I stopped teaching so my children could learn

When we started homeschooling, our kids were almost five and two and a half. We had talked briefly about homeschooling before, but it was intimidating! Then, thanks to covid, we were embarking on a homeschool journey, ready or not!

I thought we needed a curriculum, a plan, and a tight schedule. I thought we had to continue the handwriting worksheets that were so pervasive in the pre-K class, or else our four-year-old would fall behind. I felt like I needed to keep our son on task with reading, and for that, I used the teacher's manual to make sure that I introduced the correct letter sounds at the correct time.

However, the Teacher's Manual lessons were exceptionally long and seemed a convoluted way to teach letter sounds. It made more sense when I imagined a teacher trying to reach many kids at once, but it all seemed unnecessary when it was just my son and me. It made me realize that a lot of the "education" in a normal classroom that I had been keen to try to replicate was, perhaps,  just busy work to occupy kids rather than facilitating real learning. We were also still using a Montessori homeschool curriculum for ages 3-6 for both boys. I discuss this more here: From Montessori to Froebel: Our modern homeschool approach Part II.

And then (as I discussed in the above blog post), I started reading Froebel's education philosophy, the educator who invented kindergarten. He wrote that the teacher or parent is just a guide to help the kids learn rather than someone who "teaches." He said kids learn through play (as Maria Montessori said, kids learn through their "work" - what she called play). Froebel said that kids only learn when they are having fun and doing something they are interested in. As I reflected on times when our homeschooling was going particularly well, it was always when we were doing a project or reading books about stuff they wanted to know more about.

For instance, when we saw a very large orb weaver on a giant web over our window, we were inspired.

We got a bunch of books about spiders from the library, and we made anatomically correct (well, sort of!) spiders out of paper and cellulose packing peanuts. That was homeschool at its best. Homeschooling was NOT going well when I arbitrarily talked about letter sounds or made my four-year-old do worksheets.

So then I started relaxing about it all. I stopped pushing the worksheets and workbooks. I just made myself available to help with reading if he needed it. He was five by this time and enjoyed reading the Primary Phonics Early Reader books (probably because I stopped trying to "teach" him!), and I didn't use the teacher's manual anymore. I encouraged him to read the books in order because they were great about introducing a concept and providing lots of fun practice before introducing a new idea. His reading took off.

He truly loved reading and progressed so rapidly that it was surprising. By the time he was six he was reading books that I read when I was 8. His first real chapter book was my old copy of Beverly Cleary's The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and he was hooked! He started picking up just about every book he could find. He's still a voracious reader and now sometimes reads entire chapter books in one day!

The handwriting has been more of a challenge. He resisted writing for a long time once I stopped pushing the workbooks, and he did regress somewhat. Now, however, he wants to learn to write in cursive! I told him he would need to know to print first, so he is now motivated to practice writing. We tried copying words related to Halloween because it was coming up, but he wasn't that interested. Then I thought about making a joke book! He loves to tell jokes, so each day, I tell him a new joke that he writes in his Joke Book and then makes an illustration to go with it. It is kind of slow going, but he's enjoying it. I have to trust that he - that they - will learn in their own time. Kids will learn on their own schedule when they are allowed to.

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