Tag: Kelly’s Kindergarten

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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Kelly’s first grade year, our first year of homeschool, was a thing of beauty. We did “home-preschool” with Christian, too, so he would not feel left out. We loved every minute of it, but it was a lot of work–more work than I could sustain for two kids over the decade they would be in school. We followed the Classical Education, grammar stage methods from The Well Trained Mind book described in the previous post in this series. It really was wonderful.

Our only problem had to do with the fact that, unlike many homeschools, I (the dad) did all of the academic parts of the homeschool. That is not to say Lorena did not do anything. She did just as much as I, if not more–assuring the kids stayed on track to finish their assigned materials during the day, running to the library, zoo, piano lessons and a million other events, coordinating materials purchases and the million other administrative tasks required to do homeschool the way we wanted to do it.

I loved the entire process–identifying materials, buying materials, making schedules, making the overall plan, making and updating the daily plan and, especially, sitting with the kids to read, learn math facts, memorize Bible verses. I did this for Kelly’s entire first grade year. Coupled with my full time job that required an hour and a half of driving to and from work, I had virtually no time for anything other than work, church and homeschool.

Kelly spent two or three additional hours every day to work through a to-do list of assignments. She loved it. Mostly it consisted of reading some books, working on math, doing some art, writing reports and in her journal and that sort of thing. It was stuff she probably would have been doing anyway. We gave Christian a list of about a half an hour worth of pre-school things to-do, mostly consisting of doing a worksheet or two and participating in Kelly’s art projects with her.

Every night, when I got home from work, I sat with both of kids to teach, correct homework, memorize and read for two or three hours more hours. After the teaching and correction, I needed to spend another hour or so per night to go through the materials for the next day and assure they were at the right level and taught what I felt we should cover for each of the materials. I made up a list for each kid on the computer that Kelly could understand (Lorena helped Christian) and printed it out so they could no exactly what was required that next day.

Then, every weekend, I spent at least half a day in bookstores, art stores and libraries, hunting down materials. I never hit every subject on every weekend, but it was very rare when we had a weekend available only to relax and hang out with the family. Really, it was too much. I knew I could not maintain such a pace of work as long as I had a full time job. We decide we would find a different way to homeschool or put the kids in government school the next year. We decided on government school for the next year for a number of reasons I discuss in the next post in this series. In addition, I delve more deeply into the topic of why we moved away from the Well Trained Mind in another post here.

We will never regret having done it exactly what we did for Kelly’s first grade year. We might have been exhausted, but we accomplished a lot with much joy. It served the kids well. They loved the program and the materials, were not burdened with too much work and learned a lot. Lorena and I knew the later grades would require even more work as Christian moved into “real” homeschool and the materials got more difficult. So something had to change if we wanted to continue homeschooling.

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Betty Blonde #210 – 05/06/2009

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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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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.

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Betty Blonde #204 – 04/28/2009

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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Homeschool was not even on our radar when Kelly was at an age to start kindergarten. We lived in a fairly poor government school district just a couple of blocks from a low performing elementary school in a suburb of Portland, Oregon so we were not too excited about putting Kelly there. We looked around and found a high performing Christian elementary school about a mile away. We interviewed the teachers there and decided to give it a try. Kelly enjoyed herself and had quite a good year there, socially. The next post in this section of Our Homeschool Story series describes our experience at this traditional Christian school.

Toward the end of Kelly’s kindergarten year, a group home for juvenile delinquents moved into the house next to us so we decided to move. We sold our house and bought another one in a more affluent suburb with much better schools, still in Portland. We could not afford to put Kelly into any of the private schools in the area, so we considered putting her into the local government elementary school. We wanted to investigate other options because Kelly had not learned anything in her experience in a traditional kindergarten. We found that, in Oregon, a parent has the right to postpone putting them into school until they are seven years old. We decided we would take that year to push Kelly further ahead by homeschooling her.

The third post in this section of the series describes my first foray into learning how to homeschool. I took a fairly typical path reading The Well Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. I talked to lots of friends, figured out the laws, identified curricula and did all the stuff I thought might prepare me to teach the kids at home. The fourth post in this series describes what we did, how we did it and how we thought. Without this first pass at homeschooling, I do not think I would have had the will nor knowledge to make what I believe were the great (for us) choices we mad in our second pass at homeschooling several years later.

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Betty Blonde #203 – 04/27/2009

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