I suck at homeschooling. - Page 2

[elizawill]

I'm so sorry to hear of your friend's loss. How sad

You don't suck at homeschooling, mama.

If it makes you feel any better, I'll share our day. Yesterday, I taped my daughter singing jonas brothers songs and making up dance moves all.day.long. Then we would download them on the computer and turn them into rock videos. lol. After that, she decided she wanted her own youtube series called "lessons with grace". So, I video taped her teaching her 'audience' about making pinch pots, clay beads, and of course...how to turn a soup can into a jonas brothers cup holder. Finally...at about 3:00, we did phonics, math, and some spelling and spanish review. then we started to discuss environment & how our environment can change us. When I asked her to give me an example, she said, "When my cat died it changed my whole environment". Then she started bawling....so I called it a day. We went and cuddled and cried together.

That was our day!

[ABand3]

One of the benefits of homeschooling is that you can be flexible, and this might be a time to give yourself permission (ok, we give you permission) to take a break. I know it must be hard when you've just started to have to shift gears, but your friend's loss effects you and your family. Homeschooling lets you take time to live (and learn from) life, so if you need to take a week or a month 'off' to process the loss that occured and just enjoy being a family, that is as valuable to you and your children as any curriculum. You can pick back up with the curriculum later, it will always be there.

[my3peanuts]

My dd is 5.

I know she is still so young and yet I find myself struggling anyway. Maybe I'm just not a Waldorfy type person and I should ditch the OM. I know it's early and I'd like to give it some time before doing that though.

[Lillian J]

Originally Posted by Needle in the Hay

There is a lot to be said for picture books. There are so many wonderful ones. The Five in a Row curriculum (at least the first 3 volumes) uses only picture books (and that's for about up to age 8 or so).

Oh, that's so refreshing! Picture books can be so wonderful, and such an inspiring introduction to the whole world of reading. I'm always surprised when I hear of people rushing little ones into chapter books in the early years...

As Lillian mentioned books on tape or CD are great, especially since you are so busy with your DS.

I think the Kiddie Records Weekly - Classics From the Golden Age - are particularly wonderful. They're children's records from the early 40s and 50s, including many classic stories, some of which were extravagant Hollywood productions. Downloadable to listen to FREE. These are recordings people once paid well for.

Lillian

[Lillian J]

Originally Posted by mommy68

This isn't the US board so I thought more people were teaching from an early age.

Just a note to clarify that I, for one, don't connect the two things . Lots of people who do more structured studies during school-age years don't believe in starting it at age 5, and sometimes not even at age 6.

There are lots of articles I've linked to on my preschool/kindergarten page that are written by or excerpted from books by professional educators and researchers who are not unschoolers at all but who just strongly feel that those early years are not the time to begin formal studies.

We had intended to send my son all the way through Waldorf schools - where the kindergarten was based on imaginative play, music, stories, rhymes, simple cooking, and nature walks. By 1st grade, they're introducing letters and numbers, and simple mathematical concepts, in imaginative and appealing multisensory ways. It built slowly through 2nd grade. They didn't even begin whole days until 3rd grade! But it all grew until they were capable of the same kind of written accomplishment as public school peers by the time they were in 4th or 5th grade, and to where they were doing much more demanding studies than their public school peers at the high school level.

We left there when he was due to go into 1st grade, but it was not to get him into more studies - it just had to do with a whole lot of dysfunctional dynamics going on in regard to other things at that school. I hated having to have to get him reading so quickly during the summer before he turned seven in order to have him ready to enter 1st grade at a more traditional school, but I didn't know much of anything about homeschooling at the time and felt that school was, unfortunately, our only viable option.

I must say, though, that introducing letters and reading to him at that point took virtually no time - he was ready enough by the end of summer to be reading three letter words by the time he started 1st grade, and we really didn't spend much time at it. I was so clueless at the time that I took him to a retired teacher for an hour once a week to get him started reading once I'd shown him the letters and sounds - but then I realized it was no big deal, and I could have done it myself a lot better. As for math, that wasn't something I'd been told to get him ready for, but he just blended right in, becoming what his teacher termed her best math student before long. Studying math was new to him, and he just went about learning it with no problem - he'd had lots and lots of imaginative play, and imaginative play goes a long way in developing the mind to be ready to tackle formal learning.

So what I'm rambling about is that some of us just feel all that stuff is a lot easier and faster and more appropriate for most children if introduced later - which is not to say that a child who's asking to learn it earlier should be discouraged or ignored. If a child is eager and ready, there's no reason not to help them learn it - it's just that there's no need, in my opinion, for a parent to be the one to push it. - Lillian

[Lillian J]

Originally Posted by my3peanuts

My dd is 5.

I know she is still so young and yet I find myself struggling anyway. Maybe I'm just not a Waldorfy type person and I should ditch the OM. I know it's early and I'd like to give it some time before doing that though.

When my child was little and we were looking into homeschooling, Oak Meadow didn't even start teaching children letters at kindergarten age. At that time, they were more in line with the traditional Waldorf philosophy of starting that at 1st grade level. But more and more parents started coming along who were influenced by the public school position of starting it in kindergarten, and they kept asking for it - so OM started introducing it in the kindergarten curriculum. It used to be that the public school didn't start it till 1st grade either - I was never taught a letter till 1st grade, nor were generations of people before me.

Education is becoming more and more of a mess, and they keep trying to fix it by dragging younger and younger children in. David Elkind, Professor of Education at Tufts University, discusses this in his article, Much Too Early.

Elkind is the author of Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk,
The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon,
Reinventing Childhood: Raising and Educating Children in a Changing World,
All Grown Up and No Place to Go: Teenagers in Crisis
Ties That Stress: The New Family Imbalance,
and other books.

- Lillian

[Ruthla]

I'm so sorry for your loss.

Grief can affect people in crazy ways. Even if you don't think your friend's death is directly affecting how you interact with your child, it can certainly be affecting the way you're looking at things. Give yourself time to process this before making any snap judgements on your homeschooling ability.

2ndly, I suggest you do a lot of learning about unschooling. You'll see that there is a lot of learning value in "just letting your child explore and play on her own." Even if you decide that full-on unschooling isn't right for you, learning about the US philosophy can help you feel a lot better about not providing a huge amount of formal structure.