Book Excerpt: The First Year of Homeschooling Your Child
by Linda Dobson
INTRODUCTION
Are your palms sweating? Are you shaking in your boots? Welcome to Your First Year of Homeschooling!
And relax. Here it’s understood that you’re at least a little - or perhaps a lot - apprehensive about your ability to enjoy and succeed in homeschooling. Your apprehension puts you in good company. Although the number of homeschooling families continues to swell, I daresay only a small minority of families begins with certainty, and even fewer are completely confident of success. Like most folks new to the idea of teaching your own, you’re probably asking some form of the question: “Will homeschooling work for my family?”
Just as a doctor cannot recommend a single prescription for what ails all of his patients, no one can widely prescribe an educational option for all children. The answer to the question, then, depends largely on you. Specifically, whether or not homeschooling will work for your family is subject, to a great degree, on flexibility. Flexibility is built into the homeschooling process, so it’s only a matter of how well you bend and shape it until it fits your family. But homeschooling also requires that you limber up and increase the flexibility of your thinking about education itself so that you may comfortably unify everyday life and learning. The more flexible your thinking, the more you will be able to customize your homeschooling.
The first year of homeschooling has often been described as feeling like a leap off a cliff. If, by some chance, you feel this way right now, too, consider this book as the friendly push you might be needing to discover that you, like so many other homeschoolers, have wings.
WHO IS HELPING YOU?
When presented with the challenge to put together a book specializing in information most useful and important to the brand new homeschooling family, once again I turned to the “experts” in the field – scores of families practicing homeschooling in myriad ways who can look back on their own first years to share with you what they learned. Also once again I was gratified and humbled by their willingness to share, their candor in doing so, and their deep insight in and devotion to the homeschooling lifestyle.
Their information and advice felt like a warm arm around the shoulders, the same hug your favorite aunt gives you while explaining that your baby won’t be teething forever, and your next good night’s sleep is just around the corner.
What was the essence of their message to you?
• Yes, we made our share of mistakes.
•Yes, some days are hard – all homeschooled children don’t run off to help with chores, whistling while they work.
•Yes, there were many things we would have preferred to know before starting, but things turned out okay even though we didn’t.
• Yes, we’re just like you and it was possible to build a lifestyle we preferred because of homeschooling.
• Yes, as so well put by respondent Allison Dodrill, “The rewards, so far, are astounding.”
Anyone so moved was invited via email to respond to one or all topics addressed in this book. This narrowed the field in that the majority of responses came from those connected to national, state, or local homeschooling support via computer. An impressive number of responses, however, arrived via snail mail. Thanks to this “shot gun” approach, we’ve tapped into the experience of a wonderfully eclectic group of homeschoolers. While their differences are noted, it’s their similarities that will lead you to the best homeschooling has to offer.
WHAT’S INSIDE?
In talking with countless parents considering or new to homeschooling, a most pervasive underlying cause of trepidation becomes clear. When education takes place in the confines of a particular building (an institutional one, at that), options and choices are few; there’s not a whole lot to think about. Along comes the notion of homeschooling, and suddenly education leaves the confines of an institutional concept and bursts into the “big wide world.” A parent has a whole lot more to ponder when the educational options and choices mushroom to such immense proportions.
This is where Your First Year of Homeschooling begins.
Laying Your Homeschooling Foundation
A home needs a foundation in order to stand. A happy homeschooling experience for your family similarly includes some attention to its foundation before you start building it. Basic to that foundation is thoughtful attention to the reason you are considering homeschooling. An overview of the many reasons families turn to homeschooling will help you think about the very personal motives you bring to the decision. Your motives can guide you to start the process of bending homeschooling toward your children’s unique needs.
Next we’ll take a deeper look at some of the choices presented to you through homeschooling. When you observe your children for answers to questions about decisions on educational schedule, method, and organization, your discoveries can further lend direction to the way you might bend homeschooling. At the same time you’ll learn how looking at homeschooling as an educational experiment, as opposed to a cliff jump, keeps all of these important decisions in perspective.
Building Your First Year of Homeschooling
Many potential homeschooling parents are surprised to learn that there is no single “first step” for all. Rather, we’re going to make you your homeschooling experiment’s first “guinea pig” and show you how to gather your own research to decide your own first step. You’ll begin building your own educational philosophy, understand the laws that govern homeschooling where you live, decide how you will assess your child’s progress, and keep spending to a minimum.
Next we’ll visit educational readiness, multiple intelligences, learning styles and, because of their proliferation, learning disorders, and tie these into your homeschooling decisions. After that, you’re encouraged to begin homeschooling (now!) in whatever way makes you comfortable today, while understanding that you can easily turn homeschooling in another direction if you discover a different homeschooling approach better fills your child’s needs. To help you consider what those other directions are, nine different homeschooling methods are summarized before we peek at what a week of learning looks like for each.
Myths about homeschooling (and homeschoolers) continue. Now that you have a deeper understanding of the educational freedom inherent in the act, it’s time to reexamine half a dozen of the most persistent myths to see them for what they are.
Some readers will begin homeschooling with little ones who have never attended school; others are removing children with various amounts of school experience. We’ll cover some of the experiences all new homeschooling families have in common before addressing the specific experiences each type of homeschooling family may encounter.
Inspiration for Continued Building
Finally, we offer a rebuttal to the criticism that books about homeschooling paint too rosy a picture. Scores of respondents share the hurdles they faced in their first years so you’ll know everything hasn’t been all sunshine and lollipops. Your inspiration will come from their ability to solve their problems (and then, sorry, critics, their ability to move on with smiles on their faces!), as well as the chapter devoted to “gold medal hurdlers.” These families very well may make your own experience seem like a walk in the park by comparison.
And That’s Not All!
Chapter 13 is your homeschooling “Home Depot.” It contains resources from books to Web sites, from freeware for kiddies to information on college admissions, everything you may need to get your homeschool building project started.
There’s more. Scattered among the pages you’ll find kid tested, mother approved learning activities that experienced homeschoolers remember as their favorites. Use their ideas in your own homeschool, or as springboards to create new activities that become your family’s favorites.
Sprinkled throughout you’ll also find what may just be this book’s most precious gems. Don’t overlook the gifts that seasoned homeschoolers present by sharing “What I wish someone would have told me during my first year of homeschooling.” So much wisdom packed into brief, brilliant answers, they’re sure to entertain and enlighten.
May your family’s life together be graced with as much joy, laughter, love, and learning as have the lives of those who have gone before you.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The First Year of Homeschooling Your Child
Chapter 1
WHY ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT HOMESCHOOLING?
I wish someone had told me that it is better to jump in, get started, and learn from your mistakes than to sit worrying and trying to decide what to do, and how to do it perfectly.
~ Karyn Scallorn, Stanley, Wisconsin
So you’re thinking about homeschooling, are you? Finding more information than you could read in a month of rainy days? Afraid you will ruin your children’s minds forever if you don’t homeschool exactly the right way?
Welcome to the growing number of parents who right now are facing the same feelings, thoughts, and fears. I know the odds are good that you are thinking about homeschooling solely in terms of how your child will be educated, and that’s fine for now. I just want to give you Linda Dobson’s homeschooling equivalent to the surgeon general’s warnings: Homeschooling can – and most likely will - cause permanent changes to your family’s priorities and lifestyle.
“Homeschooling will not just bring education back into the home,” says Laurae Lyster-Mensh, of Warrenton, Virginia, even while noting that new homeschoolers probably are not ready to hear this at first. “The whole experience of stepping out into the unknown requires such a feisty and independent nature that we are often far more in need of an ear than ready to listen in that first, exhilarating year.”
Even if you are the new homeschooler Laurae is talking about, I hope you can listen for just a moment, anyway.
That homeschooling will change your lifestyle is as inevitable as night following day, and while you may not believe it right now, folks almost unanimously say that these changes are much more important benefits of homeschooling than the grandest of academic achievements.
Today chances are better than ever that you’re considering homeschooling before you have children, while pregnant, or still nursing your precious little one. Maybe your child’s kindergarten registration deadline is approaching and it’s “decision time.” You might be joining parents of teen children who are bored or turned off by school attendance.
Yours could be a family spending so much time on homework that you figure you might as well be homeschooling. Or a family traveling a lot. Or a family simply concluding that you’d like to be there when your children read their first sentences or to watch in wonder as a butterfly emerges from its cocoon.
Whatever reasons brought you to this point they are good and valid ones, regardless of what others may say to the contrary. No one else on earth knows your child as well as you do, or cares as much about the experiences that fill his time. Preparing food for his mind and heart is no less worthy of your time and attention than preparing food for his body.
Getting What Your Child Needs From Homeschooling
Consider this chapter a primer to help ensure that your family gets what you need from homeschooling based on your reasons for doing so. While reasons for homeschooling are as wonderfully diverse as the families who practice it, they tend to fall into four roughly defined categories. Folks come to homeschooling proactively, reactively, reluctantly, or temporarily. We’re about to take a closer look at reasons to homeschool within these contexts.
Experienced homeschoolers not only share the reasons their families came to homeschooling, but they also reveal the route their homeschooling took as a result of their reasons. In other words, you’ll get a glimpse at how they “shaped” homeschooling to provide exactly what they needed.
If you realize from the get-go that homeschooling doesn’t have to mean “school at home,” if you understand that love for your children will see you through, and if you realize that homeschooling can “fit” a wide variety of family circumstances and needs, this crash course will get your wheels turning in the right direction, helping you discover early on how you, too, can get the most out of your homeschooling experience.
Homeschooling Proactively
Are you one of those parents who was just plain smitten with the idea of homeschooling from the moment you heard of it? For some, the idea of sharing learning by sharing life together just feels so right. Other parents find easy philosophical agreement with the notions of freedom and individuality inherent in homeschooling. Still others find that the conditioning conducted under the auspices of public education only proves that government schools are succeeding in their mission to create compliant workers who question little and become the good consumers that keep the nation’s economic wheels turning.
“We first heard of homeschooling when our eldest was but a few months old,” remembers homeschooling dad Jim Henderson. “We were quite intrigued. We had philosophical concerns about public school, including low standards and complete lack of parental control. When arbitrary age rules precluded our academically prepared son from entering public school kindergarten we began homeschooling half thinking that if it didn’t work out we’d just put him in kindergarten the next year. Homeschooling worked fabulously, though, and we’d never consider doing it any other way.”
“We’ve since discovered additional benefits,” Jim notes. “It’s much more efficient, it’s more tailored to the individual student, and it provides a consistent and flexible curriculum. As a military family we move every 1 to 3 years,” he explains. “Having little concern for the quality of school districts in new places widens our assignment possibilities and removes one consideration when looking for a house. We don’t have to worry about whether the new district is ahead or behind a previous one, and we don’t have to schedule our moves for summer or Christmas break.”
It was through work as librarian and tutor before the birth of her first child in 1993 that Deb Baker found philosophical agreement with homeschooling. “I helped out at the library during the hectic after school hours,” says Deb. “So many of the children grumbled about homework, teachers, and other school related topics. Studious children were sometimes teased and taunted. The girl I tutored in phonics understood it all, but she hated the repetitive work and was shy about singing the silly phonics song in class. I wondered if she’d end up like the kids I saw at the library, more interested in which kids were currently ‘in’ than in which books were a good read.
“Then a patron came in and asked about books on homeschooling,” continues Deb. “I’d never heard of it, but while helping the patron I grabbed a book, too, the Colfaxes’ Homeschooling for Excellence. Everything in it rang true, and I wondered if homeschooling could prevent the indifference toward learning that I witnessed in the after school crowd at the library.”
Deb concludes, “When we talk about homeschooling today, we’re amazed at how many people agree that they didn’t learn much in school, that school teaches kids to pass the test and move rather than explore and investigate and inquire, that school can be very damaging to tender emotions and that it can harm healthy social development.”
Your reasons to homeschool may be closer to those of Lynn Foster who homeschools two “early years” sons in Smithville, Indiana after discovering homeschooling when her mother searched for an educational alternative for her younger sister. “Because my sister was having major health problems, because I had in the past, and my son had started, as well, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Nicholas would be sick all the time in public school,” says Lynn. “I began learning all I could and, in the learning, fell in love with the whole concept.”
“I liked the idea of being with my kids,” she continues, “being free to teach them Bible, being able to have a flexible schedule, learning as our interests prod us. We’ve homeschooled for over a year on a preschool level and love it! I have really gotten to know my sons and myself. I learn right along with my preschooler as I pick up on his enthusiasm and natural curiosity.”
Washington’s Sarah Rose explains how proactive reasons to homeschool can blend with reactive ones, even as the reasons change with time and experience. Sarah was attracted to homeschooling because she had hated school until she went to college. She stresses, “The one reason we did not have was to isolate our children from the ‘real world.’ However, as the years went on,” she adds, “that reason came to be more important than we originally thought.”
Sarah also wanted to share life’s fun and “little things” with her own children. “I couldn’t imagine missing the excitement of learning to read, write stories, do science experiments, go on field trips,” she says.
There’s more, though. “Our oldest boy was six kinds of difficult, and I knew if we put him in school he would be labeled and possibly go on to become real trouble. At the age of two he spent two mornings a week in a parent co-op preschool, and it was way too much stimulation for him,” Sarah continues. “For our family, homeschooling solved problems, and provided me with a way to have a solid influence in my children’s lives.”
I admit I have a favorite proactive reason for homeschooling, and many respondents proved this reason is still alive and well. Susan, who homeschools with her family in Wisconsin, shares a story proving homeschooling children are often its best advertisements.
“We were often in the company of a family we enjoyed very much,” she says. “Their youngest child was about the same age as our oldest. It took me a while, but one day, out of the blue, I realized that their oldest child was ‘school-aged’ and not in school. When I asked his mother about this,” Susan explains, “she told me about homeschooling. Because we really liked and respected this family, we took their ideas to heart and read the books they gently recommended. We were convinced immediately.”
See this chapter continued in The First Year of Homeschooling in our next issue or buy the book!
About the author:
Linda Dobson and family began their homeschooling journey in 1985. They were having so much fun together that she wanted to share news of this educational approach with as many other families as possible. She co-founded a local homeschooling support group that now offers regular meetings and learning activities to a growing membership. She helped found and for the first two years served as coordinator of the New York (State) Home Educators’ Network. Upon creation of the National Home Education Network (NHEN) in 1999 she served as its first public relations advisor as a media contact providing reporters, journalists, and researchers with background information and interviews. She was also Homeschool.com’s early years’ advisor.
Linda’s articles have appeared in dozens of magazines, including Good Housekeeping, but her favorite stint was as Home Education Magazine news reporter and analyst for almost a decade. She still regularly contributes a commentary column, “Notes from the Road Less Traveled,” and is acting columns editor. She has authored eight books, and contributed essays and forewords to many more.
As she became home education’s most prolific author and vocal spokesperson, Linda emerged as a nationally respected conference keynote speaker. She has traveled the country, staying in touch with parental concerns and educational approaches across the U.S. and Canada. Formerly a short-term academic tutor for children, she also counseled parents of traditionally schooled children, as she believes that parental involvement is essential to educational success and can occur no matter where a child learns. She was also an online course instructor for Barnes & Noble University.
Life isn’t all work, fortunately! She moved to be close to Florida’s Gulf coast and has started a non-profit volunteer program and a non-profit economic revitalization corporation. She’s a fanatical – if lousy – golfer, an avid Beatles fan, and grandmother of three beautiful girls, including a set of twins.
PUBLICATIONS
• The Art of Education: Reclaiming Your Family, Community and Self (Home Education Press, 1995; revised Holt Associates, 1997)
• The Homeschooling Book of Answers: The 88 Most Important Questions Answered by Homeschooling’s Most Respected Voices (Prima Publishing, 1998, revised 2002)
• Also published in Japan with the same title.
• Homeschooling the Early Years: Your Complete Guide to Successfully Homeschooling the 3- to 8-Year-Old Child (Prima Publishing, 1999)
• Homeschoolers’ Success Stories: 15 Adults and 12 Young People Share the Impact That Homeschooling Has Made on Their Lives (Prima Publishing, 2000)
• The First Year of Homeschooling Your Child: Your Complete Guide to Getting Off to the Right Start (Prima Publishing, 2001)
• The Ultimate Book of Homeschooling Ideas: 500+ Fun and Creative Learning Activities for Kids Ages 3-12 (Prima Publishing, 2002)
• What the Rest of Us Can Learn From Homeschooling: How A+ Parents Can Give Their Traditionally Schooled Kids the Academic Edge (Three Rivers Press/Random House, 2003)
