In This Chapter
Part-time homeschooling
Menu-approach home education
Afterschooling
Simple starting points
Resources
In This Chapter
Part-time homeschooling
Menu-approach home education
Afterschooling
Simple starting points
Resources
MORE OFTEN THAN you might think, I run into parents who say, “I wish I could homeschool.” Take one of my e-mail correspondents. She cannot convince her husband of homeschooling’s merits. He is dead set against it. Wisely, she will not proceed until they agree. In another case, a friend recently sent her teenagers back to public school. She prefers home education, but had to return to full-time work after her husband’s unexpected death. Sometimes a mother’s chronic illness or disability precludes homeschooling. In other families, both parents work full time just to pay the rent. They cannot give up the free child care and supervision school offers. Still other parents think home education looks like a good idea, yet they hesitate to make the final leap. Many situations lead parents to believe they cannot homeschool full time, even though they desperately want to.
As it turns out, families in all of the above situations can participate fully in their children’s education. Part-time homeschooling, menu-approach home education, and “afterschooling” all offer ways to remediate, supplement, and enrich your teenager’s learning. To complement full-time schooling, you need only two things—the desire to be part of your teenagers’ education and the willingness to spend time working with them. Here we outline your options and then suggest approaches and resources to satisfy your goals.
MOST PEOPLE HAVE no idea that part-time home education exists. Somebody at the school district office tells them homeschooling is all or nothing, and they pursue the idea no further. “Not so fast,” say the part-timers.
First, let’s define part-time home education. Part-time homeschoolers typically attend school for part of each day, usually in either the morning or the afternoon. This group differs from homeschoolers who take one or two classes to supplement homeschooling. Part-time homeschoolers usually work much more closely with schools to assure that all subjects are covered in ways schools find acceptable. In a typical case, Jason takes science, foreign language, and math each morning at his high school. Evenings, at home with his parents, he covers English and history and Bible. Another example? Maria studies history and language arts with her mother in the morning. She attends high school in the afternoon, taking math and science and physical education, when her mother begins working her second-shift job.
Some school districts work willingly with parents who want to try part-time arrangements. To determine whether yours is one, check three places. First, query members of local support groups to find families who have similar arrangements. They can tell you whom they talked to and how they went about it. Second, call your local state homeschooling association. They will usually be able to refer you to applicable laws and regulations. You need to read these and understand your rights before you proceed to step three.
Although not for everyone, part-time homeschooling allows some teenagers to experience the best of both worlds. And it creates a way for some parents caught between a rock and hard place to homeschool.
Third, call both the principal of your local high school and your school district administrative offices. Ask them about making arrangements for part-time homeschooling. Before you call, always have in mind exactly what you want—which classes and which time periods. Also, ask whether the school will recognize your homeschool credits and grant a diploma. In many states, schools have no obligation to recognize courses you teach at home. In those cases, your student would not earn a diploma from the school. As will be explained in chapter 15, this is not a major problem. You will simply do what many full-time home educators do—write your own transcript.
Although not for everyone, part-time homeschooling allows some teenagers to experience the best of both worlds. And it creates a way for some parents caught between a rock and hard place to homeschool.
FOR A VARIETY of reasons, some families send their teenagers to school one year, homeschool the next, back to school the following year, homeschool the next, and so on.
In some cases, families experiment, looking for the best educational venue. Marta explains, “My oldest daughter spent ninth grade in Catholic school, tenth grade at home, and eleventh grade in public school. She plans to graduate from public school. She loved her Catholic school experience. Except for her online Shakespeare class and her computer Web site, she was unhappy and unmotivated and unproductive at home. My husband and I decided to send her to the public school for eleventh grade. She has been happy there.”
Never assume that returning to school in grade 11 or 12 will allow your teen to receive a diploma from an accredited school.
Marta continues, “I have not been satisfied with her academic performance in any of the settings. She did make it to the honor society this year, though. Perhaps if she had been younger, we would have stuck with homeschooling. We felt, however, that she could not afford to do nothing for another year at home. For her, homeschooling was not the answer. She has to prepare for college. She has trouble motivating herself (result of years of institutional school?) and resents Mom trying to motivate her. She does find peers, grades, and other school trappings a little motivating. Maybe things would be different if we had started sooner. I will never know, and I do feel a little guilty about the whole thing.”
Other parents rotate their children in and out of school for philosophical reasons. They want them to work in classroom groups and experience the discipline of traditional academic environments. At the same time, they know home education provides benefits that schools cannot duplicate. So they homeschool every other year.
Menu-approach homeschooling also works well for families that need extra income. The children attend school every other year while mom works full time. Mom takes alternate years off to homeschool.
Families with teenagers have to be particularly careful with menu-approach home education. Never assume that returning to school in grade 11 or 12 will allow your teen to receive a diploma from an accredited school. Beginning in what would be your teenagers’ ninth-grade year, have a clear understanding with your school about recognizing homeschool credits. If they commit to accepting homeschool coursework, get it in writing.
WE WERE AFTERSCHOOLERS before I knew it had a name. I bought workbooks and did “school” with my children in the summertime to assure their math and reading did not regress. We took family field trips to zoos and museums. We stocked our home with educational games, toys, and supplies. We read aloud. We helped with homework and science projects. We funded music lessons and team sports participation.
Donna, now a full-time home educator, afterschooled also. She explains, “I guess that without knowing it, I did afterschool. Our family has always been into learning and education. In retrospect, we homeschooled while our son was still in school. Of course, afterschooling made switching to homeschooling a breeze, relative to what it could have been. One thing about afterschooling was hard, though. Everyone around us thought we were so weird.”
Denise writes, “I think we always supplemented with afterschooling when our oldest three were in public school. I thought everyone who cared about their children did the same. We went over homework and played learning games. We always took the same field trip the school did to reinforce what they missed because of distractions that twenty-five classmates present. We went to the library weekly and read all the time to our children. Benefits? I gained plenty of confidence that I could homeschool and do a better job. I know now that learning takes place everywhere, not just in a classroom. Drawbacks? My children were gone for the best hours of the day. Afterschooling did lead us to homeschool full time when I realized that they didn’t need school to learn. Amazingly, full-time homeschooling was easier than handling the problems school creates and better for them, too.”
Just as Denise points out, most concerned parents are afterschoolers. They offer formal instruction outside of school, either with homework support or purchased curricular materials. They constantly look for ways to remediate problems and enrich education. They maintain rich learning environments at home. Often they become temporary full-time home educators during summer break.
Afterschooling lets parents practice homeschooling, sometimes leading to full-time home education.
Afterschooling offers wonderful opportunities for families who cannot consider homeschooling, even on a part-time basis. In addition, afterschooling lets parents practice homeschooling, sometimes leading to full-time home education. Read on for ideas on choosing the best approaches and resources.
If your teens attend school full time, you know the drill. They sit in class six to seven hours and tackle homework for one to three hours each evening. Factor in daily transportation, meals, and personal care. Your thirteen- to eighteen-year-old already spends nine to twelve hours each day getting an education. In addition, adolescents, like everyone else, need time to relax and pursue their own interests. All in all, afterschoolers have severe time constraints. They have to pick their approaches and materials carefully.
First, think about a goal for your afterschooling. Obviously, time precludes teaching a comprehensive curriculum. Proceed with caution. Your teenagers should not come home from school just to face more school at home. Are there obvious gaps in your teens’ educations? Do they have difficulty keeping up? If so, you provide remediation. Are you worried that public school ignores Christian education? Think about supplementing with a Bible study course. Do your academically gifted teenagers find high school work boring? You can enrich their curriculum with unit studies and special projects.
Decide whether you will be providing remediation, supplementation, or enrichment. Depending on your teenagers, you may choose all three—remediation for math, supplementation for music theory, and enrichment for history, for example. Let’s check out the various subject areas and see how you might approach afterschooling.
Many children seem to do fine in math until they hit algebra. All of a sudden, their grades drop from A’s and B’s to C’s and D’s. Parents and teachers blame unproven instruction methods, poorly written textbooks, incompetent instructors, and anxiety-inducing testing. It is no accident that the terms “math” and “remediation” frequently occur in the same sentence.
Your teenagers should not come home from school just to face more school at home.
Of course, fixing blame does not solve the problem. Identifying deficits and addressing them in a nonthreatening atmosphere does. I have tutored dozens of teenagers and adults in math—usually at the level of first-year algebra. Almost without exception, failing algebra students have problems with basic arithmetic. They cannot add, subtract, multiply, and divide quickly and accurately. In addition, most cannot calculate fractions, decimals, and percents and apply them to real-world situations. Algebra, the next step, is nothing more than abstract arithmetic. If your teens have a shaky grasp of arithmetic, expect algebra to put an end to their math learning.
For teenagers who need math remediation, home educators suggest the following approaches to solidify arithmetic skills and build confidence in algebra.
It is no accident that the terms “math” and “remediation” frequently occur in the same sentence.
Work one on one with your students. Resource teachers, private tutors, and even companies that specialize in raising school grades agree with homeschooling parents. They all say that working with students individually solves more than half of all academic problems.
Work at an appropriate level. It makes little sense to struggle with algebra homework when your student cannot reliably multiply six times seven or calculate a percent. To build skills, back up to the point where your teenager finds the going easy.
Play games. Both board and computer games offer drill disguised as fun. Teens especially enjoy fast computer games.
Use manipulatives, hands-on materials. M&Ms, pennies, Monopoly money, rulers, and construction paper cutouts can work well for modeling math problems.
Relate math to everyday life. Cook or work on home-improvement projects to learn fractions, and budget or play the stock market with fake money to practice arithmetic.
Ignore vacations. Many forget the math they learn during the school year each summer. Do some math every week.
While many parents worry about remediation, another group—parents of math whizzes—seek enrichment materials. Mental math, math history, and recreational math pick up where school leaves off. Mental mathematicians learn to calculate in their heads, without pencil and paper or calculator. You can find excellent self-instructional mental math programs in any large bookstore. Or consider building a thematic unit around a math history topic. Explore abacuses, Egyptian numbering systems, or the many ways mathematicians determine the value of pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter). Recreational math—solving challenging, sometimes off-the-beaten-track problems—presents additional alternatives. Our end-of-chapter Resources suggest helpful titles.
Reading deficits become painful by high-school age. Teenagers who stumble over words suffer every day they attend school. They find English class difficult. Even science and history learning are compromised because those subjects rely heavily on reading.
You may have a teenager who reads slowly or never reads for pleasure. Adolescents without identified learning disabilities most often slip through the cracks at school. They know enough to get by and too much to warrant special education. At the same time, their minimal skills constantly limit them.
Almost all home educators will tell you that you improve reading skills by reading. “Fine,” you say, “but he won’t read anything!” Homeschoolers have found many approaches that create readers out of non-readers. Two, in particular, head most lists.
Adolescents without identified learning disabilities most often slip through the cracks at school. They know enough to get by and too much to warrant special education.
First, read aloud. That’s right. Read aloud to your teenagers. Do it fifteen to twenty minutes daily for a year or more. Pick book and magazine selections the whole family can enjoy and discuss. Listening to books on tape provides a variation on the read-aloud theme. Either way, building an appreciation for the written word may lead to reading for pleasure.
Second, encourage reading by providing materials that interest your teen. Begin with their outside activities. Do they play sports, skateboard, draw, adore Star Trek movies, or tinker with car engines? No matter what the activity, you can find magazines and books related to it. Shop for high-interest items to leave around the house. Try The Guinness Book of World Records or The Top Ten of Everything.
Reading enrichment usually takes care of itself. Good readers frequent libraries and bookstores. Many beg their parents for certain titles for holidays and birthdays. To help avid readers branch out, feed their habit. Help them find community book discussion groups. Ask your high school English teacher for summer reading lists, and obtain suggested reading lists from colleges of interest.
Writing frustrates many adolescents. Overzealous grammarians and usage police—high school English teachers—too often create environments where students resist putting any thoughts on paper. Chapter 5 contains suggestions for dealing with teenage writer’s block. These work equally well for afterschoolers as they do for home educators.
Overzealous grammarians and usage police—high school English teachers—too often create environments where students resist putting any thoughts on paper.
Recommendations for writing remediation and enrichment overlap. Just as readers improve by reading, writers improve by writing. Forget grammar lessons, and help your adolescents find real-world reasons to write. Daily journals make a good beginning and create first draft material your teen can use many other places. A friend of mine encouraged her sixteen-year-old to begin a family newsletter. Every month now her daughter writes articles and edits the work of others. Your teenager may prefer a twenty-first century writing task—building a Web page. No matter what the objective, suggest additional writing to your schooled teenagers frequently. They may surprise you with what they produce when they write for themselves and when they know no one will grade their work.
Most teenagers who have trouble with science also have difficulty with math, reading, or both. Work on reading and math skills to see science grades improve.
Regardless of your assessment of your son’s or daughter’s science skills, consider science enrichment activities all around you. Visit science museums. Play computer and board games with science themes. Work on special projects at home, such as building model rockets or experimenting with electronics kits. Find a volunteer job at a zoo, veterinary clinic, hospital, or university laboratory. Invest in field guides and take nature hikes. Check into science videos, computer software, and Internet sites for more help.
QUICK & EASY
Use amazon.com to find titles on obscure topics for teenagers. Also, if your teen likes one author, this Web site can recommend titles with similar themes and styles.
Gifted scientists will need your support for science fairs and other science competitions. Too often parents find that schools announce these events and provide registration forms, leaving the rest up to them. Even if you have no science background, do not despair. Begin at the library and on the Internet, using “science project” as a search term. Whether your budding scientist wants to investigate insects, reptiles, lasers, or stars, many resources describe exactly how to proceed. For additional assistance, help your teenager locate a mentor for his project. This is not easy and often calls for adult networking skills. Begin by asking everyone you know—including your teen’s science teacher and the science departments at nearby colleges and universities.
Success with history and geography in school depend on three factors: reading ability, memorization skills, and motivation to learn. As an afterschooler, you can enhance all three. We discussed improving reading above. Let’s focus here on memorization and motivation.
Typical history and geography classes are filled with names, places, and dates. Most students need help memorizing facts. To build a good knowledge base, look for educational card, board, and computer games. Our children particularly enjoyed the board game Where in the World, but there are many others. Also, buy map puzzles, which provide solid geography orientation in a fun format.
In addition, help your teenagers deal with that next history test with memorization aids. Show them how to make flashcards and time lines. Teach them how to construct acronyms, like H-O-M-E-S to memorize the names of the Great Lakes—Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. Discuss word associations, relating an unknown fact to a known one. For example, to memorize Lincoln as the capital of Nebraska, picture a Lincoln Continental cruising the prairie.
As your teenagers develop memorization techniques, nurture their love of history and geography. Discuss the history that led up to current events. Visit history museums and watch history videos, many available for free at your library. Find good historical fiction for avid readers. Travel and note geographic features. Discuss how rivers and mountains and other topographic features influence history. Read chapter 7 for more history and geography enrichment ideas.
Despite years of formal foreign language instruction, too many high school graduates remain fluent only in English. Afterschooling makes a real difference here. At home, increase foreign language exposure with music and videos. Peruse homeschool catalogs and buy additional instructional tapes. Subscribe to magazines like Reader’s Digest in the foreign language. Invite foreign language speakers into your home. Travel to a country where they speak the language your teenager is studying. All of these enrichment activities will give your teen an advantage.
Afterschoolers also find ways to study languages not offered in most high schools. They study Hebrew at the local synagogue or American Sign Language in adult community education classes. I used to say that possibilities are limited only by your location. However, with many free foreign language courses on the Internet, that is no longer true. Not only can your teens take Internet courses in hundreds of languages, they can also find native speakers with whom to correspond.
In the United States, too many public schools have interpreted separation of church and state to mean freedom from religion—all religion. This means they teach history with only passing references to religious influences and never adequately explain how religious faith affects individuals and societies. At the same time, more than 90 percent of Americans say that faith plays a role in their lives, and famous historians say Western civilization rests on two pillars—the Greco-Roman world and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Those from other emerging cultures in the United States have the same complaint—their views get no playtime in schools. Regardless of your perspective, it is easy to see why many families see a gaping hole in public school instruction with respect to religion.
Not only can your teens take Internet courses in hundreds of languages, they can also find native speakers with whom to correspond.
For these reasons and others, many parents feel it is essential to enrich their teenagers’ public school education with religious studies at home. Some prefer one of the many popular courses that have been developed for home educators. If this interests you, check out Mary Pride’s Big Book of Home Learning, Volume 3, for excellent reviews. Others use materials supplied by their churches and synagogues. Still others take a hands-on approach, studying comparative religions by visiting diverse religious institutions in their community. Let your goals dictate your activities in this area.
By the time our children reach adolescence, they have definite likes and dislikes. Some spend hours drawing or writing. Others program computers far into the night. Still others surf or snowboard for days on end.
Afterschooling parents recognize that learning outside of school may encompass almost any topic imaginable. They support their teenagers’ interests and enthusiasms, even the nonacademic ones. In the process, they foster self-directed learning.
Afterschooling parents recognize that learning outside of school may encompass almost any topic imaginable.
How do you accomplish this? How do you create a lifelong learner? First encourage self-directed activity—anything your teenagers do when no one is telling them what to do. Self-directed activity eventually leads to expertise. At this point, teenagers know more about their subjects, academic or nonacademic, than anyone around them. As they begin to teach themselves and network for additional resources in their community, they become self-directed learners. It is a great gift—and the best reason to afterschool your apprentice adults.
Define what you want to accomplish through part-time home education, menu-approach schooling, or afterschooling. Set reasonable goals, especially for afterschooling. Keep in mind the limited hours available, and choose activities wisely.
Attend one or two large homeschooling conferences or curriculum fairs where you can see a wide variety of resources. Interview everyone there—the vendors, the speakers, the participants—to learn how to remediate, supplement, and enrich your teenager’s education.
If you cannot attend a conference, read homeschool resource guides to locate fun and helpful materials. Consider educational games, videos, and hands-on materials for all subjects.
Review pertinent chapters of this book to find ideas and resources for different subject areas.
Help your teenagers explore their interests, even if they look nonacademic. Buy related books, and help your teens find community groups related to their interests.
Reconsider afterschooling every year. Think about it as a prelude to full-time homeschooling. Review the reasons you cannot homeschool full time. As teens mature, reasons for not homeschooling sometimes vanish.
Griffith, Mary. The Unschooling Handbook: How to Use the Whole World as Your Child’s Classroom. Prima Publishing, 1998.
Leppert, Michael and Mary. Homeschooling Almanac 2000–2001. Prima Publishing, 1999.
Llewellyn, Grace. The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education. Lowry House, 1998.
Pride, Mary. The Big Book of Home Learning, Junior High Through College, Fourth Edition. Home Life, 1999.
Aristoplay Educational Games, 800-634-7738, http://www.aristoplay.com
Audio-Forum Say It by Signing Video, 800-243-1234, http://www.audioforum.com
Blackstone Audiobooks (classics on cassette), 800-729-2665, http://www.blackstoneaudio.com
Castle Height Press Hands-On Science, 770-218-7998, http://www.flash.net/~wx3o/chp/
Creative Teaching Associates, 800-767-4282, http://www.mastercta.com
Fun-Ed, 626-357-4443, http://www.excellenceineducation.com
Institute for Math Mania, 800-NUMERAL, http://members.aol.com/rmathmania
Lewis Educational Games, 800-557-8777
Radio Shack Electronic Kits, http://www.radioshack.com
