Podcast #187 – At What Age Does My Homeschooling Need to Get Serious?

We all want to enjoy the little years of homeschooling, but we also have this nagging feeling we aren’t doing enough. When do we need to get serious about when and what we are teaching?

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Resources mentioned:

• Podcast #26 – How Many Hours Does It Take to Homeschool?
• Podcast #138 – Tests Don’t Teach
• Podcast #178 – Testing Your Child’s Knowledge Without Tests
• Podcast #183 – Creating a Homeschool Transcript
• How Many Hours Does it Take to Homeschool? (free download)
• Preschool & Kindergarten Curriculum for Large Families
• Wonderment Curriculum
• Review of Peaceful Preschool
• Tapestry of Grace (page full of resources on my blog)
• How we use Apologia Science
• Berean Builders Science

TRANSCRIPT

You’ve just been going along homeschooling your little ones, enjoying the time, getting out in nature, reading fun read alouds, doing craft projects, and suddenly that niggling feeling that you’re not doing enough creeps in and you start to wonder if maybe you’re not taking this homeschooling thing serious enough and when should you start adding in tests and bigger projects and all of these things that you’re pretty sure you’re supposed to do, but you’ve been just enjoying the homeschool process up until now? Well, this podcast is going to explain when you need to get serious about your homeschooling and what that looks like. So I hope you’ll join me for this journey on the Raising Arrows podcast.

Hello, friends. Welcome to the Raising Arrows podcast. I’m Amy Roberts from raisingarrows.net and this is episode number 187 – At What Age Does My Homeschooling Need to Get Serious?

I’m going to give you a short answer and then I’m going to explain myself. But the short answer is – later than you think. Surprisingly, you don’t need to do a lot of serious homeschooling. And when I say serious homeschooling, I’m talking about things like tests and textbooks and all of the things that most likely you associate with traditional schooling – that’s probably the things you’re thinking about. Because if you have little kids that you’re homeschooling and you’ve read all the books and you’ve watched all the YouTube videos, you’ve listened to all the podcasts, you are already settled into this world of “I’m not going to do a lot yet, I’m going to enjoy it, we’re going to get out in nature, we’re going to do all of these fun little projects.” But no matter how much you have steeped yourself in the world of Charlotte Mason or the world of Montessori or Waldorf or any of those things where you’re really trying to enjoy that nature school atmosphere, you are still going to come to a place where you start to question yourself and you think, wait a second, these kids are getting older and, and am I doing enough?

When I first started homeschooling, I was kind of a mixed bag of doing these fun little projects and then also like really wanting to give my son a rigorous education. And so I kind of went back and forth between the two. And then as my kids got older and I had more of them, I really just sort of went with this wonderment curriculum. I have a post on the blog about it, how I just sort of let them roam and enjoy, especially when they were younger. And then when they got into that kindergarten, first grade level, then we would start in on the regular school books.

And then I had a child who needed a lot of extra attention and I started doing preschool with my little ones. And not preschool in the traditional sense, but more of focused projects that he could do with his older siblings.

So I’ve run the gamut of what I do in the younger years and I have lots of podcasts and posts about all of that. But something I realized – the more children I had and the more I relaxed into this whole homeschooling world is that it’s a process from where you begin to where you end in high school. And it’s a slow process. It is not like you wake up one day and you go, oh, well, they’re a freshman in high school, so now I’m going to dive deep and we’re going to do all the tests and all the textbooks and all the papers and all the projects and all the labs and everything is going to be in those high school years. It’s a process that you build up to and eventually you get to the place where you can offer a more rigorous education. One that’s more serious, if you will. But in those early years, a lot of that stuff does not matter.

But you do have to make it a slow climb. Otherwise you go from being this really fun homeschool mom with these really fun projects to the mom who is down her kids throats over arbitrary things that they have no idea what you’re talking about because suddenly you have freaked out because now they’re in high school or they’re approaching high school. If you have already hit that point, take a step back, apologize to your kids for changing overnight, and listen to the rest of this podcast and see where you’re lining up in the getting serious level.

Okay, so first of all, start with the love of learning when they’re little. If you’re doing all of those fun things and you’re getting out and enjoying read alouds and all of that, you’re teaching them to love learning, even if they don’t realize they are learning. If you can make it fun in those early years, really early years, we’re talking the kindergarten, first grade, second grade, you make those things fun, and that teaches them a love of learning.

I find that government schools are really bad at sucking the joy out of learning even in the younger years. Now, when I was in school, I remember kindergarten, and kindergarten was still a lot of fun, a lot of learning without realizing you were learning. However, somewhere along the line, that all changed. And I think it was when the government became very stressed about the failing scores of our students. And so rather than really take a strong look at what had changed, they decided that they needed to be more rigorous at younger ages. That was actually the wrong answer. And they ended up sucking the joy out of learning for most children by making things so rigorous in those early years when children’s brains just aren’t ready yet to sop up all that information. They are little sponges at that age, but they don’t connect and separate and disseminate and categorize the information. They just take it all in. And so to ask a small child to start writing papers or to try to understand equations or even to, make handwriting legible, you’re asking a lot from a very small child as you’re teaching this love of learning and you’re being passionate about things as well.

We start to move into this age where we teach them how to learn when they’re little. They don’t really have the tools, but as they come into that second and third grade time frame and even fourth grade, you start to give them these tools. And those tools will get successively more resourceful, deeper, a deeper dive into the Internet, into books, into other resources. But you don’t give that all to them at the beginning.

Starting in about second grade, when they have a question about something, you start to guide them toward finding the answer to that question. And again, that all starts with you in the early, early years where perhaps you don’t know everything. I’m thinking you probably don’t know everything. So when your child has a question, what do you do? You look it up. But you don’t hide the fact from your child that you’re looking something up. And they start to see, oh, when mom needs to answer something, she goes and finds a resource that will help her answer that. And most kids have grown up with parents who are watching YouTube to figure out how to fix something or they’re reading in a book about something they didn’t know about. So if you’re teaching that by modeling that, then when you get to those second and third grade and fourth grade years where you’re actually starting to let them use these resources with your guidance, they know what they’re doing. And it all starts with them asking a question and you saying, let’s go find the answer to that. And yes, it seems like maybe that’s going to take some more of your time, but it’s really not. It’s just being engaged with the process. And this is part of that moving toward the seriousness of homeschooling, but also at the same time teaching your children to be independent and independent thinkers and resourceful thinkers.

So you start with a love of learning and you move into how to learn. And while you’re doing all this, you are having conversations, you’re sharing what you know. You are doing something that unschoolers called strewing. Strewing is where you leave books out, you leave information out, you take rabbit trails when need be. You look things up. This is all part of those early years where you are headed towards seriousness but you’re not serious yet.

Now, you might be curious, how long does all of this take? As far as schooling, I have a post and a podcast on the blog. It’s podcast number 26 – How Many Hours a Day Does it Take to Homeschool? I have a whole list there that you can look at approximately what it takes for our family and then some guidance in that.

And I would say that kindergarten, first grade age, where you’re teaching them that love of learning, you’re talking 30 to 45 minutes of actual school instruction. Everything else is exploration and being out in nature and finding answers to things. And it’s not real schooling. It’s not sit down in a desk schooling. The actual sit down in a desk or sit at the table or sit in the living room kind of schooling is really only 30 to 45 minutes. We’re talking phonics instruction, maybe a little bit of math, maybe some handwriting, but not necessarily at that point, you’re really just not doing a lot at that point. You’re introducing them to letters and numbers, you’re introducing them to life skills.

And there are some great curricula out there. Peaceful Press is one of those that I really think does a very good job in these early years of keeping things fun and interesting, but also not making it difficult for you as a parent. And there are many, many others like peaceful press.

But 30 to 45 minutes in that love of learning phase, then you move into that how to learn phase, that second to fourth grade and you’re talking more like an hour and a half to two hours worth of instruction and sit down work.

In fifth and sixth grade, which we’ll be talking about here shortly, you’re talking two to four hours and seventh grade and up, it could be anywhere from four plus hours to finish their work throughout the school day. So again, take a look at that post and podcast and that will kind of give you some guidance there.

But I don’t want to get too far into the weeds with that. I really just want to stay on the surface level where we talk more about moving into the seriousness and what that looks like now. Like I said, it’s a slow process.

So we’ve gone from kindergarten up to about fourth grade. We talked about the love of learning and conversations and how to learn and giving them those resources. So now let’s move into a little more seriousness.

You’ve taught them phonics, they now can read fairly well. What you’re looking for beyond that is fluency. So you’re going to start assigning them books. For us, this is usually living history books. They go along with our curriculum, which is Tapestry of Grace. And I assign books that help them with their fluency and also teach them something in the process. So that’s one way you move into more seriousness, is now you’re assigning books and you’re raising that level, challenging them a little bit as you go.

Another thing you can start doing in this fifth and sixth grade time frame is transitioning into a science that is a little more difficult or a little more challenging. Maybe in the early years you’ve been doing science readers or you’ve been doing science altogether. I think clear up into fifth and sixth grade you absolutely can do science altogether. But I think around the seventh grade timeframe is a good time to start transitioning into individual science, where they start to do maybe Apologia or Berean Builders or something along those lines, where they are learning science on their own and they’re doing something a little more difficult than what their younger siblings are doing.

Again, slow process. You’re building into it because in high school this is where you’re going to add in those harder subjects, the biologies, the chemistries, the physics, whatever it is you decide to do for your science classes. You’re building up to that. You don’t want to have just, you know, little kid elementary science class and then all of a sudden you try to dump them into a textbook book. That’s going to be a bit of a culture shock. So start in those younger years with the all together science or doing the little science readers and then as they age, start to transition them.

Berean Builders is a really good place for that because, they don’t do the typical science. They’re kind of doing the history of science. And that’s a really good way to transition into a textbook that’s still interesting, but starts to be more individualized and more challenging.

So really it’s about that seventh, eighth grade timeframe that a lot of parents have a freakout moment because they suddenly realize their child is fast approaching high school years and maybe they feel like they have no idea what they’re doing. So really, when I said at the top of this podcast that it’s later than you think, I’m talking about those junior high years when things can get serious. Prior to that, it’s just a slow process, a slow transition. And even the seventh and eighth grade years, you’re still transitioning into high school.

Now the really great thing is during those junior high years, you can actually use credits from junior high on the high school transcript if they match a high school credit level class. I have children who have taken high school credits as junior high students because it was a high school class they were taking. So as you’re transitioning, if you find that your child is actually ahead of the game and already doing high school credits, definitely go ahead and give them credit for that. If they do algebra when they’re an 8th grader, like my son did, I’m not going to not let him count that. That counts. He gets to have that credit on his high school transcript even though he was in junior high. So make sure as this process is going along that you’re not holding your child back arbitrarily because you can give them those credits.

So you might be wondering about tests. I have a couple of podcasts, number 138 and 178, where I talk about testing. I do not believe tests are a very good format for finding out what your child knows. In podcast 178, I talk a lot about how to test without testing and then how to transition into testing. I think about that seventh to eighth grade on into the ninth and tenth grades, that’s when you transition into that testing, where you teach your child how to take a test. We typically always make biology a test subject, so our children are required to do all of the tests, all of the reviews, all of the projects when it comes to biology.

So here’s a good rule of thumb when it comes to beginning to get more serious about the homeschooling subjects and requiring more of your child. Think about it this way. The Israelite children were expected to move from childhood into adulthood around the age of 12. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb right there. Before the age of 12, you are training them in the things of childhood. And then after the age of 12, you are training them in the things of adulthood. This goes for homeschooling, for homemaking, running a household, being an adult, all of those things. And it’s a long, slow, sometimes arduous process. But that’s a good thing. It’s going to take time. You need time, they need time. So enjoy the season you are in. Lord willing, they are going to have the rest of their lives to be serious, so don’t get started too soon.

Thank you so much for joining me this week on the Raising Arrows podcast. We’ll see you next time.