So, you have decided to homeschool your children. Now what?? Many times a person has a picture in their head of what homeschooling might look like. But did you know that there are many different styles of homeschooling? There is not a cookie cutter approach to educating your child at home. You are the one who gets to prayerfully decide what is going to be the best approach for your family. Let me tell you a little bit about your options.
One End of the Spectrum: Unschooling
This type of schooling seems to want to avoid all resemblance to public or private schooling. It is a total revision of what it means to teach your children. Rather than having a curriculum that is followed to teach specific subjects, unschooling does not have a specific agenda or plan for what is to be taught or how. Rather than having set days and hours for teaching the students, unschooling considers every hour of every day an opportunity for the child to learn. Rather than have tests and grades, unschooling does not really evaluate how well a child is doing or how much he is learning. This type of homeschooling is often child-driven. The parent feels that the child has interests in different subject matters at different points. The parent’s goal is to provide the child with resources to learn about that topic in whatever way the child sees fit. Although I am sure there are plenty of versions of unschooling out there, most of them have this philosophy at their core.
The Opposite End of the Spectrum: Homeschooling That Copies Traditional Schooling
This form of schooling is utilized by people who like the general structure of either the public or private school day, but they want to replicate it in their own supervised home setting. There are plenty of curriculums out there that can be used in either a traditional school setting or in a homeschool. Because they are interchangeable, they can be used the same for all practical purposes in regard to subject matter, testing and grades, and scheduling options. A desire for high scholastic quality and preparing a child for college often lead parents to choose this model of homeschooling. Grades are important to them, and they want to know that their child has learned what he needs to learn in order to go to college or enter the real world.
The Middle Ground: Where Many Of Us Are
In reality, many of us do not completely fit either of these extremes. One aspect that makes homeschooling great is giving the parents the opportunity to design their child’s education the way they want it to be. Some parents want their child to be busy with school-related materials during certain times of the day but do not want to be bogged down with all the paperwork of tests and grades. These people often gravitate toward a Charlotte Mason approach, where they supply their children with wonderful books to read about a certain subject and allow the children to absorb all that wonderful knowledge through the joy of reading. Some people want the structure of a curriculum that contains tests and grades but want to have flexibility of schedule, whether on a daily or annual basis.
The Method That Works For Me
I would say that I fall more into the latter spectrum of homeschooling. I have used many types and brands of curriculum at different times during my homeschooling “career”. But I have almost always chosen ones that have a schedule of lessons to be learned and quizzes and tests to evaluate what has been learned. I choose curriculum that gives a clear scope and sequence of the material to be learned and plans for the daily lessons. I also like material that spells out what papers or activities need to be done. Since the curriculum tells me this, I know what grade each of my children is in and how much more they need to do before they graduate. Although I am not a huge proponent of sending my kids off to college, it is my goal to have them properly educated to meet the challenges of the world.
While I use somewhat traditional curriculum, my family does not follow a “normal” schedule, as defined by traditional schools. First of all, on an annual basis we do not have school from Labor Day to Memorial Day with the entire summer off. We tried that; it did not work for us. I found that my kids did not have enough to do over the course of the summer and were often bored. With so much free time on their hands, it was easy for them to get into trouble. Also, over the course of three long months, they seemed to take a step or two backward in their schooling, forgetting much of what they had learned the year before. This led to the need to do a lot of review at the beginning of the next year just to get them back to where they had been at the beginning of summer. So, we have gone to year-round school with a short break in between grade levels in the spring.
This leads to our weekly schedule. Because we are having school over the course of more weeks, we only have school four days a week, with even some three day weeks in the summer. And we still have time to take a week or two off here or there to go on a family trip during whichever part of the year we plan it. I keep a calendar of our school year, writing down which lesson number we do on which day, so we know what we have accomplished and how much more we have to do before we change grade levels.
Which Method Will You Choose?
I use my family’s homeschooling as an example to show that it is possible to have a hybrid approach, if you will. You do not have to be at either end of the spectrum that I introduced at the beginning of this post. You also do not have to always do things the way you chose to do them when you began homeschooling. Even if it was the perfect fit when you first started, different aspects of your life change that make it necessary to change to another way of doing things. That is not something to be discouraged about. It is simply something to be aware of and to reevaluate for occasionally.
So, now that you have an overview of different types of homeschooling and possible reasons to do choose each one, you have the opportunity to evaluate your family’s needs and which will work for you. Do you want a lot of structure, or do you prefer freedom to do different things? Do you want to have means to evaluate what your children are learning? Are you concerned with whether your child will be prepared for college? Do you want to differentiate what your family does, compared to the public and private school systems? What is important to you? These are things you must consider as you plan your family’s homeschooling year.
