Homeschooling

scary_robot_music

scary_robot_music

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Looks like there's no homeschooling thread. I'll start one, with a specific question. Do any of you out there know of any good resources for teaching history to grade school kids? Doesn't need to be full on the Nazis were the good guys, moon landing fake, women should never have gotten the vote or anything like that. I'd just like something that isn't totally America-bad-because-it -invented-slavery girlpower LGBTHBDGVEE (or whatever the letters are today) commie propaganda. Basically, good minimal resources for learning objective facts like "George Washington was the first president" that my kids will need to know for passing the state exam that allows me to keep homeschooling them.

I know the details on what they need to know vary from state to state, but my understanding is that in my state it's not much, so anything that's not overtly Satanic and SJW would probably be helpful.

Feel free to discuss anything about homeschooling on this thread. I'm happy to answer questions about what my wife and I are doing, although I'll keep things vague enough to protect my identity.
 
Iacobus said:
Following, no children yet but God willing I would like nothing more than to homeschool them when they come.
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Do it, it's great. Most people think of educating their children themselves as this huge, complicated burden. I kind of expected it to be like that too when my wife was pregnant with our first, but there was no way we were going to just send our kids into the American public education system and hope for the best.

Then it turned out that for the most part it's not that hard to figure out and a joy to be present as your children learn, rather than just vaguely hearing about it from some public school teacher. You can literally perceive how their brains develop as they get older and can suddenly understand things that were just too advanced a short time before. The difference between "there" and "their" is one example, being able to read double consonant sounds like 'st' or 'bl' rather than just single consonants is another, things like that that they just couldn't wrap their heads around and then suddenly it makes sense to them.
 
We're homeschooling and it's kinda hard, but this has more to do with the Australian bureaucracy than putting the effort in to the child. We decided to put our son in primary school part time and this is mainly for him to get his PE (physical education) and the second language he will be learning. We live in a village with about 20 students in the entire school and know the two teachers but I will still keep a close eye. He just started so we'll see how it all goes as it's all new to us.

One good thing here is that they don't need to be vaxxed up here to go to school while in the USA you pretty much have no option but to homeschool.
 
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Many of my friends were homeschooled, from what I can tell women seem to thrive in homeschool environments and men seem to struggle towards the late middle school/high school age.

Since men are traditionally the bread winners and have to engage with everyday society more, they have to more expose to society as a whole. Home-schooling men for too long tends to leave them awkward or at least socially inept.

I would argue that sending young men to some kind of boarding/technical school program that promotes social integration as well teaches them a valuable skill is best for ensuring they can develop healthy relationships and become a valuable employee.
 
If you are homeschooling your kids, be sure to have them learn how to program. I found out my cousin was homeschooling his kids about 10 years ago, so I suggested they learn to code. Sure enough they went home and started learning. They ended up getting engineering degrees, and are set for life. One's about to get married to a nice Christian girl.

Here's an example resource.

Learn C++ – Skill up with our free tutorials

www.learncpp.com www.learncpp.com
 
scary_robot_music said:
Looks like there's no homeschooling thread. I'll start one, with a specific question. Do any of you out there know of any good resources for teaching history to grade school kids? Doesn't need to be full on the Nazis were the good guys, moon landing fake, women should never have gotten the vote or anything like that. I'd just like something that isn't totally America-bad-because-it -invented-slavery girlpower LGBTHBDGVEE (or whatever the letters are today) commie propaganda. Basically, good minimal resources for learning objective facts like "George Washington was the first president" that my kids will need to know for passing the state exam that allows me to keep homeschooling them.

I know the details on what they need to know vary from state to state, but my understanding is that in my state it's not much, so anything that's not overtly Satanic and SJW would probably be helpful.

Feel free to discuss anything about homeschooling on this thread. I'm happy to answer questions about what my wife and I are doing, although I'll keep things vague enough to protect my identity.
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I’ve used the Story of the World series with my son since 1st grade (he’s now in hs) and have been happy with the way it’s presented. The books are broken into four time periods (ancient history, middle ages, renaissance, and modern times). One thing I found unique about the way it presents history is that it is meant to be taught in chronological order. That may seem obvious but it's not the way most of us have history taught to us in school.

The author of the series explains the philosophy of the way it is presented by noting that in most schools history is taught in a very disjointed manner, where students learn their local state history first, then major events in American history and then finally in HS they cover European/World history. It would be like reading a book by skipping around and reading it out of order.

The logical way to tell a story is to begin (as the King said to Alice) at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end. Any story makes less sense when learned in bits and pieces. If you were to tell your five-year-old the story of “Hansel and Gretel,” beginning with the house made of candy and cookies (because that’s likely to be the most interesting part of the story to the five-year-old), then backing up and telling about the woodchopper’s unfortunate second marriage, then skipping to the witch’s demise, the story isn’t going to make a coherent whole in the child’s mind.

History is no different. Yet it’s too often taught unsystematically, as a series of unrelated bits and pieces: American history this year, ancient history the next, eighteenth-century France the year after that. By the time you graduated high school or college, you’d studied King Tut, the Trojan War, the Bronze Age, the rise of the city-state and the Exodus. Chances are you studied these subjects in different years, out of different textbooks. You probably can’t put them into chronological order in your own mind.
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By presenting things in chronological order students are able to gain a context for modern events.

One other thing I liked about her approach is that you are constantly circling back on the same material every 4 years, but going into more depth each time around as your child gets older and better able to comprehend the material. So in grade 1 you cover ancient history, in grade 2 the middle ages, in grade 3 the renaissance, grade 4 modern times, etc. In grade 5 you start the process all over again with ancient history, but this time in more detail since your chid is able to understand a more complex, nuanced look into history. This cycle repeats 3 times by the time your child finishes HS.

She also has testing material and project books to accompany the history books. My wife did most of the projects with my son and I thought some of them were pretty creative - in the ancient history project book they made a chicken "mummy" where you salt a chicken to preserve it and then wrap it in gauze, made a miniature Nile delta using soil and water in an aluminum pan, made Roman posca, etc.

I'm pretty sensitive to bias in the way history is taught and I thought overall it was a pretty even handed in the way material was presented.
 
We homeschooled our children all the way through and have zero regrets. It is absolutely worth the time and effort. I can't imagine putting children into a public school in today's environment. I know some people have no choice but we made the decision to live only on my husband's income and sacrifice what some might consider "necessities" (that are really luxuries) but our children have thanked us and we are very proud of them.
 
As we're getting ready to homeschool for high school, and after talking to several parents, I've come to realize that a lot is done online at this level. Most parents are not equipped to teach all the subjects and rely on virtual schools and courses. We looked at a couple of different options that look great, but they use mostly Google software, which as you all know, carries serious privacy issues. In fact, according to this independent research, 96% of EdTech tools share children's personal information with 3rd parties. We know our local public schools are pushing EdTech very hard, and I firmly believe that this is part of the plan for total control and surveillance of the population. I know homeschooling wouldn't be as extreme in this regard, but it is a concern, for sure.

Does anyone here have experience going low-tech for high school? I know I can just go to the library and get books, but there are so many options that I would quickly become overwhelmed. Also, I need structure, a clear plan to stay on task, so open-ended options are not great for me.

For math, I'm planning to use Math U See, which comes with DVD video lessons, workbook, quizzes, and tests. My daughter wants to continue her classical studies, so I'm considering Memoria Press, but it seems extremely rigorous, so we might only get some parts of the curriculum. Homeschool Connections uses Caravel, and I don't know how safe it is, but it looks good for writing, literature, and science. Any other ideas?
 
Camellia said:
As we're getting ready to homeschool for high school, and after talking to several parents, I've come to realize that a lot is done online at this level. Most parents are not equipped to teach all the subjects and rely on virtual schools and courses. We looked at a couple of different options that look great, but they use mostly Google software, which as you all know, carries serious privacy issues. In fact, according to this independent research, 96% of EdTech tools share children's personal information with 3rd parties. We know our local public schools are pushing EdTech very hard, and I firmly believe that this is part of the plan for total control and surveillance of the population. I know homeschooling wouldn't be as extreme in this regard, but it is a concern, for sure.

Does anyone here have experience going low-tech for high school? I know I can just go to the library and get books, but there are so many options that I would quickly become overwhelmed. Also, I need structure, a clear plan to stay on task, so open-ended options are not great for me.

For math, I'm planning to use Math U See, which comes with DVD video lessons, workbook, quizzes, and tests. My daughter wants to continue her classical studies, so I'm considering Memoria Press, but it seems extremely rigorous, so we might only get some parts of the curriculum. Homeschool Connections uses Caravel, and I don't know how safe it is, but it looks good for writing, literature, and science. Any other ideas?
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Maybe look into Dr. Duke Pesta of Freedom Project Academy?
 
For HS math you might checkout Saxon math. They are widely used in the homeschool community. The only thing I'm not a huge of fan of with them is that they use a spiral approach to teaching: introduce a concept, have a couple of problems on the new concept along with a bunch of problems from prior lessons mixed in for review. With my son I found it's better to do one new topic and make sure he's understanding the concept thoroughly by doing lots of problems (not just a couple) on just that one concept.

That being said not every parent will necessarily have that experience since each kid is different in how they learn. I used some of the Saxon books myself when I was going back for my masters to review calculus and I will say their books do a good job of breaking down concepts in an easy to understand way, with the caveat that you don't get a lot of practice problems for each lesson's concepts all at once since it's spread out among problem sets.
 
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