Jeannie

I have been fighting with the idea to unschool for the last almost 9 months. I did post about 6 months ago and after reading threads and looking at sites I have a way better understanding to what unschooling is. I am down to 1 fear about taking us into our unschooling journey and that is, how will they learn to read? Sounds silly . My homeschooling kids are 7 4 and 2. I am a little scared to do this but have faith in my kids and now just need a little faith in myself. I want to have 1 year school free and see where this leads us.

Do you always know you wanted to unschool?
Was anyone ever scared like me?

By the way my name is Jeannie, mom to 6, we live in Florida :)
Thanks,

plaidpanties666

--- In [email protected], "Jeannie" <the_smittys@...> wrote:
>
> I have been fighting with the idea to unschool for the last almost 9 months. I did post about 6 months ago and after reading threads and looking at sites I have a way better understanding to what unschooling is. I am down to 1 fear about taking us into our unschooling journey and that is, how will they learn to read?
******************

They will learn however they are best suited to learning, just like anything else. Ray learned to read by memorizing words until he had "enough" for things to make sense to him. Mo learned to read by puzzling through the phonics, based on the alphabet song (that was interesting, when she'd use "y" to make a "w" sound in her writing). A friend of mine's dd could read sentences before words - how's that for different? But that was how her mind worked. Some kids learn to read in a very predictable progression, and others by a means so individual it almost seems like magic.

Researchers on the subject of reading emphasize that the most important thing for a child to learn to read is to have a print-rich environment. The majority of western homes have a print-rich environment fairly naturally. As long as there are things to read and people using print regularly, kids will learn to read.

Read to your kids whenever they want and follow their cues on the matter. If they want you to point to the words, do it! But if they don't, don't fuss about it. Every kid learns a little differently. Some kids enjoy having subtitles on movies and tv as a way of connecting print to words. Others learn a lot from playing video games either with someone reading to them or just puzzling things out on their own.

Plenty of unschooling reading stories here:

http://sandradodd.com/reading

> Do you always know you wanted to unschool?

I didn't even want to homeschool at first! Ray's a stepson, and I sort of got dragged into home education with him. With Mo I started out with something based on Montessori at home, but then drifted into unschooling.

> Was anyone ever scared like me?

I wasn't worried about the "academic" sides of things, personally. It was more the parenting side I struggled with. I wasn't sure I believed this crazy notion that its okay to be kind to children - not "cruel to be kind" but actually kind and helpful. The difference is so stark to me, its amazing. Unschooling creates a muuuuuch warmer home environment.

---Meredith (Mo 8, Ray 16)

Deb Lewis

***how will they learn to read?***

Each in their own way!

Dylan wrote words before he could read. I don't remember that he learned the alphabet but when he wanted to write, and he liked to make up stories, he'd ask me how to write words. So, he could write lots of words before he was reading. I don't know when he started reading for sure but he could read Goosebumps books by the time he was six and when he was seven he read Four Past Midnight and followed the stories even though he skipped over many whole words he didn't know.

We did not ever have a reading lesson or sit down to write the alphabet. We read to him a lot. When he was a baby I'd read the newspaper or magazine or cookbooks aloud if I was holding him. Not with a goal of teaching him but because if I was reading aloud I got to read and if I read silently I was supposed to be talking to him instead.<g> I read a lot and we always had books and reading material around. Dylan liked books and we purchased a lot of books for him. Friends who knew he liked stories gave him books.

A couple of things happened that I think contributed to him reading really well. He loved Godzilla movies and many of them were in Japanese with subtitles, and he liked video games and many of them had bits to read. He was utterly fascinated with monsters and horror and any book or movie with a horror cover was a book or movie he wanted to read or see.<g>

He was reading really well, reading adult content type stuff and getting every word and able to pronounce even words he didn't know the meaning of at least by the time he was twelve. His reading progressed slowly and improved over those years between Goosebumps and more complex stuff. Twelve sticks in my mind because I remember thinking he could read aloud better than his dad, without stumbling over words or getting lost and that was his twelfth birthday and he was reading a passage ( a loooonnng passage<g>) from The Lurking Fear.

***Do you always know you wanted to unschool?***

We always intended to keep Dylan out of school. Between the time he was born and the time he would have started kindergarten I had read the John Holt books and some others, subscribed to Growing Without Schooling and had found Sandra Dodd's writing in Home Education Magazine. He never went to school and is now more than a year past compulsory school age in our state. He'll be eighteen next May.

***Was anyone ever scared like me?***

I was not afraid of unschooling but was afraid of failing as a parent. Those are pretty common fears. When you're worried, it's an opportunity to do more. The more you do, the more you *can do* - as someone famous once said. <g>



Deb Lewis

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Bekki Kirby

***how will they learn to read?***

My kids taught themselves. My daughter got a LeapPad back when those
were cool, and they had phonics books. She wanted them... asked for
them... so I bought the whole set. She happily spent hours some days,
going through the books. Pretty soon she had it down. She was only
4.
My son picked up the basic idea- words are symbols that mean
something- at 2, with the word Wal-Mart. LOL From there he just kept
picking up new words. He LOVES video games and computer stuff and TV,
and it's all full of words. "Play" "enter" "pause" and so on. He can
read at probably a 3rd grade level, and he turns 5 in February.

***Do you always know you wanted to unschool?***

I always knew I wanted to homeschool. I really looked forward to
actually teaching. I wanted to have time with my kids where I said
"this is how this is done" and they'd sit there, raptly in awe... that
has NOT panned out. LOL They have their own strong opinions about
things, but will sometimes listen to scandalous retellings of history,
or just last night (while we were going to bed) my son asked why the
sun goes down when it gets "moony"... so I tried my best with no
visual aids to describe planet orbits and rotation. But it likely
didn't teach him much of anything, we were too sleepy to really care.
I spent some serious time about 5 years ago devising an awesome Harry
Potter-based curriculum, just to have my daughter say "meh" and go
back to her Leapster. She taught ME that time. :-)

***Was anyone ever scared like me?***

Oh, definitely. I felt better knowing my kids could read... but my
daughter's math is "behind schedule" and I hear about it from my mom a
LOT. My son is fourteen times as stubborn as my daughter, so there's
definitely no chance of me slipping in any workbooks like I did with
my daughter earlier in my transition to unschooling. I'll really have
to trust the process with him, and that's scary for me.
Luckily, the kids I've birthed so far don't give me an option. I
couldn't possibly send them to school and there's no way on earth I
could make them sit down and conform to a curriculum. So, I'm being
dragged along on the unschooling ride whether I like it or not. They
refuse any alternative!

--
The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but
how we behave when we don't know what to do.
-John Holt

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without  losing
your temper or your self-confidence.
-Robert Frost

Mother of four angels, two pirates, and one TBD
 Kayla (11)
 Hunter (b. 8/9/03, d. 8/22/03)
 Jo (misc 1/15/04)
 Jared (4)
 Camelia (b. 12/16/07, d. 12/10/07)
 Hope/Chance (misc 11/25/08)
 Capt. Jack arriving end of Dec. 2009

Jeannie

Thank you all for sharing and the links as well. I am going to check them out. I do feel a bit better about my decision. Thank you!

--- In [email protected], "Jeannie" <the_smittys@...> wrote:
>
> I have been fighting with the idea to unschool for the last almost 9 months. I did post about 6 months ago and after reading threads and looking at sites I have a way better understanding to what unschooling is. I am down to 1 fear about taking us into our unschooling journey and that is, how will they learn to read? Sounds silly . My homeschooling kids are 7 4 and 2. I am a little scared to do this but have faith in my kids and now just need a little faith in myself. I want to have 1 year school free and see where this leads us.
>
> Do you always know you wanted to unschool?
> Was anyone ever scared like me?
>
> By the way my name is Jeannie, mom to 6, we live in Florida :)
> Thanks,
>

plaidpanties666

--- In [email protected], Bekki Kirby <junegoddess@...> wrote:
>He can
> read at probably a 3rd grade level, and he turns 5 in February.

I just want to clarify, here that unschooling isn't a formula for early reading. Some kids naturally read very early, and others much later. Reading isn't one skill, but a whole set of skills and some kids don't get all those skills until they're older - they're busy learning other things!

School gives the impression that kids "learn to read" at an early age - five and six is early - when what most kids are doing at that age isn't really reading. It certainly isn't reading in the sense of understanding print material to the same degree one understands verbal information! Schools don't even claim that, though. They expect kids to "read" a year or two "behind" their verbal comprehension. Generally speaking, when unschoolers say "my kid is reading" they mean that child understands as much or more from print as he or she does from speech - so there tends to be an impression that unschoolers read "later" than other kids.

> I felt better knowing my kids could read...

And, honestly, that's why I like to reassure people, at every chance! that many kids read later, and that's normal. It can be really stressful for parents to have a child who isn't reading by something like a schoolish schedule, especially in terms of dealing with other adults and all the misconceptions people have about how reading is learned in or out of school. Plenty of kids in school don't read until later, either, but that's hidden under special programs and reading groups.

>>but my
> daughter's math is "behind schedule" and I hear about it from my mom a
> LOT.

Just like reading, learning math naturally often doesn't look much like schoolish learning. Actually, with math its fair to say that it often doesn't look a darned thing like schoolish learning! Without teaching, kids pick up the concepts of math as a natural part of life. Its more like learning language than learning to read in some ways - math is everywhere the same way language is everywhere. A child sitting on the floor stacking blocks is learning about math. A kid building a tent city in the living room is learning about math. A couple of kids trading leftover Halloween candy are learning about math. They aren't learning terms and notation, but unschoolers have found that it doesn't take much to learn terms and notation. Once the concepts are learned, the rest is easy. Schools make it seem hard by trying to teach terms and notation and concepts all at the same time. They make something that can be learned by playing all day into something that takes years of plodding and still leaves most people unable to add fractions.

Bekki, have you ever read about the history of math at all? It may not be your cup of tea, but one of the common "paths" kids take while learning math naturally often looks a lot like math history. In a sense, math is so natural for humans that we can "invent" or "discover" the same concepts over and over, as children. So it might give you some backing for conversations with your mom if you have some history behind you, as it were.

Of course, there's no real need for you to defend yourself to anyone at all! You could tell your mom firmly that its none of her business how you raise your kids (nicely, if possible)!

---Meredith (Mo 8, Ray 16)

Joyce Fetteroll

On Nov 21, 2009, at 11:25 AM, Jeannie wrote:

> I am down to 1 fear about taking us into our unschooling journey
> and that is, how will they learn to read?

When I read replies to worries about learning to read that say
"They'll learn on their own in their own time," I suspect to some
that sounds neglectful and cruel as though unschoolers were saying
"It's more important I stick to the unschooling 'rule' not to teach
them so my kids have to figure it out on their own." ;-)

While "They'll learn on their own in their own time," is true of
unschooled kids, it's also true of schooled kids.

Teachers don't actually teach kids to read. They go through the
motions of teaching reading. They get kids to perform actions that
look like part of reading. And they do this *while* kids are
naturally figuring out how reading works. Educators are waving their
arms and kids are learning to read and then the educators think they
caused the kids to read.

The thing is, the educators don't realize they aren't necessary! How
could they? All kids are being instructed in reading. And the problem
is that schools need kids reading independently by 4th grade in order
for schools to function. (The curriculum is set up for teachers to be
relying on kids reading assigned material on their own by 4th grade.
Any child who can't is a problem for the orderly flow of the process
and needs pulled out for special instruction.)

It sort of reminds me of the experiments B.F. Skinner did on the
subject of superstition with pigeons: he put hungry pigeons in his
boxes with the levers that gave them food. But the food was supplied
on regular intervals, independent of the birds' actions. When he
checked on the pigeons later, they were performing odd motions --
turning counter clockwise, tossing their heads. The appearance of the
food while the pigeons were moving randomly, reinforced those motions
and eventually the pigeons felt the motions were causing the food to
appear.

How did you teach your kids to speak?

Speaking is a way way harder process than reading! Kids are beginning
with no notion that language even exists and yet within a few years
they've got it nailed. We supply the environment and the interaction
and they supply the process of pulling it all together into something
that makes sense to them. They use the feedback they get (like
whether someone understands them) to refine their understanding.
That's also how *all* kids learn to read, regardless of whether
there's a teacher in the room explaining how C and A and T make CAT
or not ;-) (Or how all kids *would* learn to read if the naturally
later readers didn't get demoralized by teachers insisting that they
can read and just need to work more :-/)

If we didn't know kids could learn to speak on their own in their own
time, it would make sense that kids would need to go through some
oral alphabet in order to put those sounds together to say words. ;-)
But that's not how it works!

It makes sense that kids need to know the alphabet before they can
put all the sounds together to read a word. And yet, that's not how
it works! While what makes sense to each child is different, people
tend to gravitate toward seeing words made up of chunks rather than
individual letters. (Probably more similar to learning Chinese or
Japanese characters than what we imagine kids are actually doing with
the individual letters.) But which chunks a child begins with as
they're building their reading "tower" is as varied as children are.

When my daughter was learning to speak, the ends of words were
important to her. Milk was "gook", ambulance was "blance", moon was
"moo-neh". I could have worried that she wouldn't ever pay attention
to the beginning of words. But fortunately language acquisition is so
common and effortless and no one's pressuring kids to speak by age 2
that it never crossed my mind that she wouldn't figure it out even if
she seemed to be taking an odd path.

When she was 18 mos she had most of the alphabet down. I could flip a
lower case p around and she'd tell me it was a d. I could flip it
over and she'd tell me it was a b then a q. It seemed she was
destined for early reading. Well she didn't. She *wrote* words well
before she had interest in reading other people's words. At some
point she could read but did only what was necessary. She would
"read" menus on video games (but how much was recognition and how
much reading?) but skipped past any story bits that might get thrown
on the screen. Though I know she could read at least by 10 (she read
Harry Potter aloud smoothly), she didn't read a book on her own for
pleasure until she was 12. She didn't even read Captain Underpants
which she loved. (She started reading books, by the way, with Janet
Evanovich's adult mystery series which she had started listening to
on tape.) In school she would have been humiliated for not wanting to
read. Out of school she did fine because she could draw on all sorts
of other ways to learn that schools can't support (listening and
watching and doing).

Joyce

Faith Void Taintor

Beautifully written Joyce. I'd like to add an observation Malila, my
12 yo who just started school made recently.

After two weeks of classes she said, we don't learn anything *IN*
school. The teachers tell is what the learn but we are responsible to
learn it. She isn't going there to learn, she already knows how to do
that. But I thought that interesting that she would pick up on that,
and so quickly.


Faith

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 22, 2009, at 7:22 AM, Joyce Fetteroll <jfetteroll@...>
wrote:

>
> On Nov 21, 2009, at 11:25 AM, Jeannie wrote:
>
> > I am down to 1 fear about taking us into our unschooling journey
> > and that is, how will they learn to read?
>
> When I read replies to worries about learning to read that say
> "They'll learn on their own in their own time," I suspect to some
> that sounds neglectful and cruel as though unschoolers were saying
> "It's more important I stick to the unschooling 'rule' not to teach
> them so my kids have to figure it out on their own." ;-)
>
> While "They'll learn on their own in their own time," is true of
> unschooled kids, it's also true of schooled kids.
>
> Teachers don't actually teach kids to read. They go through the
> motions of teaching reading. They get kids to perform actions that
> look like part of reading. And they do this *while* kids are
> naturally figuring out how reading works. Educators are waving their
> arms and kids are learning to read and then the educators think they
> caused the kids to read.
>
> The thing is, the educators don't realize they aren't necessary! How
> could they? All kids are being instructed in reading. And the problem
> is that schools need kids reading independently by 4th grade in order
> for schools to function. (The curriculum is set up for teachers to be
> relying on kids reading assigned material on their own by 4th grade.
> Any child who can't is a problem for the orderly flow of the process
> and needs pulled out for special instruction.)
>
> It sort of reminds me of the experiments B.F. Skinner did on the
> subject of superstition with pigeons: he put hungry pigeons in his
> boxes with the levers that gave them food. But the food was supplied
> on regular intervals, independent of the birds' actions. When he
> checked on the pigeons later, they were performing odd motions --
> turning counter clockwise, tossing their heads. The appearance of the
> food while the pigeons were moving randomly, reinforced those motions
> and eventually the pigeons felt the motions were causing the food to
> appear.
>
> How did you teach your kids to speak?
>
> Speaking is a way way harder process than reading! Kids are beginning
> with no notion that language even exists and yet within a few years
> they've got it nailed. We supply the environment and the interaction
> and they supply the process of pulling it all together into something
> that makes sense to them. They use the feedback they get (like
> whether someone understands them) to refine their understanding.
> That's also how *all* kids learn to read, regardless of whether
> there's a teacher in the room explaining how C and A and T make CAT
> or not ;-) (Or how all kids *would* learn to read if the naturally
> later readers didn't get demoralized by teachers insisting that they
> can read and just need to work more :-/)
>
> If we didn't know kids could learn to speak on their own in their own
> time, it would make sense that kids would need to go through some
> oral alphabet in order to put those sounds together to say words. ;-)
> But that's not how it works!
>
> It makes sense that kids need to know the alphabet before they can
> put all the sounds together to read a word. And yet, that's not how
> it works! While what makes sense to each child is different, people
> tend to gravitate toward seeing words made up of chunks rather than
> individual letters. (Probably more similar to learning Chinese or
> Japanese characters than what we imagine kids are actually doing with
> the individual letters.) But which chunks a child begins with as
> they're building their reading "tower" is as varied as children are.
>
> When my daughter was learning to speak, the ends of words were
> important to her. Milk was "gook", ambulance was "blance", moon was
> "moo-neh". I could have worried that she wouldn't ever pay attention
> to the beginning of words. But fortunately language acquisition is so
> common and effortless and no one's pressuring kids to speak by age 2
> that it never crossed my mind that she wouldn't figure it out even if
> she seemed to be taking an odd path.
>
> When she was 18 mos she had most of the alphabet down. I could flip a
> lower case p around and she'd tell me it was a d. I could flip it
> over and she'd tell me it was a b then a q. It seemed she was
> destined for early reading. Well she didn't. She *wrote* words well
> before she had interest in reading other people's words. At some
> point she could read but did only what was necessary. She would
> "read" menus on video games (but how much was recognition and how
> much reading?) but skipped past any story bits that might get thrown
> on the screen. Though I know she could read at least by 10 (she read
> Harry Potter aloud smoothly), she didn't read a book on her own for
> pleasure until she was 12. She didn't even read Captain Underpants
> which she loved. (She started reading books, by the way, with Janet
> Evanovich's adult mystery series which she had started listening to
> on tape.) In school she would have been humiliated for not wanting to
> read. Out of school she did fine because she could draw on all sorts
> of other ways to learn that schools can't support (listening and
> watching and doing).
>
> Joyce
>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

plaidpanties666

--- In [email protected], Faith Void Taintor <littlemsvoid@...> wrote:
> After two weeks of classes she said, we don't learn anything *IN*
> school. The teachers tell is what the learn but we are responsible to
> learn it.

Its a common complaint by families who pull kids out of school in the middle grades - that they were essentially home educating anyway, so what was the point of sending kids to school? The kids who have the right subset of abilities manage to get most of the homework done in school itself - clandestinely, while the teacher is trying to get the attention of the class most of the time. The kids who don't figure out that trick are loaded down with homework - often the kids who need more social interactions or more movement.

> She isn't going there to learn, she already knows how to do
> that. But I thought that interesting that she would pick up on that,
> and so quickly.

Its startling how obvious it is once you step away from the assumption that school is where learning happens. I don't mean you had that assumption, Faith, but that most kids are told over and over, every time they ask "why do I have to go to school" that its where people learn things. Malila doesn't have that backlog of brainwashing, so she can see the reality of the situation a little more clearly than the students or teachers in the building.

There *is* learning going on in schools, but its not what's being taught. Kids learn a lot about things like powerlessness and denial and a mistrust of humanity. Humanity in school is ugly. Not all of it all the time, but persistently. I'm fascinated to hear/read what Malila has to say about her experiences!

---Meredith (Mo 8, Ray 16)

Jeannie

Joyce,
Thank you for your post. It really made sense.

I have a 2 year old who was silent until he was 18 months old. The kid said maybe a few words a day until about 18 months when he started to talk in complete sentences. He did not have to talk. If he walked in the kitchen with a cup we knew he wanted a drink. If he pointed at the fridge we knew he was hungry. He has 5 older brothers and sister so he was around "words" all the time. When he started to speak in full sentences he blew or minds. My sister in law said "maybe he never had anything important to say " LOL

SO reading your post make sense to things that happen around here. We never taught our kids to ride bikes. They don't even have there own (until christmas) but 2 of them got on the bikes of the children next door and rode with not lessons or training wheels.

We never "potty trained" but they all di d it in there own time. So maybe we would be good unschoolers since my husband and I let them go at there on pace :)

Thank you,
Jeannie

--- In [email protected], Joyce Fetteroll <jfetteroll@...> wrote:
>
>
> On Nov 21, 2009, at 11:25 AM, Jeannie wrote:
>
> > I am down to 1 fear about taking us into our unschooling journey
> > and that is, how will they learn to read?
>
> When I read replies to worries about learning to read that say
> "They'll learn on their own in their own time," I suspect to some
> that sounds neglectful and cruel as though unschoolers were saying
> "It's more important I stick to the unschooling 'rule' not to teach
> them so my kids have to figure it out on their own." ;-)
>
> While "They'll learn on their own in their own time," is true of
> unschooled kids, it's also true of schooled kids.
>
> Teachers don't actually teach kids to read. They go through the
> motions of teaching reading. They get kids to perform actions that
> look like part of reading. And they do this *while* kids are
> naturally figuring out how reading works. Educators are waving their
> arms and kids are learning to read and then the educators think they
> caused the kids to read.
>
> The thing is, the educators don't realize they aren't necessary! How
> could they? All kids are being instructed in reading. And the problem
> is that schools need kids reading independently by 4th grade in order
> for schools to function. (The curriculum is set up for teachers to be
> relying on kids reading assigned material on their own by 4th grade.
> Any child who can't is a problem for the orderly flow of the process
> and needs pulled out for special instruction.)
>
> It sort of reminds me of the experiments B.F. Skinner did on the
> subject of superstition with pigeons: he put hungry pigeons in his
> boxes with the levers that gave them food. But the food was supplied
> on regular intervals, independent of the birds' actions. When he
> checked on the pigeons later, they were performing odd motions --
> turning counter clockwise, tossing their heads. The appearance of the
> food while the pigeons were moving randomly, reinforced those motions
> and eventually the pigeons felt the motions were causing the food to
> appear.
>
> How did you teach your kids to speak?
>
> Speaking is a way way harder process than reading! Kids are beginning
> with no notion that language even exists and yet within a few years
> they've got it nailed. We supply the environment and the interaction
> and they supply the process of pulling it all together into something
> that makes sense to them. They use the feedback they get (like
> whether someone understands them) to refine their understanding.
> That's also how *all* kids learn to read, regardless of whether
> there's a teacher in the room explaining how C and A and T make CAT
> or not ;-) (Or how all kids *would* learn to read if the naturally
> later readers didn't get demoralized by teachers insisting that they
> can read and just need to work more :-/)
>
> If we didn't know kids could learn to speak on their own in their own
> time, it would make sense that kids would need to go through some
> oral alphabet in order to put those sounds together to say words. ;-)
> But that's not how it works!
>
> It makes sense that kids need to know the alphabet before they can
> put all the sounds together to read a word. And yet, that's not how
> it works! While what makes sense to each child is different, people
> tend to gravitate toward seeing words made up of chunks rather than
> individual letters. (Probably more similar to learning Chinese or
> Japanese characters than what we imagine kids are actually doing with
> the individual letters.) But which chunks a child begins with as
> they're building their reading "tower" is as varied as children are.
>
> When my daughter was learning to speak, the ends of words were
> important to her. Milk was "gook", ambulance was "blance", moon was
> "moo-neh". I could have worried that she wouldn't ever pay attention
> to the beginning of words. But fortunately language acquisition is so
> common and effortless and no one's pressuring kids to speak by age 2
> that it never crossed my mind that she wouldn't figure it out even if
> she seemed to be taking an odd path.
>
> When she was 18 mos she had most of the alphabet down. I could flip a
> lower case p around and she'd tell me it was a d. I could flip it
> over and she'd tell me it was a b then a q. It seemed she was
> destined for early reading. Well she didn't. She *wrote* words well
> before she had interest in reading other people's words. At some
> point she could read but did only what was necessary. She would
> "read" menus on video games (but how much was recognition and how
> much reading?) but skipped past any story bits that might get thrown
> on the screen. Though I know she could read at least by 10 (she read
> Harry Potter aloud smoothly), she didn't read a book on her own for
> pleasure until she was 12. She didn't even read Captain Underpants
> which she loved. (She started reading books, by the way, with Janet
> Evanovich's adult mystery series which she had started listening to
> on tape.) In school she would have been humiliated for not wanting to
> read. Out of school she did fine because she could draw on all sorts
> of other ways to learn that schools can't support (listening and
> watching and doing).
>
> Joyce
>

eintob, d.a.

--- In [email protected], "plaidpanties666" <meredith@...> wrote:
> Its a common complaint by families who pull kids out of school in the middle grades - that they were essentially home educating anyway, so what was the point of sending kids to school? The kids who have the right subset of abilities manage to get most of the homework done in school itself - clandestinely, while the teacher is trying to get the attention of the class most of the time. The kids who don't figure out that trick are loaded down with homework - often the kids who need more social interactions or more movement.

^^^^This. My daughter was one of the latter ones.
My always unschooled dd9 insisted on trying school last year. I put her on the waiting list at a nearby school that was very small and said things I liked: that because they have combined age classrooms the kids go at their own pace and that they didn't believe in homework. She began attending at the end of July.

She loved it. She didn't like the silly things like arbitrary rules and being spoken to condescendingly by one of the teachers but she figured she'd take the good with the bad and make the best of it. But slowly it became obvious that they weren't as flexible and accommodating as it they purported to be. They had this practice of starting new units by handing her a stack of papers and saying "There ya go." She would ask for help in learning how to do it and was told "You'll figure it out". She would try to collaborate with friends to find out the steps and would get separated. Pretty soon she had so much work that they were requiring her to stay in on breaks to complete it. And there'd be hours of it on weekends. She finally decided last week she'd had enough of it. I'm glad to have her back. :)

~Michelle in AZ