Month: August 2018

Elsa and Renee are two parents who use no curriculum at all and both of them have always homeschooled their girls. Their backgrounds and educational credentials differ, as do the lenses through which they view learning. But they both have chosen a learning style without a structured curriculum.

Elsa’s girls have attended a number of classes like theatre and homeschooling co-ops, but they have had no curriculum to speak of, not even textbooks. Elsa’s philosophy of learning for her girls pretty much explains why there is no curriculum.

I’ve become even more comfortable and trusting in the process of them exploring what is meaningful and interesting to them. At this time of year, when kiddos are going off to school, I’m really happy that Annette and Caden have the opportunity to have more of a free childhood and life to develop their potential because they’re not having to do things that are being set for them to do, that they don’t have any interest in.

This family provides a view of a context where the learning is almost entirely child-led.

 Renee is a teacher. She has a carefully thought-out approach to learning that appears to discredit ‘learning from a book’; even more, learning from a highly structure curriculum that describes how and what to learn. She wants her girls to immerse themselves in their world and figure things out within that context.

When we’re walking down the street and I see a word on a van, I say Let’s try to figure out this word. It’s right there. I want them to realize that you can learn anywhere, you can learn while you’re sitting in the backseat of the car, whether you look at billboards or license plates. You can be at home and find anything on the dining room table and learn about it. My philosophy is I want my kids to not just open up this one book to page 17 and be able to read it and answer the question…I want them to look at someone’s shirt and know that man traveled to Hawaii based on what was on his shirt.

Anything in their life becomes their “curriculum.” Renee’s kids have done post card exchanges. She encourages her children to read newspapers. They have learned about writing letters to the editor of newspapers and even composed a few. They also take field trips to the local theatre, shows and dance. The dance company provides packets of information and Renee might use that as a word search for her younger children or have her older girls write up a summary. She may provide an interesting picture and have them write a story about it. Their family writes collaborative stories. Renee plays a crucial role in structuring the learning environment for her children.

While both families avoid curriculums, their approaches differ, Elsa’s being child-led learning and Renee’s being parent-led learning. I’m interested in examining the progress of Elsa’s children, leading their own search for knowledge. Infants and toddlers are so successful at learning, and they are primarily self-led. At some point parents and teachers take over and guide them along. As a culture we have come to rely on that approach, the well-established trail that educators have created. I am also interested how Renee’s children’s progress, with Renee doing much more of the guiding, but along such a different track than traditional schools.

 

As I finish up my first round of analyzing the data from five years of research I am profoundly struck by how different each homeschooling story is. For those novices to homeschooling, I beg you not to think you know what is going on when you hear someone say homeschooling. These stories I present about how curriculum is or isn’t used in these fourteen homeschools have required me to describe something entirely different every time!

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I sat down today to report on Elizabeth’s data, thinking here’s a family who used lots of curriculum. I realize I am right, they did, but oh my goodness, Elizabeth never bought any curriculum, the ones her girls used were all different and often child-managed. Elizabeth was a parent who delighted in homeschooling and came up with lots of non-curriculum fun ideas helping her daughters select books, engaging in literary discussions, organizing writing projects and they would have regular tea parties where they shared poetry they loved.

Adjusting the learning environment to meet children’s needs is much easier when homeschooling, and Elizabeth took great advantage of this benefit. Her youngest daughter, Ella, loved the outdoors, nature and animals. Ella put a tent in the backyard and slept in it for almost a full year, including the winter,

She slept outside. Periodically she will do about a four- or five-day stint where she doesn’t eat anything except for what she can forage for or catch herself. So, she knows what bark you can eat, what leaves you can eat. She knows what kind of weed makes a seed which she found in our yard and she mashed it up and fried it and it turned into a salt substitute, and then this other plant she got that you can make a paste with for pancakes. So, she made pancakes with stuff she found. She fried up earth worms and ate them one day. I mean this is her. 

Ella also loves animals. She earned money babysitting, so she could buy and fill three huge fish tanks. She also has a ball python, a bearded dragon, two fire-bellied toads, and a rabbit. My mother got her a turtle. Ella was very upset because the turtle’s tank was too small, so she nagged my mother until she got her a bigger tank from Craig’s list.

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The question remains, is following a curriculum necessary for success in school? Elizabeth’s girls are older. My dissertation, the first year of this study, had focused on Ella, her youngest daughter, but all her girls had all been homeschooled and throughout these five years the older girls provide early measures of ‘success’, particularly using a more traditional heuristic*.

Bethany, the oldest, homeschooled from 3^rd to 8^th grade. She attended a local private high school and then received a Psychology degree from a local college with a merit scholarship. She works at a day care and is considering graduate school or a fuller job at the daycare.

Patrice, the next oldest, homeschooled for 2^nd through 12^th grade. She worked her way through high school, pretty much self-managing her own learning, using the same textbooks the local school was using. She received a full scholarship to Jacob’s School of Music in Indiana, and now is attending graduate school in music with a full scholarship plus stipend for living expenses at Notre Dame.

Kendra was homeschooled 3^rd through 8^th, skipped 9^th grade and attended 10th – 12^th grades at the local private high school. She attended the local college with a merit scholarship for two years and has transferred to Temple University.

Ella has homeschooled from 3^rd through 10^th grade.  She did try the first semester of her freshman year at high school, and that didn’t work out well, so she returned home to finish out the year,

Ella has been very much on her own this year. I would say she’s unschooling except that she is doing work that I think she feels I’m requiring her to do, so maybe that wouldn’t be called unschooling, technically, because she’s not just doing whatever she wants. But she’s largely doing whatever she wants with the pressure with knowing that we have to see an evaluator, so she better have something.

Ella is very into her music. Mostly she does research. She researches various pieces of music, of classical music, and she also does a lot of composing. She’s participating in Bryn Athyn Orchestra, Bucks County Youth Orchestra, the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra, an ensemble group and her cello lessons. So, she has all these five things that she goes to rehearsals for every week and does performances for. Ella has been searching for music colleges since she was in eighth grade. College is a goal for Ella, one she will undoubtedly meet.

The success of this family is obvious, at least measured by traditional educational standards. Many parents, including Elizabeth, have detailed different ideas about what is success. In many cases what is standard in traditional schooling is what nudged these families towards homeschooling, so it isn’t surprising that they might hold different ideas of what a successful outcome is. I will address these different heuristics in a separate post.

Photo by Lê Tân on Unsplash

Susan was driven to make learning interesting and sometimes strayed from the traditional path. She started homeschooling because her oldest was bored in school. He was bright and quickly finished up assignments and sat around waiting for more. Susan knew she could offer him more at home.

I used a math textbook when I homeschooled my kids, and I found a workbook with science experiments. But I always was looking for creative ways to jazz up learning. Susan seems like a woman after my own heart, but she may easily top my creative efforts. Once, I decided we were going to only study pirates for a week! And that’s what we did. It was amazing. We read Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates and visited the museum that displays the originals he painted for his book. We studied the Caribbean and the history of pirates. I’m sure we must have calculated the value of plunder on Black Beard’s ship and other such mind-bending activities. However, Susan picked a topic each month, for practically all the years she has homeschooled, and molded their studies around it. They studied the moon landing, the Erie Canal, Native American mythology, the Great Lakes, Aesop’s Fables, Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, physics and many other topics. Some favorite activities included Performance of the Week, where they studied a different genre of music each month and look at an example each week, electronics using Snap Circuits, mapping the journey described in Around the World in 80 Days, something with the Olympics every time they’re on, and a study of the states like when they were founded, their motto, and state birds, etc.

Susan thought a blog might be an opportunity for Ozzie to write creatively. Ozzie was all over the idea, “What would it be about? Oh Minecraft!!” Susan may suggest that today might be a write a post on your blog day,  but she doesn’t tell him what to write. She doesn’t proof read anything before he posts it. They talk a little about it, but it’s his thing. However, she likes to keep an eye on this activity because once Ozzie’s on the computer, he slips easily into watching YouTube videos of kids playing Minecraft instead of blogging about Minecraft.

In 2014 they used the book Hello World to learn Python. Susan thinks it’s important for her kids to learn computer programming,

I want them to be able to program. I think that’s important, to understand the basis of the Internet…I’d love for them to be able to make an app.

Last year Ozzie used Python to analyze wave data from the Great Lakes. Monitoring stations in the Great Lakes gather data. Ozzie learned to pull that data from buoys, organize the data, graph the data, even graph multiple lakes onto the same graph. But her daughter, Melanie, wasn’t nearly as interested in programming, so Susan took a different approach with her,

Melanie is not quite as interested in coding. I’m still looking for the right hook for her. This year we ended up reading a book called Computational Fairytales, which introduces coding concepts in a general, fairytale type story, which was the right way to do it for her.

While Susan is a teacher, she doesn’t write or use lesson plans. Each Sunday she plans out the week, writing out a schedule on paper and giving each child a daily list. Like many other parents, as her oldest approached high school, she began to feel nervous about their past endeavors,

Oh, I can’t put it into words…you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, some of this and some of that and we’d have big gaping holes, and I’d be like, “Oh, why didn’t I cover that?

She embedded some structured learning into their projects. Early on she used a book teaching writing called Rip the Page. Next, she tried a writing curriculum called Think Write that introduced the essay. And finally, as her fears rattled her nerves more regularly, she purchased a classical curriculum called The Well-Trained Mind that takes a more systematic approach to history and the classics. It encompasses logic and Latin and rhetoric.

We all worry about our children’s success. No matter how much we love homeschooling, and how excited we are watching our children learn, higher education casts a deep shadow over our joy. A belief that a standardized curriculum will best serve students in treading the path of learning often calms one’s nerves. It takes courage to wander off the path.

Photo by Louisa C. on Unsplash