Category: Homeschool

I am sitting in the airport in Monterrey waiting for my flight to Atlanta.  I am going to try to put up some of the wedding pictures we took before I go.

Lorena and I	Katy y Estefania con Kelly	Luis y Priscila (los novios)
Rigo, Minita, y Luis Leonardo	Grandma Conchita, Kelly, Grandpa Lauro, y Lorena	Christian played mostly with Adrian (el guero)
Las muchas, primas de Kelly	Lili y Rigo	Ken y Lorena
El hijo de Tio Abel y su novia	Brandoncito y Tio Jorge	Lynncito y su primo
Primo Tomas, su esposa, Lorena, Conchita, Dayanita, y Tio Lauro	Los musicos	Grandma Conchita con sus nietos
Hectorin con los hijos de Johnny y Loela de Houston	Tia Dayana y Prima Dayanita	Tia Rosalinda y Primo Lynncito
Tia Rosalinda y Primo Lynncito	La familia con Prima Lili	Our family before the wedding

We just got notice that Oregon is going to try to further regulate the activities of homeschoolers.  There were a couple of events that created an interesting backdrop to the our receiving the email that describes the proposed legislation.  First, just a couple of weeks ago, an article came out in the local newspaper explaining that, after years of trying to make the questions easier on the state assessment tests in math, they had finally given up and want now to just lower the passing test scores so that more will pass.  Second, Lorena had a conversation with some people who are very, very involved in their local government school.  They have characterized the school as phenomenal.  The parents in the community arre said to be heavily involved in both academics and extracurricular activities.  The teachers are said to be engaged with and responsive to the needs of the students and the concerns of the parents.  The students are said to be receiving a stellar education–one of the best in the entire state.

So, I thought I would just take a look at their state report card.  For the school in question, the Federal Adequate Yearly Progress Rating was “NOT MET.”  In the last year reported, 45% of the students in the school could not read at grade level and 54% could not perform math at grade level.  This gave the school an Oregon Report Card Overall Rating of “Satisfactory.”  I was amazed.  Here is a school that the State of Oregon says is performing at a satisfactory level.  At least one set of parents in the school think there children are getting a phenomenal education there.  But by any object standard, the school is failing.  We started homeschooling because of the abysmal education our children were receiving at a school that was rated “exceptional” by the state.  The school had much higher reading and math scores.  I compared that to the test results for homeschoolers in that same area that are available on the Oregon Department of Education Home Schooling page.  Of course, for the entire population of students, 50% are at or below the 50 percentile.  For  the latest homeschool nationally normed, standardized test scores that I could find, the records showed that less than 20% of the tested students fell at or below the 50th percentile.  The homeschools, by every measure are doing better than the government schools.

All of the information is in the public domain so, if anyone wants to look at it, they can.  I got all of the information on websites run by either the school or the State of Oregon.  None of this even considers the wealth of studies that the quality of “socialization” in homeschool settings is better than in government school settings.  Here is a web page that describes and links to a small subset of that work.  In the meantime, while Rome burns and the legislature tries to further handcuff a group of citizen who provide a stellar education for their children, the big sports issue that really interests the education establishment in the state has risen to the Oregon Court of Appeals.

This is the last in a short series of three posts we are doing for a friend who is starting to homeschool this year. We have no illusions about our homeschooling method and plans being right for anyone else, but we thought it might be a help for others to get a sense for what works for at least one family. The following is links to the first and second of the three posts:

Homeschool methods update – Part 1 of 3 – curricula
Homeschool methods update – Part 2 of 3 – a typical day

Of course, what students do after they finish high school varies greatly. Some get a job. Others join the military. Some take a year off and travel if they have the money. Some start a business. Many go on to college. Circumstances change, but to the extent that we have influence, we have decided that we want Kelly and Christian to be prepared to enter college. There is really no problem for well prepared homeschoolers to get into even the best universities in the nation. It is commonplace to read articles about homeschoolers succeeding at places like Stanford, Dartmouth, Harvard, and good small private colleges like Grove City, Hillsdale, and George Fox. There are homeschoolers in most state run colleges and universities, too. The third and fourth tier private colleges like Linfield, Lewis and Clark, and Willamette here in Oregon have programs to try to attract as many homeschooled students as they can get. So getting into a college is not really too difficult for students who document their academic achievements and test even at just an “OK” level on the SAT or ACT. We are doing ar best to cover those bases.

The challenge with many homeschoolers is that many of them are academically ready to enter college at a much younger age than normal. It is not so much that they are not ready for college, it is more that the college is not ready for them. If we stay on our current track, Kelly will be ready to start taking college courses in just three years and Christian will be ready in four. Of course, there is no way that we want them to leave home at that time. So we have to find a way to keep them academically engaged for two or three years at the college level while they are still at home.

The obvious answer for us is the community college. The government school district to which we pay our taxes is required to pay for community college for those students for which they have nothing to offer academically. Of course it could be argued that they have not ever had anything to offer, but that is a different post. We are fortunate to live within driving distance of both a community college and a major state university. It is not difficult to meet the admission requirements of the community college, so entrance to that system is easily manageable. We will probably start the kids at the there with they idea they will continue there through the age when they would normally have graduated from a government high school. That should help them prepare well for the PSAT, SAT, and/or ACT tests. Volunteer work, a job or two, and continued participation in their clubs, music, and sports should help to round out their preparation. It is up to Lorena and I to continue to document their academic progress. All this should prepare them to get into a good school.

If we prepare well, it will be easier for them to decide where (and if) they want to go to college. We are kind of hoping they will stay at home through a bachelor’s degree and then take a graduate degree as their away from home experience, but that will really be their decision. If things move along on their current course, both of the kids should graduate with a bachelor’s degree by the time they are nineteen or twenty. The other wild-card, is that, if we have the resources, we would like to go someplace for six or nine months to pick up a third language. Whether we can do that and whether the time we take will impact the schooling is something we do not know. Neither do we know whether it will work out like this at all. But we have a plan that we can either follow or modify as time and chance change our circumstances. Even if it does not all go according to plan, it is good to have a plan.

This is the second in a short series of three posts we are doing for a friend who is starting to homeschool this year. We have no illusions about our homeschooling method and plans being right for anyone else, but we thought it might be a help for others to get a sense for what works for at least one family. The following is links to the first and third of the three posts:

Homeschool methods update – Part 1 of 3 – curricula
Homeschool methods update – Part 3 of 3 – college

Today I am going to try to describe a typical day of homeschool in the Chapman household. This is material about which I have previously written, but due to an email we received from some of our friends in Australia who are just getting started homeschooling I thought it might be nice to explain how we go about it. We make no claims about our homeschool methods other than that they work for us. Most days are not typical homeschool days because every day of the week is occupied with, not only the academic subjects we cover, but all the extracurricular activities in which the children participate. I will try to capture all of that, too. This will divided into two categories. First, there is a the kids study schedule. Second, I explain what I do to prepare, teach, and correct.

Schedule

• 5:50 – Dad goes to work
• 7:00 – Get up, make their beds, get dressed, read their bibles, and memorize their bible verses
• 8:00 – Christian practices guitar, Kelly practices Piano
• 8:45 – Breakfast
• 9:15 – Clean up (floss, brush, wash face, etc.)
• 9:30 – Morning academic subjects: Math, grammar, history, literature, vocabulary
• 12:00 – Lunch
• 12:30 – Afternoon academic subjects: Writing, Spanish, science
• 2:30 – Break for a snack
• 2:45 – More literature, history, catch-up, and corrections
• 3:30 – Go out and play until Dad gets home.
• 4:30 – Dad comes home and calls his partner, Ron at Quality Corners
• 5:30 – Dad starts corrections
• 6:00 – Kids come in and start on corrections and work with Dad on new materials
• 6:30 – Dinner
• 7:00 – Spelling and continued work on corrections and new materials
• 7:30 – Kelly and Christian read aloud to Dad and work on a jigsaw puzzle while he does his exercises
• 8:15 – Goof off until bedtime at 9:00

We are playing to do one or two days per week of drawing, painting, or pottery starting in the next week or so in addition to the following extracurricular activities:

Monday – Kelly baby sits a group of small kids with a girl from Santiam Christian School
Tuesday – Tennis and Kelly’s Piano (we are deciding on what to do about Boy Scouts on Tuesday nights)
Thursday – Tennis and Christian’s Guitar

Preparation

Each week I prepare a one page schedule for each day of the week for each of the kids. We stick very close to the schedule recommended by our Sonlight curricula provider for Science, History and Literature. We go a little faster than many on the mathematics because the kids can handle it and the Teaching Textbooks lends itself to one lesson per day. The same is true for the Wordly Wise vocabulary program and the Easy Grammar and Easy Writing programs. They spend twenty minutes per day on Rosetta Stone Spanish. Christian spends 30 minutes per day on his elective material which is C# programming while Kelly spends that much time or more writing and illustrating stories that we are going to put into a book at the end of the year.

The schedules are setup so the kids know what they are supposed to do before breakfast, before lunch, after lunch, and when I get home. It is setup as a checklist that gives them enough flexibility to make some decisions on their own about when they will do each element of the program, but structured enough so they can know whether they are ahead or behind at any given point in the day.

It usually takes me a couple of hours on Saturday morning to put a weeks schedule together and I usually have two weeks of schedule ahead of the kids when they start on a Monday morning. I keep each schedule in one large spreadsheet in OpenOffice.org. We print out five pages (one per day) per kid per week that they keep in a large, zip-up loose leaf binder. If I have to make adjustments during the week I can just pencil them in. When they finish any materials, they put their work into the binder behind the schedule for the day on which they are working so I can easily get to it for correction. They also put a red sticky note in any books where they have performed work so I can find them easily. When I correct, I put a sticky note of another color into the places where the corrections are required.

Testing

In addition to the normal, end of chapter tests we give in Math and Science, the kids take a nationally normed standardize test each year to see where they are relative to government, private, and homeschool students throughout the country. This year they will take the test in early April. This testing takes two or three days and is much more comprehensive and rigorous than the testing performed on the Oregon government school students. The State of Oregon is currently going through another effort to further lower the score required to pass and/or rigor of their tests. Kelly and Christian will be taking the Stanford Achievement Test which will be administered by one of the local private schools.

Next: Our plans to prepare the kids for college

We have some friends living down in Australia who started homeschooling this year. They asked us to explain a little big about how we go about it. I have not written about how we go about for quite awhile, so I thought I would explain a little bit about our curriculum and methods. Today I will discuss our curricula with a follow-up post in a day or so about what a typical day is like for us and a final post on how we plan to prepare the kids for college and how we test them to make sure they are getting what they need academically.

Homeschool methods update – Part 2 of 3 – a typical day
Homeschool methods update – Part 3 of 3 – college

The core of our curricula is from Sonlight. We believe their forte is their history and literature programs. This year, Christian is doing a one year survey of non-Western cultures. Christian’s program includes twenty some novels that are mostly Newbery and Caldecott Award winning books centered around the culture and time about which Christian is studying. Kelly is finishing her second year of a two year survey of world history, starting from the dawning of time and finishing in the 1990’s. Her program includes the same kind of high quality novels as those Christian is reading, but that cover the eras, places, and people she studies. Examples of the history books that she reads include Caesar’s World, George Washington’s World, and Abraham Lincoln’s World all by Genevieve Foster and Susan Rice Bauer‘s The Story of the World collection who is also the author of The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home. The thing that comes with the program that we avoid is their religious materials. The reality is that some of it is not that bad, but our aversion to organized religion, a paid ministry, and church buildings make some of them a little hard to take, so we just avoid them.

We also use the Sonlight Science programs because they are very well done. We have a great little addition to the science that is kind of funny, kind of fun, and very educational. It is series of books from company called Lyrical Learning. The kids are currently in Lyrical Life Science Volume. The sing songs about science topics and it really helps them remember some very complicated materials. And they have fun doing it.

Sonlight provides a variety of math options. Both Kelly and Christian did their elementary school math in Singapore Math. It is a program put out by the Singapore Ministry of Education. Singapore has the best elementary school math students in the world. We understand why that is true after having used the materials. Now, though, Christian has moved on to Teaching Textbooks Prealgebra and Kelly has gone on to Teaching Textbooks Algebra I. These are awesome math programs specifically tailored for the homeschool student. The program they provide is very systematic, easy to understand, and full of feedback, both for the parents and the students. Lorena is taking a calculus class at the University right now as she works toward her degree so we are all pretty well saturated in math for the moment.

For grammar we use the Easy Grammar series. Kelly has just moved from grammar into Easy Writing. We love these books. They are super for allowing the kids to learn the material on their own and get a solid foundation in English grammar. We use the Wordly Wise Series for vocabulary. The books are irritatingly politically correct and just flat wrong in some of the essays they use to get the kids to understand and use the words, but the vocabulary work is excellent. We do lots of things for writing. The kids write annual research reports, a quarterly magazine to send out to friends and family — the February issue will be the first one where some of our homeschool friends in Texas will be writing an article (and it is a good one). They do some daily writing work out of the Wordsmith series, but now that the kids are a little older, we are probably going to move on to the WriteShop series. We also give them assigned letters once per week or so and a current events paragraph from World Magazine every Friday. The kids are both fluent in Spanish because we speak it at home as our first language. We have them both working on in Rosetta Stone Spanish to get a better academic understanding of the language. We plan to move on to French in a couple of years.

On the side, both Kelly and Christian have hobbies. Kelly writes constantly. She is writing and illustrating a series of short stories right now. Christian has learned to write C# programs and loves to do claymation and 3D animations using the Blender program on the computer. He is also a Boy Scout. We do a LOT of reading aloud together and, in during the summer, spend a half an hour each evening listening to classical music and going through a drawing program.

Swimming has been the bulk of our physical education effort up until now. Kelly and Christian are both good swimmers now, so we will be transitioning them into tennis for awhile. Kelly is in her seventh year of piano. She performed in a Bach Festival yesterday and performs regularly at recitals. Christian took three years of piano lessons and then switched over to guitar. With a fellowship meeting and two gospel meetings per week, and playing with the neighborhood kids it is pretty hard to stay caught up with everything.

That is not all we do for homeschool, but it is the bulk of the academic stuff. We take an annual trip to downhill ski with another homeschool family once a year, we communicate in various ways with professing homeschool families in Texas, Arizona, California, and Arkansas. We visit museums, etc., etc. One thing we know is that we will never go back to what the government is providing. We are not against the government schools, but it is very difficult to understand how any of those kids ever get socialized, what with spending their time in a room with one or two teachers and thirty or so students of the exact same age as themselves. They never get a chance to get out and meet anyone or learn to function socially with anyone other than an isolated group of peers who do not have the benefit of having experienced anything else. It is like Lord of the Flies.

Homeschool day 61 of 180
Government school day 50 of 170

We homeschool because we love to see our children learn those things we value. We pulled them out of government school because they were taught values we did not hold. Among those values we abhor is the idea that a child should have high self esteem regardless of whether he possesses qualities that warrant such esteem. That concept was promoted with religious fervor at the school our children attended. Pride in wrong things is an insidious evil. There is a problem amongst many of us in the homeschool community that is similar in nature to the self esteem problem endemic in the American government school systems.

This is our fourth year of homeschool, our third in a row. When we pulled our children out of the local government school, we felt like we had just quit hammering ourselves on the foot. The pain of government school soon started to ebb. Our children started learning to be nice again. They were learning their academic material with joy and at a fast pace. Of course, we worried about that old canard that homeschool students are not as well “socialized” as their government school counterparts, so we got involved with a local homeschool group. There were some very nice people in the group.

It was a fairly typical homeschool group. The parents were well educated and fairly religious. They wanted the best for their children, so they decided to homeschool them. They met up with other families of like mind to start play groups, drama clubs, sports teams, choirs, shared classes, and those sorts of things. These are not bad things, but we saw a dynamic we did not understand very well at first. I suppose this dynamic is similar in nature to that of other early adopters of new (or newly reacquired) social constructs. Dramatic improvements are realized in the lives of the people who embrace the new idea. The new social construct takes on a life of its own and becomes an end onto itself. Homeschool becomes the greater good, replacing improved education, values, and socialization for the children. The homeschool parents take great pride in their own works. The accomplishments of the children are the manifestation of the great good being wrought on them by the way the parents implement their homeschool.

Now, when the children fail to perform at the desired level, the parent’s pride takes a personal hit. The performance of the children is a direct reflection on the accomplishment of the parent in their implementation of the new idea. The children learn that performance is everything. If the children do not perform, the pride of the parent takes a hit. It reminds me of stories about getting toddlers into the right preschool so they can get into the right kindergarten so they can get into the right elementary school, all the way up to the right MBA program all for the pride of the parent. If the children do not get into the right school, the parent has failed. There is an equivalent to phenomenon in the homeschool community. The pride of the parent becomes more important than the well-being of the child.

This becomes particularly sad when the parents become so involved with the homeschool community that the children’s sense of security begins to suffer. Cliques form. The parent must stay very involved in the homeschool community so their child will have the lead role in the play, the right solo in the choir, the right position on the basketball team. In some senses, it can be even worse than in the government school system. At least in the government school system, someone else can be blamed if a child does not get the right role in the play. For those homeschool parents who have bought into the idea that homeschool is an end onto itself, there is nowhere else to place the blame other than on themselves. The situation can get quite desperate.

This pride can feed on itself in these groups. There is a dynamic that manifests itself in discussions within the groups that feature the thought that “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are…” The homeschool groups can become an intemperate revelry of self-congratulations. Great pride is taken in the effort of the homeschool parent to give something better to their children than they are getting in other academic environments. Joy in the children decreases as pride in the effort of the parent increases.

The answer, of course, is the realization that homeschool is no more the answer to the well-being of the child than government or private school. Investment in the process can easily get in the way of the well-being of the child in either environment. There is not a whole lot of difference between the homeroom parent at a public school who is so involved in helping the school that they ignore their children and the homeschool parent so involved in the process and implementation of their system that they too ignore their children. They take so much pride in their own efforts that the needs of the children become secondary.

Humility and unselfish love are the only antidotes. I know my hands are not clean in this either; note the first two lines in italics at the top of this post.

The reason I really didn’t get anything done last night was because I had to go pick up a machine from Steve Davison to send over to Quality Corners in Idaho yesterday. A picture of the machine and Steve is at the bottom of this post. The pictures below are recent ones of Kelly and Christian.

Kelly Studying

Christian

Kelly reading

Steve and the new routing machine for Quality Corners

Didn’t get much done yesterday on our homeschool program, but I got some pictures of the kids and the machine Steve Davison built for us that I had to pick up last night.