Ahh Summer! We are currently on our Summer migration North to Maine, from Florida. Now is a good time to revisit the past year in review. Spoiler alert, it was a huge success. In this short article I’ll cover where we started, what worked, and how we adapted through our first year of homeschooling our daughter, Eva.
I started this article by answering a pretty simple question on Twitter…
In the beginning we needed a place to start. We had heard about Abeka as a great Christian based curriculum. It’s a bit pricey, but I figured at the beginning, I’d spare no expense to get this right.
I remember when the Abeka books came in the mail, it was like Christmas for Eva. She was SO EXCITED to bust open the boxes, open all of the brand new books and get an idea of what we would learn this year. We flipped through pages for a couple hours. I got my bearings. It was a great start and it gave us a guiding light when we had nothing else to go on.
Homeschool Styles: Classical, Eclectic, and Unschool
Technically, there are a bunch more approaches to Homeschool, but the above three make the most sense to me and are sufficient enough categories to contain the minute differences of all the rest. Abeka IS a great, classical curriculum. That is, it runs much like public school, but at home. For those, like us, who are transitioning from public or private school, Classical probably feels the most familiar, and is easiest to understand at first for us parents and the student.
While the classical approach was a great place to start, we knew we didn’t want to be quite so regimented. Once we got stated, it was easy to identify what was working and what wasn’t. Eva naturally gravitated towards certain subjects, Language, Science, History, and Bible Study.
The beautiful thing about Homeschooling, it’s a conversation and collaboration with your child. Together, you get to decide what works and where there is resistance. We have a credo and a goal, “…to foster a love of learning”. That’s it. Learning doesn’t have to be work, as in homeWORK or schoolWORK. Learning CAN be met with enthusiasm, interest, and love. That’s our job as teaching parents, to help find what interests our children, to find their spark. Once we find a spark, help feed that spark and fan it into a flame. Then into a fire. The next thing you notice, the “AHA!” moment, is when you catch your kid seeking out new information on their own and self-educating.
Spark to Flame, Flame to Fire
Eva’s spark, right now, is animals. She wants to be a Veterinarian. This actually lead us to getting a dog. The dog, all by itself, is a treasure trove of educational activities. It’s Eva’s job to train the dog, where she learns about behavior and reinforcement training. FYI, this works for dog and humans as well. She takes him out to pee, cleans up his messes, etc. It’s a responsibility, life has lots of those. Furthermore, we help to feed that spark with niche classes from Outschool. The internet can bring you together with educators that interest your child. We found Ms Marcy, who Eva just loves, an author of children’s books who’s husband is a Vet. So much of her writing is related to the one subject Eva is bananas about. We do a couple classes with Ms Marcy each week, Creative Writing and a class where they look at animal X-rays and diagnose injuries or sickness, and much more. It’s great!
Unlearning Failure
There is one subject that Eva has a lot of resistance to, Math. It’s also a subject that I would be remiss to substitute away. So, Math is the subject that I have to work the hardest on to make palatable for Eva. Something that Eva has taken away from traditional school, unfortunately, is a deep seated fear of failure. It makes her not want to try, especially in Math. She’s afraid of it. She cries if/when she gets a bad score on a test or if she’s struggling with learning a concept. It’s taken some time for her to unlearn this. I regularly have to coach her through lessons, reminding her that it’s OK that this is difficult for you to understand. It is supposed to be difficult, life is this way quite often. The important part is to persist, to exert effort to stay curious and focused on the problem, and most important to reframe “failure” as “learning”. Getting problems wrong is just a sign that you need to keep trying at it to master that concept. We expect mastery before moving on. Even if Eva has taken a test and done poorly, we’ll go back and figure out where the confusion exists. Usually, she’s 95% of the way there. However long that takes doesn’t matter, but don’t fret, relax, and try to make it fun. If you can make it fun, that removes a TON of the apprehension.
For Math we use Beast Academy, it helps a lot to make Math fun. We started with Abeka, but found that Beast Academy has put a lot more effort into providing supporting content. They have a comic book, which introduces new concepts in story form. There’s a workbook to practice a bit, and an online app with videos and further practice to master the concept before an online unit test. Reporting is great! There’s an online dashboard and regular emails as your child progresses through the lessons, which keeps you informed of progress and flags any trouble areas.
Improvising
Lately, we’ve also started replacing Abeka’s History lessons. Eva mentioned that she’s not super hot on reading about old wars. While these wars are important to understanding where we come from, and the unique privileged of being an American. I figured out another angle to deliver similar content and a similar understanding of our past using Law instead.
So, on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5pm, we do a college level course on the Constitution. Again, this is another high effort subject, from my perspective, but I love it because I’m learning too and it’s QUALITY time with my daughter. We set the environment, close the shades in the room, fire up our big touch screen tv, grab a snack, and watch one or two of these excellently produced videos from Hillsdale College. This has provided TONS of opportunity, I’ve helped expose Eva to note taking during lectures. If something isn’t connecting, either she or I will pause the video to discuss and dive deeper into certain words, subject matter, or to help build context to a story. And, she gets it! It creates conversation and discussion. She asks provocative questions. She’ll stump me! She’s a super sharp kid, I’m wicked proud of her. And, I’m honored to be a part of the process of building her up.
It’s an Honor
The final big take away of the last year of homeschool is that it’s such an honor to have the opportunity to impact our children’s life in such a profound way. We get to shatter the status quo, “one-size-fits-all” approach to education. We get to help our children find a love of learning. As parent teachers, we get to be closer to them. We get a front row seat as they grow up. We get to give them the tools to use in life. And, we have hand in their development into intelligent, wonderful, and beautiful people.