Homeschooling

We didn't set out to be a homeschooling family. It sort of arrived at us, and then we couldn't talk ourselves out of it.

Why we started

My oldest spent a year in pre-K, and somewhere in there I did the math on his day. Maybe twenty minutes of it was spent actually learning about something. Another thirty or so was the playground. The rest was filler — activities to move the clock along until pickup. That's not a knock on the teachers. It's just what a room full of small kids and one adult ends up looking like.

What I kept coming back to was that I could explain things to him better than that setup ever could. Not because I'm some natural teacher, but because I know him. I know how he hears a thing, where he's going to get stuck, what makes it click. And he already trusts me, which it turns out is half the job at this age. A kind stranger who rotates out halfway through the year is starting from zero on that every time.

Finding out we could do it

We started small, and honestly a little by accident. We had a stack of flash cards sitting around, so we did counting, then some simple adding and taking away. Then letter recognition, then the sounds the letters make. He took to the letters so fast that we sort of looked at each other and went, okay, I guess we're doing this.

By the time he was five he had the whole alphabet down and could read simple sentences. He could count up into the hundreds and handle basic addition and subtraction by counting up and down. None of that was a master plan. We just kept going because he kept wanting more, and we found out we were decent at handing it to him.

Settling on a curriculum

What we didn't have was a map. We were good at the teaching part but had no real sense of what he was "supposed" to know at a given point, so we went looking for something structured. We landed on Seton, and we supplement it with Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding to give the science side more body than the basics.

The curriculum is a mixed bag, and I'd say that to anyone asking. Having something laid out to follow is a relief. But the books sometimes crawl — they'll circle the same point three different ways when he got it the first time and is sitting there bored, ready to move. So the thing we've actually learned as the people running this is to go at his pace, not the book's. When he's done with something, we jump. We started him in first grade instead of kindergarten for the same reason — his reading and math were already past where kindergarten would've put him.

What's next

We're weighing whether to stick with Seton next year or try something else. Part of why we picked a program like it in the first place was a wrong assumption on my end — I thought we needed something that would take his tests and grades and keep them on some official record. Turns out homeschooling is a lot more flexible than that, and the "record" I was worried about mostly isn't a thing. So next year's an open question, which a year ago would've stressed me out and now mostly doesn't.

If you want the rest of who's writing this — the roofing, the day job — that's over at how I work, or the Onsite Roofing site.