Homeschooling... the early days

I know this post is supposed to be about how we drifted into unschooling, but I found after sitting here for an hour typing that I really needed more backstory. So maybe tomorrow? Meanwhile, email is still open, so are comments. Tell us more about your adventures in homeschooling, will you?

I removed Matt from school right after first grade. The original reasons we started are here: why we homeschooled

Our early homeschooling days were very busy.

The two boys I watched before school were at our door at six-thirty. This meant that I was up at five-thirty or so so I could get showered and dressed while Eric was still home to watch the baby. She was usually asleep, but sometimes she needed someone to amuse her and keep her from eating every bit of everything that was on the floor or everything that could be torn off the wall.

During the hour and a half my extra boys were there in the morning, I got the baby nursed and dressed, made sure I was ready with the lesson plans for the day and fed Matt and the other two boys breakfast.

I walked them to school at eight. When we came back home from our morning walk, it was time to nurse Lyssa and get her down for a nap.

School started for us promptly at 9.

As I said yesterday, we had a school room instead of a kitchen in our little house. A classroom with a refrigerator, an oven, and a sink... but still a classroom.

On the door leading from the kitchen into the laundry room, there were five bright sheets of construction paper. Each one served as the mat for a computer printed schedule. (Dot Matrix printer, folks... can you say wow-eee?) We had a schedule for every single day.

I don't remember the schedule perfectly, but I know we had all the usual subjects. We did spelling tests and vocabulary words. We had math class. We had art. We had grammar. We had PE homeschool skate at the local rink and walks and Friday gym time at Montavilla with other homeschoolers.

We had a spelling textbook, a grammar textbook, and textbooks for reading, math, and a 3rd grade textbook for state study. We also had a big workbook with all the subjects in it, and we supplemented heavily with worksheets. Eric and I both thought the more paper he produced the more it proved he was learning.

Matt never complained. I could tell he didn't like some of what we were doing, but I pressed on. I was determined that we would finish our books on time so that he would not get "behind." (and yes, I know at least four of my regular readers are snorting and saying 'behind what'?)

Forgive me, I knew not what I did.

I was a little bothered by the way Matt reacted when he made a mistake. He was embarrassed and apologetic about it. I could tell he felt foolish for making errors. It seriously took about six months before he stopped saying, "Oops, sorry." every time he goofed. He even shamefacedly pointed out errors to his dad when he came home from work and asked him how his school work had gone for the day. I know the embarrassment was something he had picked up in school. Now I don't think his teacher made him apologize or anything like that, I think it was just something that was starting to become ingrained and she either had not noticed or didn't care sufficiently to try to help him with it. Not sure.

One day, about hmm, two months into 'schooling' he asked me if he always got 100% correct on his spelling tests, why did he have to write the words five time apiece and use them in sentences?

Why indeed. I did not know. It was how things were supposed to work, right?

So I made a deal with him. I'd give him spelling tests on Fridays and if he got all the words right, I would not make him copy them or write sentences using them. But if he spelled them wrong, he'd have to do the extra work.

Matt didn't spell anything wrong. Ever. One day in a November rainstorm, we were rushing home from the grocery store to be home in time to pick up the other boys from school. I drove past a drugstore. On a whim, I asked him to spell pharmaceutical. He did. We ditched the second grade spelling book. Did not replace it.

During the first part of the school year, I had seen the work the boys were bringing home to show their parents, and I was unimpressed. The older one was in 5th grade, and could not read or spell as well as Matt could. Matt was reading from the 5th grader's social studies textbook and answering the questions at the end of the chapters for after school entertainment. And NOT totally off topic here... did you ever consider how strange making social studies a whole subject really is?

When Christmas break rolled around and I had two extra kids all day long every day, we did not do school work. I listened in on their conversations, though.

I tried to listen objectively, and found Matt's observations and way of looking at the world more mature than theirs. He was certainly not behind them academically. Neither of the two boys was behind in school, both got good grades and had nice report cards to bring home. They weren't stupid kids, either. I started to think that Matt wasn't missing out on anything and began to get a sense that he saw, hmm, a bigger picture of the world than they did.

(Why is this is so hard to describe? Go read this post from Katherine, written yesterday. Timely, yes?
Our Report Card )

The boys loved their break, we played with science experiments and did art projects and played video games and chased the baby around a lot. As the start of the next semester rolled around, I started thinking about changing a few things.

Tomorrow (I think) I'll talk more about the changes and the gradual shift in our focus.