I am not an expert of homeschool methods. Have read books on how children learn and I have a basic understanding of the differences. But my poor children have been guinea pigs because during the course of our continuing adventure of schooling at home, we have tried many, many things. What affect this has had on our childrens academic successes and failures is unknown. By pain and pleasure, and $$$$ and cents, we decided what to keep or continue, and when to cut our losses and try something else. My vision for homeschool was a fun adventure of loving, living and learning. That's what all the books and magazines told me. And I believed them! The first days of official schooling, when we had to begin reporting to the board of education in New York City-Queens, were joyful, thrilling, and the first of many hours, days, weeks, years, of time and memories, happiness, and expectancy. Within a short time I lost sight of our goals-rearing our children to be Godly men and women who desire to serve the LORD with all their hearts, and could can read, write, and balance a checkbook, Curriculum tends to take control. Spontaneous learning left the building! Much to my dismay, my smart children turned into idiots overnight. It was like school, in and of itself, sapped them of their ability to think, understand, obey. My dream of smiling children skipping, laughing, and learning became a nightmare of tears, and dread. I questioned my own sanity. What had I gotten us into? How would this EVER work? That's why we experimented so much with methods. I wanted my children to LOVE school. You have no idea how many times I wished that I could have been homeschooled. My parents, and I had never heard of such a thing (1970-1980). Everyone had to go to school somewhere, right?
When we started on this journey, the only curriculum companies I'd heard of, for Christian materials, were ABEKA, BJU, and ACE. ACE was our top choice because I was familiar with it from my 4 years of high school. I had the added benefit-privilege of monitor training when I was in school, so I knew the "how tos" and had practiced as well. To this day ACE is my favorite curriculum. Some will point to it and say ...... but I stand by my choice. Unfortunately, between our children being miserable doing it, and the expense for 3 children (and we wanted a dozen or more) we realized it was above our means. Somewhere the homeschool magazines came into my hands and WOW what a shock to know how many companies, methods, ideas, etc were out there. This was the mid-1990's, before most people had home computers or internet. Now you can obtain almost anything you like, for your preferred method, for the cost of a printer, paper, ink, and a good internet connection. The hardest part is deciding what to print!
As I started to explore other methods, we adopted copywork. The idea of learning grammar, punctuation etc. by copying anothers writing appealed to me for two reasons: one, it was written perfectly, and two, this was a simple way to expose them to cultural writing that many of us never read.
We also did nature journals/diaries, and journaled often for language arts. One year we did narratives of every book I read aloud for Science and History.
Each of our children have struggled with learning addition and subtraction facts, multiplication tables, and other important mathmatical information. It never occurred to me to implement copywork into our math studies. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a blog singing praises to Charlotte Masons methods, and this Mom asked the question: If we use copywork for other subjects, why not math? She pointed out that drill sheets and flash cards reinforce errors because the child has to come up with the answer, therefore each time he/she writes or says the wrong answer, the error is cemented in his/her mind, even though the child is told the correct answer immediately afterwards. This got me thinking too. So today I searched for, and found, very nice multiplication table which are easy to read and copy. I printed out one copy each for my 3 students, on their favorite color paper, and placed in 3 prong folders. They've been cautioned not to let anything happen to their new books.
I hope this is helpful to other homeschool moms and students who are ready to scream and shout, or pull their hair out or quit. I've been there numerous times, I had entire school years that I wanted to give up...but I am here to say, inspite of all the trials, struggles, fights, tears, anger, frustration etc IT IS WORTH IT!
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