All Things Hold Together

Be sure to head on over to my homeschooling blog - South Meadow Homeschool Academy - and check out my posts for Home Education Week, hosted by Principled Discovery.

I moved my new homeschooling blog, South Meadow Homeschool Academy for Boys, to the domain southmeadowacademy.com.  It was a subdirectory of this domain.

You will need to update your feed.

I also added a handy graphic in the sidebar, so you can get there quickly from here.

I have long struggled with how much I wanted this blog to focus on homeschooling.

Sometimes I talk about how I feel about homeschooling, or homeschool-related issues, but this blog is not about the actual act of homeschooling. How to, how we do it, resources, etc.

And I really don’t want it to be.

So, I decided to make a blog dedicated to our homeschool adventure.

Introducing, South Meadow Homeschool Academy (for boys), my new site that is all about the art of homeschooling.

There is not much there yet, but I did have fun writing profiles of our “students” this afternoon.

I look forward to having a place to share my homeschool stuff.

Today on a VT homeschooling online group, a legislative homeschooling advocate posted the following:

I have a senator with a request to homeschoolers. He wants to know what it is that makes homeschooling work. Please give me your thoughts as to why you think it works. Most parents who choose to homeschool do not have a teacher’s license and almost no training in educating children.

So why does it work so well? If you can put your comments in a list format so it is easy for me to compile the comments I would be eternally grateful. I need this information as soon as possible.

So, what makes it work?

This was my response:

Pedagogy and teacher training is mostly about dealing with large
groups of children, which is why a teaching degree is not needed to
homeschool.

Homeschooling works because

- Children are not forced to learn things that they are not
cognitively or developmentally able to learn at that time, just
because some bureaucrat decided that it needed to be learned at a
certain time.

- Children can get rest, food, bathroom breaks, time off, a hug, fresh
air, or what ever they need, when they need it.

- There is no peer pressure about being *too smart* or *too dumb* so
kids can comfortably work at their own pace.

- Children do not have to sit at a desk for hours at a time.

- Parents can integrate the subjects into everyday life. Since parent
and teacher are one and the same, discussion is not limited to a 30-45
minute period M-F.

- Parents can tailor the material to the child’s learning style.

I’m sure there are more.

What would you add to that list?

I love it when anti-homeschoolers make arguments such as, “I only know that I’m not an educator, and neither am I a dentist, and therefore would not drill holes in my kids’ teeth.”

(Actual quote from an anti-HS piece.)

And by love, I mean that I find it frustrating beyond measure for a multitude of reasons. So I guess I was being sarcastic.

At any rate, I was thinking about that quote for some reason.

Oh yeah. Because I was cutting my husband’s hair. And I’m not a cosmetologist, barber, or other hair-care professional.

Funny side story about that:

I was nervous about cutting his hair because it can no longer be done with clippers, since he has a weird bald spot on the side. He said, “You can do this. Just take it in sections. You are very logical. Just ask yourself, What would Spock do?”

I replied, “He would say, You should go to a professional. It’s not logical to have the ship’s science officer cut your hair.”

Logic aside, I do cut everyone’s hair, yet I am not a trained beautician. I also cook, yet I am not a trained chef. I repair clothes, yet I am not a trained seamstress. I even do our taxes, yet I am not a trained accountant.

I do a lot of things that I was not trained to professionally do.

Is educating a child the same as drilling teeth or performing surgery, disciplines in which one needs specialized training?

Or is it more like cooking, in that anyone can do it with a little easily acquired knowledge and some practice?

I think that education is like cooking.

Sure there are professional chefs, and they even might be better cooks than I am. But I doubt that, say, a trained sushi chef would be much good to my children.

They would much rather have good ol’ Mom, who knows what they like and how they like it.

I am certain that I could not prepare sushi as well as Mr. Sushi Chef, but what I can do is work with my children’s individual needs and preferences to make a meal that gives them a good balance of nutrition and enjoyment.

What good would it do to have a trained professional prepare something that will not even have the chance to benefit them because it does not suit their individual needs?

I look at education the same way.

I might not have been trained in the latest pedagogical fads, but I know my children’s strengths and weaknesses. I also know their passions. I can work with their individual styles to customize an educational plan that will allow them to excel.

Sure, there are professional educators, but they also have 20+ other students of varying needs and abilities.

That would be like sending the kids to eat at a restaurant that serves the same dish to every patron.

Just because it was prepared by a professional, doesn’t mean they want what everyone else is having.

Remember the Scholastic school book fairs?

Well, Scholastic also has warehouse sales and they are a great way to pick up a few things for your homeschool on the cheap.

I went to one last year and got a few useful resources, including a Mary Engelbreit lesson planner. (Now all I have to do is use it.)

I just received an e-mail that the warehouse sales are coming up. Here is the link to see if there is one near you.

The other day, I met a woman whose daughter has health problems that led them to homeschool her for the second half of last year.

This year, they decided not to homeschool because she is a high school freshman and was afraid that she could not get into college if she had been homeschooled for high school.

I talked to her a little about my knowledge of homeschoolers getting into college and told her that I would gather some resources for her. I thought I would share those with you.

Many of us homeschoolers already know that homeschoolers do get into colleges and universities, but might still have some apprehension about the process.

The best advice I offered to the woman I spoke about was to trust herself. We all second-guess our ability to provide our children with all of the educational advantages they need to have a successful future. The important thing is to not let those nagging voices (from within and without) get the better of us and sabotage our efforts.

I found that the most important component in preparing your homeschooled child for college is record keeping. Your child will need a transcript to show the admissions office what they learned in their home study program.

The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has an excellent website dedicated to Homeschooling Thru High School. One of their resources is a PDF pamphlet that simplifies high school record-keeping.

Homeschool Central also has a page dedicated to high school transcripts.

Learn in Freedom has a page of colleges that admit homeschoolers.

On that list, I found my alma mater, the University of Vermont. Here is a link to their admissions policy regarding homeschoolers. (Scroll down about half-way.) They require “documentation that shows what the student’s home-school curriculum has covered.”

Again, we see that documentation is crucial.

Finally, no list of resources would be complete without a link to About.com:Homeschooling. Here’s “help for homeschooling your high schooler. Information on curriculum, planning, transcripts, college, scholarships and more.”

We plan on homeschooling the boys through high school. One option that we intend to use is having them take courses at community college while they are still in high school. This is a great way to demonstrate their ability to succeed in college courses.

I welcome and encourage you veteran homeschoolers to share your experiences, advice, and success stories in the comments section.

Hey, look. I am actually doing a homeschooling post!

Okay, so here is my situation - I hate teaching the kids math and they hate the way I teach them math.

This sitch (that’s Kim Possible slang for situation) is so weird because they are like mini math geniuses and I have my BA in math. You would think that we were a match made in Heaven, but alas, we are not.

I can kind of relate to their issues because I HATED math when I was in school. Pretty much up until the day I changed my major to math my junior year in college, I hated it.

Then I realized that I loved it. It totally puts the world into a logical context. Everything around us has a math based order to it. It is just amazing to get into the higher level math, but I am getting way off topic here.

I think the reason I always thought I hated math was the way it was taught. I also think that I am killing the boys’ interest in it with the way I teach it.

I bought Saxon because I thought they could teach themselves with it now that they are in 54 and 65, which to an extent they can, but not fully.

One day I was thinking about how much Bill Nye totally makes our science learning so much better because I can alternate between Bill Nye DVDs, which come with PDF quizzes that I can print out for them, and the lessons and experiments that I do with them. It’s a good balance. We all love it.

I wish that there was a Bill Nye for math.

Then I discovered D.I.V.E into Math. It is a CD ROM that has some guy’s voice teaching the Saxon math textbooks on a digital white board. They can go at their own pace, pause, rewind, etc, until they understand what they are learning. And each lesson is a separate file, so it’s easy to find their place.

This sounds like what we are looking for, but before I spend $50/grade-level (I have two), does anyone have any experience with this?

With all this talk about the Homeschool Blog Awards going on around the homeschool blogging world, I realized that I have not done a homeschooling post since October 11th! (Excluding posting the link to the Carnival of Homeschooling.)

The first reason is that I was going to start a new blog with homeschooling tips, one that would only contain homeschooling tips, resources, etc., and no personal stuff, so I was doing HS posts over there. I decided that I didn’t want to do that, though. I think that would stretch me too thin. As it is, I started doing political blogging again and I feel like that is already stretching me too thin. (And not the kind of thin I want to be, either.)

The second reason is that I tend to blog in bursts. I might do a lot of faith posts for a while, then I might do a lot of cooking posts. I was doing a lot of frugal posts recently. I just haven’t felt like doing homeschooling posts.

The final reason is that we took a little break from formal lessons. We had a lot going on around here and we have been out of the books for a while. That is probably why I have not done homeschooling posts lately.

I think that I should make it a point to do at least one post about homeschooling per week. That will keep my focus on what I am here to do. (Here meaning at home. Not here on this earth. I am sure there is more in store for me than homeschooling. Not that that isn’t a good enough calling or anything. You know what I’m saying, right?)

Speaking of the Homeschool Blog Awards, can you believe that this blog is young enough to be nominated for Best New Homeschool Blog? I can’t believe it, but I only started this blog on April 13, 2007. Wow!

[Edit: Just to clarify, I was pointing out that this blog is young enough to be nominated. Nominations are still going on until 11/17.]

I guess it just seems like I have been blogging since, like, February of 2006. (That’s when I started my first blog.)

Don’t worry if you already nominated someone else. Just having you as a reader is worth more than any award.

When I first heard about Homeschool Tracker’s free Basic Program, I downloaded it and checked it out. This was a year or so ago, maybe more.

I decided that it was way too school-like for my taste. I mean, who wants to input all of the materials, assignments and grades… and attendance? Who takes attendance in their homeschool?!?

But the other day, I was filing away some papers, thinking about how I am trying to be more organized this year, and I decided to take another look at Homeschool Tracker.

I plugged in the dates that I had sketched out for quarters (just to make sure we stay on track to finish the curriculum I submitted to the state and don’t have to do book work in the summer, if we don’t want to). Then I put in the materials we were using and recorded the grades from the tests they have taken.

By this time, the D came over to see what I was doing. I was playing around with the reporting function and ran a report card for him. “Cool!“

The one thing the kids miss about school is having a piece of paper that proves how smart they are!

Now, he wants me to record all of their grades and print out quarterly report cards.

Recently, Bob suggested that I sit down once a week and journal what we did that week, so the annual reporting won’t be so much work. It just so happens that HS Tracker does that, too. It has a place for me to record journal entries and another one to record field trips.

I have always leaned toward the idea that homeschool should not be school at home. As a result, I tend to not like to do things that are too school like, I guess.

I am beginning to realize, though, that being organized makes my life run a lot smoother. And living in a state that requires me to demonstrate annually that my children are making academic progress requires me to be organized about my homeschool record keeping, or else face hours upon hours of hassle when it comes time to file my enrollment.

If that means doing some things that are like school, then so be it.

So, I am going to give Homeschool Tracker a try for a while. I’ll let you know how it goes.