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The Many Styles of Homeschooling
Did you know that the average family changes their style of
homeschooling seven times in the first two years?
When deciding how to begin to homeschool, how to change what
isn't working, or just how to keep up with your family's changing
needs, you first need to identify your own family's unique needs.
We can't, as homeschoolers, walk into someone else's home and
see how they 'do' homeschooling. First off, your very presence
there will change the way people act, what people do and how they
do it. Instead, we need to look to within ourselves and decide
what will work best for us as individual families at this point
in our lives.
Knowing the various learning styles of the members of your
family, when people are at their best (do they wake up ready to
go in the morning or do their brains not wake up until 4 in the
afternoon?), their favorite topics, needs and philosophies all
are important to finding the style of homeschooling that fits
yoru family best.
An Overview of Styles
"Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique
individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original
spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow
you to find values which will be your road map through life; it
should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever
you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should
teach you what is important, how to live and how to die."
-- From Dumbing us Down
by John Taylor Gatto
Does it really matter which style of homeschooling you choose?
No, as long as that style works for your family.
If you are unhappily homeschooling, burning out, or fighting
with your kids every day I will heartily agree something isn't
right. It probably isn't homeschooling that is wrong, it is probably
the style you are trying to use. Just as you can't fit a square
peg in a round hole, you can't make a family conform to a style
that isn't right for them.
- School-at-Home
- This, the most familiar of styles to those of us who attended
schools ourselves. Generally it involves 4 or more subjects a
day, taught during specific time periods. Generally this style
uses prepackaged purchased curriculums, but certainly not always.
This section doesn't need much detail because we all lived it
for 13+ years.
- Classical (Trivium)
- Classical Education organizes education into three Biblical
categories. These three categories are Grammar, Logic & Rhetoric.
Or otherwise known as knowledge (learning the facts), understanding
(organizes the facts into rational order), and wisdom (taking
that knowledge and understanding and uses it in practical ways).
This is the original liberal arts education. Memorization, dialogue,
writing and languages are stressed.
- Charlotte Mason
- A Christian based philosophy of education that stresses good
literature (rather than textbooks), copying of relevant materials,
and dictation. Nature walks are stressed throughout. Structure
is crucial and training of good habits begins in infancy. There
is no standard curriculum. Many Classical and Charlotte Mason
homeschoolers feel their two styles overlap in many areas - so
you may want to look closely at the materials available for both.
- Waldorf
- is a non-Christian spiritually based program featuring delayed
academics and a rich variety of music, arts and literature. The
aim of Waldorf education is to educate the whole child -- head,
heart and hands. The curriculum is geared to the child's stages
of development and brings together all elements -- intellectual,
artistic, spiritual and movement. The goal is to produce individuals
who are able, in and of themselves, to impart meaning to their
lives. Rituals of daily and seasonal life are strongly emphasized.
- Montessori
- The original works of Maria Montessori have been gravely
distorted here in America by a lack of copyrights on her name,
but the original concept was to respect the child's inner desire
to learn and allow him/her to make spontaneous and free choices
within a carefully prepared environment (structure the environment,
not the child). While this is frequently now limited to only
the younger grades, Montessori principles work well through high
school. The role of the adult is to observe and use brief teachable
moments to introduce new concepts (usually by doing the activity
quietly herself and waiting for a child to ask a question about
it).
- Unit Study Approach
- Unit studies can be as flexible or structured as a family
wants. They allow for a great deal of individual choice in both
the choice of units to be done and in the materials used. It
is usually an in-depth study of one specific topic (baseball,
the planets, trees, puffins) that takes into account many areas
of the topic, such as geography, science, history, art, etc.
It is a complete immersion into the topic so that the student
will see things as a "whole" instead of bits and pieces.
They can be done very frugally using a wide variety of internet
and library resources. You will find more links here than usual
- because so many of them are available!
- Unschooling
- Unschooling is not how something is done, but why. Unschoolers
use textbooks, movies, classrooms and correspondence courses,
museums and magazines, jobs and volunteer positions (and the
rest of the world) to learn, depending upon how they want to
learn about the topic. Unschooling is the belief that all people,
no matter how old or young, have a built in desire to learn (unless
that desire has been crushed by outside forces). It is a belief
that if you allow a person of any age to pursue their own interests
throughout life they will end up gaining the knowledge they will
need in order to pursue the life they want. Unschooling is not
never saying no and letting the wolves raise your children. It
is allowing them to learn without guilt and with educational
freedom.
- Eclectic
- Most homeschoolers probably fit into this catagory more than
the others. Eclectic homeschoolers don't pick any one style.
They use a formal curriculm for a few subjects, use a literature
approach for another, and enjoy long daily nature walks and copyrighting
and journal keeping. They have taken what was right for them,
and left the rest behind.
by Kathy Wentz
Copyright © 2004 H.O.U.S.E. May be reproduced
for personal use as long as this notice is included in its entirety.
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