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An Intro to Homeschooling, For Me and You
In less than a month, I’ll be starting homeschooling with my eldest. She’s almost five, kindergarten age, and I cannot tell you how relieved I am to see everyone her age going to school and I get to keep her around.
For a lot of reasons; mostly cost, quality of education, the length of the school day and the lack of outside time, we decided against Jewish day school and public schooling. Over the last few years, I’ve had a lot of questions about what we plan to do, and so, here is an intro to our plan as a family and the methodology we’ll be following.
Several years ago I took a webinar offered by an Orthodox Jewish homeschooling mother that was basically Homeschool 101. During that webinar, she mentioned Charlotte Mason; an English educator from the 19th century. I read more about her on the Ambleside Online website (a curriculum based on her writing) and fell in love with the literature-based philosophy:
Charlotte Mason was a British educator who believed that education was about more than training for a job, passing an exam, or getting into the right college. She said education was an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life; it was about finding out who we were and how we fit into the world of human beings and into the universe God created. But this kind of thinking was pretty much eclipsed during the 20th century by demands for more exams and more workers. In 1987, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay wrote a book called For the Children’s Sake, which reintroduced parents to Charlotte Mason’s methods and philosophy, and it started to gain a foothold with a new generation of homeschoolers.
Charlotte Mason believed that children are able to deal with ideas and knowledge, that they are not blank slates or empty sacks to be filled with information. She thought children should do the work of dealing with ideas and knowledge, rather than the teacher acting as a middle man, dispensing filtered knowledge. A Charlotte Mason education includes first-hand exposure to great and noble ideas through books in each school subject, and through art, music and poetry.
The knowledge of God, as found in the Bible, is the primary knowledge and the most important. History is taught chronologically, using well-written history books, source documents and biographies. Literature is taught along with history, using books from or about the same time period. Language arts skills are learned through narration, which consists of the child telling back a story, first orally and later in written form; copywork, or the transcribing of a well-written piece of literature; and dictation of passages from their books. Memorization was used by Charlotte Mason not so much to assimilate facts, but to give children material to meditate or “chew” on, so her students memorized scripture and poetry.
Science in the early years emphasizes nature study with an emphasis on close, focused observation of creation as a means to knowledge of God. Charlotte Mason was very excited about science. She felt that all the new things people were discovering in her lifetime were part of God’s revelation, including the theory of evolution which was accepted by many Christians at the time. Christians using her methods now can still identify with her emphasis on nurturing curiosity and a sense of wonder, although most will teach that from a creationist viewpoint rather than an evolutionary one.
There’s a short explanation of the ABCs of the philosophy here as well. I’m sold by B, books.
We will be using either the Ambleside curriculum or the Charlotte Mason Institute’s new curriculum called the Alveary. I’ve attended several seminars over the last several years of studying Mason’s methods, and I’ve been impressed by the CMI staff and perspective. While there is a fee to use the CMI curriculum ($200 per family per year) there is more structure and support for families than the free Ambleside curriculum. As a new homeschooling parent, that is very appealing.
For those interested in podcasts, I’ve found the Delectable Education podcast to be the best for learning more about Mason’s methods, especially the first two episodes introducing it.
Before diving into Charlotte Mason’s writing, which can be a bit dense, this is a great introductory book. When you’re ready for the real thing, buy this edition (there are six volumes altogether); there have been several poorly edited versions of her writing over the last few years.
Over here, we’re already breaking the rules, starting homeschooling with our five-year-old; not waiting until six as instructed by Ms. Mason and her followers. We need a soft open for my daughter’s sake, and mine. She’s the guinea pig; sorry honey.
Because the Alveary doesn’t have a kindergarten curriculum, we’ll be following the “Year 0” booklist on Ambleside’s website with Jewish living books, Torah portions and Hebrew additions.
I’ve been building a curriculum for the next year, a Jewish Mason-inspired kindergarten. I’ve been updating a Google doc with our lesson plans for the upcoming year (it’s, as you can see, a work in progress). Please feel free to comment with suggestions on books, activities, music, or anything else that comes to mind!
Published in Education
Wonderful!
My wife and I — mostly my wife, but I was involved as a work-at-home dad — educated all six of ours through grade school at home, and the older three through high school. The older three all went to college on full academic scholarships; I sent the younger three to a small Catholic high school after my wife passed away, and they all excelled and were at or near the top of their classes, and, again, went to college on academic scholarships.
Without intending to detract in any way from the efforts of countless dedicates parents — okay, mostly mothers — who have devoted themselves to this task, I’ll just say that educating children at home is easier than one might think. The capacity of a child’s mind to absorb information is one of our great underutilized resources: how quickly they learn, and how much they can learn, is simply amazing. And the joy that comes from sharing so much context with them, from having read what they’ve read and learned what they’ve learned, is hard to convey unless you’ve experienced it.
Ignore anything you hear about “socialization.” Normal involvement in worship, community, family and friends is all that’s required. The one area, truly the only area, where, in retrospect, a school had an advantage over homeschooling was in athletics: my younger three all became aggressive competitors in high school athletics, competing in basketball, baseball, softball, soccer, football, tennis, and track. Not being athletic myself, I underestimated the rewards of athletic competition, and that’s the only thing I’d encourage you to consider, a few years from now. All the rest, including music and art, we were able to augment on our own, even from our remote rural farm in Missouri.
In 1996, speaking at the Wanderer Forum in Washington D.C. on the topic of the movement by many Catholic families toward homeschooling, Father Joseph Fessio described the homeschooling family as “the monastery of the new Dark Ages.” At the risk of being overly dramatic, I believe he was right.
Great choice, and I wish you and your family the greatest happiness and success. Homeschooling was an incredibly rewarding, and successful, experience for ours.
H.
Good luck Bethany!
Wonderful! I wish you and your children many wonder filled years in this endeavor. As a former homeschooled kid, I see how homeschooling benefitted not only me, but my parents in the refreshing of thoughts and ideas likely long forgotten.
@cbtoderakamamatoad
We have been homeschooling for 26 years now, since the oldest of our nine children was in kindergarten. We still have three in high school this year, so only four more years to go.
One of the many benefits of homeschooling our children is that it has created a very tight-knit family. Our children all really like each other and spend time with one another, including the ones who are working full time, married, and moved out. Given our family size there are significant age differences (17 years from oldest to youngest), but they still find ways to have meaningful connections as siblings (this weekend my 14-yr. old had an overnight at her 20-yr. old sister’s college apartment). They also don’t share the aversion of social interaction with anyone who isn’t in their same grade, as many of their peers do, and they interact very well with adults. We were very blessed to have a large Christian home-schooling community in our area, and networking with this group, sharing ideas, play-dates, sleepovers, field-trips, etc. has been so encouraging. These are our best friends- of the kids and the parents alike.
It’s a lot of time and effort and yes, my wife is a saint (that goes without saying), but it is so worth it! It goes by so fast so make sure to enjoy each day in the moment and don’t fret about the process. Some of our children were reading when they were four, and others not until eight or nine. It is a beautiful thing to be able to teach according to each child’s ability, interest, and speed of learning. And the quality of the education is top-notch! We have five college graduates so far, and four of them are working in their fields of study (my three boys are engineers) with the most recent graduate working full time while seeking employment in her field. Two are married with a third wedding planned for December.
Good for you. Homeschooling is the ultimate in school choice and an amazing journey. We’ve home educated our four children, the youngest of them is now 18, so yay for me, at 52 years old I can finally forget Algebra! I say that, but as it worked out, my wonderful wife did most of the heavy lifting on a daily level.
I would say this, while the Classical model of Mason is excellent, and many of our greatest minds of history came through such a system, as I mentioned, homeschooling is the ultimate in school choice. While you may easily complete the marathon task of educating for your children with that system, it is good to be prepared to ride loose in the saddle and adapt to your children as they develop.
If you haven’t already read it, I would highly recommend a simple book called “The Way They Learn” by Cynthia Tobias to add to your reading pile. It is not a solution per se, but it will be a good read to seeing how the curriculum needs meet learning styles. Our four kids each benefited from annoyingly different methods and systems.
Also, if you like Mason, as you plug in to the Homeschooling community around you, keep an eye out for groups like Classical Conversations which is a co-op style implementation.
Godspeed on your family’s journey.
Homes cool!
I’m still homeschooling. My oldest is in college and will graduate this year with a double computer science and game design major, we hope. His brother is a sophomore studying engineering. Their sister is a high school senior who is taking community college calculus and chemistry, and studying other subjects with me.
I also have a high school sophomore, an eighth grader, and a sixth grader.
For little children, science is easy. Natural history is the thing, like drawing birds and the phases of the moon and looking at the stars and constellations, just absorbing ideas and information.
As they get older and require actual science it can be hard to find a decent text that is beneficial to both students and teachers. One with labs that can actually be performed in the homeschool lab (I do love teaching high school chemistry, which I will be doing this year) that does not contain bad information.
I wish that fewer homeschool materials were written from the point of view of people who actually believe there has to be a dichotomy between believing that the Lord created the world and believing in the forces of science.
As a Catholic student in school, I was taught by teachers who said that if evolutionary theory was true, and they saw no evidence it was not, there needed not be any conflict between the idea of Lord creating the universe and evolution being a mechanism.
The universe is not 6000 years old.
One science text I was given from a homeschool friend listed John Calvin as one of the giants of science.
No way, man. Not gonna do it.
Of course, many homeschool friends I know are actually frightened of teaching science and so they don’t seem to do it. I know a mom whose son studied Greek and Latin (he is a classicist even now!) but who never actually finished a course of high school science.
(One of her sons took my chemistry class and said I was a good teacher. He finished that class and did well. But that was his only science for high school!)
My students are given a very rigorous college prep course which includes a minimum of three years of high school science with labs.
My high school senior, for example, took hs biology with lab in 8th grade, hs physics with lab in 9th grade, hs chemistry with lab in 10th grade, and anatomy and physiology with lab in 11th grade, and is now taking college chemistry at the community college.
I love teaching history alongside literature, by the way.
My 10th grader will be doing Greek and Roman history this year. So fun. He’ll read translations (Lattimore) of Homer, some Xenophon and Sophocles, some Plutarch and some Caesar.
(Oops. I inadvertently promoted my students in my comment above. My youngest two are actually 7th and 5th grades. ! Shows you that my head is not really into it yet this year — we will start our work for the year next week.)
The 7th grader will also be studying Greek and Roman history. So fun! He’ll use some of the older student’s materials, but instead of reading Lattimore’s translation of Homer, he’ll read Rosemary Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy and the like.
And the 5th grader will be completing a two year American history study. We made our way up to the founding of our Republic last year. Pre-history, and the Indians, and the colonies and all that. Magellan and Columbus and the Mayflower. Now we get to read Washington and Lincoln and some great American books.
Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance. The Devil and Daniel Webster. Stephen Vincent Benet poems. The Constitution. Most any book from the Childhood of Famous Americans series of books. I might try to watch some of those old Davy Crockett tv shows with her. Good stuff.
This topic really pushes my buttons. I am so sick and tired of people saying education is 100% about employment. The Mike Rowe stuff. If you want to conduct your life and your kids life like that, fine. I don’t think my philosophical views should be forced on anyone. Why can’t you do both, learn a trade or STEM and get “liberally” educated or completely skip either part, at a fair price?
It is criminal that their isn’t an economical way for children and college students to get “liberally” educated in the traditional, sort of, Hillsdale sense, if that’s what you want. It is so obvious that “soft” education has to be separated from STEM and every level of education need to be almost completely atomized. Nassim Taleb has been saying this and good luck winning an argument with him. Certify the “hard” topics and let the private sector sort out both “soft” and “hard” education. Education is a racket and almost everyone suffers from it somehow.
This is what I’m talking about.
If you’re interested in this topic check out the reason magazine interview of the renegade history guy.
Listening to educrats talk about the purpose of education is one of the big motivators for me and Papa Toad.
The purpose of education is to be educated. The purpose of being educated is to try to understand better the Lord and his purposes for us, and to try to get to heaven.
Getting a job is part of that, not the be-all and end-all.
Exactly. It makes me crazy.
While I agree with both of you, there is a breakpoint beyond which education does become about employment. The moment anyone borrows money (especially in the form of a school loan) for education, the education you are getting ceases to be solely about education and becomes a capital investment.
The education’s return on investment must justify the amount borrowed. If it does not, especially when education loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, you may well be condemning the borrower to a life of debt peonage.
Having said that, there are ways to keep education in today’s environment affordable, even at the college level. (One is to go to a school within driving distance, or attending a local community college for the first two years and then attending prestige U for the final years.) But, if you have to borrow money – especially large amounts of money – yes – it is about the job.
Bethany, how does the Mason curriculum teach reading?
I taught my daughter to read with Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons. It worked like a charm, and was perfect for a “soft entry” as each lesson takes maybe 15 minutes. When you’ve finished, the kid reads at an early second grade reading level—Frog and Toad Are Friends and that sort of thing. At least for me, I found that my child really took off on her own after that.
The answer here is, almost all education is overpriced for no good reason. Everyone has seen the charts comparing it to CPI inflation since 1980. It’s the government education mafia at work and it’s going to get destroyed, the only question is how fast.
Nick Gillespie: Libertarians Have Won the Culture Wars, Even Though Universities Are “Constipated, Stultified”
I came to say Janet and I homeschooled our three to college. All three are now successful engineers. I have been telling my kids if they don’t want to homeschool their kids I will move in and do it for them. They had been viewing it as a threat rather than a promise.
This weekend I was up in Dallas for my first granddaughter’s christening and repeated the statement. My daughter-in-law said, “Really? What would you charge?” (Room and board – by the time Janet Rose is ready for school I will be in my late 60s and can either afford to move in with them or will need to.)
Reason’s Nick Gillespie & Lisa Snell Call (colloquialism) on Public Education Abuses
I laughed.
Not arguing any of that. My middle son and I have comparable degrees at similar public universities. When I graduated I earned the equivalent of the entire cost of my education (tuition, books, fees, and living expenses) with the first eight month’s salary in my first job out of college. When he graduated it took 32 months. The quality of a college education has not improved 400% in 30 years. It has probably dropped.
The question is what do you do about it? The answer is to get an education without making yourself a debt peon. My advice is go to a school like Hillsdale. (I don’t know if you can get government-sponsored student loans if you go there. If not, that is another reason to go.)
You basically overpay, one way or another, for bad education that effectively turns the child into a brain-dead Democrat. That is what is going on.
The education mafia take over the Minnesota capital building every year with their signs and their shouting and the union bosses overlook it from the balcony above. It’s so weird.
Now they want full-service schools to mitigate the fact that the family has fallen apart. More union employment. Google it.
Most people, including me, aren’t smart enough to get into Hillsdale or anything like it. Kids in this era are just sort of screwed. You have to be creative. But it will end the hard way at some point.
Just to be clear, there are more versions of this. A conservative family values version. A libertarian family values version. Maybe there is something else worthwhile. There is obviously a socialist version. The Frankfurt School is real.
What happens now is, they teach you to think like a Democrat / socialist, or the kids just see it as an accreditation scam. A racket.
When I was in college, I was completely blown away by how many people that were far smarter than me, that were bitterly resentful of having to take liberal arts classes. It was an impediment to the fat salaries they were going to get from their STEM ability. I don’t think anyone at any level should be forced to take this stuff. It’s this forced demand that is made it become so stupid and useless. The waste and destruction is incredible.
FWIW
Minnesota is notorious for having the worst achievement gap in the nation. It’s been like this for decades. All of this progressive power, and all of this wealth, and if you’re a black kid you are screwed educationally.
A local economist came up with a plan where you would hire teachers that were fed up with the education system and have them homeschool four disadvantaged youths at a time. It would only take 2 1/2 to four hours every day but you would pay the teacher the same salary. (that’s an oversimplification). The rest of the day, the kid would learn a trade, get mentored, learn a sport, learn a hobby, get a job, or whatever.
Not endorsing, just reporting.
I have an engineering degree. One reason I liked engineering was I needed liberal arts to graduate. This was back in the day when liberal arts (literature, history, art, music) were actual disciplines and not indoctrination. My liberal arts counterparts did not take science, mathematics, or engineering. Guess who got the well-rounded education?
Today, most liberal arts classes are about regurgitating the prejudices of the instructor – who is generally ill-educated and pushing a barrow filled with superstitious tripe. I don’t blame STEM students for resenting the time wasted. (STEM is somewhat immune because being politically correct doesn’t stop the bridge from collapsing, but even that is changing. When that does change to PC engineering is when the system collapses. It will have lost all utility.)
I love this. It’s so obvious what direction things will go. The education mafia are toast. Nassim Taleb is such a good interview on this. Very, very similar to Seawriter’s point, here. I can’t remember which podcast I heard him say that on. Maybe Russ Roberts.
This is something I loved about Charlotte Mason. She states very clearly the person teaching writing is Shakespeare, the person teaching art is Monet, etc. We’re just facilitating their connection.
A question: What about math? I ask, because that is the big gap in my homeschooling experience or rather the big gap that my children went back to school with. They were well-read, could write like a dream, knew a lot about history, art and natural history…but because I was their teacher, their math skills were…unimpressive.
I’ve been surprised at how much I get out of homeschooling already, just reading Mason’s work and some of the living books I’ll be teaching.
I think kindergartners don’t really need math beyond learning to print numbers. For grades 1-3 I use MCP workbooks. Sometimes we use cuisinaire rods or other manipulatives. I also use flash cards for things like multiplication tables.
Fourth grade on I use Saxon, except for geometry. Sometimes I skip a text in the series, like 8/7, and just go on to Algebra 1/2. It depends on the student.
My 5th grader will be using Saxon 6/5.
My 7th grader is in Algebra 1.
My 10th grader will not be using Saxon this year, he will use Jacobs Geometry, a wonderful text.
In 11th grade he will take Saxon’s Advanced Mathematics, which is a good pre-calculus course.
It helps to know and enjoy math.
This is the method most Mason moms use, if you click on my google doc you see it’s in our plan! I’m still undecided if I’m going to do it with her this year or next. I’m leaning towards next, she doesn’t seem quite ready, though she is very eager.