School is coming!

EEK!  There's only a couple more days of summer!  How did that happen?  Well, we have done some school during the summer, but mostly my focus was on the newest member of our class and his arrival. Introducing baby William!:

 It was nice to have a baby in the summer because I felt no guilt in dropping the ball on everything but being BIG and pregnant, and on getting to know our sweet new family member.

As for school, it will start on Labor day (monday!---gulp) and I am more or less ready.  Well less then ready to be honest, but I figure I'll ease into this year.

This year we are studying Biology, the New Testament, and Modern World History.  Hyrum will be our kindergardener, and Maxwell will be in 2nd grade.

I'm not going to stress with Hyrum (age 5), however.  He has been diagnosed as having a "Language processing disorder" which I now believe is really not accurate.  I think he's just extremely right brained.  I just got a book called "Disconnected Kids" which is supposed to help children learn how to use their whole brain and connect synapses between the two halves of the brain. Let's hope it helps.

I was going to language therapy with Hyrum, but it seemed pointless.  It was only a half an hour twice a month, and she almost never gave me things to work with at home.  She would say "look how much he's improved because I did such and such" and I would be thinking "That was a month ago, I think he's improved because time has passed and because I do my little preschool."

I'm not sure if I even want to do it this year.  They are frustrated with me that I'm homeschooling because that throws a kink in their system (even though kindergarten is NOT required or subsidized by the homeschool organization.)  It's funny. They say things like "he'll have trouble in large groups" "he needs lots of one on one" "he needs a quiet atmosphere to focus" and in the next breath want him in public school.

I'm not worried about Hyrum in the long run.  He is incredibly creative, artistic, and has amazing dexterity.  He is writing his name very well, and I know he'll do Handwriting Without Tears excellently this year.  He knows the letters and their sounds, but I really don't know how reading will go.  We'll just take it one day at a time.  Math----I'm a bit worried about math.  (See why I think he is severely right brained?) Last year at this time he couldn't count to four.  Now, after drilling and drilling, he can count to ten, but well---let's just say Daniel (3) might be at a higher math level then Hyrum.

The good news is, he's a summer birthday. Really, if he was going to public school, I would hold him back until next year.  That way, instead of being the youngest, he would be the oldest.  I will still try to have him on a kindergarten curriculum, but I'm not going worry if he doesn't accomplish everything I'm planning on right now.

Hyrum & William

Maxwell (age 7), my homeschool guinea pig, I have many expectations for, however, and many of it will be catching up in reading and writing.

Daniel (age 3), well, I don't think I'll ever have to do any kind of preschool with Daniel.  He just picks it all up through osmosis. I have to tell him not to help Hyrum when I'm doing school with Hyrum.

Why would anyone Homeschool?

FYI: This is my last preachy/opinionated post of the summer :)

Homeschooling your kids is hard. A mom needs to be "converted" to the idea for it to last.  But the good news is, statistically speaking, homeschool in general is undeniably a great choice.  I found the study to prove it.

Brian D. Ray, Ph.D. shared his study of adults who were home schooled in his book "Home Educated and Now Adults."

He interviewed 5,254 people who were home schooled for 7 or more years, ranging in age from 16-69 with 74% of them being age 18-24.
He got his data for the general U.S. population statistics from the National Opinion Research Center General Social Survey, filtering it by ages 16-29.

These were the results (click on table to enlarge):

More statistics for adults who were homeschooled:

96% Agree with the religious beliefs of their parents.
95% Were glad that they were homeschooled.
92% Say homeschooling was an advantage to them as an adult.
88% Say homeschooling did not limit educational opportunities.
94% Say homeschooling did not limit career choices.
82% Would/are homeschooling own children.
3.2% Smoke cigarettes at all.
3.3% Had 5 or more alcoholic drinks in a row.
0.1% Ever convicted of a felony.
0.8% On welfare.
Homeschoolers score 15 to 30 percentile points above the national public school norm on standardized academic achievement test scores.

The odds seem to be in favour of homeschooled children!

However, I have one complaint about the study.  I think it's unfair to compare home educated children with the general public.  Home educated children, more often then not, come from two parent families where one parent is a stay-at-home parent.  These parents obviously care about their kids enough to try an unconventional education by sacrificing time and giving effort.  They come from larger families (around 4 children,) and the vast majority of these homes are religious.

That is not the case with the general public.  I have no idea how you would do a fair study, so I will appreciate this one as is.

Homeschooling is becoming more and more prevalent, in the past decade the number of homeschoolers has doubled from one million to two million in the U.S.  I look forward to this type of study being done again now that there is more diversity out there.

In the mean time, study or no study, I feel homeschooling is right for our family, and it's nice to see that others are succeeding at homeschooling as well.

Why Public School's Social Skills Stink Part 6: Peers

I have come up with 6 reasons why public schools are one of the worst places to learn social skills. If children come out of public school with social graces, I place most of the credit on their parents, communities, and the parents of their friends.  NOT on the public school system. I will post these six reasons separately (because I'm very opinionated about this and need space to vent.)

Reason 1: You only associate with children your same age.
Reason 2: You only have friends the same gender as you.
Reason 3: You are not friends with your siblings.
Reason 4: Teachers, in a broken system, have a hard time making a positive influence socially on the children they teach.
Reason 5: Public school monitors do not teach social skills.
Reason 6: Peers matter more then parents and other caring adults.

I have a friend who is an incredible mom who is very involved and thoughtful in her parenting.  She said she would never homeschool because she believed that her children needed socialization for much of the day every day, and where she lived, that would be too hard to do if she homeschooled.

I know many people feel the same as her.  Being forced to spend most of the day every day with peers takes away boredom, shyness, boosts self-esteem, takes away awkwardness, and teaches kids how to get along.  WRONG!

More and more studies are proving the opposite.  Yes children need other children in their lives, but they need parents and caring adults a lot more.

Introducing one of the best books ever:

I recently reread "Hold On to Your Kids" by Gordon Neufeld.  This is not a homeschool book at all.  It is a child psychology/parenting book. Often in the book he shares the extreme of what happens when peers are more important then parents, but this book still sheds light on parent/child relationships in a very poignant way.

This is basically the premiss of the book: Children today increasingly look to their peers for direction-their values, identity, and codes of behaviour.  This "peer orientation" undermines family cohesion, interferes with healthy development, and fosters a hostile and sexualized youth cutler.  Children end up becoming overly conformist, desensitized, and alienated, and being "cool" matters more to them than anything else.  We need to "reattach" to our sons and daughters.


Here are some quotes from the book:

Parents ask "Aren't our children meant to become independent of us?" Absolutely, but only when our job is done and only in order for them to be themselves. Fitting in with the immature expectations of the peer group is not how the young grow to be independent, self-respecting adults.

The ultimate ethic in the peer culture is "cool"-the complete absence of emotional openness......In such an environment genuine curiosity cannot thrive, questions cannot be freely asked, naive enthusiasm for learning cannot be expressed.  Risks are not taken in such an environment, nor can passion for life and creativity find their outlets.

What they learn, however, is not the value of thinking, the importance of individuality, the mysteries of nature, the secrets of science, the themes of human existence...What children learn from their peers is how to talk like their peers, walk like their peers, dress like their peers, act like their peers, look like their peers.  In short, what they learn is how to conform and imitate.

Boredom is epidemic among the peer-oriented.

The belief is that socializing-children spending time with one another-begets socialization: the capacity for skillful and mature relating to other human beings.  There is no evidence to support such an assumption despite its popularity.

When a child knows her own mind and values the separateness of another's mind, then-and only then-is she ready to hold on to her sense of self, while respecting that of the other person.  Once this developmental milestone is achieved, social interaction will hone the child's individuality and hone his relationship skills as well.

It's not that children shouldn't spend time with one another, but we should not expect such play to meet their deepest needs.
-------------------------------------------------

Well, maybe that gives you an idea of this book's point.  Parents need to matter more then peers, and in the book it does help guide parents on how to make that happen, but it is in the last half of the book, which kind of drove me crazy, but it's still an eyeopener book.

Throughout the book, it seems evident that he is talking primarily to parents with children in public school on how to make sure their children don't get sucked into peer orientation and explains how just because children go to public school doesn't mean they have to be dependent on their peers.  And of course I know that many public school parents make sure that they never lose the attachment that they need with their kids.  So "Reason 6" is NOT something that I believe happens to all public schoolers by any means. 

However, it does happen to many kids in public school because of the nature of the system, and it seems that the parents and caring adults that do "hold on to their kids" do so DESPITE the public school system.

Honestly, because of the community in which I now live, my boys hardly have a day pass that they are not spending time with peers.  But it's easy to hold on to them and collect them because we are usually all together, and if we're not together, I am friends with the peer's parents, and know the child and they know me.  In the homeschool life style, that's just how it is.


SO! There you have it!  My 6 long-winded explanations about why I don't think public school teaches good social skills!


PS-There is one thing that I think the public school system is good at socially. If a child is awkward, eccentric, or different, the public school social scene is a great place to turn these eccentricities into repressed insecurity. Not that I think this is a good thing, but so many people are so scared of awkwardness, that for them it might be worth it.