This post is part of a narrative history of our homeschool. It is about why we chose to homeschool, what we did and how we did it. It is about our failures and frustrations as well as our successes. The plan is to make an honest accounting of it all for the benefit of ourselves and others. This is a work in progress which was started in late October 2014 after the kids had already skipped most or all of high school, Christian had earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude), Kelly had earned a Bachelors degree in Statistics (Magna Cum Laude) and they were ensconced in funded PhD programs on the West Coast. I add to the narrative as I have time.
There are a fairly large number of studies that show that the greater the access to books in a home the greater the academic advantage of the children who live there.1 This is another one of those things for which we would like to take credit but cannot. Both Lorena and I grew up in households with no television, no computer games and no video-game consoles. The only alternative was books, so even when our budget was tight, books were high on our list. We decided when we got married we decided we wanted the children to benefit from the both the lack of television and an abundance of books.
We had (have) books everywhere. The picture to the left is the niche in the bonus room where we store some of the book and homeschool project overflows. From the time the kids were old enough to understand, we read at least an hour a night to them including weekends. As they got a little older we often read much more than that. We started reading some of books the old books from my childhood that I loved–Homer Price, Henry Reed, Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was fun for them and fun for us. The kids had their favorite books and, as is the wont of young children, we read some of the books repeatedly.
The kids were so dedicated to their books, Lorena had a little bit of a struggle managing them. I actually walked into the house one day after work and heard Lorena yelling at the kids, “QUIT READING!!!” because they read so much. Lorena often had to take away their books to get them to play outside the house or to do art or build something with legos. They liked that, too, but perusing books was like breathing to them.
In the early days we spoke Spanish to them and read to them in Spanish and English. As they got up toward elementary school age, it got harder and harder to find Spanish language books so we transitioned to mostly reading to them in English while continuing to speak only Spanish to them. They could both speak both languages quite well, but we felt if either of us would have quit speaking to them in Spanish, their skills would have diminished because all the neighborhood kids, people from church, and everyone in my family, the only family close enough to visit regularly, spoke only English to them.
We had neither enough books nor enough money to buy sufficient books to satiate the kid’s desire for them so Lorena began to frequent whatever local library was available. I remembered them going to the library at least three days per week at that age. I asked her whether that was right, whether she actually went that often. She said they often went more than that and almost never less. Each kid had their own cloth bag to take books to and from the library. The checked out as many as they could every time and we frequently needed to do frantic, last minute searches to find books to get back to the library so we would not be fined.
So I guess we qualified as one of those households where the kids had access to books. One particular book that we actually owned and that we read time and time again was a beautifully illustrated picture book version of Edward Lear’s poem, The Owl and the Pussycat. That book was instrumental starting a program to memorize stuff. I will talk about that in the next post.
1. The following citation is from a long list of citations on the contribution of access to books in the home to the ability of children to learn to read from this article at the Children’s Literacy Foundation: (Source: Reading Is Fundamental, Access to Print Materials Improves Children’s Reading: A Meta-Analysis of 108 Most Relevant Studies Shows Positive Impacts, 2010). This page asks and answers questions about child literacy with relevant citations of the research. I recommend it highly.
Betty Blonde #200 – 04/22/2009
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