note: this started out as a blog post trying to encapsulate what we plan on doing with learning this year, but it became rather huge, so I have split it in to two parts. A post about What we are learning and how is here if you are interested
Since I finally took the plunge and started home educating Willem in September of 2010, how we go about this ‘homeschool’ thing has evolved. Here is a post I wrote about our approach in November 2010 and here is a post I wrote about our (short lived) use of the Workbox system. I am still not ready to approach following a total unschooling method, but I am slowly realising that highly organised/structured learning just isn’t the way forward for us. So this post is about why we are doing things they way we are for now and how I approach structure.
Daily-ish learning
We are always learning. And by ‘we’ I mean humans in general. I also mean ‘we’ as a family, as we truly believe that a) learning is not just about hitting the books for a designated period and b) learning is something you stop doing once you leave school/university. But for the purposes of this post, by learning I mean dedicated time where we are pursuing a set learning objective or topic. I have set a goal of learning four days a week, with time in the morning and in the afternoon. At the moment, these days look a bit like this:
AM
Piano Practice (this is for about 10-15 minutes)
Latin (this can take anything from 20 minutes to an hour)
Expert topic – this is the most flexible period of set learning. Some times it is reading for twenty minutes. Sometimes it is watching a documentary for an hour, then looking stuff up on the computer, then playing related games or doing a Brainpop exercise.
And that’s it for the morning. Often Willem will also watch an episode of something off BBC iPlayer or a DVD, as long as it is learning related. Often we will watch part of it while eating lunch.
After lunch we have a period of ‘quiet time’ where Willem has to go up to his room and read or play quietly. Again, this time is flexible depending on what time we finally get around to it!
PM
Maths – sometimes this is workbooks (Singapore maths), sometimes it is reading a Sir Cumfrence or Mathematicians are People, Too! book and discussing the concepts it covers. Sometimes I will write out a few problems for Willem to work on to check he is remembering things we have worked on before. Again, this can take 20 minutes, this can take an hour (or more if Willem faffs around …)
Coding – Willem will work through a CodeAcademy lesson at least two days a week.
Japanese – at the moment Willem is learning hiragana. We can get through things in 20 minutes or stick at it for over an hour.
Most some afternoons we try to go for a run, and then Willem plays on the computer or watches BBC iPlayer until dinner.
And that’s it – the total of our daily organisation. I don’t have set days either – it is a kind of ‘as long as we do 4 mornings worth and 4 afternoons worth, I’m happy’ system. For example, yesterday Willem spent the morning helping out at the stables where he has riding lessons. I had planned that we would get an afternoon’s work done, but it just so happened that in the afternoon we got a whole day’s worth done. Brilliant.
Structure
I am one of these people who loves the idea of structure and schedules. More than once since we started home educating I have written up schedules and structures – long-term, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily. And stuck to them for about a week. Don’t get me wrong, in many families, having long-term and short-term plans work. And having a schedule or rhythm is important for some people (Frontier Dreams blog is a great place to read about putting this in to practice). Problems I found with a schedule is that things came along to disrupt it – illness, opportunities to travel, friends visiting, a chance day trip – I found things too rigid, and the schedule would fall apart. HOWEVER when I tried a bit of a ‘go with the flow’ lack of schedule, we seemed to get to four o’clock in the afternoon and I would ask myself ‘what did we get done today?’ So I have tried to find something in the middle.
Long-term planning
I am only planning as far ahead as a semester at a go. By semester, I am going by the semesters I am used to from school and university in Australia: two per year. So I have a rough plan of what we are doing up until June. I know how many chapters from our Latin programme and how many lessons from our Japanese programme I want to get done. Why June? Well, a semester is half a year, and hopefully we will get to go away in the Summer.
Weekly planning
Even though I am a great lover of technamalogical gadgetryliciousness, my planning both weekly and long term is done in an old fashioned Day Timer, with a week to two pages set up. I write what I want to do for a week, and then each day I record what we did. In the UK there is not the requirement for home educators to keep a record of their progress, so I am doing it more myself. I did have huge storage boxes and binders to keep Willem’s work in, but he now does so much of it on the computer most things are stored there (even the dreaded worksheets – we have trackpad and pen he can use to write on PDFs, which we then save).
Planning, old-school style
Checking he’s doing okay, what about national standards?, why not just unschool? He spends how much time in front of a screen?
One of the most regular questions I get about home educating, other than ‘so are you a qualified teacher?’ is ‘so how do you know he’s doing okay?’ My stock answer is now that I can check against the national curriculum to make sure he is going okay and keeping up with kids he would have been in school with. Of course the important word in that sentence is can. Fact is, I know that if Willem was still in a classroom he would be ahead of his peers in quite a few subjects, a bit below them in others, and would not be doing a lot of the subjects he is doing now. And that is fine as far as I am concerned. I try to keep abreast of roughly what children aged 7 – 10 would be expected to know in school in the UK, USA and Australia (systems I know about) but also keep in mind two important principles for guiding where we are going:
a) Willem should be challenged as we go along. Not struggling, but the whole point of learning is developing. I am not going to work through certain material he can already do in his sleep just because he would be doing that in a regular classroom. If I thought that learning standard subjects at the regular national standards and curriculum was important, I would send him to school. Sometimes as home educators we can forget the flexibility we have – this is an opportunity to teach our children what they need, when they are ready for it, in a way that suits them.
b) This learning thing is a long term project. We are most likely going to be doing this home education thing for at least another nine years. So if the boy next year of the same age is better at explaining what a noun and a verb is than Willem, I am not going to have conniptions, as there is plenty Willem knows he doesn’t, and we will be learning about nouns and verbs in future, it is not holding him back right now.* If we haven’t quite mastered times tables by the age of eight he is not damaged for life – we have time to work on this. My new ‘mantra’ is trust the process over time rather than expecting a perfect day.
After all that, you are probably wondering if maybe I should just unschool. However, there are a few reasons we won’t be doing that. Firstly, I want Willem to learn languages and at this age that takes regular ‘lessons’ if you are not in a position for immersion learning, which we are not. Secondly, while I realise that many children learn subjects such as maths because it relates to things they are interested in and they therefore seek out opportunities to learn it, I am not convinced that always works. What if Willem is completely not interested in maths or maths related things? Does that mean he doesn’t learn maths? What if when he is older he is interested in something that needs advanced maths and he hasn’t done the basics at a young age? I think interest-led learning is a fantastic thing (hence the fact that a major part of our learning is an ‘expert topic’ and Willem gets to choose that) but I feel that part of my responsibility as my son’s main educator is to make sure that at this early stage he has a good grounding in the basics. Perhaps when he is older and better at independent learning things will be a lot different.
Finally, a word about the amount of time Willem spends using the computer or watching DVDs. It’s a lot. I will admit that like a lot of home educators, I started out with a plan that Willem would rarely use computers, and I would severely ration his screen viewing time. I planned on a Charlotte Mason style education with lots of reading and time in the outdoors. Has it worked out that way? No. And I have given up feeling guilty about that. There are some fantastic programmes out there for learning across a huge range of subjects. Youtube and DVDs have been fantastic for me finding materials to explain engineering topics as he does an expert topic on engineering (and we have engineer in the house who also explains things). I know there are some families that don’t let their children watch TV or use a computer for various reasons, and if that works for them, great. But Willem is learning a lot by using the computer for both learning and some of his ‘play’ time, and he has learned a lot from watching DVDs (and has also often been entertained). And he still reads voraciously and spends time each day drawing, building things with lego and running around outside.
*Willem does know what a noun, verb and adjective are, he is just not that great at articulating it at times.
Our new learning year – why we are doing it this way, and structure
note: this started out as a blog post trying to encapsulate what we plan on doing with learning this year, but it became rather huge, so I have split it in to two parts. A post about What we are learning and how is here if you are interested
Since I finally took the plunge and started home educating Willem in September of 2010, how we go about this ‘homeschool’ thing has evolved. Here is a post I wrote about our approach in November 2010 and here is a post I wrote about our (short lived) use of the Workbox system. I am still not ready to approach following a total unschooling method, but I am slowly realising that highly organised/structured learning just isn’t the way forward for us. So this post is about why we are doing things they way we are for now and how I approach structure.
Daily-ish learning
We are always learning. And by ‘we’ I mean humans in general. I also mean ‘we’ as a family, as we truly believe that a) learning is not just about hitting the books for a designated period and b) learning is something you stop doing once you leave school/university. But for the purposes of this post, by learning I mean dedicated time where we are pursuing a set learning objective or topic. I have set a goal of learning four days a week, with time in the morning and in the afternoon. At the moment, these days look a bit like this:
AM
Piano Practice (this is for about 10-15 minutes)
Latin (this can take anything from 20 minutes to an hour)
Expert topic – this is the most flexible period of set learning. Some times it is reading for twenty minutes. Sometimes it is watching a documentary for an hour, then looking stuff up on the computer, then playing related games or doing a Brainpop exercise.
And that’s it for the morning. Often Willem will also watch an episode of something off BBC iPlayer or a DVD, as long as it is learning related. Often we will watch part of it while eating lunch.
After lunch we have a period of ‘quiet time’ where Willem has to go up to his room and read or play quietly. Again, this time is flexible depending on what time we finally get around to it!
PM
Maths – sometimes this is workbooks (Singapore maths), sometimes it is reading a Sir Cumfrence or Mathematicians are People, Too! book and discussing the concepts it covers. Sometimes I will write out a few problems for Willem to work on to check he is remembering things we have worked on before. Again, this can take 20 minutes, this can take an hour (or more if Willem faffs around …)
Coding – Willem will work through a CodeAcademy lesson at least two days a week.
Japanese – at the moment Willem is learning hiragana. We can get through things in 20 minutes or stick at it for over an hour.
Mostsome afternoons we try to go for a run, and then Willem plays on the computer or watches BBC iPlayer until dinner.And that’s it – the total of our daily organisation. I don’t have set days either – it is a kind of ‘as long as we do 4 mornings worth and 4 afternoons worth, I’m happy’ system. For example, yesterday Willem spent the morning helping out at the stables where he has riding lessons. I had planned that we would get an afternoon’s work done, but it just so happened that in the afternoon we got a whole day’s worth done. Brilliant.
Structure
I am one of these people who loves the idea of structure and schedules. More than once since we started home educating I have written up schedules and structures – long-term, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily. And stuck to them for about a week. Don’t get me wrong, in many families, having long-term and short-term plans work. And having a schedule or rhythm is important for some people (Frontier Dreams blog is a great place to read about putting this in to practice). Problems I found with a schedule is that things came along to disrupt it – illness, opportunities to travel, friends visiting, a chance day trip – I found things too rigid, and the schedule would fall apart. HOWEVER when I tried a bit of a ‘go with the flow’ lack of schedule, we seemed to get to four o’clock in the afternoon and I would ask myself ‘what did we get done today?’ So I have tried to find something in the middle.
Long-term planning
I am only planning as far ahead as a semester at a go. By semester, I am going by the semesters I am used to from school and university in Australia: two per year. So I have a rough plan of what we are doing up until June. I know how many chapters from our Latin programme and how many lessons from our Japanese programme I want to get done. Why June? Well, a semester is half a year, and hopefully we will get to go away in the Summer.
Weekly planning
Even though I am a great lover of technamalogical gadgetryliciousness, my planning both weekly and long term is done in an old fashioned Day Timer, with a week to two pages set up. I write what I want to do for a week, and then each day I record what we did. In the UK there is not the requirement for home educators to keep a record of their progress, so I am doing it more myself. I did have huge storage boxes and binders to keep Willem’s work in, but he now does so much of it on the computer most things are stored there (even the dreaded worksheets – we have trackpad and pen he can use to write on PDFs, which we then save).
Planning, old-school style
Checking he’s doing okay, what about national standards?, why not just unschool? He spends how much time in front of a screen?
One of the most regular questions I get about home educating, other than ‘so are you a qualified teacher?’ is ‘so how do you know he’s doing okay?’ My stock answer is now that I can check against the national curriculum to make sure he is going okay and keeping up with kids he would have been in school with. Of course the important word in that sentence is can. Fact is, I know that if Willem was still in a classroom he would be ahead of his peers in quite a few subjects, a bit below them in others, and would not be doing a lot of the subjects he is doing now. And that is fine as far as I am concerned. I try to keep abreast of roughly what children aged 7 – 10 would be expected to know in school in the UK, USA and Australia (systems I know about) but also keep in mind two important principles for guiding where we are going:
a) Willem should be challenged as we go along. Not struggling, but the whole point of learning is developing. I am not going to work through certain material he can already do in his sleep just because he would be doing that in a regular classroom. If I thought that learning standard subjects at the regular national standards and curriculum was important, I would send him to school. Sometimes as home educators we can forget the flexibility we have – this is an opportunity to teach our children what they need, when they are ready for it, in a way that suits them.
b) This learning thing is a long term project. We are most likely going to be doing this home education thing for at least another nine years. So if the boy next year of the same age is better at explaining what a noun and a verb is than Willem, I am not going to have conniptions, as there is plenty Willem knows he doesn’t, and we will be learning about nouns and verbs in future, it is not holding him back right now.* If we haven’t quite mastered times tables by the age of eight he is not damaged for life – we have time to work on this. My new ‘mantra’ is trust the process over time rather than expecting a perfect day.
After all that, you are probably wondering if maybe I should just unschool. However, there are a few reasons we won’t be doing that. Firstly, I want Willem to learn languages and at this age that takes regular ‘lessons’ if you are not in a position for immersion learning, which we are not. Secondly, while I realise that many children learn subjects such as maths because it relates to things they are interested in and they therefore seek out opportunities to learn it, I am not convinced that always works. What if Willem is completely not interested in maths or maths related things? Does that mean he doesn’t learn maths? What if when he is older he is interested in something that needs advanced maths and he hasn’t done the basics at a young age? I think interest-led learning is a fantastic thing (hence the fact that a major part of our learning is an ‘expert topic’ and Willem gets to choose that) but I feel that part of my responsibility as my son’s main educator is to make sure that at this early stage he has a good grounding in the basics. Perhaps when he is older and better at independent learning things will be a lot different.
Finally, a word about the amount of time Willem spends using the computer or watching DVDs. It’s a lot. I will admit that like a lot of home educators, I started out with a plan that Willem would rarely use computers, and I would severely ration his screen viewing time. I planned on a Charlotte Mason style education with lots of reading and time in the outdoors. Has it worked out that way? No. And I have given up feeling guilty about that. There are some fantastic programmes out there for learning across a huge range of subjects. Youtube and DVDs have been fantastic for me finding materials to explain engineering topics as he does an expert topic on engineering (and we have engineer in the house who also explains things). I know there are some families that don’t let their children watch TV or use a computer for various reasons, and if that works for them, great. But Willem is learning a lot by using the computer for both learning and some of his ‘play’ time, and he has learned a lot from watching DVDs (and has also often been entertained). And he still reads voraciously and spends time each day drawing, building things with lego and running around outside.
*Willem does know what a noun, verb and adjective are, he is just not that great at articulating it at times.