Educating the Wheelers

So. What do you do with a 4 year old, anyway? With a 20 month old ball-of-energy boy along for the ride?

Well, she’s already a fairly proficient reader, and has been since she was 2. That’s the only good gene I brought to this marriage — early and enthusiastic reading. Even Owen is starting to recognize letters and words and wants me to read to him all the time.

Audrey enjoys workbooks, so that makes things easy. I’ve picked some up here and there for crazy cheap — you can almost always find them at thrift stores or in clearance bins. Every time she finishes a page, she likes it when we put a sticker on top, or write “100!” or draw a star on it. She’s loving her Singapore Earlybird Math — she’ll do a good 10 pages before she wants to move on to something else.

For “fun,” she loves the time4learning website. True to form, she cleared through all of the science lessons first, and then redid them. And redid them. And redid them. Then some more. But now she’s starting to explore the language arts lessons, too. She considers this her treat, not school. (Though I understand some people use it as a complete curriculum.)

I am, however, completely deficient in the arts and crafts department. So my mom got us the Winter Promise “I’m Ready to Learn” program which really focuses on the hands-on. We’re not doing it at all on the schedule, but picking and choosing what works best for us. And Audrey has her own ideas of what she wants to do with the art supplies. Humorously, her ideas are low-key enough for me to do with her. The other day, she said she wanted to cut out felt pieces to paste smiley faces on paper plates. Woohoo — I can do that! And so can Owen — he loved that one. Heck, we’ve even done it again.

And Owen? Give him a Thomas the Train coloring book and a bucket of crayons, and you don’t need to worry about him for a good 15 minutes. That’s about 4 years in toddler time, so I’m grateful.

So a little bit of workbooks (mostly math and “language arts”), a little online learning, a little hands-on arts and crafts. Then there are the read-alouds, which I’ll have to hit in another post. We usually work in about 15 minute segments, scattered throughout the day, but centered in the morning, after chores. And, when I’m lucky, they work independently at the kitchen table for a bit while I get my chores done. Works out nicely.

Okay, so it’s been almost a year since I’ve posted. At least I didn’t
only make one post and never post again! Heh. [I wonder what percentage
of blogger posts fit that description … ]

Anywhoo, Audrey is 17 months old now and soaking up vocabularly like a
sponge. She will very rarely attempt to say any of her new words, but she
can point to the objects named. And not just animals! She’s also figured
out colors, numerals, and she’s beginning to pick out individual letters.
And to think that just a couple of months ago, our doctor wanted us to
take her in for a hearing check because she wasn’t responding to much of
any verbal communication. I think she was sandbagging so she could blow
us all away when she was ready to unleash it.

In other news, we are feeling more and more comfortable with our decision
to homeschool. I feel confident that I can provide an excellent
education, and I hope that someday in the near future Audrey will have
another sibling or two to learn with. [But will I stop ending sentences
with “with” before then?]

Well, I guess we know now that we won’t be attending the Waldorf school down the road. It’s a bit of a shame, though, since it’s within walking distance, and the campus itself is quite beautiful.

We had been a bit worried that the curriculum wasn’t math/sci enough, but we’ve always assumed that it’s our job to supplement gaps in curriculum if need be. Andrew was particularly concerned by how weak they were on computers/programming. Now, looking further and harder into their philosophy and curriculum on the net, we can see that it really doesn’t match at all what we want.

One of Andrew’s big concerns [and I agree] is that whatever course we take with her, if we ever have to put her back into public school, we want to ensure that she is ahead of public school standards, not behind. I didn’t get the feel that would be the case with Waldorf.

Not to mention some of the stranger touchy-feely/spiritual stuff in their philosophy. I won’t get into that here, but suffice to say, that’s not really our ball of wax, either.

It appears that Texas is one of the best states for homeschooling. Their stance is that if your school doesn’t take state money, the state can’t tell you what to do — and here, a home school is considered a private school for those purposes. In the late 80s, the court ruled on a Texas standard for homeschools — they need to meet 3 criteria:

There needs to be 1. Bona Fide learning going on with a 2. Curriculum in 3. the Required Subjects.

What are the required subjects? Reading, spelling, grammar, math and good citizenship.

Good citizenship! I’m sort of charmed by that. When I was in the 4th grade, we took a tour of the Capitol building, and I got to sit in Gov. Sununu’s chair. [It was a nice chair.]

I stumbled across this post today [via Joanne Jacobs] on how widespread early calculator use affects later academic performance. [Hint: it’s not good.] My post-partum memory is fuzzy, but I seem to recall not using calculators regularly until my college statistics class. In fact, I still have my trusty TI-36X from that class and still use it. [I’ve since sold the TI-81 that I used in calculus.] I always enjoyed calculating in my head — I remember working at San Francisco Street Bakery in college, and I’d keep running tabs for folks as they picked out their items and would announce their total to them before I even got to the cash register. Cheap fun. Heh.

I’ve been reviewing different math curricula lately — there’s a fairly wide variety of approaches out there, but my gut tells me that tried-and-true like Saxon or Singapore Math is what most effectively teaches math competence. [The girls who babysit for us — and who are homeschooled — use Saxon.] One thing I like about them is that they discourage calculator use.

Our first daughter, Audrey, is nearly 7 months old, and already my husband Andrew and I are struggling over where/how to educate her.

The current options we’re kicking around include public school, Catholic school, the very nearby Waldorf school and homeschooling.

Admittedly, I’m not thrilled about public school. I went to a handful of public schools and a handful of Catholic schools. I had a good experience at a small, neighborhood Catholic school, a great experience at a small, rural public school, a poor experience at a wealthy Catholic school and and particularly crappy experience at a suburban “good” public school. I left there after the 10th grade and started at my local community college. But Andrew had a good experience in the Austin, TX public school system [years ago], and isn’t nearly as jaded as I am. At the risk of stereotypical old cooter “everything is going to hell”-speak, I do feel like the public schools have only gotten worse since we were there.

Thankfully, we have a few years to decide.