OT: Home Schooling

"Kim McAnnally" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

If you need ideas on HSing while working, I joined and subsequently started to help run a Yahoo mailing list for parents who work (or attend school themselves) and HS their children -- workandhomeschool -- and you are welcome to join us. There are some curriculum questions but mainly "how do I fit all this into 24 hours a day," "how do I get my child to work independently," "what do I do my child when I'm at work," "how can I get my child involved in extracurricular things," and other such issues. It's a great support group with people who understand what it's like to have to juggle everything all at the same time.

Sounds like a true partner in parenting. His daughter has my sympathies. ruby

Funny, I never found them that way. They are very consice with clear explanations and beautiful coloured photographs. Now I sound like an ad for them! lol But seriously, there is no pressure in our school atmosphere because there is no stress. If they don't understand something, I explain it in their terms. My kids aren't disabled nor high end achievers but they love these books. The long and short of it is that I wanted a better education for my kids than public school could offer, so this was an option. For us, it was a great option.

Maureen

Mel> "Maureen In Vancouver, B.C." wrote in

"Maureen In Vancouver, B.C." wrote in news:Sp6he.1338632$8l.663173@pd7tw1no:

This is what I found that left me with that belief (Please understand that I am only giving you my reasons for what I said and am not arguing with you. I know that no one product is going to work well for everybody or sometimes even not forever for one person.) And note that I have been doing this for *gulp* 17 years and haven't looked at A Beka for at least

10 of those, so it is entirely possible that it is totally different now, and actually, I truly hope it is.

1. They expect you to have *all* your multiplication and division facts memorized by the end of grade 3.
2. Their history textbooks are great, but the teacher manuals are full of history trivia stuff that you are supposed to impart to the student via lecture method and they get tested on them. (I loved their 3rd grade history book, but we did essay tests on it and dumped their stuff.)

All three of my oldest children, who have loved reading, absolutely DETESTED the A Beka readers. They loved BJU's readers, but I didn't care for their language arts. And my oldest, the one with the learning problems, was too overwhelmed with all the visual overkill with all the bright colors and couldn't concentrate on the material he was supposed to be learning. We ended up switching to Rod and Staff, and he excelled with their materials.

It is a perfectly fine option if it works for you. We went with a combination of BJU and Rod and Staff for years until we hit high school, and then we have scrambled a bit. This year we have done mainly Iclasses,

supplemented with Ambleside Online, Next year we are doing mainly Ambleside Online and supplementing with Iclasses. But I'm sure that wouldn't have worked for us earlier and especially not with my oldest.

I'm curious about something and would like to ask, "Do those who home school worry about lack of social interaction with other kids within a classroom setting?" I'm not talking about out on the playground or in the hallways. I'm talking about problem solving as a group and discussing different ways of approaching a problem.

I often think about when my oldest son was in Math 12, and the teacher had asked he and another student to go to the blackboard and both work out the answer to a problem. The other student solved the problem exactly the way the teacher had taught them. My son didn't, and as he worked on the equation a couple of students said, "No, no, that's not right..." The teacher asked them to keep their comments to themselves. Sure as heck the teacher could see where he was going and my son had taken what he had been taught and expanded on it, so had 'thought outside the box' and solved the problem in a better way.

The teacher was thrilled to see this. There was also a couple of times when my son had answers marked wrong. He went to the teacher and showed them why the answers were right, and got his marks changed. Again, the teacher was pleased to see that a student was willing to prove his work to be correct.

Btw, son is now doing his Masters Degree in Computer Science...yep, Math stuff...Combinatorial something or other, programming, etc..... It's way over my head!

take care, Linda

Linda D. wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

We do the same type of thing as a family -- in the earlier years I grouped children together for science and history types of studies, and sometimes I had one child tutor another one.

I don't think that is a problem that outweighs the benefit of letting each child learn a solution method that works for them instead of having to learn it the teacher's way.

And we have done some group classes and they get group projects that way, also.

You got lucky with the teacher. My son went from a private school, where he was doing math at his own speed, to a public school, where he had to learn things that were years behind him, and failed math, because he didn't do it the exact way that the teacher felt it should be done. Also, some kids do better with competition and some do much worse. I had one kid, who was just in it for the grades. The other two wanted to learn for the themselves. The first one homeschooled a few years and the first time she stayed out of school, she made me write stars and As and 100%s on all her papers. :) Judy

We are using mainly Rod and Staff also - mainly because of the price difference between them and the other books out there! We use Saxon for Math, Rod and Staff for everything else. And we supplement with internet information, library books, etc. Kim

Personally, I don't worry about socialization because they get very limited amounts of it in school anyway. They spend 7 hours a day there and most of it is time that they must be quiet and work, not interact with others. I also have a job at an after school care, so my kids get much more interaction now than they did before I took this job. (three hours a day of nothing but playing with all ages of kids!) Kim

"Kim McAnnally" wrote in news:118d8qqr4fjtm78 @corp.supernews.com:

Well, if you are using them for the price, do check out

It's great.

Ditto Melinda. We do things as a family as well. Maybe it's different for a single child, but there's no shortage around here. And sometimes the older ones DO help the younger ones. They seem to have a lot of patience for each other. We have one family in our group who has 12 kids, and all of them have been home-schooled from day one. I can't imagine!

Maureen

Mel> Linda D. wrote in

Hmmm...yes, I can understand doing things as a family, but how does the typical family even know about upper level science or math unless they have a career in that field or a background in education.

I was trying to understand how you manage to deal with home schooling at the higher levels...i.e. Gr. 11 and 12, and how it appears to me that students at that level often work on solving problems, i.e. algorithyms and Calculus, etc. as a group, and also on their own. If the group of students are at varying levels how do the younger ones work with the older ones? Are the older ones sometimes working with other students their same age/level in a home school enviroment?

I can see how homeschooling would work up until the high school level, but beyond about Grade 9 seems a huge challenge for any parent to me.

take care, Linda

Linda D. had some very interesting things to say about Re: OT: Home Schooling:

DH and I are seriously considering the homeschool option if/when (the "socialization" in schools is NOT the influences we want our children emulating. We do NOT want Britney Spears/Eminem look-and-act-alikes around the house),and we figure for any subject we can't learn with the kids, we can find someone (such as a college kid who'd like to make some extra money tutoring) to teach it. :-)

"Seanette Blaylock" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

That is such a good idea. My son used to tudor people in math and he was great teaching one on one. I didn't have too much trouble because my husband has had a lot of math, and also because my kids were used to learning on their own. There are some great books that teach math. Judy

Thanks, I'm going to check them out now! :) Kim

Well, I did 10-12th grades on my own with a correspondence course. No one helped, I used the books to learn what I needed. Then I went to college and got another four years (BS in Elem. Ed) So it just doesn't seem to intimidating to me - maybe to parents who didn't complete high school, but for anyone who did, why should they not be able to teach the things they learned as teenagers? Kim

Seanette Blaylock wrote: > any subject we can't learn with

Bingo! I made a fair bit of money tutoring, and even after I got out of college, I was getting offers from monolingual co-workers that they would buy me lunch if I'd look over Junior's foreign language term paper.

Because we forgot? I got straight A's in Math, but I cannot for the life of me remember the equation to solve a quadratic.

And let's not even get into the fact that I passed Chemistry on the strength of my chocolate chip cookies.

But, you have hit on one of my issues with home schooling -- the only qualification parents need is fertility. We've got people out there with an IQ of 12, who dropped out of 3d grade, home schooling their kids. Yet, it's somehow discriminatory to require that any parent who wants to home school must demonstrate adequate literacy him/herself. I'm not asking that they have a Ph.D., but it would be nice if they at least had to have a HS diploma or GED. Or, here's a test, Parent, and at whatever level you score, you cannot teach your children beyond that grade.

Hi Linda,

Well, for me it was a bit of a challenge, but between the teacher's books and the internet, I put in a lot of study hours myself just to stay at least one step ahead of my kids. I think if the day ever came where I couldn't stay ahead of the game, I'd look into hiring a tutor for the advanced math etc.

Maureen > Hmmm...yes, I can understand doing things as a family, but how does