Archive for the ‘Schooling at Different Ages’ Category

Co-op Craziness

Posted: February 7, 2012 in Family Life Learning, Schooling at Different Ages, What Qualifies You as a Teacher?
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I love my kids.  Really, I do.  And we work from home.  We see them a lot.  In order for us to not strangle get some time to refresh, we need a break from them during the week.  We don’t, however, need a 40-hour/week break (sometimes, it does sound nice).  We need a two day break where they are in an enriching environment away from our care so we can get our work completed and do those all so important adult tasks that aren’t kid friendly (and yes, that could include some um, recreational fun as well).

When kids are young, this is easy – there are preschools and mother’s day out programs all over the place.  Once they hit age 5, though, you’re SOL.  That’s what school is for!  For those of us that venture beyond the brick walls, we’ve got to find some help!

Enter in the homeschool co-op.  There are quite a few variations on this, but the one we’re looking for offers 1-3 days a week with teachers leading different subjects.  Here is a great example of one I’m looking at: The Center for Homeschool Enrichment Tutorial (CHET).  This may be an option for us.

The fifteen other awesome options in my area?  Perfect.  Except for one thing.  Here in the Bible Belt, right after someone asks you your name, the very next question is “where do you go to church?”  Thus it makes perfect sense that when I am looking to educate my children outside of the traditional school setting, the assumption is it is for spiritual reasons, I’m going to take them to a church, and in order to get into said church/co-op, I must have a pastoral recommendation.

That has been our biggest roadblock.  Out of all the legalese and things that could be a pain with non-traditional school, here I am not even allowed to take a tour of a co-op facility in the churches because I don’t have a pastoral recommendation.  They want to know what our worship attendance is, what our involvement in a church is, and exactly how much we put into the offering bucket every Sunday (okay, made that last one up).

I have been appalled by the “Christian Homeschoolers” – wow – the stereotype has been confirmed.  Homeschoolers are ultra conservative Christians who choose to only allow their children to connect with people who think exactly as they do unless it is an evangelical mission, which then allows for mingling with the “sinners.”  

Yes, yes, that is a gross generalization and cruel judgement on my part.  It is, however, the exact thoughts going on in my head when I hit the same roadblock with six great co-ops in the area.   I have to say, last week I was frustrated and pissed off at the lack of openness to a non-church-goer.  So, I’m coming here to vent, to say my piece, and then find the people that we can connect with.

If you are a Christian or if you are not, that’s not my focus here.  I want to connect with people eager for their kids to open their minds and hearts to the beauty the world has to offer, and all the people in it.  Give me like-mindedness in that alone, and the details on where (or if) we go to church are inconsequential.  If the word “homeschooler” puts me into the stereotype that the reason is only for religious purposes, then homeschooling is not what we’re doing.   Hmmm, more on that in the next post.

We’re back in business

Posted: February 4, 2012 in Family Life Learning, Schooling at Different Ages
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. We dropped off the face of the planet for a while.  Well…we were living.  Man, were we ever!  Life has been crazy, as it always is, and quite honestly, we weren’t sure what we were doing with this site.  Now it has hit us like a brick wall that our oldest will be five in April and we need a gameplan for when our sweet little preschool no longer will take her!

So we’ve jumped off the ledge into the abyss of the homeschool/unschool world.  Oh. My. Goodness. There is a lot of random information out there.  And yikes, some of the websites are horribly lame.  It seems like the homeschool networks hopped on the internet bandwagon in the early 90s, did wonderful, and then decided to just leave their websites as-is!

There are so many resources.  I know there are good ones out there.  But wow, you have to weed through a lot of antiquated sites.  So…I searched for groups instead.  I hate to break it to you homeschoolers here in TN, but yahoo groups suck.  Yes, it’s a matter of personal opinion.  Isn’t meetup.com or Facebook a little more with the present day?  Yahoo groups seem so stinkin cumbersome to me, especially with the ease of a Facebook group.  (Insert shameless plug for my new “Nashville Unschoolers Facebook Page“).

Now, I do not want to come in guns a’blazin with how I know how to do unschooling right.  I want to make friends with those of you who have blazed the trail before me.  I want to learn and be inspired.  Which leads me to my next post.  As for this one, I’ll leave it at this – I am excited about this process.  I’m finding, through my Facebook group, that I am not alone, and there are others going through exactly what I am, and others who are experienced who are able to help lead the way – yay!

So the goal of this site?  To share with you our journey.  This is not to exhaust every resource you can use.  We want to share what we like and what works for us, here in Middle TN, for our specific children.  We welcome your comments and feedback as well as questions – just because I don’t use it personally doesn’t mean I can’t find out another resource for you!

Let me know…how long have you been unschooling or homeschooling?  Which one do you do?

Hey, Remember Me?

Posted: August 21, 2011 in Family Life Learning, Preschool Years, Reading Methods and Ideas, Schooling at Different Ages
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Hey everyone! Sorry I have not been on in a while – I see Mama Rose has not filled you in on why I mysteriously disappeared, so allow me to clear the air. I recently went on a homeschooling vision quest where I reconnected with my inner child, and through an intensive re-developmental process that involved an obscene amount of baby food and crying for my mommy, I have subsequently had my eyes opened to the secrets of optimized developmental teaching. It was a wild ride, but I am happy to announce I am valiantly returning with all, yes, count them, ALL of the answers to the fool proof way to home school/teach your kids.

Ok, the truth is I went backpacking in the Smokey Mountains for three days and then returned to prepare, pack, and depart for our trip to Canada, BUT, Mama Rose and I have definitely had some fantastic realizations about how to teach our kids.

I want to echo my thoughts on Mama Rose’s post regarding the revelation of how to teach reading skills to Ladybug Girl. I think that one of the biggest fears for parents who want to teach their kids these skills is the fear of doing it wrong. Many times when we are faced with the overwhelming task of teaching our kids the fundamentals of reading, for example, we often go and over-think the entire process.

Kids are naturally curious and have a hunger to understand how things work. As the parent/teacher, we desire to maximize this trait by breaking down, over defining, over explaining, and generally end up making the entire process as boring as humanly possible. Then your child, head spinning, says to themselves, “What the heck is Daddy talking about? These letters can’t make up their mind on what they want to sound like. I just wanted to know more about ‘One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.’”

The fundamentals of what my Aunt Kathy teaches is to understand how a story works, understand how a story sounds, and more importantly understand how fun a story can be. We get so wrapped up in the details that we miss the forest for the trees, and often times give up, because the beauty of the story has been phonetically stripped from the page.

My way to combat this is pretty simply. Live. Appreciate the story, celebrate the beauty, enjoy the process, ask questions! I think that it has become fairly epidemic in our culture to strip down the learning process into tiny confusing details we end up trying to memorize, all in the name of having a better understanding. The result is we over-complicate a process that I am confident will be learned/discovered through natural curiosity and creativity, something that I am sad to report, seems to be in short supply.

So in closing, throw away your flash cards, grab a book, and read. Talk about how the words relate to the pictures, how the story flows, and how beautiful the story is. You might find that the appreciation for the story teaches us more then we could ever imagine.

It’s about the Story, not the Sentence

Posted: August 21, 2011 in Family Life Learning, Preschool Years, Reading Methods and Ideas, Schooling at Different Ages
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On the first day of our three-week road trip to Canada, we stayed at Papa Gray’s Aunt and Uncles’ house in Lebanon KY.  I had the pleasure of talking with his Aunt Kathy, who is a “reading recovery teacher”.  After 31 years in various teaching roles for elementary students, she rocked my world about reading.

Since I have a brilliant 4-year-old (I may be biased), reading has been more present in my mind lately, as she is learning the sounds of letters and has shown a major interest in learning to read.  The other day, she came in with a sheet of paper that said “mama” on it – I had no idea she even knew how!

We have always been big readers, and Ladybug Girl has an amazing knack for picking up anything that is in a rhyming format – she can finish the word on books she’s never read before if it’s a rhyme – just by checking out the pictures and filling in the rhythm.  She’s my “lyrics queen” – and, if I teach her by singing, she can remember it easily.

So now that reading is becoming more of a priority for us, I’ve been preparing for bringing out the flashcards and the lesson plans to start memorizing and learning the phonetics for the words… but maybe I’ve been laying the groundwork all along.

In talking with Kathy, I asked her what we could do, and she said when they work with children, they ask 3 questions “Does it sound right?  Does it look right? Does it make sense?”  The focus of reading, according to a veteran teacher of over thirty years, isn’t about the words.  It’s about the story.

That completely hit me.  She’s so right!  Sometimes children start regressing with reading, or losing their interest, and the issue ends up being that they’ve hit a block – they are hitting words they don’t know.  When children learn words by sight…it’s great that they understand the words, but can a teacher/parent really teach every single word by sight?  Eventually they will run across words that don’t work.

What about phonetics?  Just sound it all out!  “Ska – ka- ya” may be Sky, but it just doesn’t work that way.  If a child doesn’t know the word “sky” by sight, and can’t make it work phonetically, then what is left?  “The bird, she will fly – high in the ___”  Some children will be lost because they have not learned to connect the words in context.  The meaning is more important than knowing the specific word.  You have to learn to read within a story – pulling context clues, seeing similar words/concepts in other books and carrying it over, and fully grasping the meaning of it all.

Interestingly enough, this goes along perfect with my concept of education – I don’t want my children to merely memorize the words and letters – I want them to know the meaning – the significance – the context of how it applies to life.  To read is to open the door to a world of opportunity, and it’s not about the actual letters – it’s about the beautiful story it creates.

And…the best way to teach your children to read? Pull them up in your lap and read a book together – I can guarantee you they will get way more out of that than simply learning to spell.

 

We’re here, but why?

Posted: August 13, 2011 in Family Life Learning, Preschool Years, Schooling at Different Ages
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Why am I laughing? Because I've run out of pictures, PapaGray is gone, and this is all she wrote.

First, I will make an official apology.  We have done the blogger faux-paus.  We start a site, we blog on Saturdays, and then POOF.  Two Saturdays in a row, no blogging!

Our excuse?  Planning a family vacation to Canada, great developments, teleseminars and a live event with 48 Days, and kids.  We have two.  That means double the brain loss.  Double the chaos.  And double the excuses (yikes).

Bottom line, we dropped the ball.  I’m home alone this weekend while Papa Gray is camping in the Smokey’s with his brothers (literally and figuratively), reflecting on the last days of bachelor-hood for one of them.

While he’s gone, it’s my turn to reflect…this website – we jumped the gun – we hopped on board, ready to dive into this “alternative schooling” world, not comfortable calling it “homeschool” but  definitely think it far from institutional… so why are we doing this so soon?  Technically, we don’t have to lift a finger on schooling until our oldest is 6.  That’s two years from now!

Well here you go.  This is why: My child doesn’t start learning at six.  Shockingly enough, she’s been learning since the moment she was born.  Recently my mother and my mother-in-law both took Ladybug Girl for a day each to teach her art – she learned to draw in two ways – by simply creating a masterpiece on a box, and a detailed step-by-step on how a snail is made.

I have to say, I’m pretty proud of her.  She’s become a true artiste’ because of these two wonderful grandmothers.  She’s careful, detailed, creative… and the amount of depth she’s learning – way beyond mere paint colors – is incredible.  She knows how to mix and get another color, but she also is learning spatial reasoning, what things are concrete (a piece of grass is a piece of grass) or flexible (but that piece of grass can very well morph into a pirate ship in my mind).  She’s learning about her emotions, and how art will match her mood (wild and crazy or methodical and ornate).  She’s learning how a finished product is a process and doesn’t just appear immediately…hmm, much like life.

So much of what my girl is learning today is crucial not just as an art class but in life skills and connecting this passion she has with application throughout her day.

I promise we’ll cover nitty-gritty details like curriculum and laws, but we’re learning as we grow here, so cut us some slack.  It’s coming, it’s coming!