Alternative Year

[Tsutsie]

After reading and re-reading quark's post on an alternative 6th grade year for her son (2 years ago,) I'm very inspired by the idea.

 

However, we have always followed a WTM-styl of doing things and deviating from that makes me uncomfortable. I'm scared that we will miss something important or that my kids (who are years ahead) will fall behind. I'm nervous that I'm using the idea of a easier year because I'm tired, and also tired of doing the same things over and over (a little ADD here.)

 

How do I make the most of such a year? How much activity to I enforce or guide them towards? Do I still schedule some subject areas? How do I make sure that it does not turn into a year where they sit around and spend all their time watching yourtube videos.

 

I'm looking for an "It will all be OK, do it!" response from y'all.

 

My son will be in 6th, and my daughter in 4th. 

Edited January 20, 2016 by Tsutsie

[Arcadia]

What is your baseline? What do you hope to achieve?

 

When we left the public charter, my kids were 4th and 5th. Since we don't need to show progress or give work samples anymore, I let my kids have full rein over their academics other than they need to do "something" for english, math, music, art and PE. What and how is up to them.

 

We have a limit on screen time for gaming and we watch YouTube together on the TV screen.

 

So for english, oldest just read through his 5th grade year whatever he can find at the library. His grammar, vocabulary and reading comprehension are decent so I didn't see any need for bookwork. My youngest use a vocabulary and grammar workbook because he finds it easier than to learn intrinsically by lots of reading.

 

Math, they opt to continue with AoPS books but not the online class last academic year. They go at their own pace.

 

Science we just went interest led and they signed up for homeschool classes and park activities that they liked. They read books, watch documentaries, try stuff, search for answers on the internet.

 

How much you guide depend on your kids. My youngest needs redirection because he gets easily distracted. So he can go to the kitchen and forgot why he went there. My oldest is just intense and focus on whatever his task is. I have to remind both my kids to get some physical exercise because its low on their lists.

 

Both didn't backslide academically. Oldest is spurting again physically and academically. Our (hubby and I) baseline is that as long as they make a year's progress approximately we would rather they maintain their love of learning.

 

My oldest likes structure and routine. So from the outside it looks like school at home. However everything is what he pick which means history doesn't get done, art is whatever they choose to learn and literature does not have written output. Current affairs get done because we watch the 9pm news together.

[EndOfOrdinary]

I have let my son step away from academic pursuits last year-ish. This year we are back on the horse, but previously, the idea was for him to begin to harness his internal motivation. If no one lets go of you, you never know what you can do, or how to ask for help, or even when to ask for help before you wind up in a major pickle.

 

It was hard. Like crazy hard for me. My fears were the same as yours.

 

The Year of Age 8, Ds studied kids and how to be normal. I could directly quantify growth. He went about it like a total scientist. It was very easily school.

 

The Year of Age 9ish to 10ish was much different. I stepped back and let Ds begin to self regulate. I cannot quantify what happened exactly. I know he got through a math book and a half. I know he learned how to write an essay. Somewhere in there he memorized the periodic table and did a big chunk of chemistry. Greek was dropped, Spanish flourished, Latin was jumpstarted and died more than once. But it was a messy year. It was an emotional year.

 

The Year of Age 11 has taken off. Ds has so much more emotional understanding of himself. He is much better at expressing that he is relying on his potential rather than investing himself (his words). He expressed two months ago that procrastination really increased his anxiety and made him so stressed he self sabotaged (again, his words). After four months of me being hands off with piano, he openly asked for my help because he "couldn't do it on his own and had more experience." That would have not happened a year ago. Somewhere in that messy year my son figured out that learning was not so much about information, but more about the student.

 

By no means does he have it all figured out, but I am very glad I let go. During the whole crazy experiment, I was not as faithful it would work. Now, I encourage parents to do it as long as they are willing to really let go and have their kids flounder a bit.

[quark]

After reading and re-reading quark's post on an alternative 6th grade year for her son (2 years ago,) I'm very inspired by the idea.

 

However, we have always followed a WTM-styl of doing things and deviating from that makes me uncomfortable. I'm scared that we will miss something important or that my kids (who are years ahead) will fall behind. I'm nervous that I'm using the idea of a easier year because I'm tired, and also tired of doing the same things over and over (a little ADD here.)

 

How do I make the most of such a year? How much activity to I enforce or guide them towards? Do I still schedule some subject areas? How do I make sure that it does not turn into a year where they sit around and spend all their time watching yourtube videos.

 

I'm looking for an "It will all be OK, do it!" response from y'all.

 

My son will be in 6th, and my daughter in 4th. 

 

I have to confess that our year didn't end up being the way I had envisioned it. We didn't build the boat in the end. DS is not a builder (was not keen on legos like some kids are here, for example) and I guess it was my own wish to do some building that made me so excited about Nan's ideas. The year was alternative in a sense but only because we were always a little alternative from about our second year of homeschooling. I was already very aware then that we were not going to be successful WTM-ers so I had to come up with other ideas. 

 

What we did end up doing was quite academic but only because that's how my DS functions. If he asks for more free time and I give it to him, he'd end up choosing books to read or more math to do or science videos to watch or TED talks to ponder. These are the choices he makes freely. He is actually the perfect kid for unschooling but I didn't dare to unschool due to my own insecurities. What we did end up doing was unschooling part of 6th grade but with his academic focus it might not look like what unschooling looks to everyone else. It was a flavor of unschooling anyway because it was much more heavily child driven and by the end of the year, I felt more confident that he was ready to dictate most of what our homeschooling was going to look like from then on.

 

So what did we do? If memory serves, he certainly did continue with math (algebra 2 and group theory with the tutor we were using at the time), german and piano like I had hoped. Piano ended up being so great because our music school reinstated a jazz band program that they had introduced 2 years before and DS was the keyboardist, belting out improvisations he will definitely cringe over today if he re-watched the videos lol (he has much more music theory under his belt now than he did then). For science, we opted to go no labs and just pick something very fun to get into. I had heard a lot of good reviews about Thinkwell's Biology and DS loved the presenter's goofy style. So I bought that for 50% off (Homeschool Buyers Coop) and he watched a little bit every day during lunch or in the evenings when he was free and finished all but the final chapter. For history, we continued to unschool with audiobooks in the car, free time reading, great courses (didn't finish any of the history titles except for the lit/ ancient history unit we did with Vandiver's Odyssey and Aeneid which he loved). And he did read Godel, Escher and Bach later that year but I think he stopped about two thirds of the way through.

 

I think the best take away for the year was Literature. He read and re-read Fagles' translations of the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. He immersed himself even more deeply into Shakespeare and practically memorized Hamlet. Then binge watched BBC's Hamlet (the one with David Tennant, our favorite Dr Who) over and over and over again. He presented some excerpts of Shakespeare to our local homeschoolers, read, watched and listened to Shakespeare themed books and audiobooks (e.g. Bill Byrson, Ben Crystal) and then after getting his fill of Shakespeare, jumped into a Dickens frenzy and finished about 5 novels. I didn't bother him with written analysis. We just talked and talked and talked. And discussed comparisons with other authors he was reading. He re-read a bunch of Tolkien tomes as well and learned Quenyan linguistics for about 6 months from a guy who consulted for the LOTR trilogy (thanks to another mom who organized it, and might I add 70 miles away from where we lived!).

 

So it was alternative but not the type I had hoped. Perhaps it ended up being better than what I could have planned! What is clear is that I couldn't have planned it this way and made it as meaningful as the year turned out for him.

 

My thoughts:

1. You really won't know until you try. Maybe your kids will hate an alternative year. Maybe they'll grab it by the horns and turn it into something else.

2. As my son was learning, I noticed so much more ownership than the years when I tried to plan a whole sequence of study. It was bewildering and humbling and fascinating to watch the way he took charge of the time given to him. There were definitely days when I hoped for more...but there were also days when I couldn't keep up with his reading and had to abandon pre-reading everything but in a good way.

3. So much of the school I used to plan for him before this...so much of it had very little relevance to the kind of power and depth that self-propelled learning has. I am not advocating unschooling or alternative learning for everyone. I think what I am trying to say is have faith and trust in the process. You know your children best so don't feel bad about creating a plan (even if they don't follow it) that makes all of you uncomfortable for a while. When you inch (you don't have to leap, just inch) out of your comfort zone, you get a clearer idea of what the boundaries of your comfort zone are. But you have to be be willing to walk on that thin boundary first before you can know this.

 

Some of what he did had a schedule and that was very helpful. He doesn't do well with a total no structure plan. The math and german gave him the bare bones of structure to keep every day somewhat sane. He chose to add more structure by religiously watching Thinkwell and making a routine of it. The other things just came in and filled up the spaces. There was no grammar instruction during this time. No handholding for writing (he wrote parts of short stories but that was it, he did write a lot of math proofs). Grammar and writing and sometimes history are the things we end up leaving out anyway because they seem to be best introduced in a more haphazard way here.

 

My one regret...I should have done more writing with him...but it's a tiny regret. Ability wise the year didn't hold him back at all. I think having the break from too much structure was very good for him. It gave him time to think, for concepts to steep longer and start making connections.

 

You can do this by trying it for one week. Just one week. If it doesn't work, just go back to what makes you comfortable.

Edited January 22, 2016 by quark

[SeaConquest]

Quark, looking back through your journey, I too have been inspired by your unschooly approach. My problem with letting go is that I'm afraid Sacha will just play Minecraft, Splatoon, and watch Stampy videos all day, if left to his own devices. He gets his work done with me without any issues (usually), and seems to not be bothered by our schedule, but I so dream of having a child like yours. What to do...??

[quark]

Quark, looking back through your journey, I too have been inspired by your unschooly approach. My problem with letting go is that I'm afraid Sacha will just play Minecraft, Splatoon, and watch Stampy videos all day, if left to his own devices. He gets his work done with me without any issues (usually), and seems to not be bothered by our schedule, but I so dream of having a child like yours. What to do...??

 

Don't make Minecraft, Splatoon or Stampy or anything similar available. That's the simplest thing I can think of, sorry. :)

 

OR, do the opposite and let him get sick of them in his own time. That has worked for some families I know. One family I know learned that Minecraft really WAS their child's passion and supported him and he has been doing some very cool projects with it (Hollywood level) now as a young teen.

 

Whichever path you choose is going to take a lot of faith and some fighting. But isn't that life? (Sorry to wax philosophical, kiddo has been full of  life metaphors lately lol...OT -- today he asked me why life is like a chihuahua...apparently because life is short and frequently nasty...ha! He's not a fan of chis).

Edited January 22, 2016 by quark

[Tsutsie]

Thank you for your thorough reply quark - you gave me much to think about.