What should a child know?
We have pretty much decided to homeschool our five year old, Sam. Believe it or not there is homeschool kindergarten. There is, however, rather more to homeschooling than just not sending your child to school and teaching him at home.
Teaching him what becomes a critical question. Or, put another way, what should a child know?
Assuming for a moment that we ignore the obvious: yes, it is a good thing for a child to know how to read, write, do sums. How old they are when they acqquire these techniques is a matter of some debate with plenty of very smart people suggesting a child can be taught to read at three while lots of equally smart people suggest that a child needs to be at least six and maybe eight before the knack of reading really takes hold. I am something of an agnostic on the question as Sam seems to be quite happily learning to read without a lot of push at our end.
No, what I am really interested in is what stories, what history, what science a very young child can become usefully acquainted with. Nursery rhymes are a starting point. they give a child a sense of the rhyme and the cadence of his language. (Something which Sam and now Max – at two – has in his bones. hearing Jack and Jill and Humpty Dumpty a couple of hundred times does that to a child.)
Classic, not Disney, Pooh. With black and white illustrations and good book design. Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little if only to expose the very youngest ear to the beauty of White’s prose.
One gazillion other kids books. Though we have become increasingly selective as virtually anything published after 1970 is filled with a sort of dismal preachiness and grim little morals. Worse, virtually all of the post 1970 little kids’ fiction seems to take the view that self esteem is really the only value. And you get to self esteem by sharing. Oh God….
Susan reads to the boys during the day but I tend to read to them for an hour or so before bed. On the bed. My test for kidlit worthiness is whether Sam or I am asleep first. Post 1970 books tend to down Dad – fast. The record belongs to Dennis Lee’s remarkably insipid Alligator Pie. Out in six minutes.
Very small children need, I think, real stories and real information. But they also need to begin the journey into the culture which they will inherit.
What we’ve been doing is reading mythology – classical and biblical (sorry Stock) and Celtic – along with lots and lots of non-fiction. Space, dinosaurs (not a favorite), buildings and how to build them, history cut away books, kitchen science, cooking, natural history (again aiming for pre-1970 so as to avoid the endless enviornmental preachiness).
One of the luxuries of home schooling is that because you are not stuck with crowd control and administration, you can cover the basics fairly quickly. You only have one or two children to teach so if someone is not getting something you can spend as long as you like making sure they grasp the concept before moving on. It also means that you can include a lot of material which would not otherwise be seen in a classroom.
So, dedicated readers, what do you remember reading when you were a kid? What do you read to your own kids?
More generally, by the time a child is nine, what should he know. Concepts, techniques, ideas, stories, knots (and I am not kidding about knots – learning the difference between a reef and a granny knot is tangible, useful skill), recipes – what should a, to use Sam’s description, “freerange kid”, know?
Spend a couple of hours with a really intelligent and clued in Montessori teacher. The Montessori math curriculum rocks in terms of kids learning numbers in a conceptual way. The main thing you want by nine is for the child to love learning new things, to feel that he or she can do so independently, and to have the skills – literacy, numeracy, perseverance, curiosity, focus – to actually do so.
I agree entirely on the knots. Knowing how to tie good sturdy knots is a skill I have only lately developed.
In reality, I would guess homeshooling is only different in the degree in which you raise kids. Parents will naturally teach children things that could be included in the middle of a home school day rather than say a weekend afternoon working together at a hobby, such as gardening or woodworking.
However, the ultimate (tongue in cheek) homeschooling: beer/wine making.
Children’s books:
1. Kipling. I’m a fan of Puck of Pook’s Hill, personally, but lots and lots of his other stuff is very readable as well. Slightly non-PC, and you might want to keep an eye on the kid’s attitudes after reading them, but very rich in all the best elements of children’s stories. And that’s what matters. (Also good in terms of building a sense of right and wrong.)
2. Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle books. Adventure, etc.
3. Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series.
4. Robert Louis Stevenson—Kidnapped is especially good, though Treasure Island is, of course, more famous.
Seek out anthologies of classic short stories: Grimm’s fairy tales, “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” sort of thing. Visit a library and peruse the children’s shelves. Write down the titles you recognize and remember favourably from your own childhood, and try to recollect at what age you read them.
Arithmetic: whatever pace the kid can handle. My guess is most children can work through the curriculum (ie. the textbooks) at a faster pace overall than the schools. Buy current textbooks and old ones. Seek out the various material intended for enriched programs. You will need to work through the books over the years, remaining slightly ahead of the children in order to be able to educate.
Sciences: you will need to examine curricula to find out at what ages kids are introduced to various subjects and concepts.
Humanities: similar to sciences.
Phys Ed: this has the potential to be difficult, unless you have a budget for league sports and push the kids a little to try at least one for each season. The important parts of what PE teaches are team play, sportsmanlike behaviour, and “how to” play various sports (rules, skills). If you can’t play basketball, where will your children learn?
Art: another potentially difficult subject, although at a young age it’s mostly just about learning to use different materials creatively.
Music: lessons? Music appreciation is easy – keep a diverse recorded library (even stuff you personally wouldn’t normally listen to) and use it regularly.
Search out curricula information on the web. Search used bookstores for old textbooks.
I assume you plan to place the kids into the high school system at some point. The cost of materials is going to increase substantially for science and shop subjects.
Should have added:
You need a confirmation plan. You can often kill a couple of birds with one stone (eg. non-fiction reading assignments – sciences, history), but you need to test comprehension and retention.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Source:Lazarus Long in Time Enough For Love
Just a thought – some books you will want to save for the children to be able to read on their own. Charlotte’s Web is a good example of a great book for a child to read one their own.
One of the things I did when the children were under 6 was to sit down and create our own stories to read at bedtime. The Tribe would all contribute and I would write the words and the children would do the pictures.
Jay, I thought you might like a link to the “Carnival of Homeschoolers”
Good luck!
Grimm’s Fairy Tales are uniquely instructive. They offer a candid and realistic view of life insofar as, in many of the stories, every single fucking one of the characters dies at the end. My son loves them.