Homeschooling at last

This week we finally began formal homeschooling for Simon. Informally we've been conducting reading lessons out of Susan Bauer's Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading (OPG) and have been playing math games for quite some time now. This week, though, we celebrated Simon turning official "kindergarten" age by setting up an hour or so each morning to add some structure to the mix. To begin this we decided to keep it simple and only focus on math, reading and history. We ordered a copy of the Saxon Math 1 homeschool kit, and dusted off our OPG reading lesson book as well as the set of Story of the World history books and student worksheets we've had for some time now.

So, each weekday at 9am we do lessons from each of those three sets for no more than an hour or for as long as Simon maintains interest. If he gets bored with one of them, we move on to another and make sure we stop as soon as it stops being fun for him. Once we get settled in a routine for these three subjects, we may add others to the mix, but we want to keep the formal part of schooling as limited as possible. There's a bunch of things that we trust he will teach himself, or that we can present as just part of having fun together that don't need a formal structure.

For example, yesterday Simon and I spent about a half hour making patterns on the floor with tangram shapes. For some reason we started talking about the relative size of the planets, so he ran to his room to get his model of the solar system and we quizzed each other for another half hour with questions like: "which planet is bigger than Pluto, but smaller than Mars?" This is when we cross the line from "classical education" to "unschooling" and we just have fun together while following his natural interests.

Because Barb and I alternate being home or working/going to school during the week, we're taking turns with the teaching responsibilities. This means a bit more organization and planning on our part to make sure we both know where we are in each of our books and what comes next, but the huge upside is that homeschooling is something that we're all doing together as a family project. We've always had a good relationship as a couple, but I think the last couple of years of planning for homeschooling has solidified how much we have a common vision of the future and has brought us even closer together.

The best part of it, I think, is the mutual sensation that our future together as a family is something we're designing together and not merely a set of default choices we're making because everyone else is doing it. This adds a bit of stress and worry because there will be no one else to blame if things go horribly awry, but those concerns are held in abeyance by a strong sense of satisfaction that we're living deliberately and creating our own solutions to problems rather than relying on the government or paying to have a corporate entity handle things for us.
All in all, life is good.