And it ain't much different in homeschooling than in the rest of life.
When you decide to homeschool, you agree to play the long game. There will be days, weeks, months, maybe years, who knows, when the progress you see is fitful, sporadic, maybe non-existent. And while there is a time and place for re-evaluation of curriculum, plans, teaching methods and styles...eventually it might become clear that the one thing that likely DOES need to change is not whether you use X math curriculum or Y spelling workbook...but your daily use of whatever it is you do teach from.
I am not unlike the majority of homeschool parents in that I have fluttered from one technique or style or curriculum to another. There was the disastrous semester we attempted to do child-led learning...and my kids forgot practically all of the math they had learned. There was the year we started out with hand-illustrated reading lists. There was the year of a complete free preschool curriculum from online, mostly consisting of colouring pictures of whatever letter we were supposedly learning (spoiler: it didn't work for us). I have a copy of The Well-Trained Mind and a copy of Educating The Wholehearted Child and a closet full of Rod and Staff math workbooks sitting cheek-by-jowl with Saxon math up to Algebra 1/2 (my eldest is in grade 3. What can I say - it was a good deal?). Do you remember MEP math? I do. I printed out the pages and sat with my student and tried to explain why these two trucks were supposedly the same even though as hand-drawn illustrations there were slight differences that made me crazy. Or, what was the other one...oh! Starfall! Remember Starfall?! I haven't thought about them in ages.
The point of that somewhat depressing, and very incomplete, list of my teaching failures is that any one of those curricula, used in a rigorous and dedicated way, would probably have worked great for any of my students. For the child who detested both Saxon's spiral method and also R&S's mastery method...was the problem really that two great, well-researched math programs with two different approaches were both equally awful for us? Or was it because I sighed and said I didn't have time to explain something right now so just go get your spelling and work on that instead and then before I knew it three days passed by before we looked at the difficult problem. Was that the fundamental issue?
Yeah, yeah it probably was.
Certainly there are good reasons to change from one program to another, and I wasn't trying to fall down that rabbit hole, but ultimately I have really come to think that the one factor that most influences whether a child learns from a book is...the teacher. Which seems like it should be self-explanatory but has apparently taken me several years of homeschooling to discover.
This coming year we will be reading Story of The World Volume 2 as our history spine. I'm excited to introduce the kids to the medieval time period but I have...well...I have found myself floundering a little in my excitement. Downloading lots of free medieval notebooking pages, pulling piles of stuff out of the bookshelves. The other day I bought an Usborne book about the history of the Celts, which, um...isn't medieval history but you can see how the spinning out is happening. If we do the medieval period, shouldn't we go back to explain...well I guess that means the dark ages which also means we need to review the Roman retreat which maybe I can gloss over because I feel like the Romans are their own topic but then do I even mention the Britons? Do I? Do I mention the Vikings? The Saxons? Lindisfarne? I should mention Lindisfarne...and before you know it you're on the Gutenberg Project and lo! Henty wrote a book called Beric The Briton and I bet I could read that aloud!
But of course, none of that has anything to do with my ability to teach age-appropriate medieval history to a 9yo, a 7yo and a tag-along 5yo. I could read my little book about Celts, say 'there were people living on that island before the Romans', and be done with it.
Likewise I'm starting to look into next year's curriculum choices and, sigh, it's all happening again. The shiny new whatever that is luring me to do this exciting thing I totally should do for these little people. We should make a book of centuries! We should order and complete this 200+ page nature curriculum for children that is really pretty but comes from England and will almost certainly not work in Northern Canada. We should get another math book!
I'm reminding myself, patiently, intentionally, repeatedly, that what the children need is ME, teaching them, every day. And the rest is pretty, sparkly fluff.
When you decide to homeschool, you agree to play the long game. There will be days, weeks, months, maybe years, who knows, when the progress you see is fitful, sporadic, maybe non-existent. And while there is a time and place for re-evaluation of curriculum, plans, teaching methods and styles...eventually it might become clear that the one thing that likely DOES need to change is not whether you use X math curriculum or Y spelling workbook...but your daily use of whatever it is you do teach from.
I am not unlike the majority of homeschool parents in that I have fluttered from one technique or style or curriculum to another. There was the disastrous semester we attempted to do child-led learning...and my kids forgot practically all of the math they had learned. There was the year we started out with hand-illustrated reading lists. There was the year of a complete free preschool curriculum from online, mostly consisting of colouring pictures of whatever letter we were supposedly learning (spoiler: it didn't work for us). I have a copy of The Well-Trained Mind and a copy of Educating The Wholehearted Child and a closet full of Rod and Staff math workbooks sitting cheek-by-jowl with Saxon math up to Algebra 1/2 (my eldest is in grade 3. What can I say - it was a good deal?). Do you remember MEP math? I do. I printed out the pages and sat with my student and tried to explain why these two trucks were supposedly the same even though as hand-drawn illustrations there were slight differences that made me crazy. Or, what was the other one...oh! Starfall! Remember Starfall?! I haven't thought about them in ages.
The point of that somewhat depressing, and very incomplete, list of my teaching failures is that any one of those curricula, used in a rigorous and dedicated way, would probably have worked great for any of my students. For the child who detested both Saxon's spiral method and also R&S's mastery method...was the problem really that two great, well-researched math programs with two different approaches were both equally awful for us? Or was it because I sighed and said I didn't have time to explain something right now so just go get your spelling and work on that instead and then before I knew it three days passed by before we looked at the difficult problem. Was that the fundamental issue?
Yeah, yeah it probably was.
Certainly there are good reasons to change from one program to another, and I wasn't trying to fall down that rabbit hole, but ultimately I have really come to think that the one factor that most influences whether a child learns from a book is...the teacher. Which seems like it should be self-explanatory but has apparently taken me several years of homeschooling to discover.
This coming year we will be reading Story of The World Volume 2 as our history spine. I'm excited to introduce the kids to the medieval time period but I have...well...I have found myself floundering a little in my excitement. Downloading lots of free medieval notebooking pages, pulling piles of stuff out of the bookshelves. The other day I bought an Usborne book about the history of the Celts, which, um...isn't medieval history but you can see how the spinning out is happening. If we do the medieval period, shouldn't we go back to explain...well I guess that means the dark ages which also means we need to review the Roman retreat which maybe I can gloss over because I feel like the Romans are their own topic but then do I even mention the Britons? Do I? Do I mention the Vikings? The Saxons? Lindisfarne? I should mention Lindisfarne...and before you know it you're on the Gutenberg Project and lo! Henty wrote a book called Beric The Briton and I bet I could read that aloud!
But of course, none of that has anything to do with my ability to teach age-appropriate medieval history to a 9yo, a 7yo and a tag-along 5yo. I could read my little book about Celts, say 'there were people living on that island before the Romans', and be done with it.
Likewise I'm starting to look into next year's curriculum choices and, sigh, it's all happening again. The shiny new whatever that is luring me to do this exciting thing I totally should do for these little people. We should make a book of centuries! We should order and complete this 200+ page nature curriculum for children that is really pretty but comes from England and will almost certainly not work in Northern Canada. We should get another math book!
I'm reminding myself, patiently, intentionally, repeatedly, that what the children need is ME, teaching them, every day. And the rest is pretty, sparkly fluff.
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