Home Teaching Help

Last weekend was my first homeschool convention of the season. I traveled to what I consider my "home" event - the CHEF of LA convention near Baton Rouge. Though the attendance is not high at this event, it is always encouraging to see familiar faces and meet new homeschoolers who are just beginning their journey.

Mike Farris of Home School Legal Defense Association was a keynote speaker this year. Though the graduation of my youngest son finished my years as an active homeschooler, I still like to stay abreast of what is happening in the community, so I purchased the recordings of his sessions. He opened with a "Past, Present and Future" view of homeschooling which I found very interesting! The homeschooling movement has reached the 30-year mark, and it is obvious that God has intervened repeatedly to open doors and clear the path. However, lest we become complacent in our assumption that our rights to homeschool will continue, I encourage you to beware. There are still many individuals and groups who seek to quietly take those rights away. Stay alert to what is going on outside your homeschool walls ... the enemy is prowling ...

While a wide variety of informative sessions were being held, my assistant, Sherrie, and I spoke with veteran and prospective homeschoolers about their options. For those of us who grew up with a classroom education, textbooks and related materials seem to be the norm for education; but there is so very much more available. I think back to the various travels that my boys experienced through the pages of biographies, classics and historical fiction, immersed in the lives and thoughts of the characters in the books; and I would not want to return to the surface-skimming pages of a textbook. One episode in particular has stuck in my memory for some 14 years ...

In our first year of using Sonlight, my 5th grader had read a biography of Orville and Wilbur Wright, and his Language Arts assignment was to pretend that he was their mother, Mrs. Wright, and write a letter to her grandchildren relating a story from their father's childhood. The idea was for my son to review all the accounts he had read of the Wright brothers' adventures and select one to narrate in an informal letter format. However, my son informed me that he couldn't complete the assignment. "Why not?" I asked. "Because the Wright brothers were bachelors all their lives, and they didn't have children for her to write to!" was his reply. I was momentarily dumbfounded. I had not grasped that level of detail about their lives from the textbook that I had read as a child. I knew that they flew the first plane at Kitty Hawk, NC, in the early 1900s, but I did not know that their father owned a bicycle shop and their childhood exposure to mechanical things had sparked their inventive minds. This was a clear illustration of the level of comprehension and retention that a child experiences from real books as opposed to textbooks.

What are your stories? Did you have a Sonlight "aha" moment? I would love for you to share with us all ...

Kelly