Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Homeschooling woes...already.

You know how you write out your plans in your day planner for school? I read what I think is a better idea for kindergarten, and I use it. I bought my day planner and write down the curriculum we did each day after we do it. I expect my son to do either HWT or copy one sentence every day correctly and neat. I expect him to do one math, we have Singapore, Khan Academy, and Beast Academy. He has to do one other subject every day. Our state required five subjects, we pick one of those as the third thing. It would make sense to do one of those every day, but we just do one and figure it will even out. It's not like he's going to fall behind if we "just keep swimming". If I say, well, we haven't done this subject for a while, you have to do this today, that's good enough. This is simple. It takes less than an hour (unless he's just not doing it), and I have my preschooler and neice both do their lessons in the same timeframe. We don't all three do it every day, just most days. It really is sufficient. Anything fun, like you described, is just that- fun. Do it in your bountiful free time. I homeschool after lunch. I kick them out in the yard for two hours in the morning then let them inside for the tv, playroom, and video games. After lunch it's time to do your lessons. The lessons take about an hour for all three subjects. For example he may read a golden book as that third lesson one day, give me an oral report the next day, and copy what I wrote down that he said the next. I want the HWT, math, and third subject to take less than an hour. (actually, I bought Writing With Ease and that's my daily requirement, I just allow HWT to count as WWE).

If you write your "plans" after you've done them, homeschool right after lunch, and only count the essentials as homeschooling (the rest is just stuff we like, on our own time), I think it will make it go smoother. One might think that after lunch one might be sluggish and choose not to teach homeschool then, but I like that they get the morning free time reguardless of their choices, and that early in the afternoon they have an incentive not to waste the rest of the day by dragging their feet (most days). And by writing the plans afterwards it doesn't really matter if you miss a day here or there to go do something else.

This is a cool catapult. We were subscribed to Aurora Lipper's Supercharged Science for a while. We saw this there. She hotglued a plastic spoon on the end instead of tacking on a bottlecap.

Hey-- La Tex! Good to see ya!


Yeah-- our method was a gentle wake-up, probably with piano practice in there somewhere, going for a walk, weeding or doing some household chores together, etc.

Then, about 9:30-11 AM, (sometime in there, anyway, we'd start) we would do school. Until it was done or until we had something else going on or we'd both had enough, I mean.

Typical outside-of-the-house activities that we engaged in during our homeschooling years:

a) piano (same teacher that my DD has almost nine years later-- a homeschooling mom herself, she is WAY supportive.)

b) going and listening to weekly, free "noon concerts" at the local university

c) various parks and rec classes (cheap-cheap-cheap and because they are PUBLIC-public, they have to meet the highest standards of ADA compliance... heheh.) We did pottery (a disaster with my sensory-issues preschooler), kinder-gym (awesome b/c of teacher), art (also great), ballet and tap classes (varied widely-- but mostly awesome), drawing, music (meh-- not really on-level for PG DD), swimming (AWESOME success), Tai Kwon Do, Tai Chi, literacy programs (where we were gloriously permitted to 'cheat' a bit on age restrictions, though-- sadly-- it needed to be by about 2y more than they allowed).

d) the library. OMG. I thought that at some point, our marvelous children's librarians were going to ambush me for an intervention. Not completely kidding about that. I regularly had 110-150 items checked out at any one time.

e) trying various homeschool co-op and indoor play spaces (never had luck-- but we did try)


I'd also-- if this is something that your family would like to foster-- encourage you to explore side-by-side opportunities for community service in your local area. A food bank, collecting supplies for a women's shelter, socializing animals at the animal shelter, helping at the library-- pretty much anything goes.

Hi, Phey. We have homeschooled all along. When my kids were five, we did almost no structured instruction of any kind. We took walks in the woods, we read lots of books, we visited libraries and museums, and we did some crafts. There was lots of free time for unstructured play.

Kids at five really learn by play. There is tons of research on this, and if you want to know more, Google “importance of play,” or read anything by Peter Gray. When we were five, kindergarten was all about play. Recently, schools have been pushing instruction down into younger and younger grades, and it is not good. When your son is trying to make a catapult, it is more about process than product. His playful, creative process is setting him up eventually to make great discoveries one day! I think kids know that they need to play to learn at that age, and that is why they resist direct instruction (which pretty much all five year olds do, especially bright ones).

When my kids were that age, they did do some “school.” We had subscriptions to places like dreambox.com, readingeggs.com, and time4 learning. (Neither of mine were reading at 5.) They would “play” on one of these sites for 15 or 20 minutes about four times per week. My son also loved practicing times tables with Timez Attack, and he played through all of the Fritz and Chesster chess CD’s that year. As they have gotten older, we have increased “school” time. By about fourth grade, they were doing 1 to 2 hours per day, three days per week. Finally in sixth grade, my DYS dd 11 will be doing considerably more than that.

How does that work, doing so little? When dd 11 took the Explore in 5th grade, she blew past the DYS cut, even getting a perfect score in English. I believe she ceilinged in English because she had read, and read, and read. Whenever she wanted, whatever she wanted. She had read much more than she would have if she had been in school, because she wouldn’t have had the time.

So much learning happens in informal ways. Kids learn a ton of math from crocheting, doing Legos, knitting, cooking, etc. They learn about science by observing the world around them, especially in nature. And they learn the mechanics and nuances of language through talking, asking questions, and reading.

I do understand about these huge ideas that totally outstrip ability! That must be one of the hardest things about being a little kid. When he was seven, my son decided that he wanted to be Shelob for Halloween. He didn’t want some cutesy spider costume. He wanted a five-foot high, animatronic, remote-controlled, fully operational walking giant spider that he could climb into and control from behind its glowing, red eyes. He could imagine it walking down on street, frightening all the little kids. He was really obsessed with it, and it took some time for him to realize it wasn’t going to happen. Yet. (Although maybe someday, he will work in movie special effects, who knows!) I always find it difficult to know what my role as a parent ought to be when one of these grandiose ideas comes up. Should I help him execute it in and “adult” way, by maybe buying a kit to build a catapult? Should I merely encourage him to think about the project by asking open-ended questions? Leave implementation totally up to him? I will tell you that my son drew many schematics and drawing for his Shelob costume, and I am certain that he learned a lot doing those!

By the way, if you do want to go back to the catapult, I remember us using these instructions one day. http://spaghettiboxkids.com/blog/easy-to-make-catapult/. It worked great! We spent a long time hurling cotton balls toward a bowl that day. If you want to do something slightly more involved, but still easy, google “spoon catapult.” There are many variations online.

If I were you, I would enjoy these last lovely days of summer, and the cool fall weather to come. I would wake up without an alarm and allow your son to do the same. Linger over breakfast, and see what questions come up. My kids ask the most amazing questions at breakfast. (Yesterday, my daughter had this whole thing about Schroedinger’s cat, and how you could know if the cat were dead and alive if you used a Geiger counter, but then quantum objects behave differently than non-quantum objects, because the cat can’t really be both dead and alive, but a particle can simultaneously exist in two states at once, so really the question is, how does the quantum world interact with the non-quantum world? Me, on my first cup of coffee: “Hmmmm.”) I would scour local meadows for migrating monarchs. Download a mushroom ID app on my iphone, and go for a walk in the woods to see how many species we could identify. Look up some historical recipes and do some baking. (Did you know you can easily make hard tack, staple food of pirates?) Grow crystals in the kitchen from alum, salt, and baking soda. Watch videos about topics that interest him on Brain Pop. Browse http://papertoys.com/ and download some projects to cut and fold.

The GREAT thing about homeschooling is that it can be driven by pleasure and passion. I had a great homeschooling moment this week. I was at my daughter’s choir, and there was a thirteen or fourteen year old girl sitting reading Les Miserables. She wasn’t very far through the book. Next to her was a copy of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. My first thought was, how great that the local schools are assigning actual literature. I pictured this poor girl having waited until the end of August to begin her reading, and needing slog through it with only weeks to go. Because I am that type of person (to the endless annoyance of my children) I started talking to her, asking if that were her summer reading. “No,” she said. “This is my second time reading it.” A little while later, her mom came in, and I put it together that this was one of the homeschooled kids in choir. She was reading Victor Hugo purely.for.pleasure.

THAT is why I homeschool.

As for screens, that is a tough one. I know some homeschooling families that allow unfettered access to all screens, and some families that don’t even have a TV (fewer of those). I believe every family has to come up with the solution that works for them. Over the years, what has evolved for us is a fairly limited use of screens. When my son was younger, I had a half an hour of TV per day rule. But I didn’t always apply it consistently. Some days, I would be enjoying the quiet so much, one half hour show would become two. And sometimes even three. And it wasn’t always the same half hour. It was usually when he asked, or when I had something I needed to do. Behavioral psych teaches us that the most reinforcing kind of reward is an intermittent one, and that is exactly what I was doing. I was intermittently rewarding him for asking for TV. So what did he do? Asked for TV all.the.time. He didn’t learn to self-occupy at all, because there was always the tantalizing possibility that he might get some TV. So I eventually went cold turkey on TV. Amazingly, it worked great, and he started getting better at playing by himself.

These days, (kids are 9 and 11), no TV is allowed during the day, except for the occasional educational documentary. They watch an hour of fun TV each night with me and my husband. Computers are for school. My kids both take online classes (CTY, Athena’s Advanced Academy, OnlineG3, EPGY, etc.). My son takes a video game design course online too. They can check e-mail or surf youtube for a limited time each day only. We don’t have time limits on that activity, just a common-sense limitation. Of course, sometimes we all need to rot a few brain cells, and there are times when one of the plays some computer game for fun. But if anything starts taking too much time, or it seems like someone is getting obsessed with something (myself included), I know we need to reevaluate. I finally downloaded Mineccraft onto the Ipad, but use is strictly limited to things like the long wait between games at chess tournaments. But that is just what works for us. You might strike a different balance.
Sorry this has been so long! I hope some of it has been helpful.

THIS is exactly why we've decided to take up the homeschooling challenge. over the summer, i realized that DD5 is now a super-competent reader (ps. HK - i think i remember you saying your girl really took off all in one go - and whoa, is it ever stunning to see it in person!) and is comfortably cruising through Gr. 3 math. so, uh... there's probably not too much i need to really worry about, curriculum-wise for a long, long time. so she picked The 15th Century as her Big Idea for the year and we're going to do a ton of stuff around that - we will do all the curriculum stuff, but given how quickly that stuff goes, even if it gets bumped a day or two like HK was saying, it'll get done.

long story short, i realized that because our kids learn so fast... we just have so much time: time to explore and make mistakes and have fun and detour and follow tangents - which is probably the true beauty of homeschooling, regardless of the kid!

if it takes a while to hit your stride, i think that's probably normal - i'll be willing to bet i'm right back here on this thread at the end of our first week in September! and fwiw, i do remember my mother, who was a brilliant teacher, coming home at the end of the first few weeks totally exhausted and kind of terrified - and it was like that every single year!

Thanks for all the great ideas, and thoughts. I feel better already (maybe because it is the weekend)! I will write more specific details and what works when I get some more time. But I especially like gabalyn's comments.

And I just want to reiterate, that I am not trying to do too much structure with him 1-2 hours a day, with everything else free play/explore time (it's just that so much of that turned into electronics time). I love the idea's of more kind of unschooling, BUT, I worry that if I don't get some structure into his life, that it will never take. For instance - our day has NEVER EVER had a alarm clock on it - it has always been wake up when you are ready, take plenty of time at breakfast, drop everything and go for a hike, etc. That is already how we are living - so I sense that I need to introduce structure, or he will never learn these skills and end up like me (which is rather oblivious to time and free wheeling). Needless to say, my husband, thinks I need to at least introduce him to a more structured life! So while I love all these unschooling ideas, and I agree that kids learn by play, and man oh man, the stuff that he has learned already in that mode makes me only think that if we just keep free wheeling, he will only be so much more ahead.... But if I don't apply a little more structure, he is never going to learn it.

That makes sense, but against that background, maybe even one hour of structured work feels like a lot? Two is as much as many homeschoolers ever seem to need to go to, at least in the "planned by a parent" stages! So maybe a gentle ramp up would be better, starting with ten minutes or a single task and increasing the regular daily amount by a few minutes every few weeks until you get to where you're comfortable? You have time, after all.

Phey, did you always plan to HS, or are you choosing it because school settings would be a rough fit for this particular child (e.g. he has behavioral quirks that would make that so)?

Especially if the latter, you may need to work through the issues you see (as you noted, following instructions, self-control around glowing boxes, etc.) one by one as you step into schooling. Working through issues is also teaching, so if progress on the behavioral pieces is all you get done for a while, that would seem fine.

DeeDee

Colinsmom, we have been attempting to work up to it since Jan with this in mind. We took a break for summer.

DeeDee- we always planned to HS no matter what. But I was open to other options. With food allergies at hand though, I know I personally couldn't send him to K and stay mentally sane. I also KNOW he would be insanely board and cause trouble. Though socially I think he would be fine and love it. But I don't think there is a possible decent placement for him. He would need multiple grade skips off the bat. I think he would struggle with adult authority if they were insisting he do way below level work. He would likely take on the role of class clown. He would also see himself able to take on adult choices. I don't think he is too quirky. Very social... But typical gifted quirky... Sensitive, argumentive, intense, but he's pretty socially smart. Most his school problems would be with authority and his challenging it as he would see himself as the superior reasoner.


PArt of issue I think is mentally he is ready for work at least four grade levels up. So my brain thinks he ought be ready for more formal type study... When reality is that he is five and somehow I need to present things that are usually presented in a more structured way, in a five to twelve year old way at the same time.
Pardon typing, hate anroid algorithms!

Phey are you also coming up against an asynchrony gap between his data input needs and his output ability? My DD is skipped, she's out putting near the top of her class by she really needs to be receiving input 1-2 grades ahead of that, she seems to learn best by for example receiving instruction on how to write that is well in advance of how she is capable of writing right now. She can't output at that level yet but she assimilates what she hears way faster than normal so that lesson won't be output today by maybe next quarter instead of a few years away. However focusing purely on the details she needs to correct right now just drives her nuts. I find this tricky to deal with myself and impossible to convey to her school.