Synonyms or Misnomers?

 

With the shuttering of essentially every school building except the houses that are homeschools, there are some misconceptions going on with the attempt to now share the term "homeschooling".

I read a comment under an article that basically indicated it is splitting hairs to not just call it all homeschooling because "same materials, same things being taught". I beg to differ. I, for one, sometimes have no idea what materials we will be using on a given day or even what we are going to be learning.

Don't be alarmed by this. I have a plan within that chaos. For us, learning is a whole lifestyle. It isn't relegated to a certain set parameter that we step into for a given time then step out of when we are done. We are never done learning. At least that is what hope to instill in my kids.

Take, for instance, moments ago... My thirteen year son Clark was missing in action until just now. (He was washing eggs for a suspiciously long time.) He came in pointing out the weird clouds going on right now. Today we all just looked out the window and oohed and ahhhed and did a quick check with Accuweather to see if a tornado might be imminent.  Some other days we might look up the official terminology for the cloud formations. 

Opps. I am now in a car waiting for my fifteen year old's lawn mower customer. Yeah. It's what he does right now. He buys mowers, lists them, then sells them. With time to kill, he is sitting beside me on his phone shopping for clothes.

I left the younger ones at home pulling up the 1974 version of Where the Red Fern Grows on Amazon Prime. I figured it would make the questions in Clark's language arts assignment easier to answer if he would be better acquainted with the story. He is currently backlogged and isn't quite done working through reading Caddie Woodlawn or else I might've assigned Where the Red Fern Grows, the book.

Days ago I came across a picture of my old elementary school auditorium on Facebook. I was telling Clark that in that very place I once sat watching, you guessed it, the 1974 version of Where the Red Fern Grows. I was probably seven and bawled my eyes out.

He also got some wistful reminiscing of Westfield Center history when I began to side track. I may be slightly ADD.

Back to the homeschooling terminology thing and not really planning. I snapped a picture of the stuff I did with my almost nine year old son Clay today. He always does math (sometimes with manipulatives, sometimes without). He always does a few pages of Explode the Code (phonics). He picks books for himself to read, currently it's an Alice and Jerry reprint. His neighbor-grandma has her original copy of Alice and Jerry; she delights in listening to him read (as she has done all her grandchildren).

I have an enormous collection of picture books. Nearly every day, we pull one out and read it. Today I selected one called Mississippi Morning. Oh boy. I should've preread it. That one was a little messy. I wouldn't have necessarily chosen to deal with KKK people of 1933 today, but it came up and we tackled the subject head on. Who wrote a book about that for kids anyhow??? Sigh. Realities can be ugly; I would rather my kids hear it from me than somewhere else.

Yesterday the selection was the sunnier Snipp, Snapp, and Snurr and the Buttered Bread. Ah, Sweden. Looked it up in our map book. Learned a little about Dalecarlian horses and Pippi Longstocking.  Oh yeah, we discovered Carl Larsson paintings are great. Read a bio blurb. Today we watched his paintings parading across our computer screen. Gotta love YouTube and Google.

Trevor, he is eleven. I tell him when he is  done watching Nancy Pelosi's daily briefing to please do his math (fractions!) and read his book (also Caddie Woodlawn like his slightly older brother).

Ok, very funny. He side tracked after the Pelosi presser to produce an original political cartoon. (Don't be offended if you don't share his views. He is eleven.)  He grumbled and fussed over the fractions, but he survived.

Same materials, same topics? Not necessarily. Same goal, I would hope: well educated, well adjusted humans. 

I do not have the magic formula for educating children. I have no corner on the market. Some days I may or may not know what I am doing. I would hope everyone creates a plan that works for their unique situation. I don't hope we ever have to go with some inflexible, homogeneous formula that we come to consider "education", especially given our current climate where the term homeschooling may be evolving to also include distance learning at home.

We had been afforded the luxury of choice in our educational methods up until now. It's been understandably difficult for those who choose to utilize a school system who then had to figure out how to function within that system in their home this year. Many of those are anxious to get their children back to the routine of brick and mortar school attendance.  

For myself, I continue to be invested for the long haul to learning more stuff with my kids at our home. I don't hope legitimate homeschooling gets a black eye by some ill conceived  comparisons to the pandemic-induced, isolation, distance-learning some have had to work with.

-Colleen