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knowloveserve
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Joined: Jan 31 2007
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| Posted: June 03 2008 at 1:04pm | IP Logged
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I'm very interested in an eclectic style of learning; I admit to being heavily influence by John Holt and I've read Elizabeth's book (responsible for firing me up to homeschool in the first place), "For the Children's Sake", " A Latin Centered Curriculum", "Designing your Own CC", "Homeschooling for Excellence", the "Unschooling Handbook" and a number of others.
I want to be a Classical, Charlotte Mason, Unschooler!   But I don't think I can do it all.
I love the gentle ideas of just going with the flow. But I really, really want my kids to master things like rhetoric and logic; I think it's so important to be able to navigate this world with a proper sense of how to reason and see through propaganda etc.
I've started to curriculum write our next year, just because I feel like I "have to". I've got more than one pair of critical eyes on my family and while I know it is not my job to seek their approval... I know my weaknesses enough to sense that this may be what I am doing.
My oldest is only 6 and we don't do a whole lot formally. We read a ton. Picture books, chapter books, bible stories, atlases. I don't do any narration. We just read. My mother-in-law gives my son prepackaged worksheets and such (she's a public school teacher), I think with the best of intentions to be supportive, and I never touch those... but my son enjoys doing the matching and dot-to-dots on his own sometime. We are blessed to live in an area that is ripe with state parks and lakes and oceans... so we go on lots of walks... we identify a few birds sometimes... examine shells and rocks casually.
I read many posts on here and love the ideas of lapbooks and FIAR and montessori materials and such, but out of laziness or whatever, I just don't do them. Sometimes, not regularly, he "journals" drawings or dictates stories for me to write. There is no regularity or consistency or seasons. We just enjoy living for now.
I just feel pressured, or maybe I pressure myself that we need to be doing something formal or "boring" just to feel like we're schooling. Isn't that sick?! I'm such a product of the system that I think school has to be tedious?!?!? I tried doing the "Teach your child to read in 100 Easy Lessons" and quickly quit that since we both hated it and were bored to tears. Now, I don't teach reading at all. We read a lot of books. He "reads' memorized books to little brothers. He gets annoyed if I run my finger under the words while reading, so I don't even do that.
What am I getting at here? I'm not sure. Just looking for some reassurement I suppose. Or maybe a slap in the face telling me I SHOULD be doing more.
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Ellie
The Bleeding Pelican
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Sarah M
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Joined: Jan 06 2008
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| Posted: June 03 2008 at 2:01pm | IP Logged
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knowloveserve wrote:
| I want to be a Classical, Charlotte Mason, Unschooler! But I don't think I can do it all. |
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That's the best part of homeschooling- you don't have to take an all-or-nothing approach to philosophy. You get to glean whatever works for your family, and throw out the best.
knowloveserve wrote:
I love the gentle ideas of just going with the flow. But I really, really want my kids to master things like rhetoric and logic; I think it's so important to be able to navigate this world with a proper sense of how to reason and see through propaganda etc. |
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It kind of sounds to me like a framework of what you would like the kids to learn, supplemented by what the ladies here call *rabbit trails* would work for you. That way, the kids are getting the rhetoric and logic (and whatever else you would consider essential), but the kids would still get to follow their own interests as you explore these rabbit trails.
knowloveserve wrote:
My oldest is only 6 and we don't do a whole lot formally. We read a ton. Picture books, chapter books, bible stories, atlases. I don't do any narration. We just read. My mother-in-law gives my son prepackaged worksheets and such (she's a public school teacher), I think with the best of intentions to be supportive, and I never touch those... but my son enjoys doing the matching and dot-to-dots on his own sometime. We are blessed to live in an area that is ripe with state parks and lakes and oceans... so we go on lots of walks... we identify a few birds sometimes... examine shells and rocks casually. |
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This sounds WONDERFUL! In my opinion, a 6yo's education can't get any better than what you've described here: books, nature, and faith approached in a relaxed, informal way. My oldest is also 6, and this is what I shoot for. I have a tendency to overthink and overplan, even though I know that really a young child learns so much through these 3 basic components.
knowloveserve wrote:
I just feel pressured, or maybe I pressure myself that we need to be doing something formal or "boring" just to feel like we're schooling.
What am I getting at here? I'm not sure. Just looking for some reassurement I suppose. Or maybe a slap in the face telling me I SHOULD be doing more. |
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I feel that way, too, Ellie. I especially feel pressured when people ask my kids, "So what did you do for school today?" and my kids give them a blank stare. We do occasionally do tablework, or some formal lesson of some sort, but my kids don't really consider that *school*- they consider it *life*. My 4yo even told a family member (one who is especially skeptical of homeschooling, no less!),"Oh, we don't do much of any school around here." 
I would encourage you to keep on doing what you're doing, and maybe add in some basics if that makes you feel more on track.
It sounds like you are providing very warm and happy relaxed childhood memories for your children!
Blessings,
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SallyT
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| Posted: June 03 2008 at 9:39pm | IP Logged
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Keeping a log is a great idea -- when you've got a record of what you did in a given day or week, then you see, over time, how richly you've covered a full complement of subjects. Then when people ask what you do, you have something to say (and you can translate it into education-ese if you have to).
In our experience, the pressure and criticism do taper off to some degree as relatives see that the children aren't turning into pasty little illiterate fungi, but instead sit and have conversations with grownups in polysyllabic words, then go off and play with their friends.
When we first started homeschooling, and my now-10yo was 5, my mother-in-law used to take him to the library and make him check out "easy-reader" books, which he detested. Not that he could read fluently, but he'd been read aloud to enough from E. Nesbit, Swallows and Amazons, and Tolkien, that the easy readers just didn't do it for him. Finally she got tired of the library trips, and I took over, letting the kids just pick out what they wanted. This son liked military books -- I cannot tell you how many times that year we checked out a book called Amphibious Techniques. He would look at it, turn the pages . . . and then about halfway through the year, he confessed to me rather shamefacedly that he was "only" reading the captions. I hadn't know that he was reading at all. Now he reads . . . everything. One of his favorite books is a logic primer called The Fallacy Detective, so from totally unschooling learning to read, we're now doing logic . . . albeit in a pretty unschooly way, I guess.
I really think that you get where you really care about getting -- not only in homeschooling, but in all of life. If you care about the rigors of classical education, then you will get there when it's time to get there. In our house, that hasn't been at age 6. All the way through (I have a rising 10th grader, the 10yo, a 5yo and a 4yo), we have been very literature-based, almost exclusively so in the early years, but beginning to add in more formal work and more Mom-initiated challenges around 4th or 5th grade. My oldest, who has been the guinea pig of course, and who has probably had the most child-led experience of any of them, just finished a very rigorous 9th-grade year with Latin, tons of writing, even more tons of reading, apologetics, debate, etc. Having had a relaxed homeschool experience for the previous four years did not put her at a disadvantage when the heat was on. She was ready for the challenges, and she rose to them.
So . . . your description of what you want to be as a homeschooler sounds a lot like what I say when I describe at least my ideal for our homeschool. In one sense you can be those things simultaneously, in that the values you derive from those philosophies do guide what you do and don't do. In another sense, you could think of those approaches as representing seasons of your children's learning: unschooling for the early years, a Charlotte Mason approach as you transition into more formal work, a classical orientation for high school. Or something like that. Anyway, I don't think those philosophies are mutually exclusive -- if they were, there surely wouldn't be so many people describing themselves in all those terms!
My $.02, anyway.
Sally
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Castle in the Sea
Abandon Hopefully
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Leonie
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| Posted: June 04 2008 at 1:02am | IP Logged
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knowloveserve wrote:
I want to be a Classical, Charlotte Mason, Unschooler! But I don't think I can do it all. |
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Hey, that is what we are! 
Have you read "The Latin Centred Curriculum" and "Homeschooling With Gentleness - A Ccatholic Discovers Unschooling" ? I found they described our uschooly homechool well - responding to children's needs, living books, real life, passions and interests, lots of play, chores, some formal Religion/Maths/Latin/writing...
Here are a couple of links on Classical Unschooling, might make you feel more at home with the mesh of CM/classical/unschool -
Willa classical unschooling
my take
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Leonie in Sydney
Living Without School
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