So, do you think I have a young Andy Warhol on my hands?
Of course, I have been teaching multiple age levels since the day he was born. He nursed while I read to his sister, banged on pots while I taught her to read, and played with his train tracks on the floor while I went over math facts. In my mind, that wasn’t teaching. It was more like pacifying. Keeping him occupied. Minimizing distractions.
Then he became interested in what we were doing. I gave him a lump of play dough while we were making mountains and illustrating various types of erosion. I handed him a notebook while we were outside working on our nature journals. My daughter made him a hornbook while learning about early American education. In conversation with him, I realized that there probably are not a lot of four year olds out there who have words like “anticline” in their vocabulary and can identify the parts of a dissected sunflower.
The hardest for me has not been teaching him the skills a preschooler needs. It has been letting go of the idea that I somehow need to mimic the school system by teaching each of my children different skills from different books that are matched to their age level. That is fine for a school, but this is my home. I want our family to learn together, not independently.
Maybe this “come along side me” approach to learning really does work outside of my own idealized view of education. He doesn’t know “school.” And the world isn’t his classroom. Learning, investigating, practicing and modeling is all he has ever known. It is his world. And as my two year old daughter has begun to investigate alongside her siblings, I am feeling more relaxed about teaching her right alongside them as well.
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You know what Dana.. I went through that at first - thinking I had to do multiple grade levels at once.. but then what happened is we did Macbeth and all the kids participated.. I made no provision for having “different levels” and they all came away with something on their own level on their own and the beauty of it was I made no pre-supposition as to what they should get out of the exercise based on a grade level. I think when you say I’ll do third grade this and fifth grade that, you are making an assumption that they cannot reach above that level on their own, or that they might not grasp something because it is “too high level for them” (you’d be surprised what the little angels absorb).
I was surprised when my 5 year old started quoting Macbeth to other people - it not only stunned them but me as well.. who knew she was sopping up what we were reading. You might think they are just sitting next to you playing with playdoh - but oh my, their little minds are right there with you.
I came to realize quickly that homeschooling was never meant to replicate public school at home and in fact public schooling and it’s grade level restrictions was a system that I rejected in the first place.
Thanks, Judy. What has been interesting for me is that I “knew” that. That is the way I wanted things to work.
You would think I wouldn’t be surprised to see it actually work, but it has been nice.
I’m so glad you posted this. I have three children, my oldest is 4.5 years so we are just starting our home schooling journey. We plan to home school all of the children. While not doing any ‘formal’ teaching, I have set aside some time each day to read aloud to E4. My son B2 doesn’t usually sleep during the day so at first I found him very disruptive during reading time. He would talk a lot, and very loudly and we couldn’t really carry on. However, I’m finding he’s getting used to it and if I set him up with a puzzle or game to play near us, he’s starting to be much better. The wonderful part is, as he sits there supposedly playing, he gets to hear CS Lewis as well! And I would NEVER have considered reading CS Lewis to a 2 year old. Who knows if anything will go in to him, but it will certainly do no harm. Then what’s even more special is that the baby(4 month now) will grow up having always been exposed to these reading times.
I look forward to watching them grow and learn together.
The young ones do get a lot out of these reading times. My children love books on tape and we listen to them over and over again in the car. Recently, it has been Charlotte’s Web. My oldest has passages memorized, my four year old talks about his favorite parts and my two year old has renamed the stuffed animals and the spider in front of our house.
They’ve each gotten something out of it at their own level.
The last time we went on vacation, we checked out the Narnia series and listened to it. All of them loved it!