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.
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We put History and Literature together in this post because that is exactly what we did in homeschool. We knew from our previous homeschool experience what we wanted from a History and Literature program. Many homeschool programs feature literature that tracks with their history program. We did it that way when Kelly was in the first grade and we were following the methods described in The Well Trained Mind. It worked very well for us. There were additional features of these programs that were important to us and were thankful for our previous experience because it helped us understand what we wanted in the homeschool programs we investigated. I will describe each of those features and the reasoning behind our decisions. These features are not necessarily in order of the importance we ascribed to them.
1. Lesson plans that assured we covered what was needed to move to the next level
I was pretty sure I could make daily lesson plans that would cover all the material the kids needed in History and Literature to move on to the next level each year. I had done it before using The Well Trained Mind. I knew, though, that I could not do that, work a full time job, delivery the material to the kids and correct their work. There just were not enough hours in the day to do it all. That is why I looked for programs that were more “canned.” That is, programs with daily lesson plans and curricula that had continuity from year to year culminating in mastery of sufficient material to perform well at the next levels: high school and college. In addition, we knew that the History and Literature programs should be coordinated with our Writing program.
We liked the idea of spending a couple years on a pass through world history and a couple of years on a pass through US History, then doing it again a couple years each at a deeper level. In addition to wanting to coordinate History with Literature, we wanted to assure the kids would read a representative sample of classic children’s and young adult literature. Actually, The Well Trained Mind was great that way, but again, we just did not have the time to do all the planning ourselves.
2. Reading aloud together
I read to Kelly and Christian a lot. We did it before they went to government school, then through those three years, too. We read many different books including the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder series, all the Homer Price books, all the Henry Reed books and much, much more. We did not want to lose that when we returned to homeschool. The problem was that Kelly was entering the fifth grade, two years ahead of Christian starting third grade. We LOVED reading together, but the material they would be covering would be very different. We needed to find a way to be able to read together even though the materials were very different.
3. Literature that represented other worldviews, but that did not diminish our worldview
Everyone has a worldview, even the ones that deny it. One of the reasons we decided to return to homeschool is that the kid’s teachers, Kelly’s in particular, gave lip service to neutrality but aggressively pushed a hard secular and feminist worldview. That worldview had already started to seep into the textbooks from which the kids studied. We wanted them to have some balance. We did not want them to be sheltered from either a secular worldview nor from what we viewed as a rigid, “churchy” worldview, but we did not want either to be rammed down their throat. We will talk about that in more detail in a later post.
What we did
We looked at Sonlight, A Beka, Calvert, Harcourt and some others. The Sonlight programs easily met the criteria we had set for ourselves better than any of the others. We had to be pretty creative when it came to the second category (Reading aloud together), but even that turned out better than we had any right to expect. The first literature book we read aloud together was one of Christian’s, The Witch of Blackbird Pond. It was an awesome start. It had nothing to do with what Kelly was studying, but it did not matter because it was just great literature. The first History material we read together was also from Christian’s program, The Landmark History of the American People: From Plymouth to the West, Volume I. It was probably the best and most interesting History text we read in our entire homeschool experience and that is saying something because we ended up with an amazingly strong History coverage. After that we quit worrying so much about what books went with which program when it came to our read aloud books. Kelly would have missed that great material if we would have stuck strictly to the specified material.
Even though we evaluated the daily plans as best we could from afar, our selection of Sonlight was really a leap of hope (not even a leap of faith). There are ways we could have checked this out more carefully, but the reality is that we did not know we had selected just the right program for our family until we had the Planning Guides in our hands. We did not strictly follow the plans for most materials, but for History and Literature we did exactly what was on the Sonlight supplied plans. It did two things: 1) We covered what we were supposed to cover and 2) it was the anchor for all the other materials, even math and science, that kept us moving forward at a specific pace that culminated in a good result many years later. I will talk about the mechanics of our plans and the role played by the History and Literature sections of the Sonlight planning guides in the section on Elementary School.
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Betty Blonde #227 – 05/29/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
I thought I was just getting a gift, but it turned out to be a full-blown intervention. That thing on my wrist in the picture to the right is something called a Fitbit Charge. I was told it was not the one with the heart rate monitor in it, because that one does not come out for another month or so. I was told I am entirely too fat. I would have argued with them, but they were right. I have never been this big before in my life. They said they got this for me to help me assure I do not eat too much.