Well, hmm. I’m trying to decide how to start. First off, I’d like to say that homeschooling at this point is in some ways more of an educational experience for me than it is for my daughter. I am constantly thinking about what it is that I want to accomplish, and how I can do this in the most meaningful, engaging and enjoyable way.
We started out in January at the kitchen table, squirmy almost four year old in a too big chair, book laid out on the table before us. This worked decently well at first, when the lessons were easy and the novelty was intact. Once the whole thing was no longer new and the lessons got harder, the bloom was off the rose and things got quite challenging. We had a couple days of frustrated (and irritated!) mommy and unhappy little girl, before I decided that it was time to call a strategic withdrawal in order to rethink and regroup. We took a three or four week break and I thought a lot about Dy’s comment on one of my previous blog posts. I thought about what it is that I am hoping to achieve in these “pre-school” years. I thought about one of Steven Covey’s 7 Habits - “Begin with the end in mind”. I thought about what I want my relationship with my daughter to be like. I thought about how much I dislike getting frustrated and irritated, and how much more difficult things are when my response to her squidgity-ness and lack of cooperation is simply more and more firmness. And I reminded myself, frequently, that she is barely four years old!
So, with this all firmly in mind and with a great deal of consideration this is where I’ve ended up. I still want to start doing something a little more formal with Emma, because I think it is a good experience for both of us, and because I think she’s ready for it. Also, it makes her feel like she is being homeschooled, not being kept home from school. Emma has noticed that many children - virtually all of the children of the moms in my mom’s club - are already going off to school at her age and she feels left out. I want to make sure I’m giving her experiences (park play days, field trips, a little bit of structure) to make her feel like she’s doing something special too.
I realized that teaching her how to read is not the most important thing in the world for me to be focusing on right now. Yes, I would like to help her learn how to do this (and sooner rather than later) but it does not need to be the centerpiece and the focus of all our learning time. So, in response to this, I’ve really played down the reading lessons. We also reached a point where she is just not getting that sounds can be strung together into words (well, she does get that, but she can’t do it herself) - so I see no point in following the lessons in the book until that clicks with her.
I also started thinking about how I really want to cultivate the habit of attention (can you tell I’ve been reading about Charlotte Mason? :-)). I’ve noticed that sometimes she uses us reading to her much like many people watch TV. She looks at the pictures and just sort of zones - picking up only a small fraction of what I know she is capable of catching. I want to make sure it isn’t all going in one ear and out the other because I don’t want her to be one of those children (or adults, for that matter!) who read something and can’t tell you much about what they read other than “it was good” or “it was interesting” or “I liked it”. (Which is a big problem right now in my book group, but that’s another subject entirely!)
And also (ok, this post is turning out to be really, really long - but it has been brewing for a long time!) I started thinking about how important it is for her to have a firm and solid foundation in Christianity. I want her to know the stories, have some understanding of what is going on during the church service, and most importantly to keep God and God’s love in her mind and heart. I feel weird talking about this, because I tend to be such a closet Christian (yeah, just what Christ called us to be, I know, I know) but, well, there it is. I also feel like I lack the words to talk casually about faith, having grown up in such a secular world. Sometimes I read blogs where people do talk very easily and casually about the role of God and faith in their lives, and I feel like I am translating a foreign language - one that I can read and sort of understand, but cannot speak. But now I’m really digressing.
So with all this, here’s where I’ve ended up. Everyday, we are spending about an hour on our “homeschool block”. I make sure to call it this, so that Emma can identify something concrete that we do instead of sending her off to preschool. The first change was a physical one - we moved from the table to the couch. This is so much cozier and works much better for both of us. Emma really likes to have physical contact, and it feels much more natural and comfortable for her to snuggle up against me on the couch than it does when she tries to climb on me in my chair at the table.
We read one or two of the very short chapters of Egermeier’s Bible Story Book and Emma does a very simple narration back to me. I make sure she remembers the major names in the chapter, and that she has some understanding of what happened. We’re starting at the beginning of the book and going sequentially. We also are reading one chapter, chosen by Emma, from the New Testament stories. She usually picks a gospel story. I generally do not have her narrate this story - she’ll get to narrate them when we get to them.
We also read one (short) chapter from some other religious type book - right now we are reading a children’s book on liturgy. I really love the liturgical approach to worship, and I would like Emma to have some idea of what’s going on so that she can learn to enjoy it as well. She also briefly narrates this back to me.
We then add do a little work with sounds and words. I wrote the sounds she knows on index cards, and we’ll go through them together a couple times, sometimes just sitting and sometimes jumping or moving around. We do the same things with the words. Yesterday we ran through the house, “running” the sounds together to make the word on the card. (you should have seen the look on Gregory’s face as he watched us!) She absolutely loved it, and wanted to do several cards when we had only set out to do one. Sometimes we’ll just go through the word cards and say the words slowly, with her repeating after me. I try not to do this too often, so that she doesn’t just memorize the words.
We also read a chapter from a children’s classic (or a “living book” in Mason parlance), and I ask her questions occasionally about what’s happening in the story as we read. We sometimes will do a summary together at the end of the chapter as well. Right now we’re reading Through the Looking Glass. This one is a little too nonsensical for her to make out sometimes (me too, for that matter!) but it is what she picked. I think it will be very interesting to see how her perspective on our reading changes as we re-read things in the years ahead.
*phew* That was a lot to pull together. The things I feel that I am missing right now from this are some discussion of numbers (although we do talk about this throughout the day, and Emma has been amusing herself by “discovering” addition and subtraction) and nature study. I’m still trying to think about how I want to pull these things in. I need to work with her more on recognizing numbers, so that will have to be worked into our block. I also have some neat nature books that I think would be fun to read together and perhaps use for narration. I also want to start up our nature walks again down by the creek and I would like to do it more than once a week. I also need to get better about planning field trips - it is too easy to just blow it off if I don’t plan and mentally prepare myself for it beforehand. I think twice a month would work well for that. I also want to start doing some very simple memory work. I need to do some more reading and thinking to figure out how I want to approach this and work this in.
Wow, this got long. But it feels good to have written all this out and I think this will be a valuable reference for me. I’ll have to be sure to keep a copy of this around so that I can pull it out in ten years and marvel at how simple it all was way back then! *grin*
