Reply With QuoteFromscratch - Ive applied to join that forum almost 2 weeks ago and have yet to receive my email do you know how long it takes?
Registered User
hi all.
We are just starting our homeschool journey. We aren't registered yet, DD is only 5, but I am treating this as her kingergarten year. We can register in about 6 mths.
We are fortunate to be a part of a great homeschool network (HENCAST) and have about 6 local families to hang out with. I love that we can be with people of all ages (our group is baby - grandparents). We meet once a week. This week the kids organised their own cross country (the local school was having one). Next week we are celebrating a birthday. Some times we do craft, or sports, or tour something. We alternate between houses/properties. The more experienced homeschoolers are full of ideas....we are getting there!
We got to the library once a week and ABA meetings fortnightly. We also occasionally do a Big Outing with the HENCAST, as DD gets older we can do more things. Recently we saw a play (james and the giant peach) and toured the glassworks and coming up is an activity for littlies at the botantic gardens.
I guess I would fit the 'natural learning' style. I have workbooks for different things and DD dictates if and when we will do some. She is interested in reading and writing. I use the 5 key learning areas from the NSW dep ed site to guide us, so I can put a portfolio together, so when we register I can show what we are doing.
I'd be interested to hear how others have found the registration process.
2014 BellyBelly RAK Recipient.
Fromscratch - Ive applied to join that forum almost 2 weeks ago and have yet to receive my email do you know how long it takes?
2014 BellyBelly RAK Recipient.
Hi all. Looking into homeschooling ds1 who is 12. Were in wa so any advice or help would be awesome
Registered User
It shouldnt take that long? Mine was within 12hrs from memory?! I can't remember exactly but it wasn't long at all, maybe even instant? I have serious brain fog at the moment!
Try again or check junk mail ?
Registered User
I have a question, although ds is only a bub! With the religious curriculums, is it just like standard subjects plus a religious subject, or is the religious influence across most/all subjects?
Excuse my sucky spelling, I'm on my iPhone
Registered User
I plan to homeschool DS. As an ex Primary and Secondary teacher, I have not found much in the school system (in both of the countries I have taught in) that makes me want to send him to school. I also don't see the point in me spending all day devoted to other people's kids while I could be doing the same with my own child at home!
Here in the UK there are quite a few parents who homeschool and you can even unschool here. I am already a member of a localish homeschool group although I haven't taken DS to any of their meetups yet because he is still only small and I don't have a car to get there. However I am thinking of setting up my own in my town, so transport won't be an issue and more regular meetups will be possible.
On a side note, someone mentioned how all the schoolwork can be done in three hours when homeschooling and I am not surprised. It probably would be the same in schools if the day wasn't taken up with so many interruptions and delays that occur because of behaviour management, crowd control and the general logistics of trying to cater for thirty little individuals and making sure they are where they should be at the right time and place! How many minutes are eaten up with lining up, getting them all to listen, making sure they are attentive, sitting down, looking the right way etc etc, handing out equipment, cleaning up afterwards etc? I am sure the actual learning and working time is only about three hours!!! LOL!
Registered User
Yeah exactly!! So much time is spent in schools with all that where the kids are waiting or lining up or like you said crowd control stuff happening.... I read for a child being educated at home at the age of 5-6 they only really require at the most 1hr of one-on-one attention with the parent and even then that is broken up into 15min intervals with mini breaks as kids this age still have short attention spans!! They are more productive if given more mini breaks I'm sure.
So by 11am most days they could be finished and spending time chilling out or playing with their siblings (if they have them) or reading, playing outside, being KIDS!!
Registered User
And for all that read 'the real learning'!!! Being a kid, exploring their world around them, unstructured play etc etc! Active participants in their world instead of docile passive little fact reciters...oops you didn't want debate about the disadvantages of school or HS
Registered User
"I am sure the actual learning and working time is only about three hours!!! LOL!"
As a teacher - I disagree. I teach in 35-minute lesson slots, often doubles (so 70 mins). There are nine lessons in a day. Of those lessons, yes, some is admin (sorting out homework, settling into the classroom etc) but most is learning. Oh yes, and doing the admin bits is learning: learning about being a member of a group, socialising, finding your way in a new environment, checking work that has been done and seen without you there... you know, "the real learning". Even so, lessons taught today (4) - I would say that 25 mins of those 35 was subject-specific learning, the rest moving around/settling. And discussing work with peers is learning, both subject and "real".
So 25 mins in 9 lessons - closer to four hours actively learning new stuff. Wow. That's a lot of new stuff. And can't be done in a spare hour in the morning.
I would love to spend all day with my son and not send him to school. I'd love to teach him at home. But I know full well that school is the best place for him at the moment - he learns a lot better surrounded by his peers, where he can see what's expected of someone his age. He has no siblings with whom to playand his reading has come on so much more now he is at a school who are encouraging him with this - where would he learn if I did get to homeschool? He wouldn't read for me before he started this school, and I am not skilled to teach learning to read.
Registered User
I said this as a teacher as well. But maybe it is because I have a different view of education and schools. I just don't agree with them...
Registered User
Interesting post from a homeschooling (unschooling) blog about teaching maths. Sort of pertinent to our earlier comments about time it takes to teach and learn subjects, this one in particular maths. Apparently this guy has taught the whole primary maths curriculum to group of children ages 9-12 in 20 hours! And here is the quote about how much instruction and learning actually happens in the school day. Apparently 75 minutes in a typical American whole school day.
Anyway here is the whole article...Now studies have shown that in the standard U.S. school day at the average American public school, approximately one hour and fifteen minutes goes into actual instruction of new material. That's right - 75 minutes. This is not as strange as it might initially sound. Consider what happens in a six-hour school day: movement from class-to-class and the required settling in and getting up, attendance-taking, pledge, bureaucratic busywork, lunch, recess, “physical education,” drug-taking (both of the prescribed and illicit variety), sexual harassment. Inside the classroom, review of stuff from the day before, last week, or last year; homework assignments collection and distribution; dealing with “behavior problems”; classroom organization; tests, including review time for the statewide ones - you get the picture. I'm ignoring the days the student is sick, or the teacher is sick, or the school is sick (lots of school buildings in my state get closed occasionally because of “Sick Building Syndrome” - I would have called schools “sick buildings” by definition, but let's not go there.)
Deschool Yourself: Just Do the Math!A group of homeschooling mothers gathered together in a circle to discuss unschooling approaches to their children’s education.
“Not possible,” homeschool mom proclaimed glumly, shaking her head.
I had just explained how the Sudbury Valley School - a democratically managed, child-directed learning environment that has been around for almost 40 years - has demonstrated repeatedly that a child could learn math - all of it grades K through 12 - in eight weeks. Average (if there is such a thing), normal (never met one), healthy children, hundreds of them, learned it all, leading to admissions to some of the leading colleges and universities in the nation.
“Must be some kind of trick,” she insisted dolefully, remembering her own dark days in the classroom slaving over the seemingly inscrutable, all joy wrung out as from a wet sponge, then as an elementary school teacher herself, and now finally daily fighting what she was convinced was a losing homeschooling war with her nine-year-old over the required workbook pages.
“Nope, no tricks, no special techniques, magic curriculum, or innovative teaching method,” I informed her. The secret, if there was one, was to wait until the child asked for it, indeed insisted upon it, and had a use for it, even if the use was just college admission.
I directed her to an article on the Sudbury Valley website - “And 'Rithmetic” (from the book, Free at Last). In it, the author and school co-founder Dan Greenberg writes of teaching a group of a dozen boys and girls, ages 9-12, the entire K-6 math portfolio in 20 contact hours.
Greenberg, who admits sheepishly that in a past lifetime he was partially responsible in the '60s for the development of the “new math" and now had lived long enough to regret it, tried to dissuade them by suggesting that it would be a lot more fun to go out and play. But no use - they were obstinate and determined. He set only one rule: be on time, 11:00 A.M. sharp, twice a week, for a half an hour. If anyone was five minutes late, class was cancelled. If it happened twice, no more teaching.
Greenberg found an old math primer from 1898, with lots of exercises, and away they went. No shortcuts. They added the long columns and the short columns, the fat ones and skinny ones, “borrowed” and “carried” and memorized the times tables. Long division. Fractions. Decimals. Percentages. Square roots. (Square roots? They stopped teaching that in the '60s, I think, when we were - or least the more “gifted” among us - given sliderules.)
In 20 contact hours, every single one of the kids knew the material cold. No slackers. No failures. No one “left back.” No “math anxiety.” No boredom, frustration, embarrassment. No shame or humiliation. No competition, “achievement, “failure,” or “success.” No prizes. Just 'rithmetic. The students held a party to celebrate.
Walking around in a self-congratulatory haze, Greenberg contacted a friend, a leading elementary math specialist in the public schools, to gloat.
“Not surprising,” mused his friend.
“Why not,” asked Greenberg, having had the wind at least temporarily removed from his sails.
“Because everyone knows,” he replied, verbally stomping on Greenberg's ego, “that the subject matter itself isn't all that hard. What's hard, virtually impossible, is beating it into the heads of youngsters who hate every step. The only way we have a ghost of a chance is to hammer away at the stuff bit by bit everyday for years. Even then it does not work.” (Honesty is refreshing, isn't it?) “Most of the sixth graders are mathematical illiterates. Give me a kid who wants to learn the stuff - well, 20 hours or so makes sense.”
I could see homeschool mom was becoming more disconsolate by the minute. She could begin to get her head around it, maybe, for the K-6 stuff, but what about all that algebra and geometry and trigonometry and pre-calculus? (whatever that is - when I was in school, it didn't exist - is it some kind of holding pen?) I asked her if she remembered learning much at times when she herself was unmotivated, uncommitted, and uninspired. I felt like apologizing the moment I asked, for it was the wrong question, as all I succeeded in doing was to make her feel uncomfortable.
“Try this,” I suggested, “Let's do the math together. Let's imagine you had one of those kids who, as a teen, was really motivated, ready to spend 30 hours a weeks on getting all the math down. (I used the 30-hour figure because it is about the number of hours per week the “average” high school kid spends in the classroom. I like the metaphorical “spending" as it begs the question “what is being given in return?”) And then, let's compare what might happen if you were to learn the same stuff in school.”
Now studies have shown that in the standard U.S. school day at the average American public school, approximately one hour and fifteen minutes goes into actual instruction of new material. That's right - 75 minutes. This is not as strange as it might initially sound. Consider what happens in a six-hour school day: movement from class-to-class and the required settling in and getting up, attendance-taking, pledge, bureaucratic busywork, lunch, recess, “physical education,” drug-taking (both of the prescribed and illicit variety), sexual harassment. Inside the classroom, review of stuff from the day before, last week, or last year; homework assignments collection and distribution; dealing with “behavior problems”; classroom organization; tests, including review time for the statewide ones - you get the picture. I'm ignoring the days the student is sick, or the teacher is sick, or the school is sick (lots of school buildings in my state get closed occasionally because of “Sick Building Syndrome” - I would have called schools “sick buildings” by definition, but let's not go there.)
So 75 minutes of new instruction time. But wait! Since instruction is aimed at the "average" kid, 50 percent of the time the student already knows what is being taught, so the actual instruction time from the child's perspective is closer to 40 minutes a day. Now let us imagine that 40 percent of that, or 15 minutes a day, is devoted to math. (But wait again! A good portion of that time while the child is being instructed, she would prefer to be somewhere - anywhere - else!)
Anyhow - do the math: 15 minutes a day, 75 minutes a week, for a 180-day school year comes to 2,700 minutes or 45 hours per school year (of which a portion is in time during which the child wasn't paying attention, or just didn't want to learn - so figure 30 hours a year.) But wait again! Some of that formal math in the early years was being taught at a time when it took twice or three times as long as it would have later. After all, Greenberg had already demonstrated that all of K-6 required only 20 contact hours.
So, do the math. If you figure the actual math time at 30 hours a year for 8 years (accounting for the wasted time in the early years), it totals 240 hours. Lo and behold - if, at age 15 or so, you wanted to learn all the math K-12, weren't inhibited by math anxiety, and were willing to spend 30 hours a week at it, it would take you...8 weeks!
Nothing magic here, except that you might actually learn it.
If you never teach a stitch of math, in a mathematical culture your kids will learn heaps of it anyway. Whether it be from reckoning time/distance/velocity ratios so they can figure out how soon they'll get home from looking at highway signs, to ascertaining how many Twinkies they can get with their allowance (Twinkies? Does that date me?), to helping dad bake the pies or mom replace the oil in the car (how many quarts is that? And why are engines measured in liters???), learning math along the journey is a difficult thing to avoid.
Want a place to start? If your son has a sweet tooth, play “The Cost is Right.” Go to the supermarket, and give him two bucks. Tell him he can buy as much candy as he can manage with $2 (no tax at this stage), but that if the total adds up to more than two smackers, he loses it all. You'll be amazed at how swiftly the two-place, long-list, carrying addition falls into place, and the multiplication, and the borrowing subtraction. If you watch carefully, you'll also discover something really interesting: the “correct” way to add a group of multi-place numbers is from left-to-right, not right-to-left, and anyone who has $2.50 in his pocket and needs to buy a can of cream-style corn ($.88) and a bag of kidney beans ($1.39) knows it. That's why you had to spend all that time on those horrible worksheets, to train you in a method that goes against the grain of all human experience! Got two competitive kids? Really play “The Cost is Right,” and the winner gets an extra dollar for next time.
Have your daughter help you fill up the car with gas (and have her be the lookout for fluctuating prices in the neighborhood.) Let her make the change, and compute your gas mileage. On a long trip, have her count the number of trucks you pass on the highway (I'm assuming you speed like the rest of us), and figure out how many you pass per hour, or per 100 miles.
Daughter saving her allowance and birthday presents to purchase the poodle? Paste a picture of Mr. Poodle on top of a bar graph and make plotting out progress toward the goal part of the exercise. Get a special poodle-purchase bank account. (In better times, you might even get to explain interest, but currently there isn't likely to be any.)
Petey the Poodle Puppy already arrived? Well, put some graph paper on the wall, and make weighing and measuring part of caring for said canine. (Speaking from experience, I can tell you it works for snakes as well.) Say, every two weeks. Height, length, maybe even girth, too! Think of it as future veterinarian training. Put two graphs on the wall, and measure the "child puppy" as well. (Most children love to see analogies to their own development.) You might decide to do the same with dad, but only if he's on Atkins.
You get the idea. If you still feel your child MUST do the workbook thing, so be it. But remember that whether she succeeds with it or not will be more a function of motivation and inspiration than anything else. Give her a reason and a purpose that becomes her own and she will discover an education truly worthy of the name.
Might take even less than eight weeks.
Registered User
double post! sorry!
Registered User
Subbing to post in more detail later, but disagree with this blog post. In Austalia we don't teach maths out of a book and the "creative" examples of how to teach your kids maths is what we actually do. Yes you could teach the whole curriculum in 20 hours but how much is retained? Maths must be revisited or you lose it. How many people who don't use algebra for work still know how to do it? Will BBL as I'm On my phone and it's too hard to type.
Registered User
But that was his point...kids with a real motivation to use maths in real situations will learn it. He was just showing that it is possible to 'teach' traditional maths in 20 hours but the real learning is where they apply it in real life situations. Unfortunately here in the UK there is so much emphasis on passing tests that it is heavily text book driven although there has been recently a more topic based 'real maths' approach. I think it just gives potential homeschool parents the confidence to know that they can teach maths. So many of my students' parents were maths phobic and probably didn't realise that they could help their children learn maths. Although admittedly with the narrow UK curriculum and the insistence on strict adherence to certain methods the maths work did look pretty daunting. The curriculum might have said 'let children explore different ways of adding two digit numbers' for example but the test usually wanted a desired method. Nothing more depressing than going to an exciting maths course and then getting back to school and realising that your management were more interested in meeting government targets and making round child fit into square hole.
My teaching experience in Australia was mainly secondary but I did do a bit of supply in primary (I retrained as a primary teacher in the UK but was originally a secondary teacher in Australia) and I was impressed by the flexibility of Queensland primary schools and the autonomy that Queensland teachers had. However I did notice a few of the dreaded UK style restrictions creeping in. I hope it is not too bad for you guys there now!
Registered User
I must disagree about UK maths - I've seen quite a few maths lessons and they ARE about problem solving and having fun with numbers. I have a highly numerate son who is already thinking algebraically, without it being taught at school (he's far too young for the algebra I learnt!).
Yes, for the tests, he will have to do his maths a certain way. But that doesn't mean he can't have fun before the test. Same with my (GCSE compulsary) subject. We have fun learning, but now it's all about learning how to succeed at the exam. They can apply the "fun" stuff as well as learn the rote stuff at the same time.
Registered User
Sorry feel like I've thrown the thread OT. There is a little bit of data driven stuff going on in Australia as well but on the whole most mainstream schools are really really good at inquiry based, fun, real life learning as opposed to teaching to a test and out of a text book. I am primary so have no idea what high school is like. I agree that this way of teaching is really based on "living" which makes it easy for homeschooling parents to implement in daily life with whatever other curriculum they are teaching. Unfortunately I think some would go down the path of teaching out of a text book though for ease of teaching a subject they themselves are unfamiliar with.
I am a bit torn I guess, as I would love to home school my kids but know that it just wouldn't work for my mental health, I am torn because I teach in a mainstream school and really dislike some of what goes on, but also know there are so many wonderful teachers in schools that do a much better job than even I as a teacher could do, and also love the way many alternative schools like Steiner approach education.
Registered User
Funnily enough it was in my retraining in the UK that I discovered alot of the inquiry based stuff they were introducing into the UK curriculum was stuff they had got from Australia and New Zealand! Alot of the Australian and New Zealander teachers who were also being retrained were very frustrated because it was all stuff they were already doing back home and had been for years. Some of the guys kept on asking the instructor where these ideas came from and the instructor just kept on being evasive. She wasn't going to tell a room full of Australian and New Zealander teachers that she was teaching them to suck eggs! LOL! I was new to primary teaching (having been a secondary teacher in Australia) so I found the course very helpful but I can imagine how annoyed the experienced primary teachers would have been!!
I understand your dilemma Tanstar. I guess I am just a little jaded. However the school system does need teachers like you. In my experience for every wonderful teacher there were 10 bullying, neurotic, child hating control freaks. No parent would ever send their child to a school if they heard the way some teachers talk about the kids in the staffroom. We need more of the good ones! So keep on doing what you are doing!
And sorry Shanti...I'll shut up now!
Last edited by Loveinamist; May 20th, 2012 at 11:21 AM. : forgot stuff and then double posted and everything went wrong!
Registered User
double post!
Bookmarks