Friday, February 08, 2008

Our Homeschool History (Part 1)

Jessica, at Trivium Academy, has an excellent post which shows the twists and turns that we often go through as we develop Our History & Philosophy of Homeschooling. I can relate so well to so much of what she has written. She inspired me to write about our homeschool history. Our philosophy, and really our history too, is still a work in process and I'm not ready to put it in print yet, but I'll try to present our history up to the present time. :)

I was a public school teacher before I got married and had my own children. When the children were little I was a substitute, or supply, teacher, called in to fill in for teachers that were sick or had leave of some sort for a day or so. I hated leaving my children! It was during this time that I read an article in a magazine about homeschooling. I'd never heard of the concept before and I was intriqued. I took a year to research it before taking the plunge.

Being familiar with the school curriculum, I decided to use it as the basis for our schooling. Though it took some adjustments to suit it for home/individual use, instead of class/group use, it worked out pretty good.

The next year I discovered ABeka and gave it a try. For the most part I really liked it, but it, too, was geared more to class/group use. The cost was also a major factor in my researching other options.

It was sometime in this period that I first heard about Charlotte Mason and the living books philosophy of education. As a book lover myself, I loved the idea of using real books, instead of text books. I didn't really learn much about Charlotte Mason's methods at this time because I got carried away with the living books philosophy, especially when I discovered the idea of unit studies. This philosophy resonanted with some of my teacher training and I set out to create my own unit studies for our learning. Though it was a lot of work, we had a lot of fun learning together.

While I enjoyed this time of learning I was starting to feel the need for more guidance to ensure that I covered everything my children needed. It was at this time that I discovered The Well Trained Mind. It seemed to be what I was looking for, but I found the process of trying to gather all the resources really overwhelming. I decided to just take some ideas from the book and incorporate them into our schooling as best I could.

Well, this has become quite a long post for me and my time for computer is up so I'm going to have continue with our homeschool history later.