Thursday, March 7, 2013

Things I Wish'd I'd Known When I Started Homeschooling

The Libertarian Homeschooler, who has quite a following on facebook, is doing a series of great lists of things she wishes she had known when she started homeschooling. For my own reference, and your benefit, I am copying and pasting them here. I have not researched everything she includes, and may not agree with all of it, but want to have the list for future use.

1. You don't really "need" a curriculum.

2. More pajamas.
3. White boards.
4. The Great Courses
5. LearnLiberty
6. Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom
7. Ludwig von Mises Institute
8. Foundation for Economic Education
9. Maren Schmidt, Understanding Montessori newsletters
10. Sugata Mitra
11. Whatever Happened to Penny Candy
12. Project-based learning
13. No, really. You don't need a curriculum.
14. Grammar Island
15. Okay. If you feel more comfortable having curriculum in your house, buy it but know that you'll end up using it as a reference.
16. Children never really start or stop learning. 
17. Very few people ever do the entire year's work. 
18. They will learn better, faster, happier without a lesson.
19. Lap books? Not required.
20. Children aren't projects, they're people.

1. They'll spend more time 1-on-1 in one day at home than in an entire week of school. Chill out already. They're good.

2. One child will learn to read at 5, the other child will learn to read at 8. Neither one is "behind".
3. Books that tell what children "should" know at different ages are good for starting fires and little else.
4. If you don't teach him to add and subtract, he'll do it himself.
5. Some children don't learn to read with phonics. No matter how invested you are in phonics.
6. Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes
7. Children of the Code (google it)
8. Don't let your first three negative homeschool co-op experiences dissuade you. There's one out there that will work.
9. The Philosophy of Liberty (youtube)
10. You don't have to teach art. You can farm that stuff out.
11. Get. Out. Of. The. House.
12. Ask the child how he would like to organize his learning.
13. To my children, adult yelling = big kid having tantrum
14. To my children, adult using physical/emotional pain = bullying
15. You aren't nearly as important to the learning process as you think. Really. They'll do most of it in spite of you in the end.
16. They need your company far more than your instruction.
17. Modeling is required.
18. You'll get it wrong. Does that really surprise you? Get over it. Get on with it.
19. Find some outside-the-family mentoring relationships for the child.
20. That book/curriculum/latest and greatest doohickey at the store/expo/convention looks really nice. It's going to gather dust.

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