The breadth vs. depth question

[elegantlion]

I feel like a fly on the wall as my knowledge of educational methodology is so minimal. Is anyone else approaching this issue from a more genetic standpoint? My dh is smart, he could build you a house from scratch without blueprints if necessary. However his aptitudes don't transfer well to traditional academics. His family is very educationally focused and so he's always felt like the black sheep of the family. In my schooling I learned to play the game well, but never attended college because I thought of it as more of the same, not as a place of opportunity.

 

My hope was that ds would be more academic than he is. Truth is he is more like his father in that he likes to learn, but on his terms. I've been writing down these skills were discussing and adding my own. I'm enjoying school much more this time around, so I fight the disappointment as I realize my son is not a fan of structured learning.

 

Am I wrong to be looking at the weaknesses of life/learning skills of my dh and myself? I had to laugh when I read "ability to form opinions and articulate them logically and persuasively through speaking and writing." I think this one skill would pay great dividends to the future happiness of my child because of his personality.

 

We've been homeschooling for six years and I can see how some of my futile attempts may have been helpful. Then I am left to ponder if he's just a smarter child or if my educational ploy is working.

[Guest]

Jenn, thank you so much for that story. It's so heartening to hear that exposure to people who were interested in anything and everything, to new places, new experiences, etc. can eventually move Aspies, against all their resistance and inertia, to interest in something outside their narrow interests. I'm really struggling with that right now, despite the way in which these interests can and do connect with larger issues. The idea that my daughter will look back and be glad something went the way it did... is not one that usually crosses my horizon. I feel morally certain that she will NEVER thank me for the math foundation or the exposure to narrative history.

 

Nan, when I was talking about the college-admissions anxiety I sense behind much of our discussion and whether we will handicap our kids, I was -- as I usually do -- using the royal "we" and referring in great part to my own tendency to become caught up in this aspect of education. Living in California, it's difficult to escape the gravitational pull of the requirements the UC system imposes on kids' educational lives throughout high school, and then the preceding two years as well as people struggle to give their kids a competitive edge on the high school years. I resent this intellectual stranglehold more and more as the years go by and my daughter comes closer to being entangled in it, but I still have all sorts of worries about moving away from it too. Just wanted to remind myself that there are other end goals that have nothing to do with colleges and the job market. And I have to say that you are a shining beacon for those of us searching for ways to integrate real-world experience with academic discipline, institutional requirements with child-led learning.

 

My own child is different from the cloud children you describe, almost an inverse version, in that she has very little problem picking up the types of skills we're talking about (except asking questions/asking for help, which her Aspie father still doesn't do, so I don't know quite how much hope to hold out for that one), but tremendous difficulty in becoming interested in what she can do with them. She wants to approach absolutely everything in her own way, from her own point of view (and a very, very determined one it is, coupled distressingly with a lack of self-confidence and a lack of belief in her own abilities). I can lead her through the steps of acquiring a skill, or through a content area, and she'll memorize anything and everything while it's being required, answer every question I pose her, then quietly drop it like trash in a can before going her own way. So I have to wonder what the point is of dragging her along through a list of curricular requirements if this is the outcome, and for this particular child, breadth will just have to wait.

 

We had a hard morning with algebra (which she can do very well and which she is curiously driven to finish "so that I never have to do it again") and with physics (something she usually loves, by the way), which ended in my daughter crying and saying she'd better get a job as a hair stylist or a garbage collector that didn't require a lot of brain work because she just wasn't any good at thinking, at all. I know she's fourteen and has the added problems of being an Aspie and a perfectionist. But still: I don't believe education has to be like this, I don't want it to be an experience like this for her. Yet if I follow the conventional route, this is what we face.

[Nan in Mass]

In case anyone cares to wade through all the things that worry me, here is what my youngest has done this year (officially 9th grade). I can't say that I am very satisfied with it. Some of that is my fault. Some of is my son's fault (he had a fall of wishing he were elsewhere). And some of it is just plain my inability to find a good plan to follow with him, a good approach. That is why I am sticking desperately to this thread. I am hoping it will clarify some things. I can't even figure out what is bothering me. Well, I know science is a major worry. In general, I feel like I am doing a suitably bad job at language arts and history for an engineering type person, a suitably good job at those modern issues for a member of our family, but not necessarily a good job at the all-important math, science, and technology. I am finished with my goal of teaching him to draw and almost finished with my goal of teaching him to sight-sing. I have let go of my goal of further ear-training (since I can't do it myself and he isn't motivated enough to self-study) and have turned piano over to him. I let him quit lessons and just mess about this year. He discovered youtube vidoes and has been using those to learn whatever he feel like. Occasionally he really practises something. Most of the time, he emotes. He kept playing throughout the year, despite having no lessons and I am now congratulating myself on having gotten him through at least one transition from taught to self-taught. Now I just have to do that with all the other subjects... Gymnastics takes care of phys ed.

 

So... for the rest, our school day still runs from 7 to 2 with a breakfast break and a lunch break. He wasn't doing well at getting his math right after gymnastics practice (gee- I wonder why - could it be that he is exhausted and falling asleep?) so I switched to reading the chapter with him in the evening and having him do the excersize first thing in the morning. I opted to continue NEM3 this year, somewhat against my better judgement. I know we aren't really taking proper advantage of the problem-solving aspects of the curriculum and it worries me that it doesn't have lots of proofs. After math, he gets himself breakfast.

 

Then we sit down together and go through "the bag", which contains a Latin fairy tale book, so we don't forget our Latin, a sheet of spelling rules, some Latin grammar chants, and our sightsinging book. Latin is a worry for me. We worked so hard at getting through our grammar that it seems stupid to stop now. And he says he still wants to read The Aeneid some day. On the other hand, he isn't willing right now to work into learning Latin well enough to read what he wants to read. And I wonder if the time wouldn't be better spent making him better at what he is good at (technology). Then I argue to myself that once he hits engineering school, he will have tons of technology and it is better to use this time to get him some of the other things. And as he gets older, I have less and less choice in the matter. Sight singing is one of those skills that *I* have chosen to give him as an enrichment gift. He doesn't appreciate it now, but I bet he will as a semi-musical adult. Learning to do it, even at a very modest level, has been difficult, just like the Latin, because I have had to learn along with him. We have been exceedingly inefficient about both of those, to my sorrow.

 

Next, we do his French. He has some passive knowledge of French. This is another one of those things I worry about. It seems a shame not to push him a bit and get him literate and more active. And looking ahead to getting into college, if he has to take three subject SATs (highly likely), what will he take them in? English would not be a good idea LOL. He is an inventor. Need I say more? Nor would history, which is the subject that we have sacrificed the most. Social studies is an area that we have opted to do in a non-academic manner, so although he knows a lot, it isn't the standard body of knowledge and there is no way he can test in it. He'll have to take one in math. For family reasons, we do natural history instead of biology, so he can't take one in that. The plan is to do physics and chemistry at the community college, junior and senior year (three semesters of physics and one of chemistry at the end). So Physics is one, probably, but he won't have had chemistry until after he has applied, senior year. So what to do for the third? Latin is definately out. With a good teacher, he would have able to, but not with me teaching it. Ug. French appears to be our only good option. So I am forcing him through a grammar book to teach him to write and to speak more grammatically. His vocabulary hasn't grown for year, either. In the interests of being efficient, we are doing Histoire/Géographie 6e. The history is about like Kingfisher, which he has done, but it is mostly primary sources, which is nice. He is learning to answer textbook questions, which will be helpful. He has great trouble figuring out whether he is supposed to be using past knowledge, only the knowledge presented on the page, how long to make the answer, stuff like that. We discuss it (a tiny bit) in English but he answers the questions in French. Baby French, but French. He understands most of what he reads, at least. The geography material is stuff he knows in a background sort of way, but not is an overt way, if you know what I mean, so that is useful. And some of it, like how rice farming works, was altogether new. (It was interesting to see our country presented from a Euorpean point of view.) So that is working, sort of, but is most definately a textbook. A nice textbook that is almost all pictures and is helping his academic skills, but still a textbook. We also worked a bit with a 6th grade French language arts book. Interestingly, he seems to have seen most of that material before in Writing Strands, which we sort of did, and of course, in TWEM. I made him use cursive, and I made him do lots of copy work. He didn't balk at the copywork. I think he found it a relief. This summer, I am making him do some reading. This was a place where we worked on some academic skills, like writing and using conjugation tables and using a dictionary. He also learned to put accents into documents, photos into documents, and some other things.

 

Then comes lunch. Then he did natural history, which consisted of keeping a nature journal, learning to design simple experiments and write them up (only but so successful here - husband was too busy to help much as planned - this could have been great but wasn't), and reading some books, real books, not textbooks. Technology was a series of projects of his own choosing. This could be great with a little guidance, but that would sort of defeat the purpose. Piano he did on his own. Oh - I forgot great books. We read aloud together and then answer TWEM questions (if it isn't something we have chosen just to read) and then he does a project or paper. We didn't read as much as we might have because we spent gobs of time trying to learn to write. Sigh. I am happy with the way we do literature. And I think we finally are making progress with the writing. Finally. And he went peacewalking. He walked down through the Native American nations in New York. He read (gasp!) Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. He wrote a short essay on Indian internal politics, as he had observed them. And I will give him half a credit for Native American Studies. He won't have the organized knowledge that he would have if he studied them in a class (I know because I took one in college) but he has a different sort of knowledge. And that was our year. This summer, he is reading more natural history and some French.

 

Something doesn't seem right aobut what we did, but other than feeling like it might not be right for getting him into an interesting engineering school, I can't figure out what it is.

 

I would welcome suggestions.

 

-nan

[PeterPan]

...she'll memorize anything and everything while it's being required, answer every question I pose her, then quietly drop it like trash in a can before going her own way...

 

... algebra (which she can do very well and which she is curiously driven to finish "so that I never have to do it again")

 

Mercifully, geometry is much more interesting.

[swimmermom3]

Nan, could you do me a favor, please, and list the subjects in order of priority, with a note as to why you are doing it and what your son's feelings about the subject are. Swimmer Dude doesn't call me a mean mother for nothing.:D

[Guest]

I just thought I'd share a metaphor I came up with this afternoon in the depths of my despair.

 

Over the course of a year or two I did a lot of archival research in Oxford and London for an article about fasting women in the 18th century (really fascinating stuff). Anyway, during that time most texts came unbound. If you were rich, you waited until you had a suitable amount of printed material, or bought one longer, larger text by a single author, and then had a leather binding made for them. So books were not standardized, and you can find the most bizarre stuff co-existing between the covers of a single "book."

 

Anyway, one day I was researching a Scottish woman who had stopped eating after attaining puberty and falling off a horse, if I remember correctly. I had been reading previously in the Journals of the Royal Society, so previous stories about fasters had been cheek by jowl with stories about people struck by lightning, types of bugs, chemical reactions, anything and everything. I was expecting the Scottish faster to be in a similar type of medical/scientific collection that someone would have put together and had bound. But instead, I got this mishmash of really strange things ranging from witches to the fasting woman to monsters of myth, all bound together because they had to do with Scotland.

 

So -- my metaphor is this: my daughter is collecting standard and non-standard academic content and skills in a book of her own making. It's not going to look like anyone else's books because she is creating her own method of what goes with what, and that cohering principle, FOR HER, is her passionate, driving interests and the neurology behind them.

 

Conventional education is like a 21st-century book, with the collecting theme predetermined by the publisher and marketed to as wide an audience as possible. My daughter's book is like something from another era, idiosyncratic and organized in a way that makes sense to her.

 

The issue of skills and the refining of those skills still exists; the balancing act between breadth and depth is still necessary. But I'm realizing I have no business getting in there, taking her book apart and telling her it would be better to organize it in a different way because it would make "sense" to do so.

 

And because she's putting together what she does, how she does, she's going to pretty much invert the traditional order or hierarchy or structure of introducing a child to the broad spectrum of a field of study first, then letting her choose areas to explore in detail. The broad overview, the arching connections, is going to come later.

 

And thank you OhElizabeth and Jackie for bringing up the whole textbook issue again. Just because they CAN, or just because they will need to be able to read and process a textbook some day down the road, or will need to follow a syllabus, does not mean our kids need to do so NOW, when there is clearly so much to be learned in other ways.

 

Thank you so much, Lisa, for your support, which helped me come out of my crash today. Everyone who has been contributing to this thread and making me think so hard has been incredibly helpful. Nan, you are so brave to show us where and how you think you have not done what you perhaps could have -- although to anyone reading, what we see is all you've given your sons and how much you've made it possible for them to do.

[rwjx2khsmj]

Something doesn't seem right aobut what we did, but other than feeling like it might not be right for getting him into an interesting engineering school, I can't figure out what it is.

 

I would welcome suggestions.

 

-nan

 

I've read through most of this thread over the last few days and find it absolutely fascinating. It's the first time I've run into a group of parents/educators that are struggling with how to define what is necessary (as decided by someone else) and what is important (as decided by our dc and ourselves).

 

Nan, as I read through what you and your son have been doing (and so many other of the posts that I've read) what strikes me first is how creative so many of you have been in meeting the needs of your dc without overwhelming or frustrating them. Specifically, Nan, I love how you've selected certain subjects on which to focus the traditional academic skills and left so many others for the joy of exploration and discovery. The other thing that strikes me is that so many of you have purposefully redefined what is necessary & important and are using your definitions as the basis of your educational choices.

 

When I began homeschooling I didn't realized, deep down, that my definition of necessary or important was different from the established definition. I also didn't realize that I intended to redefine necessary or important. There are moments when the outside definition of necessary/important bumps up against my definition. It's those times that cause me to have a crisis of confidence and send me in a panic to shore up what I've done or re-evaluate what I'm doing/planning to do. Those are the moments that make me feel there are too many holes and I'll never meet the needs (ALL the needs) of my dc.

 

I keep trying to remind myself that education does not end with a diploma. That is not our goal nor is it our end product.

 

I also love how several of you have made a list to remind yourselves what you are really wanting to teach, what is really necessary and important by your definition. I need to think about this some more and make my own list.

 

Most of all, thank you. Thank you for carrying on this discussion so thoughtfully and candidly.

[BridgeTea]

my daughter is collecting standard and non-standard academic content and skills in a book of her own making. It's not going to look like anyone else's books because she is creating her own method of what goes with what, and that cohering principle, FOR HER, is her passionate, driving interests and the neurology behind them.

 

Conventional education is like a 21st-century book, with the collecting theme predetermined by the publisher and marketed to as wide an audience as possible. My daughter's book is like something from another era, idiosyncratic and organized in a way that makes sense to her.

 

 

 

 

Karen, thank you for painting this beautiful metaphor for us. I want my daughter creating her own book, as well.

 

I am grateful to all the parents who have been thinking out loud here the last few days. I have been checking in once in awhile, sipping my tea and nodding or taking notes. Superb thread.

[Nan in Mass]

But most of them don't really have a priority. The priority is skills, mostly. Anything that didn't have any sort of priority was dropped sigh. And priority for what purpose? To whom? It is all necessary, or we wouldn't be doing it. I can tell you which skill I think he will need most - math. The rest of the skills I can make any number of arguements for one way or another. Those spelling rules weren't very important to me, I guess. I'm glad we did them, though, because when he took the CC placement tests, they told him that if he had had one more spelling error, he wouldn't have placed into comp 1. They said his quote saved him. Quote???!!! What quote? He said somebody on the most recent peacewalk had suggested that he use this particular quote to help him answer the question people kept asking him about whether he liked walking (it was something about making one's own happiness) and it had applied to the essay topic, so he had used it. I can't prioritize very well, but I can put things in order of what he learned most from. I think. Maybe. Or at least I can sort of try:

 

Peacewalking

His own projects (some of which required extensive research on the internet)

Writing

sci-fi reading

Nature journal

math

French/history/geography

everything else

 

Hmmm... I guess he learned most from the stuff he did on his own. Much the most.

 

 

It is hard to tell you how he felt about each of them because that varied from day to day. At some point, he agreed to do each of them, or we wouldn't have been doing them. Left to his own devices, without college considerations, he would have scrapped French - not the language itself or improving at speaking it, but the study of it. He would rather have spent the time learning a smidgen of several other languages, enough to get around in. He has a valid point, but I can't figure out how to give that to him and I can, although inefficiently and badly, make him a bit more literate in French. And I want him to have more geography and I like how they do that on the other side of the pond better than how they do it here. I think there is value in learning the framework behind some subjects. Cultural anthropology is the framework of how a culture works. That lets one organize the knowledge of a culture. Grammar does the same thing for learning a language. Geography has a similar framework and I want my son to know it. Natural history has one, too. I may seem like I am not answering your question, but actually I am. Frameworks are a major priority for me, how things work. And ability to communicate. And invent and make things. And mediate and negotiate and persuade. My goals list is my priority, but within that, it is hard to say what is more important. I can tell you which things had priority this particular year, will that do? Except that I can't list them subject by subject because they weren't tied to any one particular subject. I guess I am sounding cloud-like. And that I am not being at all helpful. I know I am going to botch this, but I can list the things we did (they are in the order that we usually did them here):

 

math

Latin

sight singing

spelling

history/geography

French

Great Books

natural history

technology

piano

gymnastics

peacewalking (everything else stopped while he did this)

 

That sounds like a fairly conventional list of subjects.

 

I typed out the range of what he thought of them all, but afterwards, I deleted it because I felt like I was betraying a confidence by posting it. Most of them ran the full spectrum from this is cool to why on earth are we doing this. It varied day by day.

 

Some of my priorities for this last year (only some of them and in no particular order) were:

 

Math (this was probably top)

Get him writing in French

Get him to elaborate more and be more organized when he writes

Get him to answer textbook questions more accurately (in preparation for when he has to use a textbook for science)

Study skills

Peacewalking and all the benefits that involves

Switch to being an adult musician who continues to do play for his own purposes

Learn to look at something and draw it accurately

Enjoy his gymnastics (rather than competing) and continue to have the parenting his coaches provide

Learn to design and write up an experiment

Learn to keep a lab notebook

Increase his French vocabulary

Make his French more grammatical

Not forget what Latin we learned

Learn to sight-sing

Get better at reading, skimming, and studying

Put a date and title on his papers and keep things right side up and going forwards

Find time for him to work on his own technical projects

Take the PSATs so I have some idea of how well or badly he is going to test

Get him signed up for college classes for next year (placement tests, etc.)

Encourage him to continue to play strategy games

Encourage him to continue to build laptop skills

Encourage him to become good at the internet (like his friends, who are able to find whatever information they want so very easily, and explore and learn and keep in touch with friends and entertain themselves)

Encourage him to invent things

Teach him some other ways to use the library

Introduce him to research papers

Get him to use quotes when writing about literature

Get him to use his French (French/French) dictionary when he reads

Get him to use the conjugation charts in his French/English dictionary

 

I have different list for next year.

 

I'm sure there are more, but I can't think of them at the moment.

I know it wasn't exactly what you asked for, but does that help?

-Nan

Edited July 16, 2010 by Nan in Mass

[swimmermom3]

I feel like a fly on the wall as my knowledge of educational methodology is so minimal. Is anyone else approaching this issue from a more genetic standpoint? My dh is smart, he could build you a house from scratch without blueprints if necessary. However his aptitudes don't transfer well to traditional academics. His family is very educationally focused and so he's always felt like the black sheep of the family. In my schooling I learned to play the game well, but never attended college because I thought of it as more of the same, not as a place of opportunity.

 

My hope was that ds would be more academic than he is. Truth is he is more like his father in that he likes to learn, but on his terms. I've been writing down these skills were discussing and adding my own. I'm enjoying school much more this time around, so I fight the disappointment as I realize my son is not a fan of structured learning.

 

Am I wrong to be looking at the weaknesses of life/learning skills of my dh and myself? I had to laugh when I read "ability to form opinions and articulate them logically and persuasively through speaking and writing." I think this one skill would pay great dividends to the future happiness of my child because of his personality.

 

We've been homeschooling for six years and I can see how some of my futile attempts may have been helpful. Then I am left to ponder if he's just a smarter child or if my educational ploy is working.

 

Wait, Paula! We're supposed to have an educational methodology?:tongue_smilie: I knew I was missing something important. Of course genetics play a part, but I am not so sure how big a part. My dh and I could play the academic game fairly well; our children do not play it as well or in Swimmer Dude's case, the rules get completely rewritten. Perhaps for our family's situation is dictated more through environmental issues while another family's may be genetic. I really don't know. You know it's so easy to project our own weaknesses regarding life skills and learning onto our children; why don't we do the same with our strengths? I'm not saying it's wrong to look for guidance to the things that worked/didn't work for ourselves if we had some of the same tendencies as our children. But shoot, Paula, you are a bright, strong woman that can write in a way that turns me green with envy every time I read your blogs. You have a ton to give that boy and you care enough to all but stand on your head and juggle to find what works for him.

 

I love to learn and so does Swimmer Dude, but he doesn't love to learn at school. It's just school. I think this is some of what Nan was referring to. If this is what you are disappointed with, I can relate.

 

I read so much guilt between the lines on this thread, Guilt about what we haven't done, but I am willing to bet that the stack of failures is far smaller than the stack of successes for all of us.

[Nan in Mass]

KarenAnne, this is a beautiful metaphore. You are right - you have no business messing about with her organization. People have been trying to talk me into organizing myself a different way for years. I am very, very organized. It just isn't recognizable as organized to anyone else. It is very hurtful and confusing when people do this. You have shown me that I must be very careful not to do this to my own children. Mine have been willing to let me show them organizing principals, have even found them interesting (things like knowing that most cultures have a way of distributing and redistributing wealth and knowing that most life is can be classified as a producer or a consumer or a decomposer). What they don't like is for me to tell them the order in which they need to learn things or how to learn them. In other words, they don't mind if I suggest labels for the pages, but they don't want me to put the pages in a different order and they don't want me to take pages out. They will usually let me add pages if I think they are going to be useful in the future. They've found a use for the pages I've added just often enough to let me do this. Mine are older, though. When they were younger, they didn't want me to do any of these things. Maybe when you are first building your book, it is new and fragile and you are afraid, but by the time you are older and have more in it and are more used to using it, it is more robust and you are willing to let people handle it and add things to it?

-nan

[Guest]

Nan -- so funny, extending the book metaphor, because my daughter is what Ann Fadiman calls "a Platonic lover of books," refusing to write in any of her books, turn back the pages, leave them lying open, crease the binding. She is absolutely, utterly horrified when I, Fadiman's "carnal lover," do all these things, rip pages out of workbooks, draw my own diagrams in the margins. The single thing she accepts is an author's signature (we have gone to signings).

 

But it's made me think of how she might come to view her own book, and I think it will be in terms of larger systems as she broadens out her scope. One possible continued metaphor: she'll see that there are different ways of organizing books in relation to one another... by genre, by author, chronology. She'll see that some libraries use the Dewey system and some use the Library of Congress system, and some libraries in other parts of the world do neither -- the research libraries in England are fascinating and frustrating because they began organization according to who donated what, and what size the books were. I've seen some weird (to me) interior decorating shots in which artists stored books by color, or covered them all over in white.

 

A different metaphor: she'll find her book's relationship to others by looking at many other books, seeing how her own is organized similarly, how it is different; what she's got in hers that others left out, and what she doesn't have that others do. Some people are done with their book after high school, some after college; some can't help but keep fiddling and reorganizing, adding, soliciting reader response, until they die.

 

It is my hope she'll come to think of her book as something living and vibrant, see it as having a multifaceted relationship to all the other books around her. Much of life is intertextual reading... and now tada, the big metaphor ends.

[PeterPan]

Karen, my mother's husband (whom I suppose you could call my stepfather, but whom I never do) is just such an eclectic person as you suggest. Stunningly brilliant, he can tell you just about anything about antiques and american history (and much of europe and whatnot) you would care to know. He's like one of those talking brains who prices things on Antique Roadshow and always knows bizarre stories about incidental little things, stories NO ONE should know, because you can't fathom they're in books anywhere. And yet they must be, for the man knows them.

 

So to get to the point, he IS brilliant, but as you say in his own way. Is he marketable? Well sort of. He works in a museum doing curious things with curious objects, lectures, hunts antiques, and reads. He makes enough money to be happy for himself. He's not one of those Fortune 500 people who makes scads of money with inventions, but he's thoroughly happy. In school he was a mediocre student, always reading things other than what the school considered important. I know he attended college, though I doubt he was stellar there. He retains a large, multi-volume history set (some of which I have copies of downstairs, Durant?) that he enjoyed. However I doubt he had good grades in any of the lower level, more basal classes.

 

In other words, he's a happy oddity, a brilliant happy oddity. I think it will be fine if your dd is that, and I think her own mix, her special book, will make a place for her. Your job is not to change her book. Your job is to help her FILL her book and FIND her place in the world, someone that wants that book. And maybe that's where you want to turn in your mind, to looking for alternative places that value people who have their own books.

[Sandra in FL]

I strive for depth and not breadth during the elementary years. We're heavy into the basics - lots of reading and listening to audio books, Singapore Math with drilling the math facts until they are automatic. I don't even teach the alphabet (they pick it up from the alphabet song) or time. I delayed writing (especially for the boys) - doing mostly copy work and dictation until around 4-5th grade. Then we do R&S grammar and some writing program. The only content subjects we do is Story of the World audiobooks and Schlessinger Science videos. I send them to the elementary school for Spanish.

 

In the middle school years, the kids take science and social studies classes at the local middle school. We switch to US math texts (Dolciani) and take some Florida Virtual School classes.

 

I'm sending them to public high school.

[Nan in Mass]

I have a feeling that I am going to be using this metaphore for a long time : ).

[PeterPan]

Well after all this, could I say I FINALLY get it? 1) Don't be mean. Use the shortest, most efficient route possible to get the skills they need, and don't feel the need to turn it into some year-long torture session. 2) Fill the pages in their book; don't determine what the pages will be. There really isn't some prescribed set of pages, and any will do. Even colleges are looking at quantity, not necessarily specifics.

 

So there, don't know why that took me so long to realize my dd doesn't need and has never needed year-long torture sessions to learn a skill. Don't know why I thought I had to connect textbooks and skills. All I have to do is remember not to be mean, and we'll be fine. (And yes, I'm being totally polite and dancing around the fact that in my pea brain I can over-interpret just about any proscription from a book and turn it into something mean.) It's not mean to make them do what they need. It's mean to make them do MORE than they need in the most dry, mind-numbing way possible, simply because you feel guilty or because some book says to. But me, I can be mean and feel guilt-tripped even where normal, more sensible people would OBVIOUSLY know to back off. And when you have a kid who is extra capable and a little challenged at the same time (a bizarre mix), it's really hard to know if that meanness (toughness with a purpose) would actually be beneficial. But there is a fine line between sensible determination and just plain meanness. I see that know. Killing her soul is mean. Dragging them through scorching dry terrains of repetitious curriculum, that is mean.

 

Well I'll stop there. Certainly I could see two sides to this. I hear Ester Maria's voice coming in with the observation that kids NEED that consistently of application. Just not to the point of meanness, that's all that is clicking in my mind. And we all know when that is. It's when the student dies in front of us, when they never come to life because the whole day is spent that way, groaning in meanness. That's not education, that's torture.

 

Now I'm off to research what in the world Nan is using for sight singing. It's such a funny thing how each of us gets our bugaboos. I keep exploring handicraft and life skills things with dd (and aim to do more) because it's so generally squashed out of female curriculum these days in favor of a more androgenous approach. To me if I'm not educating her to be female, I'm not sure what I'm educating her for, kwim? It must be at least 50% of the value to her, kwim? I do think some of the things we value are reactionary to our own deficiencies from growing up.

[PeterPan]

I have a feeling that I am going to be using this metaphore for a long time : ).

 

Oh I know, so seriously. Pages in their books. Then everyone can have their own pages, their own filling (much better than cream puffs!) and be validated. It acknowledges that we're all working hard to help our dc fill their pages, even when we have non-standard choices for content. Yup, it's just a seriously good illustration.

[JennW in SoCal]

I'm having trouble deciding WHERE to add to this discussion -- I keep changing from the "hybrid/threaded" mode of display to the chronological mode. It's one of those order out of chaos quirks of mine, I guess that I want to add a comment in the best spot...

 

Here's another blog post I made a while back about shaping a homeschool philosophy or perhaps it should be called a Mission Statement. Another blog post

[swimmermom3]

Karen, my mother's husband (whom I suppose you could call my stepfather, but whom I never do) is just such an eclectic person as you suggest. Stunningly brilliant, he can tell you just about anything about antiques and american history (and much of europe and whatnot) you would care to know. He's like one of those talking brains who prices things on Antique Roadshow and always knows bizarre stories about incidental little things, stories NO ONE should know, because you can't fathom they're in books anywhere. And yet they must be, for the man knows them.

 

So to get to the point, he IS brilliant, but as you say in his own way. Is he marketable? Well sort of. He works in a museum doing curious things with curious objects, lectures, hunts antiques, and reads. He makes enough money to be happy for himself. He's not one of those Fortune 500 people who makes scads of money with inventions, but he's thoroughly happy. In school he was a mediocre student, always reading things other than what the school considered important. I know he attended college, though I doubt he was stellar there. He retains a large, multi-volume history set (some of which I have copies of downstairs, Durant?) that he enjoyed. However I doubt he had good grades in any of the lower level, more basal classes.

 

In other words, he's a happy oddity, a brilliant happy oddity. I think it will be fine if your dd is that, and I think her own mix, her special book, will make a place for her. Your job is not to change her book. Your job is to help her FILL her book and FIND her place in the world, someone that wants that book. And maybe that's where you want to turn in your mind, to looking for alternative places that value people who have their own books.

 

Lovely, Elizabeth. Just lovely.

[toawh]

Education is for life. It doesn't stop with a grade. There's no reason to cram subjects. If you teach a child to enjoy learning and how to teach himself things, he'll be just fine. If you "forgot" to teach him something he'll learn it later.

[JennW in SoCal]

I don't know if my oldest son is writing his own book as much as he is creating a theme park attraction, complete with state of the art lighting.

 

The kid couldn't conform to a non-conformist metaphor if his life depended on it :D

[Nan in Mass]

Skills list -warning, this is a looonnnggg list, and a lot of it is focused on how to do ok in college, because the year before last my oldest went off, last year my middle one left, and this year, I signed my youngest up for some community college classes. I'm kind of in survive college mode at the moment. This is not a list of things I think my children need to know for life or anything like that. If it were, it would contain how to drive and how to use a radio and how to use parallel rules, among other things. It is more a how-to-survive-academia list. It also isn't just academic skills. It is organizational skills as well. And some social skills. And it has repeats in it because I stuck together several of the lists I have made. I'll come back tomorrow and edit and organize them, but in case something happens, I thought I'd just stick them in here as-is for now. Sorry. I'm sure other people have better lists than mine. I have to split it into two halves because it is too long otherwise. It is probably actually too long to be useful to any of you, and two specific to the subjects that we are studying. I'll try to fix it tomorrow, as I said.

 

Ok - It is tomorrow and I chickened out and deleted it. It was too long and disorganized as is. I organized it and it is better now, but I am sort of scared to post it. It is pretty detailed, and detailed lists tend to be mistaken for complete lists. I would hate to have anyone rely on this as a complete list. I'm doing it, but I don't want anyone else doing it. It feels sort of like building scaffolding and then leaving it up for anybody to use... I'll message it to you guys if you want.

 

Meanwhile, I want to encourage everyone to work on the academic skills in TWTM - narration, memorization, copying, dictation, outlining, grammar, research, writing, different sorts of reading, logic, speech, math, scientific experiment design, foreign languages, music, drawing. I found (and please, please listen to me and don't make the same mistake) that my cloud child couldn't do narration or memorization or copywork or dictation or outlining or writing (he actually turned out to be rather good at logic and at grammar). So we didn't do them. And that was a BIG mistake. I should have done them anyway, in little doses daily, not worrying about how much time they were taking away from content, not worrying about hanging onto anything that had been memorized a long time ago (just the process to build strength), not worrying about where my child was in comparison to others or to when TWTM said it was normal to do this. I should have just kept working on those skills, because you need them to do any sort of academic work. The timing is important. It doesn't make sense to ask a child who can't narrate back something he has just read to write a report about it. Sometimes it is really hard to see how important something is until a long time afterwards. I didn't know how much my children had learned from Writing Strands until I went to do great books with them when my oldest was in high school. I didn't know how much my children needed some of those early skills, like narration, until I tried to get them to answer high school science textbook questions. And you have to keep working on the skills or they don't grow with the child. That was the mistake that I made with my youngest. He could narrate effortlessly, so being busy, I stopped having him narrate, only to discover that he continued to be able to narrate The Magic Treehouse effortlessly, but he couldn't narrate back Reading the Forested Landscape (a fabulous natural history book - I wish all books were like this), which is adult in level. Arg. And just because they can outline Kingfisher doesn't mean they can outline a science textbook. Please don't make that mistake. Cloud type knowledge is different. It is better in some ways than traditional academic knowledge. But if your child is going to go to college, he proably has to get through a science textbook or write literary analysis papers (either in English or a foreign language) or write history research papers or have good problem-solving skills (engineering/math). To do those things, he will need the skills laid out in TWTM, the ones I just listed.

 

-Nan

Edited July 16, 2010 by Nan in Mass

[Nan in Mass]

Deleting because too disorganized to really be useful

Edited July 16, 2010 by Nan in Mass

[Nan in Mass]

Deleting because too disorganized to be useful

Edited July 16, 2010 by Nan in Mass

[Nan in Mass]

Somewhere, embedded in one of my posts about what we actually do, is a bit about an agreement I have with my children about what their part in their education is, and what my part is. Assuming you can find it, is that what you are talking about? I think it is in the post that has the link to an old post of mine, one from when my I was still homeschooling my cloudiest child, before he went away to college. I have made my children cry many times. I am as capable as any of us of getting it wrong. In some ways, I hate homeschooling. Not only do I have to make my children do all the normal things mothers make their children do, but I also have to make them learn to write and memorize French grammar and a whole slew of other things.

 

Don't let me forget to tell you about writing. I have some ideas that might be helpful. Or they might not.

 

Hugs. I have learned a ton from you.

[Nan in Mass]

My son's book will be invisible. He is seriously intrigued with invisibility. And his book is really, really full of game rules, rules for the sort of games that have a shelf of books of rules at the library in the fantasy/scifi section.

Edited July 16, 2010 by Nan in Mass

[PeterPan]

I don't know if my oldest son is writing his own book as much as he is creating a theme park attraction, complete with state of the art lighting.

 

The kid couldn't conform to a non-conformist metaphor if his life depended on it :D

 

You mean he's a roller coaster of a child? :lol:

[JennW in SoCal]

Nan, I've always wished my youngest and your youngest could hang out. I mean they've got so much in common besides having intersting mothers!! D&D, building things, engineering, sci-fi and more gaming.

 

You son's book wouldn't be invisible, it would have a +5 cloak of epic invisibility or something. I mean, really, get the terminology correct!

 

And oh my yes, Elizabeth. My oldest IS a rollercoaster and we somehow both are still alive to tell the tale.

[Nan in Mass]

Right. How could I be so stupid? I wish we lived nearer. Friends like that are rare birds indeed.

[Capt_Uhura]

Substitute he for all the she's and I could have written this post about my oldest. Mine is a bit older than Swimmermom's, and we are finally, finally, seeing our old son back. Sometimes I remember to tell myself that no matter what we do for homeschooling, it can't possibly produce worse results than our very excellent, nationally ranked, public school. Most of the time I forget. People look at us and say, "How do you have the courage to let your children do what they do?" That is how. Desperatation leads to desperate means. The education we have allowed our younger two is a desperate attempt to keep them from what happened to their older brother. I just don't usually write about it, out of respect for his privacy.

-Nan

 

It was so hard watching my energetic, lovely, inquisitive, bright son wilt in K. Looking back on it and after talking to teacher friends and a psychologist, he was depressed. A 5YEAR OLD! It took another 2 miserable years in the best PS in the area for me to get the nerve to pull him out. Yes, desperate times call for desperate measures.

[PeterPan]

Nan, I'm still interested in your tips on Cloud writing, any time you're ready! :)

[Nan in Mass]

Writing (for Elizabeth)

 

This was a huge bugaboo for years. My cloud child can now write a paper. It may not be a very good one or may be a not very well written great one, but he can at least write one. I taught him cursive to try to undo some of the public school damage and stop some of the reversals. We did some dictation but it took forever so I dropped it (a mistake - I should have just shortened the passages). He spelled almost every word wrong but I fixed most of his spelling errors by teaching him a few rules, like how to add suffixes to words, and making him make his tall letters tall and his short letters short. We did Writing Strands and he learned to make a list of things he might want to put in a paper, then number the list and eliminate the off-subject items, then write from the list. Then I began the big push to write papers with a year of storytelling and learning to type at the beginning of high school, and we worked on "three things". For storytelling, I made the children each read a folk tale (Yolen's book?) and then retell it to me in the car on the way to gymnastics. By then, the older one was peacewalking and was pretty motivated to learn to tell a story because peacewalker (some of which are from other cultures) use storytelling as entertainment. The youngest was still young enough to be immersed in TWTM story-heavy grammar stage literature and so the whole thing seemed very natural to him. Meanwhile, they were doing Writing Strands (badly), so they knew about choosing a voice and how a story is structured and limiting knowledge and having different characters use different voices and things like that. That was so much fun for me. By the end of the year, they could tell a story without too many um's, with some description, in an organized fashion. They learned to type. We discovered that the cloudiest child was incapable of learning to type in short sessions; he needed to spend half an hour at least a day on it to get anywhere. We used Typing Delux (I think). "Three things" is something someone on the board suggested (it wasn't you, was it?). You pick a topic and then say three things about it, for example dogs: different types, different uses, care of. He also did Introductory Logic that year. I have no idea if that helped him or not. Then we worked on writing. We went through Powerful Paragraphs and we worked on ways to elaborate and expand things. Then we worked on various prewriting strategies. It is easier to fix than to write something to fix, so we concentrated on getting something down, anything, and then improving that. Then we worked on proof and how to write a paper that proved something. Then he read Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (very good) and we worked a bit out of Format Writing (dreadful but might have helped). He worked his way through an elementary school workbook on proofreading. We worked on stating the obvious. Then he took speech at the community college, which was great because it laid out the whole writing process without expecting him to do the actual writing. Then he surprised us all no end by getting A's in CC composition. I worked on the writing process a lot, rather than the result. There was a hump that he had to get over. At first, writing was so slow that he couldn't get enough practice improve, and he couldn't improve until he sped up and got more practice. We worked on speed and length for awhile and totally ignored quality or revising or anything. Anyway, it was a long slow process and I didn't focus on writing well at any time, really. I divided technicalities like spelling and punctuation from organization and ideas. He didn't learn to punctuate until I tuaght him to punctuate the sorts of sentences that he wrote. He needed semicolons. I was careful to say good things first, then talk about what he might be able to fix next time. With the next child, I have found a fabulous (for us) tool to fix his organizational problems: the Jan Schaffer paragraph format. I posted about it on the high school board, if you are interested. We are emphasizing lab notebooks, nature journals, personal journals (peacewalking), research, and five paragraph papers (because that format rocks for technical writing) for the youngest, since that seems to be what he needs. I taught both of them to draw and they took/are going to take drawing at the community college. I consider drawing to be as important as writing but considerably easier to teach because I don't have very high standards. They just have to be able to do a line drawing of something they see or something they imagine. Almost everyone can learn to do that. It is just a matter of practising until you learn to line things up in perspective. I was bound and determined to teach mine to do this, one because he has trouble describing things well, and one because he is an inventor.

HTH

-Nan

[PeterPan]

Btw Nan, I didn't respond to the entirety of that post, because I couldn't figure out if you were saying you actually learned something from *me* or if you meant someone else. Certainly you'd have nothing to learn from me. :) But on the point of making them cry, yes that's another dirty little secret that doesn't come out in the thread. And I've struggled with that challenge (not making them cry so much as just having to come up against their will) and pondered whether it's THEM or me just doing a poor job. I mean I talk with people who imply that if I just chose curriculum better she would wake up rejoicing to work every day and positively BEG for more schoolwork. I've wondered if I parent too sensitively and cowtow to stuff too much, thus making her more free in her opinionation. But honestly I think where we're at in this discussion is that strong kids of mind have strong ability to be strongly opinionated. And the stronger the minds, the stronger they are about it. The ONLY week I ever got to go as swimmingly smooth as what some people describe is the week we did bizarre stuff (mystery-themed logic puzzles, hands-on chemistry book, and sculpting daily). That week went well, but certainly I could never get a regular week to be so pleasant, not unless I just totally turned off the difficulty entirely. But you know Pongo has made an interesting observation with her kids that in backing off the difficulty of the material and trying less hard her last dc is still doing JUST as well.

 

My own subtle hope is that there will be this Grand Change once the VT is complete. She will process with ease, never complain of font, have beautiful handwriting, etc. etc. Ha. But it's not like we can SKIP handwriting if it doesn't become so glib an occasion. We'll STILL have to do it. And there's the rub, when you make them do the things they need to.

 

The hummingbirds are back, and now I realize I've been so consumed by VT this year I failed to put out flowers to attract them. Normally I can sit at my desk and watch them. Today the bird just came and flew on by. Bummer!

[PeterPan]

Indeed Nan, I saw your Jan S. post on the other board!!! I've pondered what to do about writing because she reacts so strongly to (or rather AGAINST) CW. It has gone into the "mean" category in my mind for her, and I've been watching for tidbits on how to go a different way. So your point was just to keep working on it, lots of different ways, and let someone else pull it together in a CC class. Now THAT I can do, lol.

 

Storytelling is such a fascinating thing. We listen to the audio recordings of the Narnia books a lot, and in Horse and His Boy there's a section where the main girl Aravis tells her whole story in Calormean style, very grand (in the days of... his heart was greatly troubled...) I've often thought how interesting it would be to try to retell stories in different styles. In Russian conversation stories are told in the present tense, which gives a different flavor to it altogether. (And then he says to me...)

[Guest]

Nan -- we can milk this metaphor for more. My daughter's book will NOT be organized chronologically or historically, with different chapter emphases to reflect her interests within that tidy structure. And most likely, rather than being nice and steady and well organized internally, it will spoof the whole idea of order.

 

I'm really going to have her read Tristram Shandy this year.

[Guest]

 

Storytelling is such a fascinating thing. We listen to the audio recordings of the Narnia books a lot, and in Horse and His Boy there's a section where the main girl Aravis tells her whole story in Calormean style, very grand (in the days of... his heart was greatly troubled...) I've often thought how interesting it would be to try to retell stories in different styles. In Russian conversation stories are told in the present tense, which gives a different flavor to it altogether. (And then he says to me...)

 

Yes, go for it! This is very similar to what we discussed once: the writing booklet I had found where kids took a basic, very short story and redid it in different genres: journalistic, sci-fi, spy thriller, grand romance, courtroom-type, witness narrative, etc.

 

There's a game your daughter might enjoy called Lie-brary. With each turn there's a card with the title and a very brief plot summary (three or so sentences) of a book from one of various genres. The players have to come up with a plausible first line. One player then reads all the entries plus the book's actual opening line, and everybody tries to guess which is the real one. As your kids get a feel for style and genre this can become quite challenging!

Edited July 16, 2010 by Guest

[Nan in Mass]

Humming birds are pretty exotic for us. I live in the woods. I keep meaning to see if I put out a feed if they will come, but I haven't gotten around to it so far. VT sounds very intensive. Haven't I read somewhere that when you are doing something like that, you are supposed to cut way back on everything else? That is interesting, about Pongo. All I can tell you is that in my house, we have school hours because none of us really wants to be doing the hard work of school. We would, naturally, prefer to work on our own projects. Schoolwork is sort of like housework - we like the results better than the process. I cowtow a lot. It has paid off in the teens. Unless you can manage to persuade them to be willing participants in the process, you aren't going to be able to teach them any of the things you want to teach them. Keeping them willing participants requires that you negotiate just about everything, which is exhausting. The one place I was totally, totally firm was that everyone had to be cheerful and work hard most of the time. I just point blank told them that I refused to homeschool them if they weren't. Everything else except math was negotiable. Negotiating is exhausting. I tried to get them to agree to something for the year in Sept and then reminded them that this is what we had agreed they would do. I ask them whether something isn't working or whether they just don't like doing it. I try to be really sympathetic if it is don't like. I try to have bits of the school day that we all like, that they can look forward to (like reading great books aloud and breaks and technical projects). I don't try to pretend that school is fun. We have found that if you try to make the awful stuff fun, it doesn't really make it fun and it does definately make it take longer. We usually opt for short and awful. When they do a bad job, I try tactfully to ask whether they just didn't do a good job or whether they couldn't do a good job, and I am really careful not to react when it is the former, because otherwise they wouldn't tell me the truth and we'd wind up wasting a lot of time. I am capable of making even my teenage boys cry and that is awful indeed because I have pretty manly boys. I will do almost anything to avoid that. There has to be a way to accomplish school with teenagers without tears. Usually we manage fine, with just a few bad days here and there, but there have been times when tears were common, almost a daily thing. One was when I first started homeschooling my cloud child and I had to convince him that things didn't just go away if he waited long enough, the way they did in public school. The other time (less tears but more explosions) was when each child began high school. I just can't seem to manage to ramp up the work slowly enough to not have an awful first six months while I try to convince them that now it is unacceptable to forget to date papers because we have to document what we do better, and that they really have to show their work in math now or they will hit a wall soon, and that they really do have to write more. It is mostly a matter of me wanting more and higher quality output from then now. I kind of refuse to insist before I have to, and it takes us all awhile to adjust. Perhaps I don't have to in high school, either, but that isn't something I am willing to risk. I'm not actually asking for that much output. I just want it to be the right way up and dated and titled so I can file it, and I want to be able to read it, and I want it to be coherent and not all question marks. It would be nice if some of it weren't folded into paper airplanes or decorated with swords, too. Once everyone gets used to that, we move through our homeschooling day fairly happily.

-Nan

[Nan in Mass]

What fun! We like pictionary and taboo and dictionary. I bet my family (extended family) would like this, too.

[Nan in Mass]

Elizabeth, that passage is the reason that I decided to do the storytelling. I have a few things out of books that influenced *my* idea of what I wanted my school to be like. Most of the time, I think of this as a cooperative venture and not a school, but sometimes I remember that I am sort of runnng a school, and that I want it to be different from a conventional school. That passage, and my sadness that kindergarten things usually get abandonned as the children get older (we still make snowflakes at Christmas), and my wish to teach my children some things they will use all their lives (like knowing some bird calls and constellations and how to sightsing and how to actually have a conversation or read a book in a foreign language and how to travel), and The Little Prince, all have given me a picture of what I want for my school. It is the reason why high school or not, I try to make room for drawing and music, and read aloud great books, and frequently substitute an art or hands-on project for a paper. I can't believe you picked out that passage!

-Nan

[Nan in Mass]

Ok - I wrote them somewhere in this thread. This is beginning to be like hide and seek GRIN.

[Nan in Mass]

They sprayed it into a pvc pipe and lit it on fire and used the explosion to propel the potatoes. I am glad I wasn't there. We stopped them from doing it anymore (hard to stop those older teens who are technically adults sigh) by refusing to buy potatoes for awhile.

 

I'm not sure I like this fishing craze any better.

[Nan in Mass]

Hugs. My mother said the same thing about me in kindergarten, to comfort me when I sent my oldest. I guess we survive. Unfortunately, growing up seems learning to hide some parts of ourselves in order to survive.

-Nan

[AuntPol]

wow -it's taken me days to read this thread and I've only gotten to around page 24.

 

I am certainly a breadth person (I'm definitely a Gemini -jack of all trades, master of none). My daughter is too. If it gets "too deep", she gets bored unless it is an area of interest. My son can go either way. If he likes something, he's going to go deep, no matter what I do.

 

In history, we slog along chronologically. We are now in the 1800's. We are only doing two cycles because we afterschooled history for the ancients and thus took 3 years on the ancients lol. We've used Ambleside and are switching to TOG so I feel we get good "breadth." Yet I feel we get some depth too. My son (9 almost 10) is fascinated with all things military, weaponry, and strategy. He's made ring male armor, chain mail armor, taken (and still takes) historical swordsmanship classes, played almost every strategy game under the sun and is especially good at chess, recreated almost every battle we have studied, studied additional battles on his own, watched every Time Commander episode, read Art of War and discussed those strategies, is an expert at the blow gun, taken up shooting and archery and is joining a team this year, done lots of living history events at forts and battle recreations. IN short, he gets big picture history but filters it through his passion. He is so part to whole -one battle at a time and charting the evolution of war as he goes.

 

My daughter doesn't care one iota for battles and strategy, etc. Oh she takes the swordfighting class and fools around with archery because it is an offshoot of her passion, mythology and she can see herself as a modern day Xena. She prefers her history through diaries, female povs, and folk tales/mythology and doing crafts (not drums out of coffee cans though-real handicrafts-knitting, rug making, candlemaking and any kind of pottery). She also loves HGTV and learning about different styles of antiques and architecture. She and my mother did a colonial dollhouse this summer. (My parents own an antique business) and she loved it. IT was prebuilt one that my parents got an auction and they touched up though. This year, her main project is going to be building a Victorian dollhouse with her dad from a kit. SHe also loves to cook and will cook up recipes that tie in with history and culture (as long as they are vegetarian -the rest of us carnivores have to make our own meat lol). She is whole to part and visual-she had to watch the entire Liberty kids video series back to back and then go back and read.

 

So I think they get the best of both worlds -they get coverage of a lot. I do move on to next topic and they explore their interests in detail on their own (homeschooling allows a lot of time). My son will know a lot of battles, blow by blow in fact, the strategy, the major officers, the significance, the outcomes, the rulers, etc. My daughter will know a few major battles and their significance but that's about it. SHe will know more about the legends and myths and the lives of everyday people in great detail. My son will know a few key stories of the times and know that people existed and did things differently.

 

In other humanities, my son loves learning about composers and listening to many types of music, dissecting poetry, and enjoy Latin. My daughter only tolerates the bare minimum in that. She much preferred doing a museum stroll with the director of the musuem on the themes of religion in art over the course of centuries, and studying drama and folk dances. She could only endure Latin when I let her make video tapes of Latin lessons by having the Roman Gods act out the lessons. She only cares about classical music if it is connected to a ballet. However, one of the highlights of our homeschool years was when they collaborated with their gymnastics instructor to perform a Chinese Opera of Mulan with their class. My son loved choreographing the battle scenes and picking the music. My daughter loved directing it and doing the costumes.

 

My son does well with singapore going along step by step by step. He will do all the problems without complaining. Then he will go back and do Life of Fred as a review in 3 days. My daughter has trouble with that. She is much more Miquon in her learning. After Miquon, it was a marathon of Cyberchase. She watched every single episode for math lessons for several weeks and then sat down and flew through her Singapore workbook whereas before I did that we were both in tears because she just couldn't get the concepts through systematic study. I am at a loss on how to procede for pre-algebra and up. (Very open to ideas)

 

Science -I love BFSU! I think it gave a good foundation and was much more logical than one year of this and one year of that. We outgrew it though and have done more unit studies. I cover the basics and then each kids pursues their interests. We cover basic plants -my son has no interest there but gets through the lessons while my daughter joined the Junior gardeners club, working in a community garden, and studying landscape. We cover animals and classification, etc. My son enjoys them okay, really likes dinosaurs but thinks paleontology would be boring. He wants nothing to do with dissecting. My daughter loves dissecting and has shadowed vets in surgury. She has worked with dolphin trainers, horse trainers, large animal vets, reptile clubs, animal rescue groups, and does horseback riding. She could spend days at zoos and aquariums. My son wants to start horseback riding only because he wants to do jousting lol andthinks zoos and aquariums are just fun trips. My daughter tolerated simple machines and understands them, my son is in lego league and has given demonstrations on robotics at local museum, and just recently gave lessons on the use of simple machines in Leonardo Da Vinci's inventions. We did the Snap Circuit lessons which he loved and he goes with his dad to cable and rewire buildings. My daughter didn't care for it but is glad that she suffered through it because she is going to be wiring her dollhouse this year. We do a basic germs unit and my daughter is fine with that. My son gets into immunology and I have to get Captuhura to send me immunology texts because he lost me with phagocytes. So later when my daughter decides her scout troop should make blankets and baked goods to take to Ronald McDonald house, my son gives her scout troop a presentation on blood marrow transplants.

 

Reading, my daughter isn't an avid reader, though she does enjoy it from time to time. She isn't a deep reader either. She likes to read books at or right below her level and discuss general "themes" and compare them to the movie or to another book. She reads fast and can do this. I have to do an audio book in the car that is high level that forces her to listen to higher level books and do take them in slowly so she gets one or two a year that way. My son is a slow and methodical reader. He will read (and reread) a few challenging books a year but he will know them inside and out. I have to do additional read alouds with him that move at a faster pace that helps broaden his genres, catch general themes, etc.

 

I guess in some ways I am lucky that my kids are so polar opposites because they do learn from each other enough to be well-rounded. It helps me to have a good basic curriculum that I can tweak as needed, to keep moving on but schedule time in the day to pursue passions. We have a 9-4 day four times a week but 2 hours is devoted to personal projects. I schedule it in because my kids can get lazy and just turn on tv or computer. Projects can be working on a scout badge or taking an area we studied generally and studying it deeper or I will assign a particular type of project (ex-display board or lapbook but they pick interest area) or assign a science fair project (but they pick area to study) or I may pick an area of study and let them pick the project type.

 

Also, just because we learn and move on doesn't mean we revisit or "visit ahead". We covered middle ages/Renaissance two years ago, but we went to Renaissance Faires before that time and since that time. We still went to the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit in Fort Worth last week because we were there. My daughter's love of mythology lead her to a book about Super Heros and mythology (wonder woman's guide to mythology?) a few years ago and then this past year, we got netflix and she wanted to watch the wonder woman tv shows and that has given her some pegs of WWII and was enough to have her look up Nazi's on wikipedia (but we won't cover them until next school year)

 

Any I have babbled out a book here, guess I should go back and finish reading this thread.

[Capt_Uhura]

While reading an article in Newsweek July 19, 2010, on creativity decline in kids in the US, I thought of this thread. A new middle school spends 3/4 of the day in project-based learning. "And they'd unwittingly mastered Ohio's fifth-grade curriculum--from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. 'You never see our kids saying, "I'll never use this so I don't need to learn it."" Even w/out the standard textbook, learning, these kids scored in the top 3 schools in their city and enrollment was by lottery and 40% of kids are living in poverty. The author of the article was laughed at by Chinese educators when he said that the US was moving to standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. The Chinese educations remarked that we are moving to what they are leaving behind and they are moving to what we used to have. :001_huh:

 

I think the large breathe in PS has caused this decline. As a HSer, not knowing at what point DS will re-enter the PS system, you feel a need to attempt to keep up. This thread certainly has me re-thinking this as well as convincing me that perhaps I can homeschool highschool. :w00t:

[Guest]

Okay, everybody, here's a huge question for you.

 

Given the passion and interest and emotional engagement generated by this thread: does anybody think there is a market for a different kind of homeschooling book -- one written with chapters by various homeschooling parents not about their schedules or what materials they use or specific how-tos, necessarily, but about:

 

--people who are specialists in various fields talking about what skills they think are vital if you have a child really interested in this area; talking about what they think a kid should know/be able to do in that field by the end of high school; what kinds of obstacles are in the way; how to explore and nurture that child's interest outside the standard curriculum

 

--people who have kids with a strong natural bent toward either a field of knowledge or a type of learning/ neurological approach to learning. They could talk about working with a child whose mind is different from the norm and from their own, what ways the child has found to educate himself or herself, what problems they run into and how they work around them.

 

--how difficult it is to work against the conventional educational pattern on so many levels, and what parents have found whose kids have made it through

 

Do you think anyone besides us would be interested in reading something like that? Would anybody be interested in writing about it in this way? It seems to me as though there's so much thought and experience and wisdom going into this thread, it deserves a wider audience. And also, I get the feeling there are a lot of people out there desperate for a book that speaks more to the way their kids do not fit the traditional educational structure, even a supposedly alternative structure like TWTM.

[AuntPol]

While reading an article in Newsweek July 19, 2010, on creativity decline in kids in the US, I thought of this thread. A new middle school spends 3/4 of the day in project-based learning. "And they'd unwittingly mastered Ohio's fifth-grade curriculum--from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. 'You never see our kids saying, "I'll never use this so I don't need to learn it."" Even w/out the standard textbook, learning, these kids scored in the top 3 schools in their city and enrollment was by lottery and 40% of kids are living in poverty. The author of the article was laughed at by Chinese educators when he said that the US was moving to standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. The Chinese educations remarked that we are moving to what they are leaving behind and they are moving to what we used to have. :001_huh:

 

 

On the otherhand, my kids were in a PBL type of magnet school that was slightly higher in poverty level and the kids were floundering except those that suppplemented outside of school.

[Capt_Uhura]

KarenAnne - YES! I think there would be a market for that. I know of a friend w/ a son who is very similar to kids described in this thread. He was miserable in school. She tried HSing but I think it was just school at home, no different. Their relationship suffered so she put him back in school. She gave up. He has slogged along and now in high school has found a niche and is happy. I think having a book like you described would have been immensely helpful to her.

[elegantlion]

Here's another thought: Cloud children and opportunities. Right now we live where cultural opportunities are minimal (major understatement), but we're looking to move nearer to a major metropolitan area where options will be more readily available. We've never used a co-op type class and probably never will unless it aligns with our needs.

 

However, if my son develops an interest and wants to study X...let's say for arguments sake it's an interest in military aircraft used during WWII. Do you go to your network of friends and look for opportunities to enhance this learning? Do you scour your area for ways to bring that interest to life? How much legwork do you do? Obviously at 12 my son is not mature enough to search these out completely on his own. Do you excitedly research behind their backs and casually show them what you've found? I've done that out of fear of turning his new "passion" into a school thing, thereby negating all interest in said subject.

 

I guess my question is how big a part do you play in the discovery and support? It's exciting to me to read about things and experience it through a page, but I used to read the encyclopedia for fun. Do cloud children require more? Do they have to experience and learn differently? I'm not even talking about learning styles, but maybe the process to take something to its fullest.

[Guest]

Here's another thought: Cloud children and opportunities. Right now we live where cultural opportunities are minimal (major understatement), but we're looking to move nearer to a major metropolitan area where options will be more readily available. We've never used a co-op type class and probably never will unless it aligns with our needs.

 

However, if my son develops an interest and wants to study X...let's say for arguments sake it's an interest in military aircraft used during WWII. Do you go to your network of friends and look for opportunities to enhance this learning? Do you scour your area for ways to bring that interest to life? How much legwork do you do? Obviously at 12 my son is not mature enough to search these out completely on his own. Do you excitedly research behind their backs and casually show them what you've found? I've done that out of fear of turning his new "passion" into a school thing, thereby negating all interest in said subject.

 

I guess my question is how big a part do you play in the discovery and support? It's exciting to me to read about things and experience it through a page, but I used to read the encyclopedia for fun. Do cloud children require more? Do they have to experience and learn differently? I'm not even talking about learning styles, but maybe the process to take something to its fullest.

 

And wouldn't this be a great chapter for the kind of book I was talking about?

[AuntPol]

My son's book will be invisible. He is seriously intrigued with invisibility. And his book is really, really full of game rules, rules for the sort of games that have a shelf of books of rules at the library in the fantasy/scifi section.

 

That would be my child -he will read D&D and Star Wars role playing books all day long.