Throwing Marshmallows

There is a great new post about deschooling over on LWOS…about how it is even more important for the parents to do the deschooling!

Being socialized to institutional public schools brings on certain thought patterns and emotional responses that need to be cast aside for a new homeschooling lifestyle to be fully realized and enjoyed.  The deschooling process is like a decompression chamber that allows the mind and the body to shift away from a situation that was stress-filled and constrained to one that is more relaxed and free.

And I totally forgot to mention that Steph over at A Room of My Own was a guest author on LWOS a few days back as well! She had a great post on the folly of school “standards of learning”.

We are free to tailor the lessons to where THEY are, instead of trying to reconfigure the kids to fit the lessons. They can find things that are meaningful to them.

You got that right!

~Steph

The Wall Street Journal had a great article on LibraryThing the other day. Now they are scrambling to deal with the increased traffic!

I really, really love when you find a labor of love that takes off and become a success. Not some big corporation trying to make a buck trying to create the next “it” thing. But a nice guy who likes books and web technology. He really seems to be having fun with it all!

~Steph

Hehehe. My friends back in good ole’ Northern Va are going to kill me for this one! While they have been socked in with torrential downpours all week, we have been basking in wonderful upper 70 degree weather. Slightly overcast, but with periods of sun. We have been to the beach a couple of times, the waterpark once and mini golfing.

Jeff keeps calling and asking if we have gotten any rain and I keep telling him no. He got caught in it on his way home from the beach on Sunday, said that he could barely see 2 feet in front of him. Got really lucky in that they closed the beltway because of a mudslide a couple of hours after he got home. Many museums in downtown DC are closed because of flooding and I have a lot of friends who have had to cancel appointments and park days because it is too hard to get any where! I am reading my email lists and friends blogs listening them talk about lost gardens and flooding basements. One friend had her monitor get fried and she has to keep kicking her daughter off the only working computer. Others have had had trouble keeping online connections.

But for some reason good ole Ocean City has been spared. It seems to go up and to the north of us each time. Until tonight. Hard to tell how much rain is coming down right now but the wind is blowing hard. I guess that we will see come morning!

I hope that my friend Kathi and her kids will be able to make the drive out to stay with us for a couple of days - it sounds as if they could use some dry weather for awhile…
~Steph

I tell people that starting to homeschool is like having a baby…there is no “right” time. You can read all the books and think you are prepared, but you just don’t know what you are in for until you take that leap and actually start.

Don’t feel that you have to have “all your ducks in a row” before you start, because you will find that things change once you start. A very good friend of mine likes to remind new homeschoolers “There are no educational emergencies”. You have time to figure things out as you go. The most important thing when you first start out is to get to know your child and how they learn. And you can’t learn that from a book.

And the neat thing is, when you do take that plunge, you will find that homeschooling is nothing like you thought and better then you ever imagined.

~Steph

P.S. One of the most common comments I hear from new homeschoolers is that they wish they had not waited so long. I have never heard anyone say that they had started too soon and wish they had put it off longer.

Also published in the 5th Homeschooling Country Fair. 

This. Is. So. Cool.

Ok, I admit it. I am a total geek. I can not tell you how excited I am over finding LibraryThing. I love libraries. I think they are the best invention since…well I don’t know what. When I was younger, I used to keep a card catalog (on index cards) of the books I owned and even had check out slips taped to the back where I would stamp it with the date. I worked for 3 years at the library while I was at Va Tech and I am currently trying to figure out how I can work in time to volunteer at our local library. If I ever had to pick a new career, I would love to be a librarian.

LibraryThing is this library lovers dream. I have not been able to stop playing around with it since I found out about it last night.

From their website:

“LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. Because everyone catalogs together, you can also use LibraryThing to find people with similar libraries, get suggestions from people with your tastes and so forth.”

I am not as much interested in the social aspect of it, but the cataloging part is incredible. Basically you search on the books that you want to add (it searches amazon.com and other online libraries for the less academic of us and can search other places like the Library of Congress as well) and it pulls up a record with cover art that you add to your library. You can assign tags (yea! categories!) however you want and can view your books in so many customizable ways.

Where I see this as really helpful is in managing my “to read” lists…I have so many different titles that I written on scraps of paper or saved in various emails. Everytime an interesting book come across one of my email lists, I save the email. Well, I have tons of these emails and finding what I am looking for is near impossible. With LibraryThing all I need to do is add it to my library with a tag (right now I am using wishlist-math or wishlist-history or wishlist-steph etc). Then to find all the books listed for a tag all I need to do is click on it!

You can click on the book cover to go directly to the record at Amazon (to read a description of the book) and you can click on the author to get a listing of all the books by that author. Adding has been a snap and it has been fun to poke around at all the other options (you can see how many other people at LibraryThing have the same book and it gives recommendations based on your books).

It is free with a 200 book limit, or you can get unlimited books for $10/year or get a lifetime subscription for $25. After playing with it for about a day, I am definitely ready to sign on. It is run by a guy named Tim Spalding, a web developer and web publisher and, from reading the LibraryThing.com blog, a pretty nice all around guy. It kind of reminds me of homeschooljournal.net…run by a bunch of folks (not a faceless company) who really like what they do.

They also have some blog tools (of course!) that allow you to list book covers and titles on your sidebar. I set one up that would list what we are currently reading, but when I tried to add it to my sidebar in a widget, the fonts got messed up and it looks awful. (Andrea or Ron…can you guys take a look and see if you can figure it out?). So ignore the messiness for my sidebar for a little while, please.

Man this is fun! And I am sure that I will have lots more neat things to share as I play around with it. Check it out!

~Steph

There were some emails going around my groups about an NPR intern who was doing a story on unschooling and looking for unschoolers to talk with. I figure what the hey, I might as well give him a call!

Turns out that he had already gotten enough people to use for the radio interview (which was good, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be recorded!) but he was looking to talk to a wide variety of unschoolers to help him get a feel for what it was about. So basically we just talked about homeschooling/unschooling for a little less then an hour or so. And the boys only interrupted me once, miracle of miracles!

He started out by asking me what the boys (after I had told him that I had two boys and their ages) were doing right now (it was about 12:30). Jason was playing his video game and Kyle had just helped me make a sandwich and was eating it. We talked a bit about how I came to homeschooling and then unschooling. He asked me some questions about HSLDA (and I think that I was very tactful, merely pointing out that what most homeschoolers don’t like about them is that they mix conservative political and religious causes with homeschooling issues and they tend to say that they represent “homeschoolers” when I can tell you they most definitely do not represent me!

He said that he found it interesting that most of the people that he talked with considered themselves progressives and wanted to know my impression of fundamentalist Christians’ attitude about unschooling. I told him that it was impossible to make blanket statements and that two of my very good unschooling friends were fundamentalist Christians. I did say that in my experience, the Christians who unschooled tended to the more open-minded side of the spectrum and that my friends felt very strongly that unschooling went hand-in-hand with their spiritual beliefs. 

We talked a bit about Jason not learning to read until around 8 and how that did not hold him back. About the idea that kids develop on their own schedule and when they are ready they do it. And how hard it can be when that schedule is later then our culture says it should be. Even got to work in my “kids need two things to learn…they need to be ready and they need access to information in a way that makes sense to them” idea.

He was kind of funny…he asked if he could play devil’s advocate for a minute and ask me some harder hitting questions. He then asked me the “S” (socialization) question (hah! you call that hard hitting??) and the “how do you respond to people who say that schools need parents like you and that you are abandoning the kids in school”. Had no problem answering those. (Probably should answer them on my blog one of these days!)

One thing I did have some trouble with was how did I define unschooling (like I could not have seen that one coming!) After the interview was over, I thought about it for a little while and realized that I have been gradually coming to my own definition of unschooling. Unschooling is not about the “what” you are doing, but rather about the “why”. And the “why” needs to be driven by what your kids need…not from your own fears…not from what our culture says…not from what the “experts” say. It is about trusting in your kids and letting them develop on the timetable that is right for them. Ok, so it still needs a little work…

He asked if he could come out and meet with us (thinking that we were in Northern Va). I think it would have been fun, but when he found out that we were in Ocean City he thought that might be a bit too far to go. Kind of bummed, it would have been fun, I think.

All in all we had a very nice conversation. I asked him how he came to be interested in unschooling. He had a friend in college who had been unschooled and had not started reading until 12 and he found it really interesting. So when he was looking for topics, he decided he would like to learn more about it.

The unschooling program is being done for his internship program and will be “fully produced” and available on their website. There is a chance that it will be aired if an affiliate decides to pick it up. Like I said, I will not be on the actual program, but at least I was a part of it. And it was fun! Now I just have to cross my fingers that unschooling will be portrayed in a positive light! I think that it will, given our conversation. He said that he would email me with a link when it was available. I will let you know!

~Steph

The boys and I were playing Cinq-o today which was a lot of fun and reassured me that Jason’s adding and multiplication facts are still progressing. Jason was leading at first with me really far behind. Then I got a great score and the tables were turned. Kyle wound up winning, we me coming in second and Jason third.

After the game, Jason was asking me why he always seemed to loose at dice and card games. We talked a bit about how he did not always loose, but how it could seem that way. And how with most card and dice games it was all about luck. There usually was very little skill involved.

Jason said that he much prefered board games like Risk and card games like Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh, which after thinking about it, makes perfect sense. He has more control over these games…there is some element of luck in the games (dice rolls and draws of a card) but there is also a lot of strategy in them.  Same with his video games. He can practice and work at it and get better/faster/smarter. He can improve his game and work towards winning. In a game like Cinq-o it is all about luck. Luck of the roll or luck of the draw.

Funny thing is that I prefer card games and dice games rather then complex strategy games. I like how the playing field is level…younger players have the same chance as older of winning. I also don’t have to work quite so hard…I don’t have to think 5 plays ahead. They are more straightforward and thus more fun for me.

I am sure that there is a right-brained/left-brained parallel in there…actually it does make sense from that point-of-view. Dice games and card games are more sequential. More straight forward. Strategy games (including video games) require you to see the whole picture…to take into consideration many variables and to see how a move you make now affects the play down the road.

I think that strategy games also play to a right-brained learners’ sense of fairness…after all, if you work harder you will become better and that is only fair. With games of luck, there is no rhyme or reason to who wins really…which is very frustrating to Jason! Mainly because he is just as likely to loose as he is to win. And of course at this point in time, winning is everything. (Although I will say he is much better at loosing now…no getting upset or mad. He just started loosing interest towards the end of the game when he thought he had no chance to win. But he did not ask to stop playing! Big improvement!)

~Steph

I took this picture a couple weeks ago while we were at a nature center program. I took several from different angles (one reason I love digital cameras…no worry about “wasting” film!) and this one is my favorite.

~Steph

Reading Confessions of a Pioneer Woman has inspired me to start taking pictures again. She periodically posts really cool pictures that she has taken and it reminded me that I really enjoy photography and have not been doing much with it lately. I mean, I am constantly taking pictures of the boys and always have my camera with me, but I also enjoy taking other types of pictures as well. So I have been keeping an eye out for interesting photos to take and have created a new category called My Photography where I plan on posting some of my favorites.

Oh fair warning if you do check out Confessions…her front page right now has a picture of a box of castrated calf nuts (she lives on a cattle farm after all). I have to say that I never would have thought that I would have found this topic very intriguing, but after reading some of her stories….let’s just say that cattle farmer humor is very interesting at a certain level….

~Steph

Looks like Doc has a great line-up for Country Fair # 4. Check it out. The Country Fair is a great place to find new homeschool blogs and it is fun to read everyone’s different take on this wonderful thing we call homeschooling.

And, yes yours truly has a submission that was included…

~Steph

I mentioned earlier that we have relocated down to Ocean City Maryland for the duration of the summer. I thought that I would give you a small taste of what it is like down here (and please, don’t hate me for it!).

View from our back deck

First, some history. We had been coming to Ocean City periodically for a few years and enjoyed staying here (yes, it is a bit commercial and noisy, but it is only 3 hours away and there is lots of stuff to do with the kids) so we decided to look into getting a place. We started out with a townhouse about 6 or 7 blocks off the beach, on a canal. The boys were small (it was right before Kyle was born that we first bought) so we pretty much did a week here and there during the summer. The townhouse doubled in value in about 4 years (!) so we sold it and bought a new place, about 4 blocks off the beach, still on a canal and a couple of blocks from our favorite places to eat. This place gives us more room which really helps when we have friends and family down.

Our Beach House

Last summer was the first summer we stayed down for the whole summer and it worked beautifully! No packing and unpacking and we got connected to the local homeschoolers and met some really wonderful families. One in particular has adopted us during the summer and the beach is so much more fun when you have friends to share it with. Jeff usually comes down on Thursday and stays until Monday (it is good to be the boss!) and gets to enjoy some quiet time in a clean house without the animals (we bring the 2 cats and 4 guinea pigs with us) during the week.

The boys are in their element down here and absolutely love the ocean. We have finally found a way to tire Jason out…spending a full day, in the sun, getting knocked around by high waves does it.

The nice thing about the beach house is that it is home, but it isn’t. There is not quite as much to do housewise (the place is smaller and we don’t have as much stuff in it) and there is tons of stuff to do…the beach, the waterpark, the boardwalks, mini-golf, boating, jet skiing…It is like being on vacation without leaving home. Obviously we have internet and email (without which I could never leave for the entire summer!). I still have to shop and clean house and make meals, but hey, even these don’t seem as mundane when yo are at the beach. Yes, life is good.

The weather has been nice…the breeze is still a bit on the cool side (but who’s complaining!) and the water is still way to cold for me. The boys have already been in twice to boogie board and only came out when they could no longer feel their legs. I am still way to white but hope to work on that this week.

We have already gotten our annual henna tatoos…here are pictures of the boys (they got dragons, I have a flower on my ankle):

I have seen this story in many variations and wanted to capture it here. I think that it really captures the potential problems with treating all kids “equally” rather then individually.

This version is by R.H. Reeves, as quoted in the book The Art of Education by Linda Dobson (page 186).

Animal School 

Once upon a time, the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a “New World,” so they organized a school.  They adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming, and flying.  To make it easier to administer, all animals took all subjects.

The duck was excellent in swimming, better in fact than his instructor, and made excellent grades in flying, but he was very poor in running.  Since he was low in running he had to stay after school and also drop swimming to practice running.  This was kept up until his webbed feet were badly worn, and he was only average in swimming.  But average was acceptable in school, so nobody worried about that except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of the class in running but had a nervous breakdown because of so much makeup in swimming.

The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed frustrations in the flying class where his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of from the tree-top down.  He also developed charley horses from over-exertion, and he got a “C” in climbing and a “D” in running.

The eagle was a problem child and had to be disciplined severely.  In climbing class he beat all the others to the top of the tree but insisted on using his own way of getting there.

At the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim exceedingly well and could also run, climb and fly a little had the highest average and was valedictorian.

The prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought the tax levy, because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum.  They apprenticed their children to the badger and later joined the groundhogs and gophers to start a successful private school.

~Steph

Steph over at A Room of My Own has added her thoughts to the conversation I raised in On Being Ready. I started to respond over there, but my reply got a bit long, so I figured that I would move it over here. Isn’t blogging fun? I love these kind of conversations that make you think and see different angles on the same thought.

I think that what Steph talks about is trying to find the balance in being child-led and letting kids develop on their own timetables (I love her examples of teachers and people using what we know about child development to try to “speed up” kids development or get all kids “where they should be” at the same time). She says:

It is a natural process. In my opinion, it is the handiwork of God, much like a baby’s development in the womb or the growth of a blossoming flower. We can create conditions that help a child develop, unhindered by stress or lack of enriching experiences, but we can not speed it up.

I think that this hits the nail on the head and is the point that I was trying to make in my earlier post. The hard part comes from the not knowing exactly when a child is ready and worrying about if we are “doing enough”. Questioning if we are providing enough of those “enriching experiences”. Worrying that by not finding the “right program” we are actually hindering this development…not just not helping it, but actually hindering it. Is the reason that they are not learning something because they are not ready or because I am not doing enough? And that is where the fear comes in, I mean how scary is that? I have heard it called “unschooling panic” and have yet to meet a homeschooling mom (no matter what approach she is taking) who does not have moments of questioning what she is doing. It is this fear (of actually hindering our kids learning in someway) that causes the main struggle of the homeschooling parent…can I really trust my kids to learn everything that they need to learn.

The problem is that there is no guide book that gives us the answers. Because there is no “one right answer” for all kids! ”Enough” for one kid might be too much for another or not enough for a third. All we can do is look to our kids. And that too is a hard thing to explain …it is not that you sit back and do nothing until they tell you they are ready…it is finding that balance and reading their signals…if they absolutely hate something and you can tell that it is not working, then you back off and either wait or look for a different approach. But even that can be tricky!

I have told this story before about when Jason learned to read. I had realized that he had all the pieces but was struggling to put it all together (mainly because of his perfectionism). I thought maybe a more structured approach might help and checked Phonics Pathways out of the library. It was awful for him. He hated it and I did not push him on it. I then tried 100 EZ Lessons and there was a big difference. He still did not really want to do the lessons (thus causing me lots of unschooling angst!) but during the lessons I could see the pieces fitting together for him (something that I never saw while trying Phonics Pathways). It was obvious that this was making sense for him. He never asked to do a lesson, but he did show interest while we were doing it. I also at one point told him that he did not have to do all 100 lessons, but he said that he wanted to and he did.

What I am slowly coming to realize (and am still in no way perfect about this) is that you need to look at the “why” behind what you are doing rather then just looking at the “what”. With Jason, I started looking into a more structured approach to reading because I could see that he was ready but was just not putting the pieces together. So I was looking for something that would help him put the pieces together. Not something that would get him to read because a kid his age should be reading. It was no different then when I introduced him to the world of video game cheats…I saw something that I thought would help him acheive a goal and I showed it to him. But because it involved something “schooly”, I questioned whether I should.

Now I also had a friend of mine, who, after I told her this story, commented that maybe if I had tried 100 EZ Lessons when he was younger, he might not have taken so long to learn how to read. Which totally missed the point of my story! The point was not that 100 EZ Lessons is a great curriculum and got Jason reading. The point was that a kid needs to be ready and needs to get the information in a way that makes sense to him. If you do not have that combination, you will just be hitting your head (and his!) against a wall. If I had tried to use 100 EZ Lessons with Jason when he was 5, I am convinced that it would not have worked at all because I strongly believe that was not ready then. And when he was ready at 8, Phonics Pathways did not work because it was totally the wrong approach. And by wrong approach I don’t just mean the wrong curriculum. For some kids, any curriculum is the wrong approach. They need something hands on or need to experiment or just read or whatever works for them. No kid is one-size-fits-all.

Steph makes many more really good points in her post. Her best being that she believes that there is “no one ‘right’ way to school, or unschool, or a combination of both. Each family finds its own path, based on the unique and ever changing needs of the child”.

Definitely! The key is being open to realizing when something is not working. And being willing to change and look for something that does work. To be able to realize that if something is not working, the problem is not with the child. The problem is with the approach or that the child just is not ready yet. And that is ok.

I hope that I don’t sound like I have all the answers or never question if we are doing “enough”. Because I definitely do. All the time. It comes with the territory because, I, like all other homeschooling parents, want the best for my children and want to do right by them. After all that is why I made the decision to homeschool in the first place.

~Steph

P.S. We made it to the beach this afternoon and met up with our friends. The water is still cold, but the boys did not let that stop them! I really love it down here…

Well, I think that we are ready to go. Mostly packed, although I am sure that I will be scrambling a bit tomorrow to get everything in the car.

For those who don’t know, we (the boys and I) are lucky to be able spend the summer in Ocean City, Maryland (we have a place down there). We did it for the first time last year and had a blast. We are really looking forward to getting down there. Jeff will come down for long weekends and we hope to be able to convince him to take off a week or two now and again.

We do have internet access down there (of course!) so it will be like we never left.

Well, gotta go get some sleep…next time we talk it will be from the beach!

~Steph

This is a recreation of the post I lost the other night…I had the boys re-tell their stories, which they thoroughly enjoyed. The idea was to record some of the small snippets of learning that happened throughout the day. These kind of exchanges happen all the time and help reassure me that the boys are learning constantly.

Kyle and Math

As we were getting ready to go to the Nova Unschoolers park day (why do they always do this when we are trying to get somewhere?) I had this conversation with Kyle:

Kyle: 5 is not an equal number, is it?
Me: (guessing because I am not sure exactly what he is talking about) Do you mean, even?
Kyle: Yeah
Me: You’re right. 5 is not an even number.
Kyle: What is an even number?
Me: It is a number that can be evenly divided by 2 (or in half) with nothing left over.
Kyle: You mean like 20? 
Me: Yes, just like 20.

And then I grabbed some pennies and showed him how if you lined the pennies up in 2 columns, the even numbers lined up evenly and the odd numbers had an “odd” penny left over. Since then he has occasionally come up and verified if various numbers are even or odd.

Jason and Government

We are currently listening to the Children of the Lamp series and really enjoying it. One of the story lines led to a great discussion of the difference between a president and a judge and how our government is set up (three branches, checks and balances etc). Don’t ask how we actually got there, but we did! And Jason was really interested.

Storytelling

I have to remember to do this more often as both boys really enjoy it and it is good practice at organizing one’s thought. Jason seems to really go for subtleness…he put a bit of thought into his stories and really choose the words carefully believe it or not. He also wanted to play around with the capitalization of the letters. We have been talking about what gets capitalized and what does not lately. He remembered in one of his books seeing the capital letters all over the place and wanted to see what that would look like. He decided that it made it harder to read, but he still liked it.

Once you get Kyle’s mind going, you can’t stop him. He actually had about 6 different variations of this story that he wanted to tell. I had to stop him after 3 as we had to get going.

One of the hardest things is to stop Jason from editing Kyle’s stories. He is always giving plot suggestions and correcting Kyle’s verb tenses. I have to remind him that this is Kyle’s story and it is up to him to decide how it goes.

A Short and Dumb Story
by Jason 

OnCe UPoN a TiMe ThErE wAs a GuY. He gOt SquIsHeD By a bOuLdeR.
THe EnD

A Little Bit of a Longer Short and Dumb Story
by Jason

Once upon a time there was a guy. He looked up and saw a boulder. It squished him.
The End.

Rock
by Kyle 

Once upon a time, there was a rock.
The End

Run Away from Big Boulder with Eyes
by Kyle

Once upon a time, there was a guy. He saw a big boulder with eyes. The man saw the boulder going after him. The man turned. The rock turned. And then the man was so tired that he hide behind a bush. Since the boulder was so big, he could see the man. And then the boulder squished the man.
The End.

Run Away from Rock with Eyes
by Kyle

Once upon time, there was a rock. A man saw the rock that had eyes. The man runned and the rock ran after the man. And then the man turned and then the rock turned. And then the man was tired. So he hid behind a bush. Since the rock was so thin he couldn’t see the man behind the bushes. Then the rock keep on running. Then the man hopped on the rock and then the rock felt the man on his back. And then the rock flipped over and squished the man.
The End.

Joanne over at A Day in Our Lives is hosting an Unschooling Carnival. Basically interested people send in a blog post about unschooling and she will compile them and post them on July 1st. Sounds like a fun way to find new, interesting bloggers…like I need more blogs to read! I swear this is getting almost as bad as my email lists. But it is so much fun!!

Read more about the Unschooling Carnival and check out the rules.

~Steph

I had a great post almost finished (complete with really cute short (and goofy) stories written by the boys and I lost it! Arghh! I am not sure what happened. I tried to use the new spell check from HSJ and it said I needed to go to a download page which I did not feel like doing. So I clicked on my google tool bar to use that spell check and it totally blanked out my post! I have used this before with no problem…

Why oh why did it have to pick the post with the boys’ stories in it? I will have to see if they can re-remember them tomorrow.

Ah well. I guess this is the world’s way of telling me to go to sleep. I have to get up early for the guy who is replacing our water heater anyways…

~Steph

I originally posted this on Life Without School but wanted to save it here as well. I hope that you don’t mind reading it again if you have already seen it!

The Isolated Homeschooler

One of the more common arguments against homeschooling is that it “isolates” kids. That somehow kids, if not in school, will never be exposed to the world at large. That homeschoolers sit at home all day with no interaction with anyone outside their family.

I have found quite the opposite has been true for us.  School can become a crutch – you don’t need to look beyond it because all your kids’ social or academic opportunities are provided for.  But I do not want to be limited by what the school can provide. Homeschooling, for me, has led to a greater involvement in my community precisely because I do not have the school to depend on to meet the needs of my kids. I can not just sit back and let the school provide everything; I need to stay active and engaged in my kids’ lives.

Because we are not in school we have more time to explore our community. I am constantly looking for new activities through our county recreation centers, local YMCA and other neighborhood centers. I search out new parks to explore. I network with other homeschoolers to find interesting activities. I have been amazed at the variety of opportunities that come across my local homeschooling email lists – special events at museums, storytelling evenings at a local community center, music shows, fascinating websites – all things that I would not have been looking for had my kids been in school.

Homeschoolers are also extremely good at creating what they need – be it foreign language classes, park days, co-ops, or yu-gi-oh clubs. We live by the motto “Build it and they will come”. And they do! Local businesses and organizations are happy to offer classes during their typically slow times during “school hours”. Many people are very willing to share their expertise if just asked. And it is amazing what a group of motivated homeschool moms can accomplish together. I sometimes wish that there were not as many great opportunities as it is very easy to get overscheduled! Socialization is not a concern here by any measure.

The homeschooling community is a very welcoming one. When a new homeschooler moves into a new state or city, all they need to do is find the local homeschool email list or support group to get advice about the new laws or places to live. They can also get hooked into the local activities before moving. When we were going to spend the entire summer in Ocean City, Maryland this past year, I joined a few email lists and made connections with some local homeschoolers. The boys made some very good friends and we had a wonderful summer and are looking forward to going back this year. These summer connections led to our finding out about a Maryland homeschool camp this spring where we had an incredible time. The group we camped with has exciting activities that we are now hoping to take advantage of such as star gazing evenings (they are far enough out that light pollution is not the issue it is where we are).  We have now broadened our community from not only Virginia, but to several parts of Maryland as well.  And best yet, these connections are based on common interests and friendship rather then on our zip code and school zone.

Homeschooling has also led me to be more active politically. I am a member of my inclusive, statewide homeschool organization that helps monitor homeschooling legislation. As I have learned more about how the process works, I have been empowered to take a more active role in other political causes about which I feel strongly.

Are all homeschoolers as active and involved in their community? No. Some live in areas that do not have as many opportunities or some choose to not be involved. But attendance in school does not guarantee community involvement either. Some families are able to remain isolated even when their kids are in school. There is no guarantee. Are there parents of school kids who actively look for interesting opportunities outside of school? Yes, of course. But after four years of homeschooling, I honestly believe that I am much more connected to my community and the world at large then I would have been had my kids been in school. I have had to be and I would not have it any other way.

~Steph

Every so often a discussion comes up on one of my homeschool email list about things that kids must learn. I find these discussions very interesting. Recently, on Homeschooling Creatively, talk turned to the learning of multiplication tables. One mom wrote “I think those tables are pretty darn important. You just can’t get through the math without knowing them.” I thought about this a little bit and on the surface it seemed to make a lot of sense. After all, much of higher math depends on knowing your times tables.

But then I started thinking…but what if you can get by? It is challenging assumptions like this that has helped free my thinking so that I can look at what might work best for Jason. If I think that a skill is critical and must be learned, then we are stuck and can not move forward, when moving forward might be just what we need to do. What if moving forward actually gives him the reason to learn the critical skill? Or what if putting it aside lets him have the time to mature to where he can grasp it?

Right brained kids definitely need to see the why, the whole part, where they are going…so maybe Jason will find the motivation to learn multiplication when he wants to determine the area of something (or wants to know how much money I owe him for 10 weeks of overdue allowances). Or like my friend’s son when he realized that multiplication was way faster then adding to figure things out.

For me, letting go of things that my kids must learn is critical. When I realized that if all else failed, Jason could always use a calculator to do his math facts when he got older, it let me relax. I don’t feel as much pressure to “get him to learn”. This allows me to take the time to look for ways that make sense to him and let him learn it on his schedule.

Does this mean that I think that multiplication facts aren’t important? No. Knowing them definitely (in my mind) makes a lot of things easier. And we do work on them. I just try not to stress over how fast he is learning them and we do not make learning them our sole focus in math. He definitely understands the concept which in my mind is much more important then being able to spout off a memorized answer.

Realizing that if he never learned them, he could still manage to have a productive, successful life has let me back off and give him the space and time that he needs. I have to trust that he will pick them up over time. He still does not really know all his addition facts either and still needs to calculate what 6+7 or 8+5 is (he does this by figuring out that 6+4=10, 7-4=3 and 10+3=13, and he does this pretty danged fast - pretty neat for this left-brained girl!) But I have seen these too gradually come easier and easier for him.

A friend of mine just shared her son’s reading story on a local list. He has CAPD and she tried just about every known reading program including individual tutoring. At 12 (!) he still could not read. At that point, she decided that if he never learned to read that would be ok with her and she backed off trying to teach him. She just started focusing on his strengths and would read whatever he needed read. 6 months later, he picked up a manga book and read it cover to cover. Then he read the instruction manual for a video game he was really into. Now at 14 you would never know that he was not reading 2 years ago.

This set off a storm of posts about how can you say that it is ok if he never learned to read! How can you survive in this world if you can’t read! I think that they missed the point of her story. She was not saying that a parent should not help their child to read if they need help. She was not saying that she did not want her child to ever learn to read and that not being able to read is a good thing. She was saying that no matter what a parent does, if the child is not ready, that child will not be able to read. The child has to be ready. And I would add to that, a child needs to get information in a way that makes sense to him/her.

The biggest thing that I get from her story (and something I try to always keep in mind) is that sometimes you have to let go and trust that your child will learn what they need to learn.

~Steph

Also published in Unschooling Voices #1. 

My car is back in the garage!! No, not the mechanics, our garage. Our two car garage that for over a year has not had room to park any cars. Ok, so it is not world peace, but pretty dang exciting for me. And I can take absolutely no credit for it. Jeff and his Dad took a first crack at it. Then a couple of weeks ago, Jeff finished the job. He is the organizer in the family. If I try to organize something, it winds up looking worse then when it started. I am still trying to figure out this part of my personality….

We used to have both cars in the garage until about 2 years ago. I decided that I needed space to paint a small hutch I had picked up. Well, as soon as the car was out, the space gradually filled up (wonder how that happened? Couldn’t be that we have way too much stuff, now could it?). Then last year, Jeff finally sold his Prowler (that rarely left the garage) and made the mistake of not immediately parking a car in it’s place. You guessed, it…that side soon filled up and we found ourselves with a 2 car garage that did not have room to fit even 1 car.

We did have a minor debate about whose car was going to have the honor of living in the garage. My arguement being that more members of the family would benefit from not getting wet when it was raining if I had it. His arguement being that he did all the work and should reap the rewards (I am afraid that he had me on that one!). However, he did agree to let me have the space since we would be leaving for Ocean City (Maryland) in a couple of weeks and he will have it all to himself all summer.

Very gracious of him, don’t you think? So thank you hon…we appreciate it. And yes, I will look into getting rid of the half-painted hutch that is taking up so much room on the other side of the garage…

~Steph