Homeschooling Failures

The past couple of weeks have been full of hands-on, active learning, a big preference of C.  We have been picking and taking pictures of wildflowers in the neighborhood, gathering rocks, measuring rain, and looking at the effects of UV.

Generally, I suppose it has been successful.  The kids seemed to learn and enjoy our activities, but there were also a couple of failures.  The failures have mainly been mine for poorly understanding an activity we attempted.  One was trying to gather earthworms to compost in the house.  The three worms we found didn't last and very soon we realized we needed more research.  We found out, of course, that you need special red wigglers and you need to be careful about buying or constructing a worm bin.  We are likely going to proceed with getting the right worms since it is a way to compost indoors in the city, but we felt silly for putting time (no money - thank goodness) into something without research.  The other failure, while not much wasted time, made me feel really stupid.  We tried to make a rainbow using the sun, a mirror and water, but failed miserably.  It seemed to be such a basic activity, but we couldn't figure out what we did wrong.  Fortunately we saw a rainbow in the sky a few days later near our house, no need to take the bus to Niagara Falls!

As the teacher of my children, I have spent the past several days back and forth on the implications of some of these failures of activities.  To an extent, I feel that "all's well that ends well" - nothing really bad or really great - end of story - move on.  In other ways, I am very worried that I am setting a poor example for my kids regarding preparedness by not testing the activities before introducing them or not doing enough research before jumping into something.  Still in other ways, I think I may be setting the exactly the right example by showing that science and life is trial and error and that you continue the exploration and pursuit of truth no matter what happens.  I would like to comfort myself that this this precisely the point of homeschooling, but I am not sure when I will stop wrestling with this.  They are 5 and 4 now, won't this dilemma get worse as they get older?  What do you think, success, failure, or no big deal?  Have you had experiences like this? 

When the Annoying Becomes Educational

C is very active and I am beginning to have to make lessons more hands-on and, well, active.  She is a good little girl, but her need for activity can be annoying at times.  A recent example is her obsession with dandelions.  Since we walk all over the neighborhood, this invades most of our outings.  She is constantly bending over to pick them or blow the seeds.  Sometimes this behavior is charming, but if we are in a rush or if the risk of stepping in dog stuff is high (if she ventures onto grass) it can be too much.  She even collects them when there are other activities going on.  On a recent WNY Homeschool co-op day, the other kids were in the playground equipment, trading cards, or playing chess and she was running around collecting dandelions sometimes socializing and sometimes not.

Of course, they are good flowers for learning about how plants reproduce and a broad interest in wild flowers isn't bad.  I decided to try to find books at the library about flowers since they seem to be of such interest to both T and C.  It seems like a good way to reinforce science, reading, and maybe even life skills if we decide to rip out the lawn and put bulbs in during the fall.  I never guessed, though, that I would find a book on dandelions specifically called From Seed to Dandelion.  It seems like a great book for C and even T.  They were very excited to take it out and want Dad to read it ASAP.

Customizing learning to their interests is one of the great things about homeschoooling.  I have tried to do this where possible in a general sense at least.  Now, however, I am beginning to see that sometimes I will need to nurture even the annoying interests since they can lead to more learning.  It will be interesting to see if after reading the book they are satisfied or want to pursue flowers even further.  I guess we will soon see!

Endless Joy for Mom - Continued

Unfortunately, I am afraid to bring my camera near the pool, but we have had a banner set of homeschool days over the past week.  Both C (on Friday) and T (on Monday) have passed their swimming lessons from Mom.  T isn't even 5.5 yet and C isn't 4.5 yet and they can both swim 25 yards doing a combination of doggie paddle and rolling onto their back and floating and kicking.  I feel that they are safe enough in the pool.  There is plenty of time for stroke refinement.  C is a real natural at swimming so it may not be far behind anyway.  I was so thrilled.  Start to finish our lessons took less than 6 weeks (we have been averaging 3 times per week of swimming).  I would love to take credit, but their comfort in the water made it easy.  Still, it makes me feel so good as a Mom!

Homeschooling: Endless Joy for Mom

I am going to break from my normal style with this post.  My posts tend to be factual, explanatory, or even argumentative.  I rarely write the more reflective pieces about the maternal joy that comes from homeschooling or homemaking.  It isn't that I don't feel this joy, it just isn't my writing style.

As I may have mentioned before, my career experience is in accounting and school business administration.  I am a licensed CPA, School Business Administrator (SBA), and School District Administrator (SDA).  As you can imagine, the writing I did during my career was technical.  In some ways, my role as housewife and stay-at-home-mom still feels foreign while other times it feels completely natural.  Many people would believe that I am devastated that I can no longer work.  While there are times when I sadly think about the fact that I put a lot of time and effort into my career only to have it end, the sadness is more than replaced by the very great joy of homeschooling.

This past week has brought great joy at my son's accomplishments.  T had two big breakthroughs.  One break through is in reading.  While he can't pick up any book and start reading, he can read a substantial amount of the words from the kids' books that he picks up from the section of readers at our local library branch.  He is still slowly sounding out words quite a bit, but his success at it and confidence have both taken a recent jump where he wants to pick up books to read a lot more often.  His other break through was in swimming.  He mastered floating for several seconds, a big water adjustment step from Infaquatics: Teaching Kids to Swim.  It is hard to describe, but his comfort level in the water went up dramatically too.

Both of these are big steps for two very important life changing skill sets.  The sense of pride I had was obvious to me.  I felt great.  It was a greater sense of accomplishment than I ever felt for any degree or certification I received.  It wasn't until Tom came home from work and I told him about both, that the privilege I have in seeing and contributing to them was even more apparent.  He was quite pleased at T's increase in skills of course, but I could tell that he didn't feel the same way I did.  He just didn't have the first hand level of joy that I did as the parent who was there.  I suppose the situation was reversed when I worked and he was home.  I don't remember being as excited about T walking or talking as many mothers would be.  I was too busy and too stressed.  Of course, having Tom experience the joy instead would be fair enough, but if the kids were in school we would both be missing out.  Money can't buy the great sense of joy that can be savored almost daily by homeschooling.  Spread the word!

Insourcing: Teaching Your Strong Areas Yourself

While it isn't unusual in homeschooling to teach most things, I recently wrote Outsourcing My Teaching Weaknesses.  Unlike many homeschooling parents, I don't do arts and crafts too often relying on the library for this quite a bit.  Other homeschooling parents outsource too, but much of the discussions I have had related to physical education.  They have their kids participate on community sports teams for physical education. 

In this case, I have decided to insource.  While not a trained swim instructor or life guard, I am an avid lap swimmer and used to swim competitively.  Now with my fibro, it is the only exercise I can still do rigorously.  Rather than sign my kids up for a set of nine or ten lessons, I am taking them swimming with me on a pretty regular basis.  I do my laps while they count down for me (a good math lesson), then they come in to play and work on skills.  I am following Infaquatics: Teaching Kids to Swim.  It is quite an old book, but the step by step method seems like it will be successful.  We just started and T and C are already pretty comfortable holding their breath and going underwater.  Now we are working on the next step: floating.

Since I have to go to the pool anyway (I will stiffen up if I don't swim and stretch), it isn't adding too much time to bring them with me when I go.  For most people who are avid swimmers, this can be done with no problem.  With the significant amount of rest I need, I did need to make some sleep schedule changes to not get too tired at the wrong time of day, but it is still far easier than dragging them team to team or lesson to lesson or having to do it at the end of the day after school.

Tell me about unusual areas that you insource.  I would love to hear about all the different approaches!

Homeschooling for Different Learning Styles

While I am very proud of the fact that by homeschooling I allow my children to learn at their own pace, I don't spend a whole lot of time contemplating their learning styles.  The unschooling portion of our homeschooling seems to meet their needs since they are learning more than enough and are happy most of the time.  I still am not sure which style I would assign them to or how to use it to consciously customize our program.

I first started to notice differences when T practiced reading from some of the level 1 readers we get at the library.  He meticulously sounds out phonetically each word.  It is obvious that he really has a handle on phonics, but sometimes longer words or words that don't follow the rules trip him up.  C, on the other hand, sometimes guesses the word before him out of context even though she doesn't have all the phonics tools yet.  I am not sure what this means.  Perhaps one is more visual and one is more auditory.  Both are certainly hands-on learners.  I think most kids are.

As far as hands-on projects go, one of the most interesting examples of learning differences happened this past Saturday.  We went to the Crane Branch library , they had a great flag making program where they drew a design on Styrofoam to make a stamp for paint onto the flags.  It was fascinating to see how each one handled the project.  They were given six flags to put designs on and string together.  C was the only one at the class who completed all six and strung them together.  However, the creativity level was low compared to the others.  The teacher demonstrated a simple red flower.  C made five simple red flower flags and one basic red heart one, but again was the only one to complete the whole project:

T, on the other hand, made a painstaking picture of a princess to stamp onto his flag (blue to be my favorite color).  For the next ones he began an elaborate picture on the Styrofoam of a laptop computer with pictures of princesses on it.  Because he ran out of time and the fact that he became enamored with keeping the Styrofoam itself, he left with only one flag on a string (and his beloved Styrofoam computer):

For several days now, I have been wondering what this says about their learning styles and personalities.  I wonder if I could find some books to help me sort this out.  Is it important to know?  Would the information help me customize their learning better?

Have you experienced these phenomenons with your kids, homeschooled or otherwise?  What advice would you give me?

Urban Homeschooling: A time for activism?

In light of some of the very recent developments regarding Buffalo Public Schools, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the recent posts at City Kids Homeschooling regarding Kerry McDonald's interview with Huffington Post.  Kerry McDonald is a very eloquent and informative advocate for urban homeschooling.  Overall, I am extremely pleased that articles are being done on the topic by the media and that she is a resource.  When her first post on it hit, I laughed at myself and told my husband that it is better that she was interviewed than me since I would not have been so diplomatic.  Apparently since then, as per her second post on the topic, some people feel she was too diplomatic.  I have mixed feelings on this.

When it comes to individuals, diplomacy is more than warranted.  With the current societal structure, some people simply can't homeschool.  There are too many pressures many of which are outside of one's control.  Further, no matter how well you know someone and think you know what options they have, it is often impossible to know what their pressures are.  It would be wrong to look at an individual and judge them for not homeschooling.  This happens to me all the time with my fibromyalgia since it often limits my activities.  People judge me all the time about what they think is really wrong with me or what they think I should be able to do.  When I was first getting it, many thought I was just lazy or distracted by my young children or had depression or whatever.  It is amazing the ideas that some people have about other people about all kinds of things.

When it comes to looking at society and education as a whole, however, I am much less diplomatic and more cynical about the choices that people make.  First off, homeschooling has been legal for quite a while now and data has been accumulated on its effectiveness.  The fact that 5% or less of students are home educated despite the compelling evidence tells me that parents generally care too much about being like everyone else to even research it.  They either don't want to be thought of as different or care too much about what the second family income can buy.  For many, it is a lack of confidence after being told that only professionals should educate.  However, even the confidence issue could be remedied by reading a few books on homeschooling.  After all, what could be more important than the right educational choice for your kids!  I know that this sounds harsh, but with the current educational crisis, we need to be more willing to try dramatically different approaches, especially homeschooling.

This week in Buffalo, the headline is Parents Vote To Recommend Pulling Students Out of School .  The state education department wants teacher evaluation to include all students, the teachers don't want to be held responsible for the educational results of chronically absent students, and the District can't afford to lose any money needing the teachers to agree to the new evaluation measures.  Parents are naturally appalled by the idea that over $9 million will be taken away instead of used to educate their children.  The problem here is that no one is wrong.  The state education department needs to be interested in all students and not just some students.  The teachers can't teach students who are chronically absent.  The District can't run smoothly when resources are being taken from the schools and students who most need it.  Parents who care about their kids' education have a right to expect the District to obtain all funding to which it is entitled and that if they turn their kids over to professionals on nearly a full-time basis that results will be good.

With all parties being right and the students losing out anyway, it is time to rethink whether the conventional schooling model with its competing interests can work.  Conventional public education has been around long enough with mediocre results that it has been given enough of a chance.  It isn't the fault of teachers, administrators or parents, the model just isn't that great.  Homeschooling could be the answer.  For the chronically absent students, it probably is the answer.  A few parents may be irresponsible, but my guess is that most families of chronically absent students have some challenge in their lives that homeschooling would solve: student chronic illness, parent chronic illness, family members out of state or the country requiring extensive time away, or many other problems.  For the other students, why waste years in a situation that won't be fixed since in the current paradigm it almost can't be.

While I think urban homeschooling advocates could stand a little less diplomacy, I agree with Kerry McDonald that we can do a tremendous amount to help other families by showing the advantages of our homeschooling lifestyle.  She has one of the best urban homeschooling blogs.  I am adding a new blog to document our daily activities to give a real nuts and bolts look at our lifestyle.  These are valuable things to do.  I, like her, didn't seriously consider homeschooling until I had my own children.  I also have graduate degrees in education.  It is interesting that when the chips were down and we made decisions about our own kids we chose homeschooling.

On a personal note to those families who struggle with the current educational system particularly those who have trouble with attendance.  While some people can't homeschool, we almost have to homeschool.  It has been a solution for us.  With my fibromyalgia, it often takes me over an hour to get out of bed in the morning.  I am not sure I could always have T & C ready for a bus.  Further, a great homework burden is placed on parents.  There is no way I could guarantee that my kids homework would be done since I am often quite tired by 3 pm.  My days vary a great deal and I never know exactly how I am going to feel.  With homeschooling, my kids get me at my best in the middle part of the day.  While they work on lessons, I can do a few household chores and then we get our other activities, outings and errands done before I get tired.  If we do a longer day out, we can (sleep in and) follow it with a shorter day the next day.  We can spend time on lessons on the weekend if we want.  I am sure that for a great number of you out there with problems, homeschooling can be a solution too.

I hope policy makers are paying attention to what is happening.  A dramatic overhaul of education funding should be undertaken if results are so important.  School districts receive money to educate students whether the results are good or not.  Some money is taken away, of course, like the $9 million in question in Buffalo, but most of the District's budget will remain intact.  I am getting results in my homeschool and remain unfunded.  Is that fair?  For families that currently can't homeschool due to economics, funding may really make it an option.  Perhaps the future of public education should be large tax credits for families with school age children and some sort of online curriculum bank with tie ins to landmarks and museums.  There are many ways homeschooling could be set up to work for many more people.

Outsourcing My Teaching Weaknesses

A couple Saturdays ago we went to the Dr. Seuss birthday event at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.  One reason we went is that I am trying to find new library events for the kids who have outgrown the beloved toddler story hours.  It was getting awkward to bring them on a weekday with the two year olds to our local branch.  Even though C is only 4, she is as big as her brother and they were starting to overpower the group by over-participating and sort of jumping in front of the smaller kids.

The other reason I brought them is that the description of the event mentioned arts and crafts.  This was their favorite element of the story hour and one of their favorite activities.  This of course is a weak area for me.  Partially due to my impatient personality and partially due the fibromyalgia, I lack the energy and patience for this.  Despite being a homeschool mom, I don't think I have organized an art project in almost a year.  I have decided to handle this by attending as many library activities as possible where this is covered.

I have done the same thing with speech.  T was very difficult to understand.  I got him evaluated at Buffalo Public Schools and, despite his pretty high IQ, he was deemed to have a moderate to severe delay in pronunciation.  I was not as intimidated with the speech as I am with art, so at first I tried to find resources to do homeschool speech.  There was some information available, but nothing that I felt confident in using, at least for the articulation part.  I let the CSE place him at a school nearby just for speech.  Despite warnings from other homeschool parents that it would be a waste of time and that he would outgrow the speech delay anyway, the placement seems to have been pretty successful.  T is doing much better with pronunciation thanks to the very good speech teacher.  I am sure that part of the success does have to do with outgrowing it, but not all of it or even most of it.  Additionally, he does get to experience a small bit of conventional schooling allowing him to learn with other kids while not being couped up in the full-time job that school is for conventional students.

This is another advantage of homeschooling.  In public education and government in general, "outsourcing" is a sort of dirty word usually having to do with union contracts.  In homeschooling, though, you can customize and tailor the program to each child.  I am confident in my ability to guide my children in learning their core curriculum, reading, and field trips at their own pace, but for some of the more labor intensive areas or areas where I lack skill, I can turn to better resources.  I hope that understanding this will give more parents the confidence to homeschool.

Science Museum Visit

We went to the Buffalo Museum of Science last week.  We had a great time.  The kids especially love the Explorations section where they learn through play.  Check out some of the things T & C did:

We went to the exhibits too, but this was the part that was most fun for them.  It is interesting to see what exhibits they are drawn to, mostly the more hands-on ones, but sometimes they surprised me.  I know that I thought that rocks in glass cases would be of no interest, but because of the interesting shapes and colors, they actually wanted to stay in that part for a while.  I will need to keep that in mind.

The Homework Lie, Modern Child Labor

At first, I wasn't going to read this book because we homeschool and don't deal with traditional homework:

 

However, since most of my childhood and teenage years were consumed by homework to the point that college was more of a break, I was drawn to it.  The book is well written and hard to put down, even though it is a research type book.  It pretty successfully debunks the mainstream ideas about homework showing that there really are not compelling studies for it.  Often times, the researchers defaulted back to the myths despite no research evidence.

It was hard not to get angry about all the wasted time in my life on homework.  According to the book, I was likely to be just as successful without it and probably healthier and less stressed since I would have had more free time and more sleep.  It is scary that no one challenged it including myself.  I suppose I could have gotten lazier like some of my peers and not been so good about it, but since it was assigned, being the conformist that I was, felt inclined to push myself.  I kept pushing until I completed graduate school and further into my career until, due to health, I was forced to slow down.  Crash!  Homework can't be blamed completely.  My mother has similar health issues so there seems to be some genetic predisposition.  Still, hers set it at about age 50 and mine by age 30.  She had a lot of homework too, from the same catholic schools, but not as many of the career and graduate school stresses in her twenties, not getting her masters degree until her forties.  Perhaps after all those years of stress, when we heaped full-time work and graduate school onto them, it got to the tipping point with the genetics.  Who knows? But worth contemplating when I think about my own daughter, C.

Should I blame my parents?  In the 1980s, there was not anywhere near as much literature challenging traditional school so I can be more sympathetic to going with the flow back then than would probably be appropriate now.  Also, even though homeschooling was legal, without the internet, resources were quite scarce more challenging to come by.  Given this extremely high likelihood of going with the traditional school grain, my parents were far better than most.  While most parents kept their money for new cars and vacations, my parents sent me to the best catholic schools money could buy in our area.  When most parents thought education was so unimportant that they pulled kids out of school to go to Disney, mine had a whole family schedule: daily, weekly, and yearly that put the focus on school.  Education was the top priority even though it was manifested in the misguided idea that everything about school was good for us.

Now that I am grown up with my own kids, like my parents, education will still be important to the point that I am outside of the mainstream in homeschooling despite the still significant peer pressure to use conventional schools.  "School", however, will not be the priority.  Conventional school takes too much time from the family robbing it of the true education, health, emotional, and spiritual needs.  While I have said before that our homeschooling doesn't have anything to do with religion, we do have more time to read the Bible and make it to Church more consistently because we homeschool.  My kids can sleep when they need to get sick less than their peers despite lots of exposure to germs in parks, libraries, museums, and buses.  Instead of my husband struggling to help them with "homework" when he gets home, he has the joy of playing educational board games with T & C and reading with them, low stress family time.

While I enjoyed the book, it may be more important to recommend it to our traditional school parent peers!  Maybe it will at least get people to change the debate from how much to whether or not to assign homework or even use conventional school.

Homeschooling and Less Wasted Time

When I look at homeschooling, it is hard to not see so many benefits, but for me, one of the most compelling one is less wasted time.  Some of it is obvious.  When kids do their lessons at home, they don't need to wait in line or for the class to settle down.  There is also the much better commute time.

What about when you are waiting at the doctor or dentist?  Today, I had some ear discomfort and decided to go to the urgent care clinic at my medical group.  Of course, depending on how many people are already there, there can be a lot of waiting (even though it is comforting to know you can go when you are sick and not worry about getting an appointment).  While we waited, we read five of the optional reading books that go with T's unit in Time4Learning .  They spent less than an hour on their online curriculum earlier and the rest we took care of while we waited at the doctor (actually more than usual, we usually do one or two of the optional books a day).  Homeschooling turns some of your potentially least productive time into the most productive.

The verdict about my ear, unfortunately, was a bad ear infection.  I talked the provider into letting me go three days with continuous over the counter decongestants first to see if it would go away without antibiotics, but I took the script anyway in case it doesn't work.  Since 80% of ear infections go away on their own if you are properly hydrated and draining, I hate to mess up my micro balance unless I have run out of options.  That being said, if it comes down to it, at least antibiotics are temporary and loads of yogurt can be eaten later to compensate.  It is still a better medical technology than some of these new drugs for blood pressure, cholesterol, or pain whose expected use seem to be indefinite.  Medical consumers need be skeptical and ask a lot of questions these days.  While doctors aren't bad, their training is biased toward trusting the drug companies and the FDA.

Sorry to get side-tracked, but I just wanted to share how homeschooling can be so efficient.

Homeschooling: Why Not?

Another great post at:

City Kids Homeschooling

Read it and my comment!

Bad Teachers or a Bad Model

While I like books on homeschooling, I often read books about education in general or economics.  I recently read this one:




I never see Dr. Steve Perry on CNN because we don't have cable, but I thought it would be interesting to see what he has to say.  Warning, I am not a snob about foul language, but there is a bit too much in this book.  While not over the top conversationally, it feels strange in print.

He does make some excellent points about teachers behaving as professionals.  Instead of whining about the kinds of kids they get in terms of poverty and home life, if they were good teachers they would be able to get good teaching results regardless.  In some ways I agree with this because if you turn your kids over to certified professionals full-time, it seems shameful to not be guaranteed reasonable results.  He even goes so far as to talk about suing school districts over poor results which is not a bad idea.

That said, is it really that simple?  While he isn't wrong, everyone knows excellent teachers who work 10 or 12 hour days regardless of their union contract or poor pay in the case of private schools.  They certainly do far better than bad teachers proving competency does matter, but even in their classes there are still a few students who struggle at times.  Can even the best teacher follow up and guarantee success for twenty or more students?


It seems to be a tall order.  A talented teacher can work his or her butt off and not necessarily get through to all students.  I, as a homeschool mother, don't work any harder than my conventional school parent counterparts (following up on homework, meeting with teachers, calling about a bus problem or bully takes more time than people acknowledge), but am getting far better results than the schools (so far).


Am I a great teacher? No, far from it.  Again, I don't work that hard at homeschooling - for many reasons I can't.  The self-pacing, low stress, and resulting high motivation of my kids take care of all of it.  When will everyone get off the merry-go-round and see that the model is to blame and not necessarily the people?  Sure, there are plenty of incompetent professionals in education, but by focusing on that everyone just stays wedded to the model when it should get thrown out.

Our First Pet

We are allergic to dogs and cats, so we always knew that we could only get fish.  The unit that T is working on in Language Arts extensions in Time4Learning is oceans and we read several books from the library about fish.  It seemed like the perfect time to give it a try.

Of course, only time will tell if it was the right thing to do.  The Elmwood Pet Supplies store was very helpful if you are considering getting fish.  T & C named the fish Snow White after one of their favorite characters.  We were inspired by reading What's It Like to Be a Fish.

Homeschooling: The Best Kind of Pizza

Whether you want pizza but have a tight budget or just savor the idea of cooking with your kids, making homemade pizza is a great family activity.  Saturday, I decided to try a homemade pizza with the kids.  Truthfully, it was semi-homemade because I didn't make the cheese or even the dough homemade.  I bought mozzarella cheese and pizza dough.  Realistically, I will probably never make my own cheese for it, but will try my own dough next time.  For Saturday, though, I did use my homemade tomato sauce left over from spaghetti on Thursday. 

If I may brag, the sauce made a huge difference compared to even the best pizza places in Buffalo.

That said, the experience making pizza was not without incident.  The first one stuck to the pan big time because I forgot to put a thin coating of oil on the pan.  The second one was much better since I coated the pan a little and put more sauce on it.  I used a convection setting reducing the time and temp by about 10% each.  It cooked amazingly even helped by having the right pan with holes in it - very much like this one:



Again, next time, I plan on a homemade dough, but in a pinch the dough from the supermarket works fine if time or energy runs out.  Happy cooking!

Homeschooling: Time to Change Political Parties?

Like most people, I am pretty discouraged by politicians generally.  Most seem pretty clueless about what regular people are going through and only interested in being re-elected.  Currently, I am a registered democrat, not because I am thrilled with them, but because they seem a little more in touch with regular people than republicans.  Not only do most republicans running for office seem bigoted against low income or minority people, I don't believe in their general philosophy that government shouldn't have a role at all.  Clearly the resources of government can, when used properly, bring equality and stability to the wide citizenry in a way that competition alone cannot.  Unfortunately, democrats take it too far by not only having government fund basic services, like education, but operate them.  While cut-throat competition is too far, the inefficiencies of government is not all that desirable either.

Then I read up on Ron Paul's views on homeschooling.  He is proposing tax credits to defray the cost of homeschooling.  It is perfect.  Government funding of education without operating it.  Parents who are the best champions of their students would be in charge without the penalty of a reduced income.  It is a real program of equality.  Low and middle income people wouldn't have to be afraid to give up an income.  While homeschool is more efficient and so it doesn't take as many hours to educate students, taking kids out of public school does mean parents are without free day care making a second income almost impossible.  The credits would fix this.  There would also be more family stability because a parent would be home to be a homemaker removing some of the stress of the over scheduling that often goes on in two income families.

Should I rush out and change parties?  Not sure, I think it was Ron Paul's son that thought civil rights went too far.  Also, most republicans don't want federal involvement in education, but leave it to the states.  Perhaps, I should lean on my state politicians for consideration of tax credits.  Mark Grisanti, my state senator whom I already strongly support, despite being a republican has gone out of his way to support equality by supporting gay marriage and funding for the NFTA (public transportation is a very important way to further equality).  He is the type of Republican that would be well worth changing parties for if it came down to it.  However, voting for Ron Paul would also sent a message to politicians about homeschooling.  If republicans in NYS took it up, they could begin to cut education costs in half since the $5000 that Ron Paul is proposing is half the per student cost in most school districts in WNY.  Time to send our politicians an e-mail!

Homeschooling and Parent Illness

In a recent post, I talked about the advantages of homeschooling when it comes to kids getting sick.  It is pretty intuitive that the flexibility would be an advantage.  But what about when you, the parent, are sick or maybe have a chronic illness?  Most people would assume that you couldn't homeschool, but my experience has been that homeschooling is far better.

From talking to my counterparts with kids in traditional school, despite turning their kids over to professionals thirty plus hours a week, they still face significant work in educating their kids.  There is homework (even in the younger grades) with deadlines, getting them ready for a school bus on a tight morning schedule, being home to wait for the bus (or drive to pick up their kids), calling the teacher about progress reports, meetings with the principal over bullying, etc.  All of these things are stressful, deadline driven activities.

I stopped working several years ago due to pain and signficant fatigue which I recently found out is fibromyalgia, an illness that is not life threatening but life changing.  I need to live at a careful pace to feel well and keep up with daily activities.  I rest ten to twelve hours a day and have a careful exercise routine of swimming and stretching.  Even with these careful measures, I still have quite a few bad feeling days.  Getting up on a strict schedule (the stiffness in the morning can make things hard) or having to help with homework in the evening with waning energy would be very difficult.  It would be unfair for T & C to do poorly on a homework assignment because of how I am feeling.

With homeschooling, we can go at our own pace.  On a good feeling day, we do a field trip or go to a homeschool group.  On a bad day, they can stick exclusively to their online Time4Learning and free play (puzzles, library books, board games, blocks, dolls) at home which requires virtually no work on my part.  Most days are in between where (in addition to their online lessons) we go out for an hour or two to the playground or library and some local neighborhood errands before my energy starts to fall again.  On balance, I probably don't spend any more time than my traditional school parent counterparts, with far better educational results and very little stress.  The flexibility also makes it possible for Dad to pitch in when needed since he can be with T & C whenever he isn't at work.

I hope this helps people understand more of the advantages of homeschooling.

We're Back!

For obvious reasons, I didn't tell you that we have been away for more than a week.  Everything came together at the last minute and we went to Florida to see the grandparents (not the set in the board game post).

The kids were great in the car!  They practiced reading signs and by the end of the way down, T and C realized that food and gas signs on the interstate are always blue and that the exit ones are green.  I am a little embarassed though that I was so exhausted from the little bit of driving I helped with, that I didn't do most of the techniques I read about in Carschooling, even though it is a really great book.  I felt silly reading it because we don't own a car and need to rent one to leave town, but it is a great read regardless.  It really does have have great ideas for covering all subjects on many types of car rides, from long trips to commuting.

I also thought that it would be fun to check out the homeschooling laws in Florida.  Before I looked, I assumed that they would be less stringent than New York.  Was I wrong!  While I didn't see anything about quarterly reports, Florida requires a specific type of log and under certain homeschool options the need for a certified teacher to adminster tests.  It seems a little more stringent to me.  Of course, I only read the summary by HSLDA.  Still, it made me thing that New York may not be the most difficult state for homeschooling.  More on our trip in future posts!

Homeschooling When the Kids Are Sick

My daughter got a rash on her face, temporary and not serious.  It reminded me, however, that neither of them has been too sick this winter.  They each had the same long but very mild cold and the same six hour stomach virus, but that is it so far.  This could change of course before winter is over. 

When I think back to my own childhood, unless I had a fever or threw up, I went to school.  It is a good thing that I did too because when I had chicken pox and was out for several days, it was horrible trying to catch up.  It seemed so unfair to just finish being sick and then go back to school and have to do double the work.  It is a wonder we didn't get sick repeatedly from being worn out.

That is the best part about homeschooling.  When the kids are sick, they can take a day off or do a shorter day.  With the little ones, maybe it is a day for cuddle schooling, anything that can be done curled up on the couch with Mom (or Dad).  When we cuddle school, we read books and watch Spanish DVDs.  I didn't make up the term "cuddle school"; I have heard the phrase from many homeschool moms.

Defensive Testing

It seems that homeschoolers are often homeschooling because they don't like that schools seem to "teach to the test" or think that tests are not a good measurement of how well a child is educated.  What about testing as a defensive measure?  In New York State, standardized tests must be given every other year starting in 4th grade, but not all states require them.  When T finished kindergarten before he turned 5 I thought that there would be many people, maybe at the school district, but more likely naysaying extended family members or acquaintances who would question whether he really learned what he was supposed to learn by that age without going to school.  I decided to take a chance on it and give him the California Achievement Test for kindergarten thinking that, by the standards of those who believe in conventional school, it would prove that he really did well enough in kindergarten to proceed.  Fortunately, he scored 60 percentile or above on everything.  While I don't believe that standardized tests are a great measure of acheivement, it feels like one more piece of evidence that we are on the right track.  What do you think about defensive standarized testing?