Profiling Home Educators

Home Education Week at Principled Discovery

Here is the question:
What is it like to be home educated in your family? What is “normal” for you?

Here is my answer:
Normal seems to change each year. So, I'll write about normal according to this year. I've tried over and over to label our way of homeschooling. I use whatever seems to work best with each child. I don't really know what you call it - maybe Eclectic.

My oldest, 14 and a high school freshman, loves to learn. He is self motivated, teaches himself, and he can spend hours a day on his latest topic of interest. I let him do a lot of delight-driven learning and unschooling. However, he is following a schedule for Math, because he knows that he will need to be well prepared in Math for his college major choice. For Language Arts, he wanted to learn Creative Writing. So, I got him the Idiot's Guide to Creative Writing. Sometimes, he spends hours a day writing fiction at his computer. He also choose his own electives, this year - cooking, Bible and Christian growth, logic and thinking skills, and computer science.

Two of my daughters, 13 and 11, do not have a natural desire to learn academically. They are both very active and could spend the whole day playing. So, I have homeschooling much more structured for them. They have daily workbook pages in Language Arts subjects and Math. For History, I usually read historical fiction books aloud to the family. For science we are unschooling, this year, and making the most of science activities, field trips, books, TV shows, etc. I also require that they read five days a week, alone or to me.

My youngest two daughters are 8 and 6. They each have Language Arts and Math workbooks and they read aloud to me. I don't assign work to them, because they are so anxious to do it on their own. They learn a lot through unschooling experiences and from their older siblings.

During the summer, we learn through unschooling. We have decided that learning is a way of life for us. It doesn't stop on the weekends, during the summer, or at a certain age.