Category: Our Homeschool Story

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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This story will be divided into nine sections, each consisting of several chapters. Kelly is sixteen months older than Christian so some of the experimentation was done with her followed by refinement and adjustment for learning styles with Christian. Again, I am making this up as I go along so this could morph some as I remember more stuff or revisit previous sections to backfill material needed for future stuff to make sense. The sections are as follows:

1. Introduction – This section.
2. Before Kindergarten – Both of the kids learned to read fluently by age four. They learned to read in completely different ways. This section describes how each of them learned to read, the materials we used in teaching them, and our struggle to find appropriate materials for each one. The small series of events that lead to our understanding of the difference in the way each child learned started with the different way each of them learned to ride a bicycle. This also describes how they started memorizing poetry and scripture, something which we had no initial intention of teaching them.
3. Kelly’s Kindergarten and First Grade Years – Kelly attended a traditional Christian Kindergarten in our neighborhood. The experience was really quite good. Good but not great, so for her first grade year we decided to try homeschooling. I describe why we decided to homeschool, the books we read to try to get a handle on how to do it, what we did and how it went.
4. The Government School Years – Kelly and Christian went to the local government school when Kelly was in second grade and Christian was in Kindergarten. The first school they attended in Sherwood, Oregon was quite good. We might never have returned to homeschooling had we stayed in that school district, but we moved to Albany, Oregon the summer before Kelly entered first grade and Christian entered second grade. That year convinced us we needed to do something else. This section describes the good and the bad of their experience in traditional government schools and why we decided to switch to homeschooling.
5. What Kind of Homeschool Did We Want to Be – We knew that we had to do something differently in our second pass at homeschooling than from when we did it in Kelly’s first grade year. That went great, but it was a lot of work and I had a day job. If we used that method, there was time to plan for homeschool or deliver the homeschool, but not for both. We investigated different homeschool systems and chose the ones that we thought might work best for us. In addition to systems, we had to decide what style of homeschool we wanted. There are many good styles of homeschooling including classical, unschooling, what might be characterized as traditional, unit based and what we have come to call “tiger mom” style homeschooling. It is possible for the kids to aim at vocational careers, the arts, sports or some specific college goal. This section describes how we decided between the plethora of tools, styles, systems and philosphies available to us.
6. The Elementary School Years – This section describes a lot of the mechanics of our homeschool. We describe how we organized the work required to homeschool. This includes Lorena’s role as the stay at home mom, my role as the educator even though I had a full time job that required travel, our daily expectations for the kids and other operational considerations. I talk about the curricula we chose for this period, why we chose it, changes we made along the way, supplemental materials and, above all, planning.
7. The Junior High School Years – Since Kelly skipped three years of high school and Christian skipped all of high school, we spent a lot of their junior high school years on things that would help prepare them for college. We chose curricula not only to help them prepare for the elevated academic rigor, but for a more challenging social environment. We discuss how we addressed worldview issues. It was very important, at this point, to explain in detail why we believed what we believe. We did not like the US History curricula from the system we had used during the elementary school years so we made one fairly large change that, serendipitously helped us understand how to better prepare the kids for college. I describe why and how we made those changes in the US History program and how it helped us with other materials and college preparation.
8. CLEP Testing, the ACT and the Community College Years – Kelly and Christian both took the ACT college admissions examination every year from Christian’s seventh grade year until they entered North Carolina State University in the Fall of 2010. The did it as part of the State of North Carolina’s requirement for all homeschoolers to take a nationally-normed, standardized test every year they homeschool. The ACT as well as CLEP testing the kids took as part of their junior high school homeschool programming played a big part in their success in preparing for college. I describe the role of this testing and their transition, socially and academically, to community college.
9. Hard Undergraduate Degrees and Graduate School – The kids were still young when they got to Big State U (North Carolina State University). This section describes the admission process, their degree selection (something hard), social adjustments between community college and Big State U, the amazing influence of NCSU’s math lounge on their social lives, and application to and selection of graduate schools and graduate degrees.

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Betty Blonde #197 – 04/17/2009

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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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Though this story is part of a larger blog that is now over ten years old, I want it to stand on its own. To that end, I will briefly describe the educational background of our families and the early days of our marriage. My wife Lorena and I have surprisingly similar backgrounds. She comes from a family of farmers and woodworker’s from Northern Mexico while I come from a family of farmers and woodworkers (loggers and mill workers) from Oregon. The only one of our parents who went to college was my mother who got a degree in Pharmacy from Oregon State University in 1952, a time at which very few women studied Pharmacy.

All of the next generation in both families went on to college at some sacrifice to our parents. Lorena has three brothers with Bachelor’s degrees in engineering from excellent universities in Mexico. Lorena’s fourth brother runs a successful business, but education is valued so highly that he started and is half way through a mid-career law degree. It was only through great sacrifice, hard work and the family working together over a long period of time that they were able accomplish this uncommon level of education achievement. Lorena, herself is now half way through an Associate’s degree at the local community college.

My family has a surprisingly similar educational background. Of the four children, three have Master’s degrees (Psychology, Engineering and an MBA). The fourth ran a successful business for twenty years while earning a mid-career Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. Our family sacrificed to get all the kids through college though not nearly as much as Lorena’s family. So, both Lorena and I came from families who valued education and, more importantly, were willing to make sacrifices to make college a possibility for all the kids.

Shortly after I finished my Master’s degree, I met Lorena at a church event in Texas. I had gotten accepted at Texas A&M for a PhD, but left graduate school when Lorena and I got serious about our relationship. I took an engineering job at Motorola in South Florida and Lorena and I got married a year later. Our daughter Kelly was born during the three years we lived in South Florida. We spoke only Spanish during our time in Florida, but Lorena took English as a second language at a local community college and was quite fluent before we moved to Oregon at the very end of 1994. We like to say that was when Kelly learned Spanish and Lorena learned English.

We moved to Oregon so I could start a small business with my father. Our son Christian was born there not to long after we arrived. We continued to speak Spanish at home, so both the kid’s first language was Spanish. Everyone around the kids other than Lorena and I spoke with them in English. That include their grandparents, cousins, neighbor kids, people at church, etc.  That meant they were fluent in English very early, too. That fluency in both languages was something at which we had to work pretty hard and probably had a significant influence on both how and why we did homeschool.

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Betty Blonde #196 – 04/16/2009

Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

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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I have decided to try to write a narrative history of our homeschool. My kids suggested that I write a book about what we did, not so much because we had anything particularly important to say, but as a way to remember and pass along a little family history. I have thought about this and even written about it in this blog. My conclusion is that I do not have the time at this point in my life nor discipline required to make an overall plan for something as ambitious as a book.

We do get lots of questions from friends, family and readers of the blog. I try to answer them as best I can, but I believe a continuous narrative might be a bigger help than just the hit and miss blog posts we have on this website. I have tried to pull some of the stuff together into series which I think have been a help to, actually, quite a few people. The series on skipping high school, use of CLEP testing in a homeschool setting, and socialization rank fairly high on the search engines and we get many visits there.

After a couple of false starts and the realization I do not currently have the will, time nor discipline to write a book, I kind of gave up on the project. Yesterday, though, it dawned on me that I have been faithfully writing a blog now for over ten years. All this writing has never been about any monetary benefit we might receive from it, so why not just record the history here. The story might lack in structure to a certain extent, but at least I can get the narrative down. That is what I have decided to try to do. I am sure it will be like all of my blogging effort–there will be periods of activity followed by times when my day job requires my full focus.

I am not quite sure about the structure yet, but the preliminary plan is to start writing about what led up to our decision to homeschool the kids. Soon after I get started, I will write a contents section and provide a link to a table of contents page for the whole narrative so not too much clicking back and forth is required to read the whole thing. If I ever get through the whole narrative, I will probably put it all into a PDF document or something similar so it can be downloaded all at once.

As for now, this is still in the experimental stage, so the whole project will surely morph a little before I settle on a format and/or writing schedule. I hope to keep posting on other things that interest me as I go along, too.

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Betty Blonde #195 – 04/15/2009

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