Two Weeks and Counting

We are two weeks into our new curriculum work and I can honestly say that this is one of the best decisions I have ever made for our home ed. A couple of years ago it probably wouldn’t have worked for us, and who knows where we will be in a couple of years‘ time, but right now, for us, this absolutely hits the spot.

I am one of those people who loves a list. Shopping lists, To Do lists, list of ideas for the millions of things I may explore at some point; they help me collect my thoughts and reassure me that I won’t forget those important things (until I lose the list, of course). I am much, much happier when I am organised. 

With half our house due to be demolished in less than three weeks, we have an eye-watering amount to do. Over the past few months, knowing this was coming up, I have gradually worked through the boxes of random stuff thrown together during house moves, invested in sensible storage furniture and generally got us a lot more sorted than we have ever been. Now it is time to do the last big push as we race to shift things into storage and declutter the few rooms we will have left to make room for a camp kitchen, filthy waterproofs, muddy wellies, and the pile of straitjackets that will certainly be the only way to stop my children hijacking a bulldozer and ‘helping’ to widen our driveway by adjusting the position of next door’s house wall. 

With all of that looming, it is a huge relief to know that we have a home ed routine that is sustainable and will keep the boys engaged and happy whatever else is going on - and that I don’t need to apply too much thought to while dealing with everything. Most importantly, it will carve out a piece of time for me to spend with each of them in the midst of the chaos. 

Daniel is using Build Your Library Level 1, which covers the Ancient World for History. The focus is largely on reading great books together (me reading to him and natural discussion as it comes up) - short bursts of amazing content. There is The Tale of Despereaux for literature, which we are both loving. Daniel was hooked from the first day and is always disappointed to stop reading. We have both learned to leave this until last. The magic of the writing resonates for some time after we finish reading it and immediately moving on to another subject is a complete waste of time. Since Daniel prefers to get his least-liked work over with first and finish with his favourite, this works out nicely. 

History uses sections of Story of the World, which hadn’t exactly gripped us until we were able to get some maps out to work out the region we were reading about. Daniel really enjoys being able to slot together different pieces of information, so I suspect we’ll get into it. Last week we read a fun book about archaeology and made the mind-blowing discovery that US historical eras are completely different to ours. (For any Americans reading, ‘Prehistoric’ for us refers to anything before around CE43, and is divided into eras like the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age etc.)

The week finished with an exciting archaeological dig in an exotic location (a.k.a. squatting on the concrete outside the garage, digging in the washing-up bowl). With Ben’s help, I had snuck out in the morning and filled the bowl from the flowerbed, complete with post holes (compost) and layers of knapped flint (picked up and worked on a walk a couple of weeks ago), Roman jewellery (since adopted by Ben, who loves a bit of bling), a grotty Saxon coin (an old £1 that once spent three weeks inside one of the boys and looks suitably revolting), various shards of glazed pottery (some that fit together), some Swiss coins (evidence of international trade), and a small plastic car that reduced Adam to a state of outrage when unearthed. Everyone got involved with this project. Daniel painstakingly scraped the soil off in layers and I was detailed to sieve every bit of it. Adam dashed off to fetch some water and came back (treading so carefully that several snails zoomed past him) with one of our china bowls full to the brim. He spent three quarters of an hour diligently scrubbing every find. Ben, entranced by the ready supply of both earth and water, mixed mud to the perfect consistency and painted himself from head to foot. Adam was mildly put out that his Very Important Archaeologist’s Brush was being put to such a plebeian use (he may not have actually used that word) but that was soon sorted out with a bit of diplomacy and an extra paintbrush. A few days later, Daniel was able to talk to my dad about the whole thing, and hear the story of the real post holes he excavated on Dartmoor in his youth, which was very cool. 

Science is Nature Studies this year. For all we spend so much time outdoors, Daniel hasn’t tended to enjoy the topic when studied before. However, he seems to appreciate BYL’s combined approach of practical activities in our own chosen area of nature (the allotment, since the garden is shortly to become a bulldozed wasteland) and books that present complex information in accessible but still challenging language. Right now I doubt he will remember all the levels of animal classifications from kingdom down to genus and species, but he enjoys discovering the concept. Now he knows the information exists, he will come back to it when he feels ready for more. 

Art is my real mental block after an appalling teacher in secondary school. I don’t remember ever learning about particular artists there, nor learning any techniques that produced a result I liked or wanted. Even before looking at full curriculums, I was wondering if I could find a guide to teaching Art, as I had absolutely no idea where to start. We have rediscovered watercolours (which I never used at school, only at home, thus bypassing most of the block) and I love how easy they are to get out and clear away. There is also flexibility, though. This week’s picture study was a set of paintings of faces constructed from different materials (fruits, vegetables and plants, in this case, to represent the seasons). As Daniel had already done some painting this week, I suggested he could build a face in Minecraft using different blocks. He ended up creating an engineer using different redstone blocks (for those who aren’t MC-savvy, redstone is like electricity and you can build circuits with it) and giving a full guided tour to a visiting friend. 

Poetry memorisation was a new idea for us. At the start, he was a bit huffy about doing it and really couldn’t see the point. Fortunately, both he and Adam (and probably Ben, as far as I can tell) have amazing memories. As he has realised how easy it is for him (he reads it twice and he’s generally got it), and especially when we have managed to find a bit of humour in each poem, he has started to warm up a bit. 

Aside from the curriculum, we have carried on with Cursive Kickoff for handwriting, Maths Seeds, and Usborne reading books. We were just coming to the end of a Year 2 CGP Geography book about North and South America, and although we liked it, it was still a bit of an uphill battle each week. Seeing the completely different approach of a Charlotte Mason-inspired programme, it occurred to me that we were taking far too much time relative to the amount of content. So far we have had to spend ages negotiating how much reading Daniel will do, and then ploughing painfully through the workbook (which, let’s face it, is really there so a teacher can tell which of her 30+ pupils have taken in anything they they have read with their often-limited decoding skills). Now we have decided to ditch the workbook and just read the main book, discuss it, and look things up in books or on the internet if we want to learn more. The extra busy-work didn’t seem to be achieving anything other than putting him off the subject, so we are going to stop doing it. 

Hebrew is carrying on and I am gathering information and resources to build a whole Jewish Studies curriculum for the kids. We won’t start that until after the High Holydays (end of September) so I’ll do a post about that another time. 

All in all, this is definitely a success. Daniel is so much happier; he is interested in what we are doing, happy to give things a go, and his creative side is blossoming as we do just enough of each thing to spark ideas without getting bogged down in busy-work (which then leaves us time for other things too). Loving the journey so far! 

We need to talk...

We need to talk about the c-word. 

No, not that one. 

I’m talking about the c-word that regularly has UK home edders on Facebook foaming at the mouth: curriculum. 

This is one of the huge differences between home education in the UK and the US. In the States, many homeschoolers are Christians wanting a religious alternative to secular public schools. Also, most states (as far as I know) have at least some requirements for evidenced academic work. In the UK, on the other hand, we are all apparently barefooted, brown-rice-eating, anti-establishment hippies, raising our tangle-haired feral monsters on a diet of illiteracy and blissful ignorance of social norms. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle on both sides of the Great Puddle, but the fact remains that using a boxed curriculum is considered fairly standard across the pond, but is not mainstream home ed practice (oxymoron alert) here in the UK. 

I have lost count of the number of times I have joined scores of experienced home educaters advising new parents, who have often been forced into home education with little or no time to research and who assume they need to recreate the worst elements of the classroom in their traumatised child’s safe place, or parents of two-year-olds who believe their toddler needs to be doing pages of sums and grammar exercises before their next birthday. The National Curriculum is so embedded in our school system that it is easy not to realise that there are many other options that are generally a better fit for children learning at home. Anyone starting to home ed needs to understand that moving away from school-based education will take a period of readjustment for child and parent, and that learning is likely to look very different from the traditional view of children sitting round the kitchen table while mum writes fractions on a blackboard. If there is one thing that seasoned home edders in the UK generally agree on (doubtful - if you have two HEers you will find three opinions) it is the importance of following a child’s lead and letting them develop their natural love of learning. 

Of course, some children thrive on structured work, and many of us do at least a couple of hours of table work most days. A whole curriculum covering several subjects, though, can get quite a hostile reaction, perhaps because so many of the curricula available are overtly Christian (the Creationist flavour). But there are curricula covering the whole gamut of religious (and not) views, plus many different home ed approaches. As with all styles of home education, there are some children who find a curriculum really suits them... and it turns out that my children are among them! 

It’s funny, because if you had asked us when Daniel was little, we would have said that unschooling would definitely be our approach. We even went to a Radical Unschooling camp one summer, although that did convince me that RU, at least, was not the best fit for our family. But over the last year and a half I have realised just how much my eldest two thrive on the routine and predictability of formal academic work. Daniel struggles with change and feels much more settled and able to learn when there is a certain structure to his work. Adam loves time with me and gets a huge kick out of the small triumphs of working through a programme step-by-step, while harbouring a burning ambition to overtake Daniel in everything. Ben’s goal in life is to do everything his brothers do, with a sprinkling of mayhem to keep things interesting. 

An added kick up the backside for me to sort out what we are doing is that we are starting a massive building project soon and will be living in half a house for several months. I am pretty sure that for all of us, coming out the other side of that with any shred of sanity will require a level of organisation I have never even aspired to. We had a chat with the boys and they agreed that this feels like something they would like to try, and they like the idea of something stable and consistent during all the upheaval. 

Both boys will be using curricula inspired by Charlotte Mason, based on reading together lots of amazing books that bring alive the subjects we are studying. Daniel is starting Level 1 of Build Your Library. Age-wise he is on the border between levels 1 and 2 but he and I felt it would be a good idea to get the groundwork secure first. Level 1 has a lot of mythology, which he enjoys - he loves spotting references elsewhere to literature he knows. BYL doesn’t include Maths, so he will carry on until the end of Maths Seeds and then try out a few other options that we have heard recommended. 

When I looked at Level 0 of BYL, it just didn’t seem very Adam. Blossom & Root, however, looks like it will suit him perfectly with its nature focus and he is really excited about the Space topic. He will be starting Kindergarten and carrying on with Maths Seeds and his reading (a mixture of Reading Eggs and the Usborne reading scheme). 

Added to both curricula (which are secular) will be some Jewish Studies, though I’m not quite sure yet how much. Both boys use Aleph Champ through cheder for Hebrew reading, and Daniel started Bright Beginnings a few months ago to learn Biblical Hebrew. Adam plays games with me to learn some Modern Hebrew vocabulary as his Modern Language; Daniel is teaching himself Esperanto at the moment but I expect will dip in and out of our Hebrew too. I’ll probably add an extra read-aloud each week to look at the parsha (Torah reading) but beyond that we’ll wait and see how we feel. 

So there we go. This feels like a great fit for us at the moment and I’m really excited! On the other hand, our bank account is trembling in fear as I eye up the book lists; I’ll use the library for lots of them but I’m not even slightly reliable when faced with the opportunity to recreate the Great Library of Alexandria in our house.