Update, and books

When I started this blog, for one, I thought I’d have more to say about it, and two, I thought I would have more time to think, process, and write. Neither of these things have happened.

Since the beginning – officially, three years ago, I believe – this has been harder than I imagined. Then again, my kids are not me. I remember being their ages, and taking off and running with everything. Tabitha reads very well, but she doesn’t do it for fun. I remember spring break at school when I was her age, and pretty much reading the entire vacation, probably well over 1000 pages! She’s the one who thinks she’s missing out on the “social” aspects.

Asher, he likes homeschooling, he just doesn’t want to do it. He’s bright, especially in math, but there tend to be a lot of arguments about actually sitting down and doing work – who does computer work first, who does their reading time with me first, etc.

So… here’s a couple things that we’ve read recently; this may be interesting to people looking for appropriate books, especially for boys.

Tabitha (8) read “From Anna” by Jean Little. I think she liked it pretty well, and she did a really good job with vocabulary and expression and such, but when she was done with it, she kind of shrugged and wanted the next book to have “more pictures that go along with the story”.

We are currently reading “Heidi” by Johanna Spyri, which I think she’s gotten into more than she will admit, though it’s not as though she’s picking up the book for fun and reading it. Considering its setting, there’s a lot that we’ve talked about as far as what the world was like in the time that Heidi would have lived, and I think that’s helped her a lot, not just with the book, but with the realization that things weren’t always the way they were in the world – that amenities like electricity and plumbing and food safety and quick travel are all fairly recent in human history.

And Asher – we’re on our second “Boxcar Children” book. They’re no literary powerhouse, certainly, but present some kind of adventure, and aren’t terribly hard. He says he doesn’t like them, but I think he’s going to say that about just about anything. We finished “Frindle” by Andrew Clements. It’s kind of a funny book, but also showing some signs of age. It’s set in the 1990s, which in itself isn’t a problem; books have settings, after all, but when you take fictional characters and put them on “David Letterman” and the like – well, I guess I’m just getting old. 🙂

October Update

So how are we doing?

According to the laws of the state that we live in, we must have our oldest registered, informing the state that we are homeschooling her. It is also recommended that a certain number of hours be dedicated to lessons each year. They also recommend tracking these hours for one’s own reference.

I’m actually finding the exercise useful, being as it makes it easy to see what we’ve actually been doing. However, even with working a couple of hours six days a week, I’m not sure that we’ll actually hit the number of “lesson hours” recommended. The problem is, of course, the easier it is to work with the kids, the less time it takes to go through the work. For example, with Tabitha, a normal reading exercise usually takes her 15-20 minutes to complete. On a day when she’s being stubborn, it can take up to an hour. In terms of “lesson hours”, it looks better when she’s acting up, because then we have an hour of a reading lesson. In reality, though, she does better when it takes her the 15-20 minutes, because she’s actually listening well, and thinking about the lesson rather than expending her energy being upset and not concentrating. So, practically, I’m trying to make sure that she gets a number of thing in in a day, and not worry so much about the “lesson hours”.

However, it does get me to thinking – a LOT of what ‘education’ has become is the counting of hours rather than accomplishments. A school day these days typically lasts between 6-7 1/2 hours. If a child is in school, all of that gets counted, regardless of what was actually done. Now, I’m not counting lunch or ‘recess’ or any of these things as lesson hours, even though a regular school would be able to, which seems somewhat unfair. Furthermore, a teacher will have 30-45 minutes blocked off for students to complete a worksheet, for example, but if a student has it completed in 10, it still counts as 30-45 minutes of “class time”. At home, if that exercise took 10 minutes, I certainly wouldn’t feel right counting it as 45.

I’m somewhat surprised, though, at how much Tabitha and Asher actually enjoy their school time. This isn’t to say that it’s always easy, in particular for Asher who wants to wiggle a lot. They are learning a lot, and probably well ahead of where most of the kids are in the classes for their grades.