Family Times - Fundamentals of Homeschooling

From the Foreword of Fundamentals of Homeschooling
by Linda Dobson

Can an act seemingly as complex as educating one's children at home really be reduced to the four remarkably simple elements outlined in this book - play, conversation, togetherness, and growing up? Like the author of this book I, too, can look back at the homeschooling experience and offer an unequivocal yes!

Believe me, I know the concept is hard to grasp. It goes against everything we were programmed to believe during our years in traditional school settings. The concept begins to make sense, however, when we take a moment to look at what the word "educate" really means. Despite our many shared school experiences, such as sitting in a classroom where, like a pitcher, a teacher dispensed knowledge into all of the little cups sitting in rows before her and they later poured out the acquired knowledge on to test papers, the intent of the word "educate" isn't "to put in." In fact, it means just the opposite. Educere, the Latin root of educate, means "to lead out."

If we consider education in this perspective, the perspective much truer to education’s purpose, what better opportunities exist for parents "to lead out," or educate their children, than play, conversation, togetherness, and growing up?

In her opening note, Ann Lahrson-Fisher describes successful homeschooling's simple foundation as "living a satisfying learning lifestyle." Education characterized as a learning lifestyle instead of an ordeal to survive until you make it to the welcome reprieve of summer vacation. Success defined in terms of satisfaction instead of things. A family that plays, converses, and grows up together. Ah, yes, homeschooling is so different from – and so much more than – schooling at home.

Lucky are the families newly turning to homeschooling, not only to have access to the wisdom of one who has "been there and done that," but also to receive that wisdom so neatly presented in a down-to-earth, common sense package as the one Fundamentals of Homeschooling has grown to be. Some of the ideas will leave you wondering "Now, why didn't I think of that?" Others will be revelations that because of our own schooling you wouldn't have considered in a million years. All of the ideas are born of the author's experience, remembrances of the good and the bad, the personal successes, and lessons learned from the failures.

And that, dear reader, is what learning is all about.

Linda Dobson, author

A Note From the Author, Ann Lahrson-Fisher

This Book is About Habits
Here is a thumbnail sketch of the contents of this book.

Play

Parents who homeschool with the greatest success love to play with their children. They learn to protect children’s playtime. They appreciate how much learning results from many kinds of play. Play allows the spark of creative insight to flame – a most powerful learning tool.

Conversation

Parents who homeschool love to talk and listen to their kids. Conversation includes all communications – oral, written, and mathematical. Parents encourage and guide their children to love learning through daily conversation. Conversation builds strong families through the oral tradition of passing culture and information from one generation to the next.

Togetherness

Parents who homeschool love to hang out, go places, and do things with their children – together. This section explores several important family togetherness issues, and tips for coping with differing ages and stages. Togetherness suggests a process of staying connected with family and loved ones, building community, and learning to live with others in the wider world.

Growing Up

Parents who homeschool find ways to celebrate or otherwise note the myriad steps of growing up in a way that is consistent with a homeschooling lifestyle. Accomplishments, culminating events, rites of passage, and celebrations memorialize the path to maturity and independence. In this section, we’ll discuss some of the issues of concern that are often part of our modern coming-of-age experience, such as test-taking, college, and decisions about work. Growing Up, including ordinary family activities and those activities that others hand over to schools, are those
activities that celebrate the seasons of their lives.

( The following is excerpted from Part II - Conversations)

Conversations - optimal learning through family chit-chat

Besides play, what else do successful parents do with their children? Well, for one thing, they talk, and they talk, and they talk!

This constant stream of interactions one reason successful homeschooling parents love homeschooling. They love listening to the arguments, the debates, the rambling stories, the wheedling, the screams and shouts, the silly jokes, the budding sarcasm, and the battles of will.

Don’t be misled by the occasional parent who complains, tongue-in-cheek, that their children talk all day long. Deep down parents love it, Daddies delight in telling and reading stories, singing silly songs, and making up goofy games. The flubs of children tackling tricky new words trigger fits of mommy-glee.

Talk permeates every activity and parents constantly demonstrate conversational interaction to their children. If not for the fact that parents listen so carefully, you might think they loved the sound of their own voices!

For whatever reason, we learn through conversation, and increased conversational skill is essential to successful learning. To make sure you know where I am coming from on this point, let’s assume for a moment that all knowledge can be thought of as conversation.

Knowledge as Conversation

In this conversational model of learning, the bubbling stream of family chatter allows knowledge to flow. I sometimes think of speaking and listening as a delivery system for knowledge. However you hold the idea, let’s expand a bit on the notion of knowledge as conversation.

The conversations that define the collected knowledge of humanity are recorded in widely varied media. Ancient tales of prehistory are told through fossil remains, artifacts, and engraved stone. Books, letters and original documents are the modern versions of collecting and preserving information. Photographs further expand the availability of history’s more recent conversations to a wide audience. Rapidly increasing access to technology brings conversations through electronic media such as radio, television, audio and video, fax, computer software and Internet access. The types of media through which we access knowledge also grow at an astonishing rate.

Usually, we think of conversations as verbal interchanges that take place right here and right now. It is not a big stretch, though, to see that books and relics can be thought of as conversations that take place between the writer (creator) and the reader (learner) over time and space.
For example:

• Fiction or literary books record the art of the storyteller. The author may use storytelling as a way to convey more than an interesting story. he may include a metaphorical message or a timeless truth of the human condition. When the stories are recorded on tape by a favorite author, we step closer to an actual conversation with that person. A play is a more complex conversation, written by one speaker/writer, ten interpreted by others – actors, directors, and producers –for an audience of listeners.

• Music is a complex conversation of high emotional content. Consider Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Already deaf, Beethoven translated the music he heard in his head into a written musical code. The musical notes are then read from sheet music by skilled instrumentalists whose interpretation is directed by a conductor. Upon hearing a performance of the Symphony, we share a conversation with Beethoven as interpreted by the orchestra. What a miraculous conversation!

• A work of art can be thought of as a conversation. The artist’s ideas are captured in physical and visual form that viewers can interpret according to their own level of understanding. Whether in paint, sculpture, or other form, a gifted artist tells a story with power and beauty.

• Architecture, the styling of buildings and homes, tells a story. A gifted builder’s understanding and use of materials speak powerfully and wordlessly. Steeply sloped roofs speak of snow and ice, wind and cold. Adobe homes bring visions of hot deserts and cool interiors tucked behind thick walls. Tepees, tents, and yurts bring nomadic living to the mind. A builder’s values may be captured in his or her work. Synagogues, churches, mosques, temples, and cathedrals echo, in the eye and ear of the mind, or ritual, music, faith, and the grandeur of the world’s great religions.

• Museums are vast collections of past conversations. Collections of specimens, such as stamps, insects, rocks, and art, are physical demonstrations of patterns of knowledge. Think of the conversation between the collector and the viewer, again, across space and time. The collector presents knowledge in such a way that a viewer can learn from it.

More examples you might want to explore:

• Archaeology is a conversation with/about the past.
• Biology is a conversation with/about living things, past or present.
• Astronomy is a conversation with/about space.
• Theology is a conversation about spiritual belief.
• Mathematics is a conversation, using a specialized language, about the nature of the universe.
Books of nonfiction are perhaps the most familiar repository of information. These resources retell factual knowledge or opinion, creating a conversation between the author and reader in another time or place. Published journals and diaries are the self-talk of individuals. Some books are collections of a broad range of standard information, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias. Magazines, newspapers, Internet sites, video, and audiotapes record recent contemporary conversations.

To stretch a metaphor even more, common items have a story to tell What does a yellow Dixon Ticonderoga soft lead pencil have to say? A highlighter pen, chewing gum, bicycle, and rice cooker all tell a story if we care to seek it out. No matter how far we take the metaphor, the best access to knowledge is available through conversation. Parents are the perfect ones to teach conversational skill.

Bridging Conversations

Parents rarely think about the fact that knowledge is shared through conversation – they just do what works. Parents rarely think about how children learn to speak and listen – they just do what works. And why not, when what works best is such a powerful tool – the tool of common family conversation?

Everyday talk is so natural and normal that it is rarely recognized as the incredible and respectable tool it is. When we as parents begin to notice family conversations, though, we discover that nothing draws a child out more powerfully than daily conversations with his parents.

With very little effort on anyone’s part, conversations between parent and children fling open the head gates of curiosity. Parents develop bridging conversations to help their children move from baby babble to sophisticated communications skills.

Parents know how to create effective bridging conversations – but how? Their children teach them! Step-by-step and day-by-day, conversational skill grows through practice and through all those delicious little lisps, goofs, and mispronunciations that make parenting a young child such a hoot.

You don’t need me to tell you how to talk to your kids. As long as you enjoy talking and interacting with your children, they are learning. Here are some of the basic conversational patterns that I have noticed again and again in successful homeschooling families.

Interpersonal Conversations

Interpersonal conversation – dialogue – is a most effective method of learning.
Did you put your toys away? ?No, I forgot!? the clearest and simplest conversations of daily life clarify understanding. On the foundation of such basic interactions, children build their ability to understand and interpret meaning. In time skill develops so they can grasp the complex communications that explore the nature of the universe.

As children build their skills, interpersonal conversations can be enjoyed through varied media – written correspondence, e-mail, photos, videotape, audio recordings, drawings, and cartoons. These have the advantage of taking place over time and space, allowing each participant time to think out his comments and to record them carefully. Reading and writing – the process of translating ideas into and out of print – hone communication skills.

Dialogue is efficient: there are two minds to bounce ideas around; you are both there to check and double check the information. Error correction can be instantaneous when one person questions and the other has knowledge to share. Dialogues between individuals who care about one another make the exchange satisfying on several levels.

Dialogues, besides being the usual conversations in families, are the basis of efficient and effective tutoring. Even if your child doesn’t care that much about learning to subtract, at least she gets to have some fun with her dad. That is often enough to motivate learning.

Family-Sized Group Conversations

As children grow older, they benefit from learning experiences outside the family with a social group, class, or learning circle.

Workshops, study circles, and book clubs are examples of groups where students learn from some different kinds of two-way dialogues. In t his type of setting, conversations between each child and the teacher/leader are most common. While students interact with a variety of others, group dynamics usually require that some listen more while others speak. Students increase their conversational skills by listening to others speak.

Learning through group conversations often seems time consuming, as time is taken for individuals to make and explain points. That extra time is counterbalanced, though, by the benefits of learning from ideas of others, learning patience, and formulating one’s own ideas before speaking.
Group learning does suffer a drawback when the group grows too large. While some individuals thrive in the spotlight that a larger group offers, speaking more frequently and/or longer, perhaps dominating the conversation, that advantage may come at the expense of others. quieter students often fade into the background, content to listen without engaging. And depending on who is in t he group, even a group of three can be too large!

The conversational pattern that develops in groups needs to be well understood. If you are to assure that your child develops conversational skills, she needs the chance to participate frequently and fully.

Most children learn to converse best either in one-to-one conversation or in very small groups. And wouldn’t you know it? When a child pulls back in a group, the size of the group has usually swelled beyond ?family-sized.? If you wonder whether the size of a group works for your child, sit in once or twice and you will easily be able to see if your child is learning speaking skills or simply being an audience for others.

A flaw of crowded classroom schooling is its inevitable failure to help all children develop strong interpersonal conversational skills. Classroom schooling pushes too many children into too-large groups too early in their lives for too many hours in the day. Conversational skill development is stopped cold. Children learn to sit and listen to the teacher at the very time they should be developing their own one-on-one conversational skills. The teacher talks and silent, stifled students listen. Self-stifling, as taught to children in group settings, is at once damaging and wrong-headed.

Homeschooling offers the extraordinary advantage of allowing children to develop conversational skills naturally through their daily experiences – talking and listening - with parents, family, and friends.

Reprinted with permission.
Fundamentals of Homeschooling - Notes on Successful Family Living by Ann Lahrson-Fisher.
430 pages ($24.95)
Published by Nettlepatch Press. P.O. Box 1279, Carson, WA 98610
For more information visit the web site: http://www.nettlepatch.net/homeschool