I’ve been asked a few times what ‘type’ of homeschooling family we are. As in, which types of curriculum do we use, etc. so I thought I’d write a post about the how, and why, of our homeschooling adventures. I’ll start off with a warning though, I’m not always the most eloquent ‘speaker/writer’. I know what I know, I know my passions, and they are very deeply embedded in my heart, but finding the words to share them openly with others, doesn’t always come naturally to me. I do however, feel very strongly about the importance of sharing with one another, not just tangible things, but our experiences too. I believe it’s what makes us truly humble with one another and able to learn from each other, to share, deeply and passionately. So, I will do my best to share and hopefully make some sense!
We began homeschooling when Alesia, our eldest who is now 19, had just turned 5 years old. She had attended ‘junior’ kindergarten the previous year, as that was the ‘normal’ thing to do in the area we lived in at that time. In all honesty though, I believe the journey began before then. Right from the time I first felt her kick inside me, I knew I wanted to give my children the best life I could possibly give them. Don’t we all?!
I understand that everyone’s views on the ‘best’ life we could give our children is unique. The passion within my own views on child raising actually begins right there, with that knowledge. It begins with following my very own instinct as a mother, encouraging my husband to follow his instinct as a father, and being stubborn enough to stick to what we feel, and know, is best for OUR family. In my mind, and heart, a lot of it all starts right here.
This is my view on the best way to raise our children.
I believe every.single.child is unique and should be treated as such. If every child is unique, then how could anyone else ever know the best way to raise, and teach, that child like one who spends the most time with that child, and the one who cares most deeply for him/her? From the VERY beginning, the thought of sending my child off to a fairly lifeless building, to be taught by, and spend time with, people who would be strangers with the start of each new school year, just never, EVER, made any sense to me.
It just didn’t.
They didn’t know our child. I knew our child. My husband knew our child.
It just never felt right.
Even as I would say goodbye to Alesia after a rushed and frantic pace each school morning to get her out the door on time, it didn’t feel right. Each time I waved goodbye, a little piece of me would mourn the time we would loose together that day. Time that could never be replaced. Childhood is such a VERY short time, and goes by much too quickly. I never enjoyed ‘giving away’ that time.
My husband’s cousin had children older then our children and they were ‘homeschoolers’. I had never, ever, heard of a ‘homeschooler’ before. I was intrigued right from the start. His wife was very good to me, she shared a LOT about homeschooling, most importantly, she shared her wisdom. She never shared any of it until I asked. This meant the world to me, it still does today. I owe her a lot, and I hope she understands the impact of her willingness to help a floundering young mother, so many years ago. She took me to my very first homeschool convention. I still have the books I purchased at that first convention.
From that very first homeschool convention in Toronto, 15 years ago, I’ve never wavered in my decision to homeschool our children. Homeschooling has ALWAYS felt right. Thankfully, my husband has always allowed me the freedom to teach our children as my heart leads. I suppose he trusts my instincts… although I’m sure that over the years there have been plenty of times that he questioned himself as to ‘why’ he trusts me with that, ha ha! But in all seriousness, I know he too, has never questioned whether we should continue to homeschool our children.
When I first began to homeschool, I tried really hard to stick with work books and a set curriculum. It ‘sort of’ worked for a couple of years, but our lifestyle has never been one of… not sure how to word it really? A strict schedule? We’ve always been the type of people, even when our first two children were toddlers, that if something came up during the day, we usually jumped up, dropped everything, and became a part of whatever was going on. This included (and still includes) ANYTHING from watching a dump truck deliver some wood, dirt, or rocks, on our driveway, the snow plow going by, a flower that suddenly showed itself in our flower bed on a spring day, the septic truck coming to clean out our septic tanks, a quick trip to the store leading itself to a long talk with the butcher, the appliance repairman coming to fix the washer, the dryer or the dishwasher.
We’ve become side tracked by neighbors, friends, family and even strangers. We’ve been side tracked many, MANY, MANY times by animals. Whether it be a buck gazing through our family room window while we lived in the city, an owl, eagle, hawk, or one time THREE great big ugly vultures on our fence line, a family of Canadian geese complete with mama, papa and babies waddling through our front yard, or a lost German Shepard who found it’s way to our front deck. Not to mention ALL the times our own animals have side tracked us, whether it was a horse getting stuck in the fence, a cat catching something she just HAD to show us, or a dog with an injury.
No matter how hard I have tried, no matter how many times I’ve tried, I just can’t seem to stop allowing life to get in the way of our ‘schooling’.
Thankfully, along with that passion to follow my instincts, I also have a HUGE passion for learning, and an even bigger passion for passing that love of learning onto my children. My passion for learning however, does not fit into the typical ‘box’ of what some might consider ‘education’. I do not believe ‘learning’ and ‘education’ are done best within the walls of a classroom or the confines of a textbook. I could go on and on about love of learning, and a learning lifestyle… but I won’t.
Because of this inability to keep our homeschooling on ‘course’, and my desire to teach my children a true love of learning, the textbooks, workbooks, strict curriculum that comes in a package, has just never worked very well for us. This hasn’t stopped me from acquiring quite a nice library of curriculum though! I am a self proclaimed curriculum ‘junkie’. However, I believe that each workbook, textbook, and package of curriculum I acquire for our family must fit into our lifestyle, not have our lifestyle change for the curriculum. Hopefully that makes some sort of sense!
So, what does our homeschooling lifestyle look like then?
Well, it changes quite often actually. As I mentioned, it began with using one of those prepackaged curriculum. We did that for a couple of years, to the best of our ‘side tracked’ abilities. It worked out alright, and I’m sure Alesia, and then 2 years later, Joshua, learned some things during that time but unfortunately I have the feeling they learned more about their mama’s frustrations then what the curriculum was trying to teach them.
Life also changed a lot in that time. In just a few years we went from having two children to 5. By the time Joshua was in grade 1, we had an 8 year old, a 6 year old a 22 month old and newborn twins. Having 3 children within 22 months was a VERY big ‘side track’ from any daily routine we may have had before then! If I ever had dreams of becoming the ‘perfect’ organized and scheduled homeschooling mom, they didn’t just ‘fly’ out the window during that period of time, they went out that window with the force of a jet plane.
So by that time, I had two choices.
I could completely fall apart, throw my ‘instincts’ out the window right along with those dreams of ever becoming the perfect homeschool mom, put our eldest two children in school, and realize I was in over my head…
OR
I could pull myself up my boot straps, realize that NO one is perfect, NO education is perfect, NO child is perfect, NO home is perfect, and certainly NO PLAN is ever perfect, and just deal with life as it comes and do the very best we could do, ONE DAY AT A TIME.
And, for the past 11 years, since our beautiful twin girls were born, that seems to have been enough!
Thank God!
I can not imagine what our daily lives would be like today if I had not come to that realization.
So our homeschooling days have looked different every single year, every day, since that time. And now, right now, as in this year, our homeschooling time looks a little like a hodge podge of pre-made curriculum, relaxed schooling, unschooling, unit studies, great books, some printable pages from the internet, google earth (a LOT, we all LOVE google earth, this week we ‘visited’ Verdun, France and some other places while looking up war memorials for Remembrance Day) and just about any and every other learning opportunity that happens to come by our way each and every day. And they DO indeed come about almost DAILY.
You’ve heard of stopping to smell the roses, I believe in also taking the time to learn about those roses you just stopped to smell, oh… and that weird white spider crawling on that rose bush too. And then, maybe we’ll learn about the rose hips too (Did you know that rose hips have 13 times the vitamin C that oranges have?!), and then we might learn about that roosvicee Dutch drink they make with the rose hips… etc…etc…etc…
To me, THAT is real education!
But for the ‘nitty gritty’ of our daily homeschool life at this time, the older two have grown (17 & 19 years of age) so now it’s mostly just the younger three (12 years old, and twins who are 10).
For spelling we are using a workbook. It’s called Building Spelling Skills and I love it so much I have every grade I need for each of the kids because I’m that confident that we will be using this curriculum until we’ve done the whole set of books. I absolutely LOVE the way it truly teaches spelling, and understanding the words, and they ‘whys’ about how the words are spelled, yet all done in a way my children (and I) can understand easily. We can get our spelling done in about 10 minutes a day with this program.
Math right now is two workbooks, one is working on the times tables and the other is about Canadian money. I added the money book mostly because my mother noticed that Elsa, our child with asperger’s, still doesn’t have a handle on money, and it’s value (she’s 12) when they are out shopping. I think it’s important that we work on anything that needs working on, whenever it comes up in our lives, whenever we can! I found this great book teaching all about Canadian money (most of our math books have US money in them… ) so we’re running with that until I feel she’s got a handle on it.
We love unit studies, and right now we are in the midst of two different ones. Prairie Primer, which uses the Little House books, and History of the Horse unit study which uses great horse stories we have really come to love. Both these unit studies cover every subject, depending on how many of the suggestions we’re wanting to use. Everything from math, spelling, history, geography, science to cooking and more.
We do a true ‘sit down at the table all together’ for the morning, about 3 or 4 days a week. Some weeks it’s 5 days, some weeks it might be 2 days. It honestly depends a lot on what is going on that week and my work schedule.
The girls are all old enough now that they also work independently on things such as their nature notebooks, LOTS of stories, especially our twins Shaylah & Julia. They LOVE writing, just like their big sister! I use their story writing to help them learn more about spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence and paragraph structure, etc.. You can learn a LOT by writing stories.
We also have some learning games all three like to play with, and they love puzzles, word cross, etc..
Elsa is more difficult to teach as her needs are different. For some subjects, such as times tables, she’s a whiz and flies through the pages. For other things, such as reading, she has a harder time and it takes a LOT of patience some days to get through certain exercises we’re working on that day. I’ve learned more about myself, my own weaknesses, and my strengths, by teaching Elsa then she’ll probably ever learn from me.
All three girls also ‘work’ for the business. They cut out our reusable cotton balls, and Julia now also does the facial mitt packages. Creating their own income allows them to learn a lot about many things. Work ethics such as doing a job well, thinking of your customers while working on things you are creating for them, appreciating your customers, handling money, plus all the skills such as cutting fabrics, learning about the different fabrics, and they are all learning to sew, etc..
Our eldest daughter has graduated and now works about 24-40 hours per week at her ‘out of the home’ job in our local grocery store, and then about 10-18 hours a week with my business. She cuts some of our inner & backing fabrics, helps with packaging all the orders, printing labels and sending out shipping notices. She also writes. At one time she was writing for a horse magazine, as well as writing her own book series ( www.acwillard.com ) which she continues to work on now.
Our son is working through an online grad program this year to prepare for a college mechanics course he is wanting to get into next year. He also works for an excavating company when they need him (this can be 5 days one week, or no days the next, depends on the weather mostly) and he works in a mechanic garage aprox. 2 days a week. When he’s not working for others, he can also be found working along side my husband laying floors, building decks, and other such work. On top of that he enjoys being his own entrepreneur by working for quite a few of our neighbors and also works about 4-6 hours a week for our home business, doing snaps.
So as you can see, each one of them not only schools at home, but also works for our home business. It’s important to understand though, that no one does a job they do not want to do, long term. We always suggest they try everything out though! I had always hoped Alesia would want to sew. She even thought she would want to sew. After buying her first sewing machine and trying it for a while, she realized she does not like to sew. Ha! So now I hold out hope maybe one (or more) of the other girls will want to sew. I don’t believe in having them work a job they are not interested in though. I also do not believe in running an in home ‘sweat shop’ and because of this, I also teach the children that their time is valuable and they should be paid appropriate for it. I think they are learning as much through the home business as they are through the homeschool.
And there you have my long winded tale about how, and why, we homeschool.
