Homeschooling Discussion & Experiences #1

[Yeddi]

Banshi is right - the age you register your child at is no indication of their grade level. There is a 16 y/o homeschooler who has just started doing a few uni units with us. It's best not to get stuck on the idea of "grades" anyway but rather how well they can do or understand the learning areas. Grades are only something that schools use to categorise and manage having lots of children at similar ages using the idea of "average" on every learning area. Unfortunately, very few kids are actually average on everything - they have strengths and weaknesses that unlike a school you can individually cater for (intensively if needed) and will typically find your child to be either on average or ahead in most areas.

We currently use the ENKI curriculum. Must say I LOVE it and it really suits our family and my daughter's learning style (she has some special needs, and is particularly behind in speech - so verbal-instruction-based teaching is not the most effective - she needs to SEE). It's a sensory integrated program that sort of combines all the best parts of the Steiner, Montessori and traditional education models. The reason why I love this curriculum so much (other than I only have to organise it, not write it) is that it teaches her learn in a creative child-led way while still focusing her in a certain direction (so it's not all over the place).

When we first decided to homeschool I started doing a uni course on how to write a primary school curriculum because I thought it would be helpful - it was in a sense as it made my choice to homeschool more concrete. I stopped after a month because it infuriated me. It was very obvious, sometimes even blatantly stated, that the purpose of the school curriculum was to teach children WHAT to think and WHAT to learn, not HOW to think and HOW to learn. I think there is a very big difference between the two; one was the "give a fish you eat for a day", the other is the "teach to fish you eat for a lifetime". I don't want a child who's a sheep and needs to look to other people to form her opinions/interests etc. I wanted a child who was able to look at something critically and logically and make her own decisions.