The second thing I learned was that there are different kinds of 'homeschooling' methods.
First, there's UNSCHOOLING. Basically, this is where the parent doesn't teach with a lesson, but uses whatever they are doing as a means of educating the child. For example, playing with soap in the bathtub is opportunity to explain how air fills the soap and makes a bubble. It's teaching, but there are no books, no plans, no schedules. For more information on this, see Unschooling.com.
Then there's UNIT STUDIES. That's where the parent chooses a topic and does all the teaching for that month (or whatever) from that topic. Say the topic is birds. You'll do bird math problems, birds in nature, songs about birds, pictures of birds, read books about birds... I'd get bird overkill, personally. But to some people, this is a good way to teach.
CLASSICAL home school is based on the Trivium, a Medieval-based program utilizing reason, record, research, relate, and rhetoric. Some of the greatest minds in history came from this line of thinking. There is a fantastic book out on this - The Well-Trained Mind, by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer that is helpful in learning more about how to school this way. Here's the site.
The most publicly known schooling is SCHOOL AT HOME. This is where the students learn from textbooks and mom has a manual and the exercises are in a workbook - this is the most costly, the least flexible, and has the highest burn-out rate, from what I've read. You buy a curriculum in a box and *voila!* - school. Sonlight, Calvert, and Abeka are a few names.
The ECLETIC method is the most popular with parents. It's pretty much where you use a little of this and a little of that out of whatever books you can get cheap and smudge it all together with a little creativity. It's flexible, it's cost-efficient... it's not very organized to my way of thinking, but... again... Here's the EHO for more information
I've chosen to use the CHARLOTTE MASON Method. She wrote educational materials on schooling, and her techniques are still used today. She bases everything on classical learning - Shakespeare, classical music, the Bible, hymns, Pleutarch, and other historical sources... while at the same time encouraging nature and the out-of-doors. I thought it sounded weird, until I was shown Ambleside Online, a site with scheduled learning guides, explanations of the hows and whys behind her method... |
