As we have been going through everything in the house with the goal of determining what to save and what not to save, we have inevitably come upon all the old kid drawings and stories and school assignments that have been crammed in drawers and boxes and files over the past twenty-ish years, and just moved from house to house to house.... to house. It has brought back lots of memories of our early days of homeschooling.
We started to homeschool 20 years ago last fall, with our then four and five year old daughters. At that point they would have had three younger brothers, one of whom had a lot of health issues and, as it would turn out, hearing issues we knew nothing about at the time but which made for some fairly challenging toddler years. If me-then had asked me-now for homeschooling advice me-now would have told me-then not to bother doing anything with kids so young and to just keep on playing and reading and having fun for a couple more years. But at the time I was a product of a culture that believed it was the natural law that formal schooling begin by five years old or the children would be doomed to a lifetime of ignorance. Luckily I also had a husband who had a fair amount of both educational philosophy and teaching experience behind him, and between us we came up with what was a pretty easy-going, very do-able, and still fun plan for school at home anyway. So despite the lack of advice from experienced homeschoolers (I knew none but my own sister who was only a couple years ahead of me on this journey), I think we got a decent start.
Back then I still thought of my kids as being in a grade level, that dependence on grade level disappeared very quickly, but to me this was Erin and Bayley's kindergarten year and it went like this:
Every day they did about 5 or 6 math problems which I hand wrote on the back of a piece of scratch paper for them. They learned that year to add, multiply, subtract and divide with one digit numbers. We had a large collection of wooden colored cubes that they used to figure their problems every day, physically manipulating each problem before writing the answers on their paper. A pile of 3 blocks combined with a pile of 4 blocks became 7 blocks. 3 piles of 2 blocks each became 6 blocks. A pile of 8 blocks with 3 taken way, 5. A pile of 9 divided into 3 stacks, 3 in each stack. Elementary math. I still think it was the best early math program we have ever used.
We went to the library every week and checked out books to read. I had no training whatsoever in teaching a child to read. I sat with them each on the couch with an easy to read book from the library and we sounded out words together. Some days we would make it through a page. Some days more. Some days I was sure I was doing something horribly wrong because after we had just painstakingly sounded out a certain word on the left hand page, we would turn to the right hand page and my darling little reader would have totally and completely forgotten what that very same word was! Sometimes I got horribly frustrated. Sometimes I was seriously impatient. But we stuck to it.
But what I am finding in the boxes and files mostly come from the last aspect of their early schooling. Their research topics. They picked anything they wanted to learn about, we read books together about those things and then they made projects and dictated reports to me. I have found reports on Cheetahs and Fireworks and Elephants and Sacajawea and Australia. They made posters and models and games and maps and books bound with masking tape.
I am sure I sometimes wondered if I was doing enough. After all, our 'school' hours each day were probably more appropriately measured in minutes and didn't even come close to approaching the half day of kindergarten that was even then falling out of favor in comparison to the full day kind. The rest of the day, my girls played crazy wild games in the yard with their brothers, wrote emails to their Daddy at work, listened to Kris and I read stories to them, helped bake cookies or make play dough, did little chores around the house, drew more pictures than I ever knew what to do with, made giant messes in the playroom and helped take care of the baby. Now though I know that we were definitely doing enough. That it was, in fact, pretty perfect. And don't worry, a few of those cute little reports and drawings survived the purge. Two boxes full actually.
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