Homeschooling: what has and hasn't worked for us recently

Reflections on the various resources we've used, motivation levels, and realities the month has presented us

Oz recently shared our overall plan for homeschooling. I’ll supplement this with semi-regular updates about how our goals are matching up with reality, so as to normalize the fact that children are autonomous beings :)

Overall, we’ve found it hard to impose our desired learning times on the kids. We’d set up a schedule between us where Oz would homeschool in the morning, and I’d take over parenting in the afternoons. Oz and I both benefit from morning cortisol boosts, and tend to be pretty fired up to get going with the day early. So the idea was that he could prioritize the most important thing (homeschooling our kids) early in the day. The problem has been that the kids don’t reliably feel like “learning” then, and often find themselves immersed in their imaginary play worlds or absorbed in a book. It feels wrong to extract them from this and force them into a learning activity when they don’t feel like doing it. If they were in school obviously this issue would be moot. Ditto if Oz and I didn’t have flexibility in our days. But we do, so we’re currently experimenting with him directing his morning energy into his work, and I’ll either homeschool in the morning if the vibe is right, or we’ll do so later in the day. Or sometimes, not at all! (We want them to feel excited to learn, and want them to experience the benefits of play etc). I’m grateful that we can be adaptive, even if the lack of reliable structure can mess with my head sometimes.

Projects

Go, Oz! Recently, Oz has overseen their building of a dollhouse from scratch. It was such a great way to teach them non-traditionally-female skills like woodwork (yay!) as well as math and design. Much fun :) (And also a healthy dose of stress, sometimes).

He also made a life-sized solar system with them, where they calculated planetary scales and spacing, made the sun and planets, and will space them across our property (50 acres) to help them develop an intuition for just how mind-boggingly large space is.

Somewhat less ambitiously (stressful), the girls and I are learning how to sew together; we made some soap (? did it teach them about chemical reactions or was it just a fun craft project for me?); and made some lotion (science education liquid and solid states / fun and frivolous non-creative craft project? Tomato tomatoe). These kinds of projects are fun sometimes, stressful at others, and only feel worth doing if I am really in the mood for it; I don’t put a lot of value on their educational/creative/bonding potential - to me, there are better ways.

What has/hasn’t been working for our 5yo

Math

• Oz and G have a lovely history of doing Beast Academy together. We’ll write a review of it sometime, because it’s a really great math resource. We’d love to do as much of it as possible, because it teaches inspiring, often unconventional, concepts. But G seems a bit fatigued by it, so after a few attempts to reignite her enthusiasm, we’re kind of shelving it for the moment.

• Ditto, to an extent, with Matific. As we’ve shared, Matific is a pretty great way to practice math drills. They make it way less boring than most other options - especially dreaded worksheets! But over time, no matter how you slice it, learning e.g. multiplication gets boring! Unfortunately the app hasn’t historically been great at letting you choose your topics, so until they improve this aspect (they have a little, recently), we’ll probably just keep offering it and letting her interest level be the guide.

Coding

• Code Monkey continues to be a pretty fun learning resource, and G has been using the app ~once a week

• G started using MIT’s Scratch program along with the guide book to develop her own computer games. Super empowering and fun for a 5 year old to be able to do! She came up with the idea to create her own game from scratch without following the book, but unfortunately lost steam and it seems to have been a net demotivating experience for her. It coincided with Oz being overseas and me attempting to homeschool two littles at once, but was the kind of project that needed an adult’s undivided attention. I’d like to revisit it to demonstrate to her that she can do it (because she can!). Oz is the programmer in our relationship, so he’d do a great job of this, but I’m also drawn to learning it with her to model the learning process. Watch this space if you’re in the market for a goblin-catching owl game and wish to rescue some fairies ;)

Literacy

• G has been reading for multi-hour stints recently, and it is such a glorious thing to be able to let her do so in the middle of the day on any random Wednesday. Yay to homeschooling!

• Typing Land has been a fun way for her to learn to touch type. Why are you teaching your 5 year old to touch type, they ask? Because, DR, she wants to.

Handwriting. G expressed interest in learning how to write in lowercase, and has been teaching herself this simply by copying letters and writing stuff. She taught herself to write in uppercase letters from the age of 3, through exactly the same motivation and process. I still remember being chastised for my ill-formed “a” as a 6 year old. Look at me now, b*@$es!

What has/hasn’t been working for our 3yo

Reading

• I wrote a while ago about the process of teaching R to read, and how she subsequently lost interest. We let it go for a while, and upon returning from a long trip decided to start afresh with the Logic of English program. I’ll write a post about it at some point. Suffice to say it’s much more fun for her, albeit a much slower process than Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Nevertheless, she’s now up to reading short books so that’s awesome for her!

• We’ve supplemented her reading learning experience with such things as: CVC bingo; writing stories on the computer (phonetically, which can be fun to read :) ); writing text messages to grandparents; games like finding words around the house to read (inspired by LOE); and reading short books together (those that are ostensibly phonetic, e.g. Bob Books, the early reader Biscuit collection, LOE’s books)

Math

• Matific. This kid has happily been spending 2+ hours a day on this app recently - she’s obsessed at the moment! She’s been wowing with me with her ability to learn addition and subtraction. It’s been such a great app for her recently! We just don’t give kids enough credit for their capabilities (my kids are the best and smartest kids in the world, and so are yours, as are all of them). We probably wouldn’t have introduced Matific to her yet if it weren’t for her older sister using it, and I’m glad we did!

• Khan Academy Kids. R likes this, and I like it sometimes because she doesn’t really need hand-holding during it (vs Matific where we’re actively engaged with her). I.e. she uses it when we need to focus on G’s learning, or I’m in the mood for ditching dogmatic principles and feel like indulging myself in writing this Substack post, for example. I previously wrote a review about it.

Hopefully that’s a helpful insight into how another homeschool family has been operating! I certainly appreciate learning how others do it.