End-of-year reflections
We made it
Time to reflect a bit on the many sorts of lessons the year offered.
First off, this was my first year homeschooling all five offspring, and it was insane. I had barely enough time to do laundry and meal preparation in addition to lessons everyday; lots of things I would previously have fit into school days got pushed to the weekend or, uh, not done. Some things I noticed about this:
I spent way more time in one-on-one lessons with Agnes than I should have. Guys, I don’t even believe in kindergarten. But she begged for lessons this year, and then every day (until about April), she begged to read just one - no, two! - more pages or do five - no, ten! - more math problems, and suddenly I’d find I had spent an hour with her. Next year, she gets 30 minutes a day max.
Juggling so many students, there is a strong temptation to take the path of least resistance and let more independent learners drift away to their bedrooms and do their own thing. Agnes is begging for time with me; Benedict is…not. Certainly, some of this is right and just and developmentally appropriate. But there is a lot I’ve been waiting years for the kids to be old enough to learn and discuss, and if I blink, or spend an hour a day with Agnes doing simple addition problems, I am going to miss my opportunity.
In addition to increased activity inside the house, we also upped our activity outside the house, from orthodontist appointments to a homeschool band program to volunteering commitments. Some of those activities - like band - happen on a mostly regular schedule that our routines changed to accommodate. Others - like orthodontist appointments - happened at random and could throw off a whole day, or even week. Next year, I’m setting aside a week every 6 or so weeks to confine and corral as many of those random obligations as possible.
Somehow we have got to find a way to do just a little more housework during the week beyond basic food prep (granted, for us “basic food prep” involves making all our own dairy products) and laundry. I’m trying not to despair, but this one I have yet to come up with any brilliant solutions for. With three more years before my eldest graduates, it seems safe to assume these will be the three busiest years of my homeschooling career. Still, I’d like to enjoy these in a somewhat peaceful environment rather than always seeing things I’m not getting to everywhere I look.
Fairly typical records from a week in January. I must document stuff after the fact or I never feel like we accomplish anything - checking items off a to-do list just doesn’t do it for me.
Ok, moving on from global observations to specific subject areas:
English: something you should know about me is that I’m not sure we all really need to study vernacular literature or how. As far as academic subjects go, it’s quite a newcomer and still doesn’t seem to be quite sure of its purpose. So we go quite light on formal English literature studies here.
This year, my K-6 students read a combination of the Free and Treadwell readers and the Everyday Classics series and many classic children’s books. But they just read them and told me about them - no writing assignments, no comprehension questions, no literary devices, none of that. Benedict read MANY short stories and some sonnets, we all read Midsummer Night’s Dream,1 and Benedict and Kateri read Macbeth. Family read-alouds and audiobooks included Great Expectations, Taming of the Shrew, Pilgrim’s Progress, and some other stuff I neglected to write down.
If I’m a little skeptical about spending a lot of time analyzing English literature, I’m extremely enthusiastic about spending a lot of time practicing English composition - once students have had a good grounding in classic children’s lit and decent exposure to the great stories of the canon (various mythologies and epics, folk and fairy tales, Shakespeare). Thus far, Benedict has been my only student to do much formal composition, for which I use the once-quite-popular books by Francis Donnelly, SJ, Model English vol. I (The Development of Thought) in 7th and 8th grade and vol. II (The Qualities of Style) in 9th and 10th grade. I love these books so much, and they deserve a post of their own at some point.
Math: Benedict was in an algebra 2 class taught locally by a friend who is a terrific, thoughtful math teacher. Great experience, no complaints. Kateri, Edmund, and Nicholas all continue to work their way through Math Mammoth - K ended the year in 6A, E finished up 4B, and N completed Multiplication 2. I kept Agnes busy with some Miquon and Ray’s Primary using an AL abacus.
I got sort of opposite ends of the math student spectrum with Benedict and Kateri, and it took me a while to (1) notice and (2) do something about it - perhaps because I was had three very small people to keep alive while Kateri was doing primary arithmetic. Last year, it finally dawned on me that she didn’t need math explained differently than her brother had, she just needed more practice. This year, she drilled the heck out of her times tables just using MM’s online practice program (and actually seemed to quite enjoy it). Unsurprisingly, it has made a huge difference. I also spent some time this year collecting a list of resources to pull extra practice from as needed going forward, and I feel a lot more comfortable identifying when my students just need more reps.
Latin: I feel like we have hit our stride here. Benedict finished Familia Romana about halfway through the year and then we read Caesar. Kateri read through capitulum IX. They both took the NLE and participated in a JCL chapter, including attending regional and state conventions, which was great fun.
World Geography: this was put in the curriculum at the Principal’s request, as he had a fondly-remembered world geography class in 9th grade, and by the time I was done planning for it last summer, I felt totally cheated that my own education skimped on geography so much.
In addition to some assigned readings and group read alouds, I made research templates for my fluent writers, and they gradually built their own atlases over the course of the year. Kateri and Edmund in particular loved this project; there is something about that upper elementary age and research. And they took complete ownership of the process; all I did was provide them with the templates, help put needed library books on hold, and do a round of editing with them on their rough drafts. We will be doing more with this format in the future for sure.
Science: uuuggghhh. Ok, I’ve never really done “formal” science with K-6 students. We simply garden, do some nature watching, care for livestock, cook, do home repair projects, and have an extensive library of science-related children’s books.
But high school. Benedict started the year with The Sciences: An Integrated Approach, a textbook by Robert Hazen and James Trefil, the E.D. Hirsches of science.2 Hazen and Trefil adapt Hirsch’s arguments to advocate for what they call “scientific literacy,” which, they say, is needed for Americans to make well-informed decisions on policies touching scientific questions and wise consumer choices in the face of scientific-sounding marketing claims.
This felt very persuasive, and, given that my own high school science courses left barely a trace in my brain, I was game to give it a try. But as we got into the “integrated” sciences textbook Hazen and Trefil wrote to produce scientifically literate citizens and consumers it felt just like…a dumbed down version of my high school science courses. Which certainly didn’t leave me capable of evaluating “the science” on even one, let alone all, public policy controversies touching on scientific questions.
And anyway, are public policy questions touching on scientific matters generally reducible to scientific questions? Will knowing more about science lead a citizen to make a prudent choice on such a thing? And are citizens, well-informed or not, really running things around here at this point? But I digress.
Disenchanted with the scientific literacy approach (which was also, according to Benedict, really, really boring), I dropped the textbook, set Benedict up with Khan Academy physics and a stack of pop physics and physics-adjacent books from the library,3 and proceeded to think more about what exactly is the purpose of high school science. And that is another post for another time.
Music: as mentioned above, the three oldest students joined a homeschool music program this year. It had us out of the house for much of the day on Fridays, a big change we were a bit apprehensive about. But this program has turned out to work really well for us. There are bands and choirs at different skill levels that meet throughout the day, so we can go once a week, and all the kids can each participate at their level (the program starts in 4th grade, so Nicholas and Agnes will be able to join also in a few years). The Principal was a band teacher himself at one time (two of the kids are playing his old instruments), and I think he has enjoyed it almost as much as the kids. Except for the driving.
Well, despite my doubts at times, it seems like everyone did learn a few things after all. And now on to the best part of every homeschool year - planning for the next one.
No joke, as I’ve been typing this, Agnes drifted in to tell me that the course of true love never run smooth and then departed swifter than an arrow from a Tartar’s bow.
In fact, Trefil helped out with the science items in Cultural Literacy, and is a co-author of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy.
Randall Munroe was a huge hit, of course - Benedict ended up reading almost the entirety of his books aloud to the family in a lengthy series of “you have got to hear this” moments.