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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
I’ll second Saxon math. I keep wondering when they will get bought out and go all PC, but I kept all the old books.
The program we’ll be using is called Right Start. In reality, I’m probably going to have to hire a math tutor (in addition to a Hebrew / Judaics) when they get a bit older. Which is still far cheaper than sending them to Jewish day school.
This was a great article somewhat related: https://www.businessinsider.com/homeschooling-is-the-new-path-to-harvard-2015-9
This is exactly what we’ll be doing; that’s why we’re doing the workbook daily – basic practice forming letters, numbers, shapes.
The other one is Bryan Caplan. The guy is just devastating. Charles Hugh Smith, too.
You might consider getting the book Arithmetic. The link goes to my review of it. (It is another book going into my homeschool texts box.)
and for whom getting hired meant having the right prejudices.
I would recommend that you look into some sort of legal defense. We used the Home School Legal Defense Association and they more than paid for themselves when the Hawaii Dept. of Ed came to knocking.
https://hslda.org/content/
The Frankfurt School is real. Ever look at Melissa Click’s CV? She’s still a professor.
Atomize it. Yesterday.
How depressing.
I swear 20% of the GOP don’t have their heads around this stuff.
Home school was rewarding for us in so many ways. I am glad to see that you are planning to do this <span class="atwho-inserted" contenteditable="false" data-atwho-at-query="@beth“>@bethanymandel.
I’ll second that. I read it (after reading Seawriter’s review) and it has some good insight into the conceptual basis for arithmetic.
G-dspeed! What a gift to your daughter…
Have you looked it over? It’s worth buying the book—fairly cheap paperback, and it’s reusable (hand-on-able) just so you can get a sense of the process. I started my daughter at 3.5 and she was done about five months later (one lesson a day, five days a week). Because it was only 15 minutes, even on a restless day we could get it done, especially when it became a sort of ritual (put her sister down for a nap, have a cookie afterward). Knowing what I know now, I would’ve done it with all my children, and probably around the same time… four to five, that is.
Hints: Don’t teach her the alphabet song. Knowing that this “W” is called “double-yew” doesn’t help when reading “wuh.” Also, somehow slip certain words into conversation—“ram” and “cap” were two that just hadn’t quite arisen in my young child’s life, go figure.
Good thinking on the math tutor. Wish I’d realized just what a handicap my non-math-ness would be! It wasn’t a problem of choosing textbooks (I also bought Saxon!) but my general absence of attention and enthusiasm communicated all too clearly, particularly when compared with the intensity of my interest in history, natural history, writing and art!
So how do you do home school lab classes? I always felt lab classes never worked very well either in high school or college (experiments always fail for various esoteric reasons), and basically you always just eneded up going back to the book to describe what should have happened. Maybe it’s just the way I like to learn, but lab classes felt like a waste of my time compared to lectures. I don’t need to titter the acid with a base to accept it works, or actually run the DNA on a gell to believe it spreads out based on size (though I now do this so regularly it seems quaint that it was once the subject of a week of lab work).
From your lips to God’s ear…
But don’t think it’s going to be anytime soon – maybe a generation or two. The bureaucracy is too entrenched and too much gov’t money for the taking is at stake (no DOE money ever gets into the classrooms).
I get what you’re saying and I know you are right, but there are some economic factors that work against those guys. It’s all that Austrian stuff I babble about and no one cares. All current education is based on an inflationist-style economy. Between birthrates, technology, and the obvious bad value proposition, that is always working against those guys. Deflation. It’s unrelenting too.
Biology is mostly microscopes and slides and dissection and the like.
Chemistry is things like calibrating a thermometer, calculating the amount of a substance based on the mass and the like before and after a reaction.
We blow some things up.
We use a lot of vinegar, epsom salt, draino, things like that.
I use my kitchen stove for heating substances.
I have a set of test tube holders, beakers, graduated cylinders, several different scales, etc.
Making test solutions from red cabbage is something I usually do several times a year.
Anatomy was also all slide work, and anatomy coloring book. Lots of memorization.
Again, I get that no one cares, but it relates to the job stuff Ben Sasse was talking about last time he was on here. We need a far more libertarian Fed and economy instead of saying some people are just going to get the shaft. Better living through purchasing power. Western inflationism died due to trade opening up, robots, and birth rates. If you hate Trump I suggest you look into what I’m saying.
True, but… I once took a biochemistry lab class; it was a requirement of the major. We did a bunch of things; I can’t remember them all but DNA isolation was one, and preparing polyacrylamide gels and doing gel electrophoresis was another. The professor was well aware that one of the possible esoteric reasons for an experiment or project not working well was that some people are smart but have neither manual skills or common sense.
For that reason, rather than picking or being assigned a lab partner at the beginning of the quarter and staying with that partner, we were assigned a new partner every two or three weeks, depending on when the break between projects came. We were graded on purity and yield of product, or for successfully doing the procedure so that, for example, the gels looked they way they were supposed to for the substance applied to the gel.
However, if every time Jane Jones was somebody’s partner that partnership was a catastrophe, and Jane’s partners did much better with partners other than Jane, the part of the grade that depended on purity and yield was dropped for Jane’s partners for the projects they did with Jane. In hindsight, I think that Jane would have been advised that her chances for career success would improve were she to pursue studies not involving lab work, but that’s just a guess.
In any case, I subsequently applied for Research Associate jobs in several academic labs. One of the interviews included a conversation that went something like this:
“Have you ever done gel electrophoresis?”
“Have you ever…”
“Did you ever…”
And so on, listing techniques that were either covered in that class or that I had been taught in my advisor’s lab.
I got the job. Where I experienced frequent prolonged exposure, without protective equipment, to one chemical whose MSDS reads
And other, less frequent unprotected exposures to worse chemicals.
Hillsdale accepts no gov’t money, including student loans. They will, however, search for ways to help students financially – scholarships, jobs, etc. This allows them to provide a real education with no strings attached, an education Hillsdale is so famous for.
I believe Grove City College operates the same as Hillsdale – and may be the only schools that do so.
Dude you could not be more wrong. Pretty much everyone on Ricochet cares. That’s why we are here.
OMG, I love myself LOL
Look at this tweet. He has a screenshot. This is the picture of deflation. LOL
Education is supported by inflationist debt. Student loans. Home prices. Think of all of the excess administrators. Think of the horrific value so many are experiencing. Think of the desperation to support their stupid pensions. Think of the Janus decision. #theft
I’m not that smart, I’m just obsessed. LOL
***EDIT***
Think of all of the buildings.
I think the University of Minnesota blows a million dollars a year on lobbying. They can’t lobby #MATH Lol
I don’t see how it lasts as it currently exists. Too many of us are on to them now. Think about Detroit and what happened to that city and the auto industry there.
We’re Living in the Age of Capital Consumption
The education mafia feast on your children. Is this even debatable?
That’s what I think.
Prior to 1970 or 1980 education was a “public good” shepherded on some kind of social compact or something. Not now.
Closer to 1980, it seems…Focus was on well-rounded, civically-engaged adult as a result of education; tripod of family/faith community/school all working to achieve this goal, even in the mid-70s through early-80s (for me, at least).
How about titrating the baking soda with the buttermilk to evolve gas off the acid-base reaction to make the pancakes fluffy? There is so much chemistry (and biochemistry, and anatomy) you can learn in cooking.
I discovered that a trip to the Chinese market could provide nearly every specimen I dissected in my college zoology class.