my homeschooled kid

I just wanted to brag on him a little bit.
He just turned 8 and I've started taking him to the library.
He's been choosing these huge adventure type novels and has been reading them (close to 500 pages) in 4 days. Four Days! I even have him a little quiz to make sure he's actually reading them and he is.

Proud of my kiddo.

I don't claim responsibility for his reading skills though. I do very little with him, at least so far. I put some effort into teaching him basics and he pretty much took off after that. Yay homeschooling

That's awesome! Sounds like you do a great job
Sadly, here in NM, we have high school graduates who cannot read as well as your 8 year old.

Sounds like he has a true thirst for knowledge ~ that is a great gift you have given him!

I homeschooled my kids, got a lot of crap from the public school people and the law,-- one is an attorney , one teaches at Colorado School of Mines -- it was worth it...
hang it there...

Syber, it sounds like you are an Unschooler or "Life Learner"? All of my kids are unschoolers.

My eldest two did go to school (until the start of their 3rd and 4th grade years), but Colliepup has never been inside of a classroom. The first (and only!) test he has ever taken was the one to get his hunting license and he passed with a score of 97%. He was only 10 at the time, so wasn't even eligible for his deer tag until this year.

Syberchick70":q8cz9j4n said:

I do very little with him, at least so far. I put some effort into teaching him basics and he pretty much took off after that. Yay homeschooling

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We approach learning as just a part of life. For example, when Colliepup was learning to read (and spell) he asked me how to spell "phone". I answered "P-h-o-n-e. Sometimes "ph" is used to make the "fff" sound.", and then we went on with our day.

jeannie":q8cz9j4n said:

Sadly, here in NM, we have high school graduates who cannot read as well as your 8 year old.

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Before the advent of compulsory government schooling (1850) the literacy rate in the U.S. was at 98%. It is now less than 80%.

Keep up the good (non!) work, Syber! You will be amazed at the things he learns when he is in charge of his own education. My kids constantly amaze me with the things they know.

I made sure the kids could read, I took them to the library, they chose what they wanted to read about [a lot of car magazines at first]

MamaSheepdog":3gbzbuf5 said:

We approach learning as just a part of life. For example, when Colliepup was learning to read (and spell) he asked me how to spell "phone". I answered "P-h-o-n-e. Sometimes "ph" is used to make the "fff" sound.", and then we went on with our day.

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That is EXACTLY my approach. I always feel kind of guilty 'taking credit' for his learning though, when people remark about how much he knows and what 'good job' I've done teaching him. :lol:

Ok, I'll take credit where credit is due. I started him early, very early. From the beginning I was teaching him his letters, letter sounds, how to form simple words and such. By the time he was 2, he could spell some 3 letter words (mom, dog, cat, etc). At one point, when he was about 4 I think, I was starting to get worried about him being able to actually READ stuff, then one day it just clicked with him and he's been reading ever since. He's good at math too... he can do complicated addition and subtraction with 'carrying' numbers over, he can do basic multiplication, basic algebra... he's learning the concepts (which pleases me).

I do have several 'curriculums' that I use with him, but I rarely push him to do any lessons. He earns 'tablet time' by completing lessons, so he does have some motivation to do that. Most of what he does as far as lessons are online and self guided. Every so often, he will start whining that he doesn't know how to do something (he's very dramatic lol) and I'll go give him some guidance and then he goes off on his own again.

I am just very pleased with how well he has been doing with very little interaction from me... not sure how long that will be practical as the things he SHOULD learn increase from year to year, but right now I'm somewhere between feeling guilty about not being overly involved in giving a more structured learning atmosphere and just being happy about how much he is learning on his own.

It's very encouraging to hear stories from the rest of you about how well your own kids did. People have tried their best to scare me off from trying to homeschool with how 'expensive' and how much 'work' it is... but my experience is proving something different.

He asked me to let him have a garden this year. I bought him his own little shovel and hoe. He goes out into the garden space and is tearing up dirt, digging around, talking about putting seeds in ground and seeing how the rabbit compost is getting mulched in to make healthy plants. You can't beat that in public school.

Thank you all for the words of support!!!

I believe public schools today are more about indoctrination than education. I worked a couple of summers on a dude ranch where most of the staff were college students on summer break. I was surprised to discover that what little I remembered from high school 50 years earlier was more than those kids had ever learned.

coyotejoe":ih9xvc3s said:

I believe public schools today are more about indoctrination than education. I worked a couple of summers on a dude ranch where most of the staff were college students on summer break. I was surprised to discover that what little I remembered from high school 50 years earlier was more than those kids had ever learned.

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I know, it's truly scary to realize how little kids often know these days, even when they graduate high school. 'No Child Left Behind' my butt. :roll: Kids know how to spell with 'txtspk', so they can send shallow messages and half naked pictures to each other on their expensive cell phones. :evil: /rant

TOTALLY agree! If I had it to do over again I would homeschool my kids. The public schools are war zones, not much learning takes place. We have foster boys that are forced by the state to go to public school. My husband and I spend hours helping with homework…why bother to send them just so they can learn things we don't want them to imitate and not even learn the basics?

coyotejoe":2zzshv1d said:

I believe public schools today are more about indoctrination than education.

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Whoo-boy. :canofworms:

You are absolutely correct, and in fact that is the reason behind compulsory (government mandated) schooling.

The model for our current system was taken from Prussia. The industrialists of the time were impressed by the obedient and complacent nature of the Prussian population and wanted that same zombie-like behavior in our citizenry so they would have a willing workforce for the production lines in their factories.

This is an excerpt from Public Schools, Public Menace (emphasis in bold is mine):

From the 1850's to the 1920's, public-school activists such as Horace Mann and John Dewey worked to create a public-school system like the one they admired in Prussia. Mann and Dewey considered public education a religion, with a holy mission to mold children and society. Simply teaching children to read, write, and do math was too commonplace a goal for them. Mann and Dewey wanted the schools to have total control over children's lives. This meant removing parent's influence over their children. Mann put it this way: "We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause."

Dewey also had a utopian vision for America and he wanted the common schools to achieve his vision. To create a socialist America, public schools had to mold generations of children into the habit of obedience. In his Pedagogic Creed of 1897, Dewey wrote "Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth..."

By the early twentieth century, public schools had expanded their functions into areas undreamed of in the 1850s. Schools took on the role of social agencies, with nurses, social centers, playgrounds, school showers, kindergartens, and "Americanization" programs for immigrants. Public schools became a major agency for social control.

The NEA's 2001 Handbook claimed that public schools should focus on the whole child. It claimed that the NEA has an obligation to deal with all the issues that shape a child's life, such as health and safety, the economy, and the distribution of wealth in this country.

Syberchick70":2zzshv1d said:

I know, it's truly scary to realize how little kids often know these days, even when they graduate high school. 'No Child Left Behind' my butt. :roll:

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Every child left behind is more like it. The whole point of cramming all kinds of useless information down our kid's throats for twelve years of their lives is to make learning painful, boring, and something to be avoided at all costs.

As if all that isn't bad enough... ever wonder why our politicians are stepping all over our rights on a daily basis and passing unconstitutional laws?

Are you ready for this? :evil:

Law schools no longer teach the Constitution at all. Courses are not even offered as an option!!! Instead, they teach what is known as "Constitutional Law", which is based on International Law.

I firmly believe that the only hope for our country is the homeschooling population. They are the only ones that will still have thoughts that are theirs, not the product of the current propaganda taught in schools.

MamaSheepdog":rb1kwhub said:

The model for our current system was taken from Prussia. The industrialists of the time were impressed by the obedient and complacent nature of the Prussian population and wanted that same zombie-like behavior in our citizenry so they would have a willing workforce for the production lines in their factories.

This is an excerpt from Public Schools, Public Menace (emphasis in bold is mine):

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That was a truly horrifying read, MSD. That's even worse than I feared and I truly don't think the fact that the book was written so long ago nullifies what it's saying.

Idiocracy, here we are. :shock:

I was unschooled. : )

I home school/cyber school my two. PA isn't very home school friendly, so the cyber school helps schedule and manage the record keeping and mountains of tests they are required to take.

I was at least able to raise them free of zero-tolerance laws, and without being routinely confined to classrooms while the police use drug dogs to inspect lockers.

dangerbunny":1qoj73j8 said:

I was unschooled. : )

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Awesome!!

I had to find a math tutor very early on, [we used Saxon math books] as my boys were beyond my education almost immediately, so I traded work for education with a friend who was a math major. it worked very well 30+ years ago...
My rules were simple, do your farm work, do your school work, then do what ever you want to as long as you don't get into trouble. [and girls had to go back home before 10 pm]

michaels4gardens":2at8mmxe said:

I had to find a math tutor very early on, [we used Saxon math books] as my boys were beyond my education almost immediately, so I traded work for education with a friend who was a math major. it worked very well 30+ years ago...
My rules were simple, do your farm work, do your school work, then do what ever you want to as long as you don't get into trouble. [and girls had to go back home before 10 pm]

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Sounds like good rules to me!!
You know, many people forget that MOST people were 'homeschooled' for a very long time, and probably better educated than most PS kids are now to boot. Books and reading used to be a precious commodity and skill.

Wow, the more I hear about schools in the US the happier I am that I am a teacher in Canada.

So good to hear so many are ensuring their children are turning into lovely lifelong learners! It is the best thing you can do for a child.

My two were "unschooled" in Maine where it was fairly easy even in the early days. We were able to find mentors or help at the libraries for whatever they wanted to know that neither their father nor I knew much about. Many people are pleased to share what they know, to answer questions from someone who is really interested instead of doing what they have to do to fulfill an assignment/get a grade. Now many things would be so much easier to find with the internet (although sorting information for accuracy can be a challenge--but I wouldn't have had to buy that dictionary of word origins when Joanna was 6.) We kept a roll of shelf paper on the back of a closet door and wrote on it the questions that arose that we didn't have an answer to or resource for, just ripped off the latest questions and took them on our weekly trip to the library.
Some unanticipated consequences do occur. We didn't send our first child to school because she taught herself to read just after she turned 2 and I thought she'd be bored at school, thought she'd go to college early. But she started reading economics and announced at age 12 that she wasn't going to college because it perpetuated class privilege. She also became concerned about what we consumed and how the people and land were treated to produce stuff. Asked a lot of hard questions that restricted our shopping options. And wanted to learn to do more of the necessary work herself.
As things turned out, neither of them ever went to college and they jokingly refer to themselves as part of "the dark underbelly of home-schooling"--a phrase they heard used in a debate over Maine's homeschooling laws after various glowing reports had been made of things home-schooled kids were doing, describing the "other home-schooled children" that we should all be worried about

I am both homeschooled and unschooled (whichever's necessary). My mom is indisputably the greatest teacher on the planet, and I'm sure your kids think so about you, too . Mom kept the government out of my head. I prefer unschooling, but homeschooling is great, too. I get to learn in my own fashion until it clicks in my head and I understand it. I am very musically minded, and often find the expression I'm looking for from the lyrics of the umpty-ump songs in my head :lol: . Like now. This whole thing about compulsory schooling and indoctrination reminds me of this one, particularly the first verse...

[youtube]https://youtu.be/OJAsNIh1gEU[/youtube]

Hopefully that link works for y'all.

I love my books and my music. Friday night is movie night for our whole family, and we each have a vast store of catchphrases that we pull on each other all day long . Mom doesn't even bother assigning me literature lessons anymore because she's got the classic old books on her shelf and she knows that if I haven't read it yet, I'll discover or get to it soon :lol: . And Bunny-Wan's getting there, too, I think. He reads really well!

GO, HOMESCHOOLING!!!!

Fun to hear of the other homeschoolers out there. I homeschool my 3 girls and am so thankful for the blessing of it.