The Nature of Education (Part 2)

 in Basic Homeschool Information / Educational philosophy  tagged education / homeschooling / planning by

I was having trouble making an educational plan for our homeschool. To help, I analyzed my education. Read my conclusions in “The Nature of Education (Part 1).”

 

The Basics of My Plan

In dwelling more on my conclusions concerning my education, I feel a bit freer when it comes to deciding what to teach the kids. I’m definitely not as concerned that I’m not going to cover everything they’ll need in life. We’ll still need to cover some more traditional or formal subjects (e.g. math), of course, but we’re free to learn subjects like history in a less formal yet still effective way. I’ve remained steadfast in my desire to expose the kids to many interests and subjects to see if something really clicks with them as being a strong interest of theirs. These experiences can’t be cursory ones or they wouldn’t get the full effect, but I don’t want them to be completely bored of it and hate it. So I’ll keep my educational experience in mind as I plan out our year.

In the state of Indiana homeschoolers are required to provide an “equivalent education” to our children. There is no definition of what “equivalent” means but it’s implied that it’s compared to public school offerings. This is something to keep in mind while making a plan. I have to admit it won’t affect my plan a lot yet since the kids are only in elementary school.

The last building block of my plan is my list of subjects to teach and to whom:

  • Individual subjects
    • Math
    • Typing (4th grade and up)
    • Grammar (4th grade and up)
    • Handwriting/copy work
    • Spelling
    • Literature
    • Phonics
  • Group work
    • Bible
    • Character
    • Writing (composition) (3rd grade and up)
    • Vocabulary
    • Poetry
    • Read-alouds
    • History
    • Geography
    • Science
    • Nature study
    • Health/P.E.
    • Life skills (including outdoorsmanship)
    • Art
    • Crafts
    • Music

 

Turning Theory into Practice

I can separate the subjects I want to teach into things that need to be taught with a textbook or systematically and things that can be taught casually or at the point of interest. These broad categories will help determine what kind of resources we pick with which to teach the kids.

The individual subjects will all need to be taught systematically. It’s important to work on skills in some order and build on those skills. For that reason I’ll be using a textbook/workbook-type approach to these subjects. I can add activities as needed to supplement the materials to ensure the concepts are mastered or understood.

There are a few group work subjects that need to be taught a bit more orderly. Playing a musical instrument, practical art (as in learning to draw), writing (composition), and crafts all fall under this method of teaching. That means I’ll be more likely to be picking resources that are a bit more formal in nature to teach these subjects.

The rest of the group work subjects will be taught more casually. The only formality with those will be that I’d like the history to be the subject that drives several of the others. It will help determine what we’re covering in geography, art history & appreciation, music history & appreciation, and possibly poetry and read-alouds. The other subjects will be taught based on interests or what my husband and I feel we should teach.

 

The Final Step

The last step to making the kids’ educational plan is picking the exact resources I want to use and arranging how I want to implement them. I’m not going to go into detail about this step, however. For one, a list of all the resources I plan on using would make this post way too long. I may post them elsewhere on my blog eventually.

How I’m picking the resources would need a post all its own, as would how I plan on implementing them. I will most likely end up writing those posts and I’ll link to them if and when I do. In the meantime, I can offer you a general decision process. I decide if a resource is a good fit for us by looking at what we want to teach and how we want to teach it. If the resource fits I consider using it, otherwise it goes on the stack of resources we won’t use. Skipping over the nitty gritty details, I plan on implementing the resources using their recommendations but modifying them as needed to fit our family and homeschool.

 

How do you plan out your child’s education?

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