Abraham Lincoln You have a Bible and a library card. What more could you possibly need? You prefer the Charlotte Mason Method of reading living books for everything: historical fiction, biographies, real histories, nature guides, etc. No soon-to-be-outdated textbooks for you.
What Type of Homeschooler Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla Quiz written by Carolyn.
Thanks to Enbrethiliel via Joyce for this fun quiz. This is the first quiz I’ve taken for a while where I’ve actually strongly identified with some of the answers (though for one question, “What is on your dining room table?”, I was looking for “all of the above.)
At first I was going to say that I’m not really a homeschooler, but I suppose I am — our curriculum is just daily living. Naming colors, counting, talking about letters, reading together, talking about plants and animals, saying prayers…. I would like to start something a little more structured but I am not sure where to start. I suppose I could just designate 15 minutes of “school time” every day and just dive in.
Ummm…here’s what it said about me:
“Mr. Potato Head You have your ideal of how things should look, but youre flexible enough to allow for change. You are not bothered by changing methods, mid-course if necessary. You use an eclectic combination of curriculum sources.”
Pretty accurate, I think. :^)
I’m not sure but I don’t think “unschoolers” are big on designating school time, so you may be just as much a homeschooler as people who are raising their children that way with the tolerance of the state. Unschooling seems a pretty popular approach on a local HSing list that I sampled. I would be afraid to officially cast aside a plan or a routine (if that’s what unschooling involves) so I haven’t looked into it much but I am sort of attracted to the approach, from what little I know about it. I’d probably do a combination of “make sure the government and onlookers don’t get concerned” set-curriculum stuff and a lot of freestyle “what are we ready for and interested in today” stuff. Actually, I want my kid, if capable, to learn to read and to multiply and so on by a certain age; I do get concerned when I read about homeschoolers who were just dandy with their kids not “getting into” reading until 10, etc. — if my kid has the ability, I want him or her to be able to read at typical grade level should we have to put him into school, for just one big practical reason!
Actually, the reason I don’t think of myself as homeschooling my 27-month-old yet, despite doing a lot of what you’re doing with your 3-year-old, is that we don’t have to submit any papers to the government until he’s 5 or so, and I’m not even attracted to the ideas of preschool or school. “School” seems like a clock-punching thing to me above all — it’s sad, when I was little and my mother would ask if I had learned anything that day in school I seriously thought she must be joking. It just didn’t seem to be what we were there for. So that may explain some of my attraction to the idea of “unschooling.”
You don’t have to decide what, if any, homeschooling format to choose until the child reaches school age. What you are doing is actually more effective at his age than a formal curriculum would be. You might want to read Maria Montessori’s books for support, though. She really had great respect for the child’s drive to learn.
Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller’s mentor and friend, said:
I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every
child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less
“showily”. Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself… Teaching fills the mind with
artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.
If you aren’t running a formal curriculum, I would think there are precious few reasons to put a kid in school (I really can’t think of any, but I’m sure there must be a couple). Homeschooling through (insert whatever family crisis comes up) is hard and maybe impossible if you have a formal curriculum. But if you’re unschooling, the crisis is just a part of the child’s education.
Check out http://www.vegsource.com‘s Unschooling bulletin board. It is the most balanced group of ladies I’ve come across in the unschooling world.
Sandy
That is such a fun quiz…..but I couldn’t get it to work. No boxes or 0’s to click on. I’ll have to try later. I fear ‘all of the above’ is my answer to more than one question. 🙂
I’m so glad you enjoyed my quiz! Just writing it was a riot — thinking about all the homeschoolers I’ve known and sorting them into categories. We’re all extensively different from each other, even within our own “categories,” because we all have unique children and educate them in unique ways. Visit my blog for more homeschooling tips and fun activity ideas — and don’t miss the Webpage link at the upper right corner of my blog (more info there).