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.
The purpose of kindergarten is usually to get kids acclimated to a traditional school environment while giving them some of the basic skills they will need to function properly in first grade. That is exactly what happened in the Christian kindergarten Kelly attended in our neighborhood. There was nothing deeply negative about the experience at all. Some of her kindergarten was very positive–memorization of Bible verses (we especially enjoyed Psalm 8), visits to local nursing homes to sing for the people living there and a few new friendships. We were glad we did it.
We saw though, that moving forward, traditional school was not a great place for academic advancement nor for healthy socialization. There was nothing she learned in Kindergarten she did not already know. We pretty much expected that, but when we investigated what would be covered in her first grade year, we found she would not move forward there either as most of the students would need to continue improving their reading skills and start on basic arithmetic. All of this would occur in a social setting, while much better than the local government school, whose predominant feature was still a room full of 20-25 same age kids with one teacher and a part time aide.
When kids leave school, they almost never enter such a homogeneous, unhealthy “Lord of the Flies” social environment for the rest of their lives where a group of relatively unsupervised kids socialize each other. Kelly had lots of friends from swimming lessons, the neighborhood, church, library and other activities where there were people of different ages and more adults per child than in a traditional school setting. That seemed like a much healthier social setting than that of a traditional school. Even in kindergarten we could see a pecking order get established. The competition to wear the “right” clothes, play the “right” games (Pokeman was the rage at the time), watch the “right” television shows had already started. That we did not have a television in our home became a topic that needed to be explained. It was pretty low grade competition at that age, but it had definitely started.
We really did not care whether or not Kelly learned anything in kindergarten. She was only in school a few hours per day and we kept teaching her new stuff at home anyway. That would change when she went to first grade. We wanted her to actually learn things then. That and the social aspects of the artificial social environment in traditional school settings gave us pause. We started considering homeschool toward the end of Kelly’s kindergarten year. At the end-of-the-year assembly, they had Kelly read a passage from a book none of the other kids could read and implied the school had taught her those reading skills. That pushed us even further down the road toward homeschooling.
Betty Blonde #204 – 04/28/2009
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