homeschooling from scratch

I never expected I would be a homeschooling parent. As a child, I met many homeschoolers in mission and church circles who were social misfits, whose parents had kept them out of the secular school system to avoid them being 'tainted' by the real world. I wanted my children to know and understand how to rub shoulders with the very real human beings whose paths they would cross every day, and to understand the global world they lived in - a diverse world where a knowledge of other ideas and religions, and other cultures histories and geographies, not to mention language could make the difference between a fatal misunderstanding, and an affective partnership.

Unfortunately the real world experience of secular education left much to be desired. For the same reason as I had shied away from Christian homeschooling, I found myself quickly frustrated by the scope and breadth of current public/state (vs. private) school curriculum. And bottom-end private school curriculum wasn't much of an improvement. I finally found a school with a curriculum I liked ... the cost was well in excess of $20,000/year per child! Not a likely scenario.

So I did some more research and discovered that a few people were homeschooling using a similar approach to curriculum. It is called the Classical Curriculum model, and has several slightly divergent approaches to it, but the main theory is a four-year, three-cycle approach, whereby the first four years are spent at the grammar stage - learning the facts; the second four years are spent at the logic stage - learning to question the facts; and the third four years are spent at the rhetoric stage - learning to discuss the facts, the questions of the facts, and the conclusions the questioning has unearthed.

Well, when you homeschool, you can't turn your brain off on the subject of curriculum and send the children out the door to let someone else do your thinking for you. That was out when we first made this decision. But some homeschoolers use pre-packaged materials available from various curriculum publishers - they come with all the books, all the exercise pages, and all the equipment aids needed to teach all the subjects each year. These are not readily obtainable for the classical curriculum. There are classical curriculum methods which give lists of potential textbooks/workbooks for each grade level, but unfortunately we have found that they are either, a) americentric; b) below our daughter's functional grade level; or c) poor attempts to teach the subjects Trevor and I are each educated in. (It does help that Trevor has a degree in physics and I in history!)

So I have reached the conclusion over the weekend, having tossed out the english curriculum ages ago, and tried heavily modifying the math, science and history curriculum (strangely enough, the geography curriculum actually works!), that I will actually have to throw out the science and history curriculum completely, and will likely only be able to rely on the modified math curriculum until the end of this year. I am therefore homeschooling from scratch!

And to make it just that little bit more challenging, I am doing it all out of a carry-on-size suitcase worth of materials - that's right, just 15kg of books for two children of different grade levels, for everything including background texts, notebooks, pens and pencils, and teachers resources.

All of which is to say, that on the days when this blog gets written in less than it might, you can think of me sat at the dining room table at my in-laws house, trying to explain the history of medieval asia to a seven-year-old whilst listening to my three-year-old learn to read! (Please note that although she is determined to learn to read, she is still not potty-trained ... )

Off to brush up on my grammatical structures!