Three - Homeschooling Series: Homeschooling Methods
“just ask the old guys”
In the last newsletter, I covered the topic “Learning Styles”. Once you determine your students learning style and have an idea about how to present material, you determine the methodology you’ll use.
You’ll find that many homeschooling families try several methods before they settle on a dominant one that fits the “(learning) style” of the student(s). When you ask them how they arrived at the method they chose, you’ll get a variety of answers, but most often it will get back to their discovering how the student learns best.
I discovered with my student that he pretty much knew what he wanted, especially once we got into the middle school years. The goal, his goal, was to go to a great college. We accomplished that. He went to one of the top ten engineering schools in the United States.
I discussed college with my student as early as 4th grade. He knew at that age he wanted to go into Engineering. This is a very appropriate conversation to have with a student as part of homeschool planning. I imagine most students will very much appreciate developing a big goal like this. I imagine any student who agrees to homeschooling, already has a goal or will be easily convinced to develop a long term goal.
A homeschool method helps keep your student on a path towards the goal set. As part of my own homeschool, we were always looking at new things, methods included. I used to maintain a website that was pretty popular starting in the 90’s. I wrote these descriptions at our website as we decided where we were going:
Unschooling
Unschooling is child-led learning. Learning is natural for children and when children lead the way, learning is meaningful for the child. Parents provide support and act as mentors/facilitators rather than teachers.
Montessori
Montessori education began with Maria Montessori in the early 1900s. This method focuses on the development of the child from birth onwards and presents the concept of the Four Planes of Development. The parent acts as an observer or guide as the child spends long periods of uninterrupted child-led study. The environment is set up to provide a place for the child to freely explore. Subjects are explored in an interrelated way rather than separated into different areas of study.
Waldorf
Waldorf Education was developed by Rudolf Steiner in the early 1900s. The approach values creative expression, nature, cooperation, play-based learning, and social responsibility. There are three stages of development. The first stage is from birth through age 7. During that stage there is no direct teaching and an emphasis on creative play and experiencing the world. From age 7 through age 14 lessons are approached through art. From age 14 to the end of high school, the approach is a focus on learning to think for oneself.
Classical (Well Trained Mind)
Classical education is a three-part process of training the mind. The lower school years (K-4) are spent in absorbing facts laying the foundations for advanced study. In the middle grades (5-9) students learn to think through arguments. In the high school years, they learn to express themselves. This classical pattern is called the trivium. It uses a model similar to unit studies where all of the subjects are somehow woven together with a subject theme.
School-at-Home
Many families using this approach will have a mini-classroom set up in their home. Parallels a typical classroom. Grade level textbooks, workbooks, and teacher’s manuals are used. Tests, grades, and schedules are a regular part of school at home. Sometimes it is authorizing a public school to exist in your home. For example, a public school supplied laptop loaded with K12, a popular curriculum used in these public school at home programs. (Remember authorizing a public school to operate in your home isn’t independent homeschooling. This idea was covered in detail in a previous newsletter.)
Well Trained Mind
See Classical - these are used interchangeably.
Charlotte Mason
The Charlotte Mason method focuses on educating the whole child and not just the mind. Charlotte Mason believed in the importance of establishing good habits. Shorter lessons with focused attention are preferred over longer blocks of time. Understanding ideas is prioritized over learning facts. Living books, spending time outside, literature-rich studies, art and music studies, and narration are all elements of this method.
Democratic
Students have total control over what they learn, how they learn, their educational environment and how they are evaluated. They choose their curriculum. They choose their method of instruction. They choose, through a democratic process, how their environment operates. They choose with whom to interact. They choose if, how and when to be evaluated - often they choose to evaluate themselves.
Traditional
Education books typically define traditional schools as teacher-centered delivery of instruction to students with a focus on having students master academic core subjects, including math, reading, writing, science, and social studies. This method encourages a thorough grounding in the core academic subjects.
Eclectic
Is a mix and match of many different methods of that offers a unique mix that works for them. These homeschoolers tend to go broad and deep with subjects.
My student read all of these method descriptions and some others as well. He thought some were goofy and others he was game to try.
I was always insistent that we stick with learning basics as in a Traditional method, but because of my students giftedness and learning style, I often found he already knew the basics of what we were going to study. (Kept me scrambling to, find material!) He tended to steer us toward the ideas in eclectic homeschooling where we studied broad and deep. And, just the idea that he generally led where we went, we were unschoolers.
What do I mean by unschooler? Unschooling is child led learning.
Let me give an example.
I remember one Christmas when my student was around age nine or ten and he was very enthusiastic about building a new scale model train set on a table in the basement. When he was really little, he had a Lionel train set that was O27 scale – we were told big trains for little hands. That train went in a loop had some buildings and the transformer to make the train stop and go fast, forwards and backwards.
That train now on the shelf, my ten-year old student wanted to build an “HO” scale train. He convinced me that it could be a study in “school”. I was skeptical – but game. As it was Christmas time, I thought I’d get him started with the basic “stuff”. We had been to the local hobby shop dedicated totally to trains plenty of times just to “look”. I knew that this could really be a confusing outing so I blew the surprise for Christmas and asked my student what to purchase.
He told me “just ask the old guys”.
At the train store the day I went, there weren’t many old guys, so I asked the young guys about a starter small scale set. They just wanted to sell me stuff. When finally I found the old guys hanging around in the back of the store, I asked them what to do about getting started with “ho” trains. They got a chuckle out of that and they were more interested in keeping the hobby interesting for the newbie than selling me a boatload of “stuff”.
They began to speak a language that to my ears clearly covered many topics in “school”, as they described scale drawings of track layouts, percentage of curves, calculation of slope, chemistry with the molding compounds, electricity required. All very interesting topics and I wondered just who the student was.
I purchased a Railway semaphore signal, a red caboose, a scale diner building model set called “Mama’s” and the Santa Fe engine and car my student had decided he wanted. The rest was going to be up to my student.
He did those scale drawings and had to calculate what was needed with regards to electricity to run everything powered, among other things.
In addition to the engineering he learned, he also acquired a good bit of hands on carpentry from my dad in building the table and structures where the scale model train town was to be built. He developed patience in building the models but also how to order the process so more than one model could be built at a time. It was a large undertaking complete with mountains, cliffs and a lake.
The observation here is that with that one phrase, my student demonstrated this project was handled and he knew where to get the information he needed to accomplish what he wanted to learn with the “HO” trains.
This is my most memorable example of child led learning. It was one of the first times I was pretty sure that my student had under control, the content requirements for his own education. My job from that point on was to teach what I could, find what we needed and demonstrate time management.
Some people found it horrifying that my student had this power. But that’s the ticket isn’t it? Get your student invested in his own education?
The key to developing our course of study was the idea that my student, from day one, designed his own path, sometimes in detail, sometimes at a very high level.
In "Elementary school" years he told me at a high level what he wanted to study, for example how animals live in different places (habitats), how germs grow (biology/chemistry), why some poems rhyme, then I would find books, videos, field trips I knew would be interesting to him.
In "middle school" years, my student was able to give me more specifics in what he wanted to deal with as far as topics, materials and trips. This may not be what purists’ call child-led learning, but it is close.
I’m not pushing unschooling here, it’s just where we landed mostly. We also landed in the Traditional education camp when I felt basics were lacking. As labeled “gifted”, my student was able to participate in gifted programs, for example a basic writing class from Stanford University’s Gifted education program (now defunct due to funding). Also a math program from Stanford University’s Gifted education program which my student found too repetitive and eventually boring, we then jumped to eclectic to find a math program that worked.
We also did a lot of traveling, which when you think about it involves all kinds of life and academic skills.
Maybe for some students, sticking with a canned curriculum that is framed by one of the above methods would be satisfying, but you won’t know that until you try several things.
They’re not going to miss out on anything, and it fact will learn more from trial and error than anything.
Remember, you can’t establish a method until you understand how your student learns (learning style) and how to present materials to them in a way they’ll learn/retain it.
Again, I know this is a lot of material to internalize. It’s worth the time you invest. Put questions in the comments, and if I feel I can answer them, I will.
BOOKS
Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling By John Holt and Pat Farenga.
Well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer.
Waldorf Education: A Family Guide by Pamela J. Fenner (Author), Mary Beth Rapisardo (Author).
The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori.
Home Education (Charlotte Mason's Homeschooling Series) by Charlotte Mason.