Dear Homeschoolers

[crankyoldman]

Cause I know there are a few of you on here. If you're in the US of A and were/are/know a lot about homeschooling, I need some infos.

- Where did your parents (or you if you are a parent/teacher thing) get your homeschool materials? This is especially relevant if this involved computers somewhat.

- Aside from learning to read and the basics, what sort of activities did your parents do for you (did you go to museums, church, run around naked in fields)? Which of those would have been easier/cheaper if you could do them on the computer?

- Which subject were your parents least prepared to teach and thus needed the most support on? What kind of support worked best (a book, a website, a forum, a laser show)?

- Did you get much STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math) beyond what was required in your state? Why or why not?

Pointing me to communities/resources is also very helpful.

Edit: For those not on my f-list that may not know me that come across this: I work at a small educational gaming company, and this is kind of part of some informal market research I guess? You won't get spammed (we don't have the staff to spam anyone XD we've got just enough to make our games and do the research related to them) and I most certainly don't want personal info.

I just find that it really helps my research and creative process if I go to the internet sometimes. If the internet didn't exist you can bet I would be that annoying person asking questions of people at the bus stop. Just the internet is less intrusive and works quicker. XD

Comments

[sara]

In from network -- why do you want to know?

[crankyoldman]

Research for my work. I work at a small educational gaming company and I'm in charge of informal and nontraditional education markets (like after school programs and homeschooling). My biggest roadblock I keep coming up against is that well, I wasn't homeschooled. I went to public school. So I wanted to see if I was missing anything that would be obvious to those closer to homeschool.

Nothing nefarious I assure you!

[crankyoldman]

Also, academic papers get really dry after a while and I like hearing from REAL LIVE PEOPLE who are not trying to sound like an academic paper.

[wandererriha]

You've probably heard me go on about this before, but I'll put it up again since you asked. ;)

First thing: EVERY state has its own standard for home education. Some of them are lax to the point of having almost no rules at all, and then you have others that require you to do/hand in SO. MUCH. STUFF. that there are 4th graders who are learning harder stuff and submitting more term papers than your average college freshman. :P My home state of PA is one of the latter and continues to be one of THE MOST obnoxious places to try to home educate your children for sheer number of hoops to jump through. For instance, my mom already has a Masters in Health/PE and a long-expired teaching certification therein. PA does not REQUIRE parents to have a teaching degree, but it makes it a helluvalot easier if the parent-educator has an education-related degree.

That being said...

- Where did your parents (or you if you are a parent/teacher thing) get your homeschool materials? This is especially relevant if this involved computers somewhat.

We learned about homeschool from friends that went to the same church. So happens, said friends were head of the local homeschool board: CHAP (Christian Homeschool Association of Pennsylvania). You can find them here. I drew the comic in their news letter/magazine for years. There is also a "generic" homeschool organization over here. We dealt primarily with CHAP. Heck, my parents were board members whilst my sister and I were HSed.

There are curriculum conventions, catalogs, websites, and 200million other places to obtain materials for teaching. Heck, you can use the curriculum of your local school district if you're so inclined. We found most of ours through CHAP and discerned what might be best by talking to fellow HSers. My first year we used the Calvert School curriculum. They're an oldschool classical establishment. Their curriculum was pretty hardcore, but since we had NO IDEA what we were doing, it was probably just as well that Calvert had everything planned out down to the TINIEST detail.
Calvert, however, only goes up through middle school (8th grade) and we thought it was too rigid to continue using anyway. I used a mix of BJU and A Beka Booksfor the rest of my home-highschool career. Those two seemed to be favs across the CHAP board. The kicker, however, is that in PA all of these MUST be ACCREDITED or else all your efforts are no good.

This was during the elementary school years of the internets (we were still working with The Fossil- 1991 DELL with external modem) and it was easier to just order through a catalog. However, there is a HUGE online movement among HSers. There was actually a LARGE controversy over that a couple of years ago when the PA Edu board tried to lump online charter schools/tutors with homeschooling. There was some extraordinarily polite and conservatively dressed picketing on the Harrisburg mall, as I recall. In the end, it the amendment didn''t go through.

- Aside from learning to read and the basics, what sort of activities did your parents do for you (did you go to museums, church, run around naked in fields)? Which of those would have been easier/cheaper if you could do them on the computer?

ZOMG I did SO. MUCH. during home-highschool. I was in the church choir (which was a huge HUGE commitment as we went to an early mega-church and there were almost 200 people in the choir ALONE- oddly enough there was no youth choir and so me and another girl were the token teenagers therein), did ballet two times a week, took voice lessons, piano lessons, recorder lessons, helped out a CATRA (a riding stable for profoundly disabled children), hung out with friends (this was the first time I actually had REAL FRIENDS!!1!), did some local mission-related stuff like yard work for the elderly, made it to Cadet in Girl Scouts, and...just...craploads of other stuff.

...I miss it.

Er see above about the internets still being in its Geocities stage. Companies HAD come out with a lot of edutainment style games for the home computer, but they were a bit pricey. I have fond memories of playing "Incredible Machine" and an updated "Number Munchers" from this time. ^^;

- Which subject were your parents least prepared to teach and thus needed the most support on? What kind of support worked best (a book, a website, a forum, a laser show)?

All the homeschoolers in our church had created what was referred to as a "co-op". All the parents helped teach small groups of children in stuff that was kinda tricky to do at home. This included art (painting/drawing), science (simple experiments), PE, public speaking, drama, music, foreign language, and writing.

It should be noted that all the "teachers" were nauseatingly brilliant people. Among them were 3 heart surgeons, 4 ER docs (one of which was fluent in French, Spanish, English AND Latin), two journalists, a professional painter, 5 with PhDs in Divinity/Biblical studies, and a host of others that I didn't know all that well because they taught the younger kids.

Mom purchased a copy of "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" as well as some speak-back software for learning German. We usually called in the Reserves (literally- my Marine father has a Masters in Physics) when it came to math.
I vow I will never EVER subject my hypothetical children to the universal terror of homeschoolers that is Saxon Math. H.A.T.E.

Alas, so many of my answers are not going to be relevant because the tech just DID NOT EXIST yet. I mean yes there was SOME stuff but it was expensive and the various companies hadn't yet worked out all the bugs. I mean, AOL was still the ONLY online service back then. :P

- Did you get much STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math) beyond what was required in your state? Why or why not?

Yes and no. PA requires you to spend 180 days/900hrs of school time and to finish AT LEAST 2/3 of all your accredited text books. Mom and I were PROFOUNDLY grateful for the 2/3s rule when it came to Algebra III. :P I SUCK at math and because of this, we did the minimum and opted for the science route.

I had some pretty hardcore science, albeit with a creationist slant (which didn't bother me, tho it might others) tho it also presented the other schools of thought that existed between 1993 and 1998. I have never been very good at math- not just because my brain does no seem to be wired for numbers, but because I was never really taught in a way that I could understand it when I was much MUCH younger. However, the math that I did do was HARD. The science was pretty heavy too. I remember thinking the stuff I did in college (Anatomy I, Earth Sci, etc) was far easier than what I did in HS.

Pointing me to communities/resources is also very helpful.

See above. ^^;
Also, on the CHAP homepage they mention their Curriculum Convention. There's like a zillion vendors listed who carry everything from nursery school to college prep with lots of fun edutainment stuff in between.

[crankyoldman]

Thanks!

Though, we're not edutainment. We put a little more thought into our stuff than that crap. :P

[wandererriha]

XD I'm sure you do. Keep in mind that the number of brave souls who choose to educate their teens through highschool is MINIMAL compared to those who HS elementary school. Therefore, a lot of the "edutainment" stuff is geared for a much younger audience.

Also, long comment is long.

[ilyat]

This may only be tangentially related.

I live in a poor, rural, fundamental county where a large percentage of the kids are home-schooled. Two of my seasonal employees are included. One of the things that my park does is cater a number of educational programs to the home schooled demographic. They deal heavily with history, biology, earth sciences, Colonial and post-Colonial American culture, and anything and everything associated with farming from the Colonial American period through the present.

Most of the parents communicate with one another to find programs like this around the state. At this location, we host a different topic for one day each month and typically get 20-50 kids. Most of them know each other. While they are still geared toward home schooled kids, the programs also fulfil the SOL (Standards of Learning) requirements for public schools.

The material in these programs would definintely be less expensive to learn on a computer (presumably already owned), however the interaction with other home schooled kids is important, as is the emphesis on a hands-on learning style.

[crankyoldman]

Oh, I would never suggest REPLACING hands-on learning. I probably should have worded it along the lines of augmenting; I mean, we're trying to work with museums eventually too.

But that is interesting, I'll have to research some programs like that. ^^