Volume 3 - Edition 8 - May 2007
Your Best Investment
This is the time of year when many people start curriculum shopping for the new school year. Everyone is researching curriculum options and trying to figure out the best way to invest their education budget. We want quality materials that will help to equip our children for God’s calling on their lives. I spent more hours than I can count researching and putting together the HCOS Curriculum Packages this year. I wanted them to be perfect. They must cover PLOs, yes, but – more importantly – I wanted to find quality Christian materials that would inspire a love of learning in the home. I was looking for the perfect curriculum.
It doesn’t exist.
God provides us with something better. He has given you to your children. He’s given you a mother’s (or a father’s) heart and he’s paired you with his unique creations, your children, who were designed to be with you. We are the most important educational resource our children will have in all of their years of homeschooling. If you haven’t invested in that resource yet, now is the perfect time.
We have to be very careful, when planning our homeschool year, to ensure that our children are getting enough of our time. There is a lot that can be learned independently, but it’s our input, thoughts, and challenges that will help shape our children’s thinking and will bring their learning to the next level. Whether it’s grammar instruction, literary analysis, or mathematics – our input will help inspire and motivate them; it will help them learn.
It’s a good idea to look for a balance between independent work and work that is done with you. Math programs lend themselves well to this balance. The lesson can be introduced by Mom, practice problems can be worked on together with immediate feedback, and then the student can go off alone and complete an exercise independently. Corrections can be made by Mom with more feedback. History and literature are wonderful to share together. For younger students, reading aloud and then discussing the material together is a great way to provide immediate feedback and challenge while having a cozy and enjoyable time together. Then you could assign some independent work – drawings for young ones, writing or map work for older students. Independent readers can do some of the reading on their own and then meet back with you for discussions.
If you struggle with finding the time to homeschool then it’s a good idea to set some boundaries for your time. Let people know that you school during certain hours and don’t answer the phone during that time. Set up chore times and meal preparation times around your school schedule. Have the children help with more chores to keep chore times shorter. Managers of Their Homes and Managers of Their Chores (www.titus2.com) are both detailed guides for homeschool parents and will help you to schedule your time and chores.
Remember that you don’t have to be an expert at everything. It’s Ok to learn alongside your child in some subjects. It’s also Ok to outsource subjects that you really don’t want to do. Science is something I continually struggle with so all of my kids did science at our homeschool co-op this year. It was bliss! I didn’t even have to think about doing science at home. The online courses are a great option for this as well. HCOS offers a wide variety of courses starting in grade 5.
Invest in yourself. You need regular professional development. Summer is a great time to do this. Pick a subject you would like to be more familiar with, find a higher level book in that subject, and spend the summer working through it. By fall you’ll have a much better grasp of the subject matter and that will help you as you’re working with your children at their level. As an added benefit, your children will see your model of lifelong learning. You could try signing up on a Yahoo group with other homeschool moms who are pursuing self-education. There are also some great DVD programs that teach parents how to teach.
This summer I will be working through a higher level text of Classical Writing in order to better understand where we’re going with writing and how we’re going to get there. I’ll be watching Teaching the Classics (again) to better equip myself for discussions on literary analysis. I’ll be completing my own spelling book using Spell to Write and Read in order to have a better grasp on what I need to be teaching in the fall to my two younger boys. The kids will continue with science at co-op, so that’s one subject I don’t have to worry about. I’ve signed my eldest up for an online Latin course so I don’t have to worry about keeping up with her anymore (whew!) but I am planning on keeping up with my younger boys so that I’m able to do higher level Latin with them at some point.
Here are just some of the options available for professional homeschool mom development:
Harvey’s Summer Grammar Course – over 120 homeschool moms signed up for this last year
http://www.classicalco-op.com/co_op_new/ce_tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Harveys+Grammar+Summer+Course
Profound Understanding – a Yahoo group for adults who are working through the book, Elementary Mathematics for Teachers, that teaches teachers how to use Singapore Math
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Profoundunderstanding/
Homeschool French – a group for English speaking homeschool parents wishing to teach their children French
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HomeschoolFrench/
Teaching the Classics – a DVD program with syllabus that teaches parents how to conduct Socratic dialogues as a way to teach literary analysis using any book
http://www.centerforlit.com/teaching_the_classics.htm
Teaching Writing Structure and Style – DVD program with syllabus teaches the teacher how to teach writing using the IEW method