Ok, so what are your children reading? Are they reading on their own, or are you reading to them? My sixth grader is reading Fablehaven right now. I do not have her reading anything in particular for “school” so to speak. I figure it is more important to keep her reading anything that is close to or above level. I know that as she gets closer to high school I will need to work on more literature based reading. There are tons of books she needs to read because she needs to have the ability to make connections. That sounds odd, doesn’t it? Here is what I mean. Suppose she goes for a job interview, and her boss, an older person says, “Six of one…”, leaving the remainder of the sentence unspoken. Of course, we know that, “…half a dozen of another”, is what follows. We make the assumption of what he is talking about, because we have some basis in learning or experience, that tells us how to complete the answer. Or suppose someone makes a reference to steering clear of another person because, “he is a real Ahab.” Would my daughter know that the “Ahab” was a reference to the sea captain from Moby Dick, hell bent on revenge at all costs? I will give you another example of why having the experience of literature is important. My father was born in another country, his first language was not English. He came to America, got a high school education, became a naturalized citizen, joined the military, married, had children, owned his own company, and then decided to go back to school. He thought that pursuing the American Dream was a life calling. When I was in middle school my dad began college, eventually receiving a B.S. and a masters degree. Somewhere along the way he discovered that his scientific education was not enough. He discovered that he didn’t have the cultural or literary basis to take part in the circles his science education thrust him into. He began a secondary, and completely separate line of educating himself. That line of education had him reading literature that many people didn’t even thing about knowing something about. Milton, Shakespeare, Byron, Steinbeck, Hemingway all became his companions. He would sometimes come home from work with a library book or two, and comment that he had met yet another author he needed to become familiar with because of some comment or discussion that he did not have the reference knowledge to understand. He was a lifelong learner, always hungry for the next world a book could take him to. I want to follow in his footsteps, I always want to hunger for the next piece of knowledge. I want my daughter to have the love of learning that drove my father. The way that I am fueling that fire in my daughter is through allowing her to read as she wishes. I am purposefully addicting her to books and knowledge, so that she will always want to learn more, always need to learn more. In addition to the books she reads herself, we have books that we read together that are above her level, and audio books. The good thing about books that are a little bit above level is that they also improve her vocabulary. Sometimes we use literature based word lists to let her see the words she is hearing through audio books, or when we read to her. Often, she doesn’t even realize that she is learning something. My goal is this, should you ask my daughter what she loves about reading books, and learning, I hope her answer is, “Everything!”

There are so many words in the English language. If you are an adult, who learned to speak English as your first language, you may not realize how difficult our language is. If you are an adult who learned English as a second language, you know what I am talking about. One of the worst things about English is that is not a pure language, it is a conglomeration of several different languages. Because of this the grammar rules and spelling rules are not as easy to navigate as in other languages. An example of this is Dolch words. These are essentially sight words that can not be decoded by pronouncing them phonetically. I’m not sure how many of them there are but I can tell you that there are pages and pages of them and they are divided by grade level.

Because the Dolch words cannot be decoded phonetically and must be learned by sight it is important to give our children other ways to learn and practice the spelling of these words. Of course, my favorite method teaching spelling words of any sort is to have your child play a game with them. My child likes to play crossword puzzles, and word ladders. Other children like speed drills, or matching games. Any of these will help your child learn to spell Dolch words and other words from their spelling lists without the drudgery of copying words over and over. Another benefit of playing online games is for those children who do not like to or are unable to write. For these children, the computer games allow their brains to move at a faster pace than their hands can write the words, allowing them to learn at their brain age, not at the pace of their physical limitation.

English is a difficult language to speak, and spell. Help your kids out in any way that you can. Games, flash cards, typing games, and word searches are all ways to assist our children, and if you can make them online, the children will also be learning valuable keyboarding skills in the mix, quite a bargain.

My daughter is a voracious reader. She always has a book in her hand, whether it is an actual, physical book, or an e-reader, or a computer with e-books on it. She loves to read any and everything, Because she loves to read so much, I have not worried much about her vocabulary. She seems to retain a lot of what she reads, and she seems to be able to put those words into her spoken vocabulary. For this I am grateful. That is, until I read an article about ways to expand vocabulary. This article indicated that only about 20% of information that was read was actually retained, but that information that was read, spoken, and heard was retained at a level closer to 90%. Wow, that is an incredible difference in retention.

I have always said that playing games helps my child learn, and more and more studies are showing that the more ways a child is exposed to a piece of information, the higher the retention of that information is. So, once again, I’m advocating the use of word games, like word search, or word ladders, as a way for students to practice vocabulary. This also means that my child will be doing more repetition, because it seems that repetition is a good way of retaining information also. She hates repetition, and so I will have to be more and more inventive. This means that I am looking for more ways to be a sneaky parent. I need to find out more ways to allow my daughter to repeat her work without actually looking like she is repeating it. And I will throw that question out to home school parents out there. Does any one have a new or inventive way to get your child to do the repetition that they dislike, without the repetition becoming boring? I’d love to hear some suggestions!

 I’ve been asked whether it is easy or difficult to home school. My usual answer is something like, “well, that depends on what you consider hard!” In reality, the answer is dependent on where you live, how committed you are to home schooling, and probably how organized you are.   

I’m fortunate. Ok, there are many reasons that I am fortunate, but among them is the fact that I live in a state in which it is very easy to home school. I don’t have to jump through any hoops. I don’t have to get approval, I don’t have to have my curriculum approved, I send a letter once a year to the State Department of Education and voila! We home school.

I know that some states have much more difficult laws about what parents have to do to be able to home school. Some only require a home school portfolio. This is basically a record of the child’s achievements. This can vary from a simple list of subjects, chapters completed, and a grade for the chapter test. Other states require portfolios that show every detail of the home school plan from a copy of their printable lesson plans, to the number of hours spent per day, on which subject, and where that instruction was given.

Because there is such variation, it is important that you know the laws of your state, and what is required for you to stay off the radar. By this I mean something like this…does your town or municipality have a daytime curfew? Daytime curfews mean that local officials like policemen, may stop your child if they are out of the house during the hours that would normally be school hours. That official may question your child, and may turn them in to a truancy center. If your locality does have rules like this then you need to make sure you are with your child, even if you have them in the front yard for P.E. during the day. Another thing to consider is the errands you run during the daytime. If you are doing mundane errands such as grocery story, or picking up the dry cleaning and you have your school age child out during the day, be prepared to get strange looks, and even questions.

We do have doctor’s appointments, pharmacy pick ups, and field trips, and library trips during the day, but we try very hard to not to do household errands. My child is clean, fed, dressed appropriately, and hair brushed (ok, most of the time anyway!) if we have to go out. There is no need to play into any preconceived notions about home schooling by being careless.

In the end, the more you comply with the state laws, and local statutes, and the better the records you keep, the easier home schooling will be. It is important for you to take your child’s home schooling seriously, letting it take priority over other outside commitments, at least during the hours you designate at your school hours. The more seriously you treat school, the more seriously other people will take your home schooling. You might even get support from unlikely sources, if you show dedication and consistency. While this all may seem like a lot of trouble, the benefits of home schooling might just be worth the difficulty!!

Words. It is hard to remember how much there is to actually learn about the English language. Every day that we do language arts in school I remember something that I have forgotten. Who knew English was so complicated? For those of us who grew up speaking the language, over the course of many years, we learned all about homonyms, and compound words, idioms and oxymorons. No wonder our children are frustrated sometimes. We have got to be patient, because English is a hard language, and we have learned so much that our children have yet to learn.

It is important to use every resource at our disposal to help our children in learning the rules of language arts. One of the things we like best at our house is games, but for some families children learn better on paper, like by the use of workbooks. Or perhaps flash cards are more your child’s style, or word blocks. Sometimes your child might just need the lesson taught one more time, by one more method. So after your child has done their main lesson on a language arts subject, and you think that he or she didn’t quite get it, or needs a little more practice, pull out the compound word video lesson, or let your child play a game contraction game. Every little bit of practice in helping your child learn one of the most difficult languages on the planet, English, will go a long way in all of their school work!