Exploring Each Homeschooling Approach

Let’s explore each of the most popular homeschooling approaches. There may not be any one approach description that fits perfect. Rather, you may want to combine several to custom fit YOUR homeschool lifestyle.

School-at-home

The advantage....you know what to teach and when. It's put together for you.

The disadvantage...most expensive, highest burnout rate because of the demand on the teacher/parent and lack of interest on the students part.

Classical

The goal is to teach the student how to learn using the five tools of learning. The five tools of learning are reason, record, research, relate, and rhetoric.

Younger children begin with the preparing stage, where they learn basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. The grammar stage is next, which emphasizes compositions and collections, and then the logic stage, where serious reading, study, and research take place. All the tools come together in the rhetoric stage, where communication is the primary focus.

Classical homeschooling approach looks at the philosophers of the ages and the classic books that stand the test of time. These create the curriculum’s written foundation. Students read from the collection of literature known as "great books" to spark their minds and show them how other people thought.

Mortimer J. Adler, a professor at Columbia who coined the term “great books”, put his own list together. Not everyone agrees with this list, and you may not either, but it’s a good place to start. The Great Books List One popular way to approach these writers is to read an author’s works as you study the time period in which they lived; thus, students studying ancient Rome read Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, etc.

The Great Books curriculum is a site worth looking at if this approach seems to fit your style. The sonlight homeschool curriculum is very much of this homeschooling approach.

Unschooling

Unschooling, according to Wikipedia, “contrasts with other forms of home education in that the student's education is not directed by a teacher and curriculum. Although unschooling students may choose to make use of teachers or curricula, they are ultimately in control of their own education. Students choose how, when, why, and what they pursue. Parents who unschool their children act as "facilitators," providing a wide range of resources, helping their children access, navigate, and make sense of the world, and aiding them in making and implementing goals and plans for both the distant and immediate future. Unschooling expands from children's natural curiosity as an extension of their interests, concerns, needs, goals, and plans.”

Montessori

Waldorf

The hope is to provide students with the ground work or foundation to develop into free, moral and socially integrated citizens. It is a quite widely used independent educational system in the world, used by private, pubic and homeschool schools.

Charlotte Mason

Probably the most well known of Charlotte's methods is her use of living books instead of dry, factual textbooks. Living books are usually written by one person who has a passion for the subject and writes in conversational or narrative style. Children are then expected to tell about what they have read. This can be oral or written or drawn and done after the first reading of the story. By doing this the child has to synthesize all he has read, organize it in his mind, and determine how best to share his new knowledge with others.

Children need to learn how to govern themselves. Charlotte encouraged a child's learning the habits of attention, perfect execution, obedience, truthfulness, an even temper, neatness, kindness, order, respect, remembering, punctuality, gentleness, and cleanliness, among others. Usually, a child would work on a specific habit over a four to six week period.

Charlotte advocated short lessons for younger children, growing progressively longer as the child matures. Elementary-age children's lessons should be no longer than fifteen or twenty minutes on one particular subject before moving on to something else. In this way, the habit of full attention is encouraged and children receive a broad education filled with many varied subjects.

Charlotte used prepared dictation to teach spelling and reinforce grammar and composition skills. In prepared dictation, the child is given a sentence or passage to study until he is sure he knows all the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. The teacher then dictates the passage to him, one phrase at a time, watching carefully as he writes to catch any misspelled word and correct it immediately. In this way, spelling is taught within the context of great thoughts and rich language instead of static lists.

Handwriting was also taught within the context of ideas, not isolated letters repeated over an entire line or page. To copy, children are given a phrase, sentence, or paragraph to copy in their best handwriting this exercise taking only a few minutes each day so as to encourage the habits of attention and perfect execution without becoming tiring.

Art is another place where living ideas are found. The great ideas of men and women of history are revealed in their works, whether paintings or writings or music. Art appreciation is taught through Picture Study, which introduces the child to the works of a great artist one at a time, allows her to look at it undisturbed, then asks for a narration of what she has observed. Music Appreciation is taught in much the same way, listening to the works of great composers.

In Charlotte's schools one afternoon each week was devoted to spending time outdoors. For nature study, children take along a sketchpad to draw and label the different aspects of nature they observe. Regular nature study paves the way for meaningful science instruction.

Charlotte emphasized the importance of children's understanding math concepts before ever doing paper and pencil equations. They should be encouraged to see and experience hands on how math applies to life situations.

Poetry was an integral part of daily life in Charlotte's schools. However, poetry is not presented in order to be analyzed, criticized, and told what to think about it. Poetry, as in other subjects that introduce the child to great ideas of the past, is shared together and allowed to stand on its own, encouraging the child to develop his own relationship with that poet and his thoughts.

Since grammar is the study of words, not of things, Charlotte thought it is a difficult concept for young children to grasp. She recommended postponing the formal study of grammar until the child reached the age of ten. Consistent practice in narration, dictation, and copywork lays the foundation for grammar study.

Charlotte's method of studying the Bible was simple: read it every day. She gave children credit for being able to understand passages directly from Scripture, and she assigned several large portions to be memorized and recited each school year.

History comes to life for children through the use of living books, biographies, autobiographies, and narration. In addition, Charlotte's students kept a Book of Centuries that was similar to a personal time line in a notebook, adding people and events to the pages as they study about them.

Just as history is the story of what happened to a person, geography is the story of where he was and how his surroundings affected what happened. Geography is best taught through living books, also. Short map drills can supplement.

Since Charlotte lived in England, her students learned French as a second language. Consistent with her philosophy, a foreign language is best taught in a living setting. Ambleside Online is a free homeschool curriculum designed to be as close as possible to the curriculum that Charlotte Mason used in her own private and correspondence schools.

Eclectic

Make it YOUR own!

Come see our homeschooling approach and how we have structured our homeschool curriculum and schedule.