So you want to homeschool. That’s great! For us at Homeschoolers for Christ, God has called us to teach our children at home rather than sending them to a traditional school, either public or private. We prayed, sometimes we cried, we studied God’s Word, and ultimately, He led us all to the same decision: “Train your children yourself, at home, and lean on Me for all things.”
“Okay,” you said, “I’ll do it.” Then you started researching curriculum and laws for your state, right? And you saw all this stuff, and you thought, “Lord, what in the world do you want me to do? I am so confused!” Been there, done that! All of us have gone through it at some point or another, some of us several times! I sheepishly raise my hand to that one.
Take a step back, and take a deep breath. You can do this! We will help you wade through the craziness that is homeschooling in today’s world. In the first of several articles, I hope to acquaint you with the different styles of homeschooling families today, and in so doing, equip you to make the best decision for your family. So, what are the basic styles of homeschooling?
The easiest to explain, and the one that you probably thought about doing at first, is the traditional, “school at home” method. This is almost self-explanatory. You buy the textbooks, workbooks, and other goodies, and you do what they say when they say it. It’s literally, school at home. You operate in much the same way as a traditional brick-and-mortar school – only instead of 15 or 30 kids in your class, you teach one (or several, if God has blessed you with more than one child).
Another popular method of homeschooling is called the trivium, or classical, approach. Three stages constitute children’s learning: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. As the children progress through the stages, children focus on systematic learning, logical reasoning, and persuasion. The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer offers a concise step-by-step guide to teaching your children classically.
A style of homeschooling that wins reviews time and time again is the unit study approach. Children learn all subjects of school focusing on one unit at a time, for example, space. So math would be counting planets, history would be the discovery of the planets, science would involve books and experiments about space, even the music would be “out of this world.” When that unit is finished, choose another, perhaps the American Revolution. Again, as the children learn about the American Revolution, all subjects revolve around that topic.
A style that is growing in popularity is the Charlotte Mason approach. Charlotte Mason was a teacher who lived at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. She advocated an education based almost entirely on great literature and hands-on learning, with nature studies, Shakespeare education, and even art and handicrafts. Hers is a very untraditional approach, yet it is incredibly effective.
Maybe several of these styles appeal to you. Homeschoolers call this eclectic homeschooling, a mix of different styles and resources. Some subjects would use traditional textbooks, perhaps, and others would be more literature-based. Still other subjects may be hands-on, while others are more of a unit-study type approach. There are many definitions of eclectic homeschooling, as well, because of the varying degrees of using each style, resource, and for which subjects.
Unschooling is a very different approach to the education of children. In this style, the children lead their learning process. If they develop an interest in cars, they exhaust resources related to cars, digging in as deep as they care to go. If they suddenly switch gears and find horses interesting, they again go digging, looking for as much information as they can find about horses until they develop yet another interest. Parents usually do not use a set curriculum in an unschooling setting.
So there you have it – a very quick and broad view of the various styles of homeschooling. In our following articles, we will look at the different styles above more in-depth to help you understand the world of homeschooling and the various methods you can employ to help your children learn to love learning.
