Homeschooling the Little Ones

The Four Moms are:

• Connie @ Smockity Frocks is a wee bit distracted because she just might be working on having a baby.;-)
• Kimberly @ Raising Olives writes about homeschooling the little ones here. 
• KimC @ Life in a Shoe blogs about homeschooling little ones here.
• and ME

This week we're talking about homeschooling little ones. Here are my thoughts:

You can't really homeschool anybody until you have a good relationship. This means you love and cherish your children and they love you and trust you - and, yes, that old fashioned word "Obey." For the rest- up until about first grade, more or less, I think you should be doing chores together, reading together, singing together, playing and working and worshipping together, telling stories, and doing this kind of thing, that sort of thing, some of this, some of that, plenty of this, and that's about it. This 'playing' around that kids should be doing when they are little is incredibly important, far more important than many people realize.


A recent study in England confirms that children need extensive play time in their developing years:

Far from getting cleverer, our 11-year-olds are, in fact, less “intelligent” than their counterparts of 30 years ago. Or so say a team who are among Britain’s most respected education researchers.

After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King’s College London confidently declares: “The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years’ worth in the past two decades.”

It’s an extraordinary claim. But it’s one that should startle parents and teachers out of complacency. Shocked by the findings, experts are questioning our entire exam system and calling for radical changes in the way our children are taught in primary schools.

In their painstaking research project Adey and his colleague, psychology professor Michael Shayer, compared the results of today’s children with those of children who took exactly the same test in the mid-1990s and also 30 years ago. While most exams have changed (been made easier, if you listen to the critics) this one is the same as it was in 1976 when pupils first chewed their pencils over the problems.

In the easiest question, children are asked to watch as water is poured up to the brim of a tall, thin container. From there the water is tipped into a small fat glass. The tall vessel is refilled. Do both beakers now hold the same amount of water? “It’s frightening how many children now get this simple question wrong,” says scientist Denise Ginsburg, Shayer’s wife and another of the research team.

There's more, much more:

“By stressing the basics — reading and writing — and testing like crazy you reduce the level of cognitive stimulation. Children have the facts but they are not thinking very well,” says Adey. “And they are not getting hands-on physical experience of the way materials behave.”

Ginsburg says parents too can do their bit. “When did children stop playing with mud, plasticine and Meccano and start playing with Xboxes and computer games?” she asks. Parents should switch off the television and “sit children around the dinner table to debate issues such as ‘What should we have done about the whale in the Thames?’ ” says Adey.

If these experts are right — and our children are losing the ability to think, the burning question is: what is the value of what they are being taught in primary school and of all those test results that every year rise to new heights? Paul Black, professor of education at King’s College, London is one of the experts so startled by these findings that he now wants ministers to reassess what our children are being taught.

“The decline shown up by this research is big and it is worrying,” he says. “It casts doubt on claims that standards are improving . . . There is not much evidence, in fact I don’t know of any good evidence, that the things tested at the moment in national tests at the age of 11 and 14 are of long-term benefit to learning . . . The government should look at this again.”

So, who writes these tests and why do we trust them? Are we sure they really measure what we think they do?

This week our family is on vacation because we have a good friend's wedding to attend, so we decided to stretch out our time and visit some interesting sites. We went to the ocean. We've lived near the sea before, many times, but the last time was when the Boy was two, and he didn't remember it. He came up out of the chilly embrace of a roguish wave sputtering in delight and informed me, "just so you know, the Atlantic Ocean is salty."
I was surprised, because he really should have known that, and he explained that he was aware of that, he'd read it in books, but that wasn't the same as being there. He had not known that a salty ocean would taste the way it did.
Children need to experience these things when they are small as much as possible. The child who has played in mud puddles and built little dams along side streams and floated leaf boats in ponds will understand it in his bones when he is taught formal lessons about viscosity, erosion, and water flow, about the geography of peninsulas and islands, about evaporation and more.


Miss Mason wrote, on page 79-80 of Home Education (the third book in her series):

There are, what I may call, dynamic relations to be established. He must stand and walk and run and jump with ease and grace. He must skate and swim and ride and drive, dance and row and sail a boat. He should be able to make free with his mother earth and to do whatever the principle of gravitation will allow. This is an elemental relationship for the lack of which nothing compensates. Power over Material––Another elemental relationship, which every child should be taught and encouraged to set up, is that of power over material. Every child makes sand castles, mud-pies, paper boats, and he or she should go on to work in clay, wood, brass, iron, leather, dress-stuffs, food-stuffs, furnishing-stuffs. He should be able to make with his hands and should take delight in making.

Playing with real stuff (not computer games) is the stuff that later learning will build upon.

If you live in a three story apartment building, you can still let them splash in the sink and bathtub, take them to the park, go out to muck about in mud puddles, drive out to stream or lake, take walks together, and find a tree to climb. Kids need these experiences.

After that, well, we pretty much did the sort of things listed for Amblesideonline, see years one, two, three, etc.

Come back next week, and every week, to see what else we're blogging about.  In the meantime, you might enjoy seeing how this large homeschooling family does on vacation.=)

quick inventory of what we did yesterday in Philadelphia
Cool idea for an easy but very special travel journal
Troubling trends on the freedom front
Look at this booklist- these are the titles the eight of us brought along on this trip!
The Brandywine River art museum, and more (so special!)
wild dolphins!!!  Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Previous Four Moms Posts:

• May 27 - Teaching big kids: what changes? What do they need that little ones don't and where do you need to give more freedom.  How do you make the transition?
• June 3 - Putting it together. How does it work?

Previously:

• March 4: Introduction to the Four Moms series, who we are, where we come from, why we do what we do
  
• March 11: Four Moms Talk Scheduling- or why some of us don't
  
• March 12: In Which I Give Readers a Test On the Aforementioned Post
• March 18 - Live-blog day, in which all 4 of us live-blogged a real day in our home. This was exhausting!
  
• March 25 - Outings with only little ones.  Children are a blessing, but a few consistently enforced rules will make it easier to remember this, and it helps to raise them so that they are a blessing to others as well.
• April 1 - The Growing Family Beats the Incredible Shrinking Dollar: budgeting in the kitchen to feed a crowd (and I mean crowd.  My family has from 12-25 guests for dinner each week)
  
• April 8 - Menu planning, how we plan (or don't plan) to feed our hungry crewmates.
• April 15- Why we homeschool;
•   April 22: Recipes, including some our readers who shared in a joint link-fest!);
• April 29: Cooking from Scratch (you might be surprised at what can be made from scratch);
• May 3: What's our philosophy of education?
• May 13, Four Moms Choose Curriculum
• May 20: Homeschooling the Little Ones (that's today!)

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