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Hi,

After such a disappointing reply from the school last week I am starting to consider homeschooling a bit more seriously.

DS5 is in K. I also have a DD4 who is at home. For those of you that have younger siblings at home how do you balance them? DD4 does not like to be left out of anything but she and DS are definitely not both currently ready for the same work. DS5 would also have a hard time working if DD was playing.

Also how do you transition a child from a brick and mortar to school at home. One of my serious concerns is that adding this other dimension to our relationship could do it harm. How do you separate school time from play time without a constant power struggle occurring?

This is just the beginning of the many questions that I will have, I'm sure. Thanks ahead of time for you help and patience!

School time and play time kind of blurred together some days and that was okay. But if I really wanted to read a certain book and discuss it with him I went by either please read chapter 2 before lunch or please read for a half hour before we go for a bike ride. Timers were my friend. Also if I had an agenda for the day and week we spent a few minutes Sunday going over the plans for the week including homeschool PE sessions (a group we went to) and he helped me plan out the week. With that he had some control over some stuff.

And I also explained to him that I wanted to cover second grade math in a year. We needed to be to this point by Christmas and this point by June. It was perfectly fine to go as slow as he wanted and have math game days and go off on exploring math however we wanted to but then it would mean we wouldn't "graduate" to third grade math and would need to work through the summer which was fine with me. But he also knew that I didn't assign every problem on a page. Sometimes we did them on the white board or sometimes in sidewalk chalk...

And this brings me to how to do it with a sibling. Take math out to the drive way. Do the lesson in sidewalk chalk. Sibling gets sidewalk chalk too. Everyone is happy.

A lot of the time if my younger son could have the same materials (for art projects or science labs or math manipulatives) he was just as content to pretend to school along side my older son to explore and listen.

During reading time the younger can have books to read and look at too and employing the older one to read to the younger one worked a lot. Other times the younger one did wander off and play...but he knew he had to play quietly and out of sight.

School was 2 hours to 3 hours tops for us each day and it wasn't always 3 hours straight.

Eibbed, my kids are older so take my advice with a grain of salt, and we are also not homeschoolers in the traditional sense, but we do a bit of part-time homeschooling with all three of our kids. All three are very different in terms of ability, needs, interests etc - and my two dds in particular are highly prone to distraction over what the other dd is doing. What I do is to have a game plan for each of them, so that when one is working all three have "work" to do - and it doesn't have to be school work, it could be something that is a cleaning "chore" (which was fun for my kids at 4), or a quite play activity. The key is that I have a list for each and they each need to check off what's on their list.

I also make sure I have something interesting and fun included on each list, so it's not all "work".

polarbear

Eibbed- I obviously have no advice. However, I am very interested to hear how it goes for you! Homeschooling would be very difficult for me this year with 2nd ds2, but could maybe make it work next year depending on how things go with the school. Ultimately, I wonder if homeschooling is the right thing when they are young. It's not very time consuming and fun. Not to mention, then I wouldn't have to worry about afterschooling- lol. My dh is pretty against homeschooling, but maybe I could change his mind (I'd be the one doing all the work anyway.)

What I'm trying to say is I will be watching to see how it goes for you and your ds! Hope it is a positive change!! Keep us posted!

DS4.5 is currently in public preschool for 3hrs a day and should go to K in the fall that is also just a half day program. We wanted him in preschool setting right now for the social aspect of it but we are seriously considering homeschooling him at least K and 1st. K isn't even mandatory in IL so we could also just have fun for a year and forget all about school. My plan is if we do homeschool, we might continue with the schedule he was used to at school, just do it in our home. He absorbs a huge amount of information from everything around him so I don't really even feel the need to teach him much at this point. I never really taught him anything and he just picked it up (counting, alphabet, simple addition and subtraction, all kinds of science problems, etc.) so unschooling might actually be a great way for us to go.

Now, as for the younger sibling, our younger son is turning 3 in March and has high functioning autism but has in some areas academic knowledge beyond of what the older one knows. He's perfectly happy playing spelling games on my Android and Kindle but he will always be around when / if we homeschool the older one so if he feels like tagging along, we'll just do the same work with both (minus what would be too much challenge for the stubborn autistic part of him). There are actually times when the younger one does things that the older one can't do yet and they take turns in learning from each other (while staying at least 5 feet away because that's about as much closeness as they can tolerate! lol)

Thank you all of the advice. I'm still considering all possible avenues and am not ready to commit to homeschooling just yet. Though this was a conversation I had with DS5 yesterday

me: Do you know that some kids stay home for school? That they do school from home?

DS5: They do?

me: Yeah, would you like that?

DS5: Yes, that would be great!

me: Wouldn't you miss school?

DS5 Yes I would but I don't really learn anything there.


It's so hard to hear him say that so frequently. Going to school shouldn't be this hard when you are a kindergartener.

We homeschool. Aiden is 6, Nathan is 4 and Dylan is 2.

They each "work" at their own level. I had Aiden and Nathan draw up their own "timetables" with subjects that they had to slot into the week. So they often do different things and thats okay. Now my goal is to make it as fun as possible so we do very little paper and pen work and a lot more games etc to learn. This way all three are involved.

When we do do sit down work, they each carry on with their own thing and I help here a bit and there a bit. I KNOW that one day (in the not so distant future) they will be wanting to do things I cannot do (or am not interested in doing), so I am trying to be more of a facilitator than an at-home teacher.

AS for the change over, we spent 9 months playing without any formal work, until Aiden was ready to and asked for it repeatedly and then eventually started doing it on his own. Then I knew he was healed from the school trauma and was really ready. So we went on loads of outings, we played games like chess, scrabble, monopoly, snap, UNO and even babyish games like candy land or whatever. We walked, we swam, we cuddled, we read, we sat in the sun together eating fruit and just being happy.

We don't use school words (they still make him anxious nearly a year later) - so we have a work room, and even I work there. We don't focus on grades or age things or levels, we do what interests us to the level we can take it to (and I try to keep some sort of track quietly on my own). I am not his teacher, I am his mom and as such I want him to enjoy his life and learning. And if he cannot learn whatever from me then I will help him find a credible source. And I tell him (them) this often. I am here to learn with them, but most of all I am here to help them be happy, enjoy their childhoods and enjoy their time with us as a family.

The fact that learning new maths stuff or experimenting with whatever makes them happy kids, well so be it. If we have days of not working, that's fine by me - they learn so quickly anyways its not like they will ever fall behind will they?

At the end of the day, you must do what works for your family... Homeschooling works well for us, and my boys are happier than ever, they are learning more than ever in shorter time spans than ever, and they are best friends too! Which means I am a very happy and content mom Feel free to PM me to chat!

We have been homeschooling all along, and it has been great for us. We have always had unschooling tendencies, though we have done some structured stuff, and are doing more now that they are older.

When my dd was younger, we went to the zoo or a science museum at least once per week. We took walks in the woods and collected rock samples. Once we got home, we all washed them in the sink and then spread them out on the kitchen floor with a geology book and tried to identify what kinds of rocks they were. We took walks in the woods and noticed different mushrooms, different kinds of tree bark. We grew crystals. We read books about ancient China, watched documentaries about ancient China, and then took a road trip to DC to see the terracotta warriors exhibit. We attended a Chinese New Year celebration, and made our own dumplings. When we learned about Vikings, we made our own mead, and learned about fermentation into the bargain. When we learned about ancient Egypt, we mummified a chicken. (It is now buried somewhere in the back yard.)

During the summer, we planted milkweed, watched the butterflies lay their eggs, then watched every stage of the monarch life cycle up close. When the last butterflies of the season emerged, we tagged them and sent them on their way to Mexico. (We still do this. Kids are sick of it, but I am now a die hard butterfly hobbyist. My kids have seen so many monarchs emerge they aren't even interested in it any more!)

We went to library all the time, and came home with stacks and stacks of books. Science books. Myths and fairy tales from the cultures we were studying.

Most of these things were activities that my older one could fully participate in, but even my squirrely boy could be on hand for, or get something out of. There was little to no sitting at the kitchen table doing book work. There was no power struggle because we just did fun learning things every day. There was no line between "school" and "play" because learning is play, and play is learning. I always let my kids help pick what we were going to "study" that year.

To check the box in terms of "hard core" academics, I had my daughter do some "school on the computer." We used time4learning for math and reading, and also reading eggs for reading and dreambox.com for math. (We still use dreambox.) My daughter could work independently once I signed her on. It didn't matter what the younger one was doing. She didn't need a lot of attention from me. If she got something wrong, it was the nice computer voice that would say, "That's not quite right! Try again!" not me. I have NEVER had to play the instructor. If I really needed direct instruction, I just found a computer option for it.

This is still true, incidentally. Now my kids use EPGY for math, and take online classes at places like CTY or OnlineG3. I just kind of help them create the structure to make sure they have time to get it all done.

HTH.

I homeschooled my then 5 yr old and 4 yr old. It was great initially but I got pregnant; morning sickness and fatigue took over and I just felt guilty all the time because I wasn't meeting my own expectations. and also once the novelty of it wore off for the kids, they kept wanting to do their own thing all the time and refused to work. My 4 yr old was a distraction to my 5 yr old; becaues they're so close to each other in age, they're best buddies which is great, but when it came to school time and my 4 yr old did not have any much to do or more play-like school work to do, my 5 yr old was too distracted to focus on his own work. I think you're smart to think about the potential problem of unclear school time vs play time. I tried to reassure myself by saying, OK so we're kind of transitioning to unschooling, I guess, which is fine ... but that wasn't really what I was doing. We were floundering. After a few months of struggling, I chose an online program that worked out great for us. My kid could learn at his own pace, the online school provided all the materials and structure we needed. Something for you to explore. Good luck!

gabalyn - Your approach sounds so wonderful! Thank you! I really need to look into all the possible variants of "homeschooling". There are so many possibilities!

junior - I definitely think that some type of online class would be part of what we would do since DS already does them on his own.