One sweet opportunity that pursuing a home education has afforded our family is the flexibility to meet each family member where they are, and go from there. We been able stick with something until it is mastered, not matter how long that takes, and then move on and build on what we know. It is a pattern that applies to academic learning, to life lessons, and to a path of discipleship in the Gospel.
Today two of our teens are working independently on their first week of college-level algebra (online, concurrent enrollment). They know the math concepts pretty well, but they are learning a format of teaching and a pattern of participation and assessment that is very different than what we’ve had all these years in our homeschool.
It is also a difference from the study patterns they’ve watched me use in going back to college online as they’ve worked on their high school homeschool education. I am now 5 classes from finishing this course of study – a degree program that was set aside for a job opportunity more than 3 decades ago. My undergraduate business management program is ‘competency-based’ where I can test out of, or ‘skim & cram – take the exam’, instead of doing all of the recommended assignments, reading, and exercises. Often, the lessons learning through work and life experiences over many years make these crammed learning sprints work. However, I’ve felt like the academic advice I’ve been giving them recently is a lot of ‘do as I say, not as I do’. There’s not much of Come, Follow Me in my own pattern.
To what extent I am modeling in my own study habits recently the patterns that, if imitated, will result in success for their life? If a person is honest, most would know that such self-reflection will lead to identifying some areas for improvement. The pattern they’ve observed recently from me is to procrastinate, then cram for the exam. Then I ‘crash’, not able to sustain the cram pace, until the next time. This needs to change.
Having three children within three years meant that in their early years, we could prepare a single lesson, curriculum choice, or format, and it would work (more or less) for all. As they have grown and matured, there have been forks in the road, and varying rates of progress and varying needs for parent or peer tutoring.
This affected everything from where in our home we located our learning experiences to how we structured our days. Here’s some of our ‘what not to do’ tips, from our own experiences.
- When we were homeschooling our pre-K through 1st grade years, we tried to duplicate the resources we saw at public school and speech/occupational therapy settings. So many special purpose educational toys, books and bins purchased at great expense. Endless laminating and folder game preparation. So much money spent. SO many bins of expensive materials now stored in the garage or storage unit, needing a new home.
- We initially brought our kids home from public school due to medical/autoimmune concerns for some (7 cases of strep in one term and 1 hospitalization) and academic/cognitive concerns for others, and the realization that our special education student was able to meet IEP goals according to the school staff, but unable to generalize those basic skills beyond the classroom. We found that another very bright child had been putting assignments in the desk at school, where they were finally discovered weeks later in a parent-teacher conference for near failing grades. Something had to change.
- As a transition, we enrolled in an online charter school. Doing school at home – 3 kids, high speed internet, full time 8-10 hour days of computer time, homework, and parent review of concepts that were elusive. A recipe for exhaustion and burnout, much like the remote learning, school at home many families attempted in 2020 during the pandemic.
- When we first came home again for school (after a brief 3 years in the public schools), we also thought we needed the perfect set up for our physical homeschool space & best curriculum choice. Once we withdrew from the online charter, we subscribed to and purchased what we thought was the best curriculum out there based on the experience of a homeschooling neighbor. We bought desks for each child – but eventually learned that the desks collected dust and other odds and ends, while our comfortable living room furniture and kitchen table worked best for group learning, family read-alouds, and discussion. The comprehensive curriculum materials we chose, though right for some families and well-reviewed, were not right for our learners or for the parent primarily leading them through it. Too structured, too many worksheets – kids on 3 different levels with different learning styles. Comprehensive curriculum did NOT turn out to be a one size fits all solution.
Finally, we realized that we needed a serious family reset, which you can read about here. We discovered the need to look less at curriculum, and more at family culture. We devoured the lessons in parenting and family culture we found in the Leadership Education/TJEd philosophy, but also felt like we needed to have ready access to quality but simple lessons to use as we reshaped our homeschool experience. Unschooling was not the right choice for our family. We looked for a supportive curriculum option that reflected our values and belief system that retained the flexibility to adapt to our needs.
We found what we were looking for in FamilySchool by American Heritage School. A one room home schoolhouse approach where we learned and explored together, parent-led, Gospel-centered, spending our days in LIFE rather than primarily in LESSONS and on computers, and left us looking for extended LEARNING opportunities in the world around us. We invested time in daily family read-alouds, both in the classics and scripture, and approached other subjects aligned with the seasons – science when the world was alive with examples in the spring and fall, history and literature in the winter when days spent reading next to a roaring fire seemed perfect, music and art as punctuation to heavier subjects, and physical education primarily through the family work and community service trips that dominated our middle school and early high school homeschool years.
We learned to like each other and love learning again. We worked through the challenges of puberty together, and gradually discovered the unique gifts and needs of each family member. Mom went back to college online during this time as well. Gradually, the rigor of the academic material we sought together increased. We learned Latin, wrote essays, read and discussed more difficult literature, subscribed to college-level mathematics, learned spreadsheets, robotics, made time for auditioned choir participation, traveled the country in an RV and even went to the Holy Land together to learn more about the world and deepen our faith.
When our homeschool high school years were ‘complete’, two of our three young adults transitioned to concurrent enrollment online college courses from an accredited university. They retained some of the benefits of a home based education, but learned to succeed in a more structured, exam-assessed or project-completed competency evaluation and began to branch out in terms of their social development. For us, this pattern eventually worked.