy with.  Then I got the sense that it wasn’t a very rigorous program – my impression was that it’s good for students who are weak mathematically.   We moved on to The Life of Fred.  Interesting but it didn’t seem thorough enough.  (Since it’s been a while, I don’t remember the specific details regarding each program, but I did a lot of research on each at the time.)

Then we moved on to Video Text, which I was very , very happy with.  The main downside of this program is that it’s very expensive; I bought it used so I paid about half price, $300 at the time.  The algebra program includes three years of math – prealgebra, algebra 1 and algebra 2 so it wasn’t nearly as expensive as it seems.   What I like about programs like this is that your child can watch a lesson with a very good math teacher explaining all of the points very clearly, and can rewatch it to repeat points that weren’t clear.  What I don’t like is that if the disc becomes damaged (which in my house is inevitable), you have to buy a new one.  I brought this along with us to Israel, bringing the unit ds12 was up to and packing away the rest to be sent with my mother’s lift that arrived ten months later.  The only problem was I brought the unit he had just finished, not the one he was about to start – not so helpful!

Since I brought along a few Saxon tests, ds was able to use Saxon Algebra 1/2 (though for the first year he had so much going on that there was no extra head space for doing math after school hours).  This also works as a self-teaching text, as ado re all of the Saxon texts from 54 and on.  Then I got a free four month trial of a program called yourteacher.com; it was the duration of this past summer and I optimistically set up accounts for a few of the kids, but only ds13 used it.  I heard him recently speaking to a friend on the phone who needs some math help, telling him that this program was really good.  So when I saw that a free four month trial is being offered again, I signed up once more.  I also signed up for a free year’s trial of  hotmath.com, to check out what it’s like.  (I took advantage of both of these free offers through http://www.homeschoolbuyersco-op.org; it’s free to sign up and then there are lots of discounts on curriculum purchased through the co-op.)

Another free resource that you don’t have to sign up for is Khan Academy, that has online videos of many topics broken down into short lessons.  Many lessons are being translated into different languages, one of which is Hebrew.  My kids didn’t use this much because they had math programs they were happy with, but it’s a great resource that I’ll probably use with someone at some time.

If you have math resources that you love, feel free to share about them with us!

Avivah