Our local Catholic homeschoolers’ co-op held a meeting this week with a "panel of experts," i.e., three mothers of several children who’d been homeschooling for years sat up front and answered questions. Last year, Mark reported, the questions were mostly about high-schoolers; this year, the topics were about managing schoolwork with multiple children and preschoolers.
Here are the four most useful ideas that I took away:
1. Every day, sit down with the youngest child to do her schoolwork first, and work your way up to the oldest. It’s too easy to convince ourselves that the oldest child’s work is the most important, because it seems harder, or because we’re teaching or guiding those subjects and skills for the first time, or because that work interests us more. Working one on one with the younger children, giving them the attention they need, right off the bat, helps keep them from being shoved aside and forgotten and put off till the next day. Meanwhile, the older children get practice with initiative and independent work.
2. To integrate regular prayer into the school day, hang up signs, e.g., the Meal Blessing over the dining table, the Morning Offering in the room where you begin each day, the Guardian Angel prayer in the children’s bedrooms.
3. Beginning the day with Mom reading aloud to all the children can ease everyone into the school day, even kids who aren’t "morning persons." We can even start while the kids are eating breakfast, saving time; or, if chores are to be done before schoolwork begins, then the promise of a good story can motivate kids to finish their work quickly so they don’t miss a word.
4. Group children’s learning together to save time; they will all have different educational paths anyway. It’s perfectly all right to teach two children of different ages on the same level in a particular subject, if that’s where they are (e.g. teaching phonics to a precocious reader at the same level as her older brother). Subjects such as history or nature study can be learned by a group of children, although children of different ages may focus on different aspects of a given subject. If you assign essays to multiple children on the same subject, even if they are "graded" at different levels, you can give the instruction to all at the same time.
One of the more interesting comments came from a mother who allowed her sixteen-year-old to attend the local public school this year, after he made his case (and, of course, after she’d spent many hours and many dollars researching and buying his curriculum materials for the year). She related an anecdote of how, after several weeks of waking him up after he slept through his 6 AM alarm, her husband finally convinced her to let him take the responsibility of getting up on time — the end result of which for him was a few days of riding his bike forty minutes to school each way, with her practically sitting on her hands and biting her tongue to stop herself from "rescuing" him.
This led to a discussion about "letting go" in general. Hearing the different experiences was really eye-opening. One mother commented about her son who entered the undergraduate seminary this year. He’d always been a late sleeper and she’d generally let him start his work late, at least in high school, as long as he got it finished. "Well, at [name of seminary] they have to get up for morning prayers at 5 AM. I thought, there is no way he is going to last a week there. But what do you know — he’s doing it, and he says he loves it."
The point I would make with that story, of course, is that it isn’t necessarily true that "they’ll never learn" a particular skill or habit if they’re not made to learn it before it’s needed. Often, a young person learns a skill on a just-in-time basis, when the need for the skill becomes apparent. (But the seminarian’s mother might have been trying to make a different point — I think she regarded her son’s transformation as an instance of divine intervention!)
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