Saturday, April 5, 2008

Reflections At Week 30 of "Official" Homeschooling

Dana's final prompt for her "Home Education Week" states:

"What are your goals for home education? What do you hope to instill in your children? Are you planning any changes to how you educate your children?"
The first two questions I addressed in my inaugural blog post, which you can read here.

The third question is a timely one, as we will be starting week 30 of "official" homeschooling on Monday and I'm in the process of deciding which materials to order for the upcoming school year.

The major change I've noticed over the course of the past year has been a drift away from hands-on activities and towards workbooks. Based on my own school history, I'd assumed that DD would hate filling out worksheets and love the hands-on stuff. But her idea of "busywork" and mine turned out to be almost completely the opposite. This kid actually likes to do workbook pages and specifically requests to do them. But she has little patience for activities that look like fun to me. Lapbooking and History Pockets? Big flops. All those crafts in the Story of the World and Kaleidescope Kids activity books? With a handful of exceptions, her reaction was a big yawn. All the games used by the Right Start Math program? Again, she only liked a few of them. The only hands-on activities she seems to enjoy are science experiments.

So our homeschool is turning out to more closely resemble a traditional one from an academic standpoint at least than I'd envisioned when we started. Silly me- I'd been under the impression that home educators usually get more relaxed and use fewer and fewer traditional materials the longer they homeschool their kids...

4 comments:

Stacy said...

It's funny how our children suprise us and how we suprise oursleves.

It's great that you are willing to work with what works for your family.

Have a great day,
Stacy

Hanley Family said...

That's funny...my daughter loves the hands on project things, but she likes worksheets too. Because she can do them all by herself without so much as an instruction from mom.

That is a huge motivator for her.

Thank you so much for taking part in HEW!

Unknown said...

Good for you in being flexible, no matter which direction things seem to turn. My preconceived ideas of what will work with my kids are always being retooled.
www.diaryof1.com

Barbara Frank said...

Yep, I had one of those workbook kids too. Of course the next one was the complete opposite. And the third was a mix, and the fourth has special needs, and that's how I ended up needing so many bookshelves and cupboards for our enormous collection of homeschool supplies!

Isn't your daughter fortunate to have a mom who cares how she learns?