A Typical Homeschool Day--Part 2

Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.-- W. B. Yeats

Once Bill agreed to let me educate the kids at home, the next step was to choose a curriculum to use. I would love to say that our choice was the product of thorough research and prayer, but it wasn't. It was mostly due to self-awareness and grace. I knew what I had liked about my own education. I loved reading, but the reading had to be a quality story about something real, not churned out pap with an obvious moral. (I would now call this the difference between a "living book" like Freedom Summer and a "junk food" book like Dora the Explorer Makes a Friend.) Grace came in the form of a homeschooling acquaintance who invited me into her home to pick up some catalogs. She told me about her curriculum and gave me some information to start me on my journey.

What ended up being more important, however, was her hospitality. She had originally only intended to hand me the catalogs, but instead she invited me and the 4 kids in to lunch. Her home was not clean, but it was orderly and hospitable and full of 6 loving, well-behaved kids, and I recognized that it was the sort of home I wanted for our family. This home truly sold me on homeschooling, and in my bleak moments, it still does. Jodie's description "lots of really good books and poetry...flexible...not required to enroll their school but you can if you want to...solid Catholic foundation" sold me on the curriculum.

The curriculum which she uses, and we use too, is called Mother of Divine Grace and is a Catholic classical curriculum created by Laura Berquist. Reading Mrs. Berquist's Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum, I recognized that the foundations of the classical style appealed to me--especially the living books part, and her recommendations of how to teach a classically designed curriculum are intelligent and do not neglect that Heaven is the final end for Man. I have to also admit that knowing that my brother John uses this curriculum and knows Mrs. Berquist personally and respects her makes me even more confident about it.

We are currently in the grammatical stage or pre-grammatical stage with all the kids. At this stage the curriculum emphasizes that the tools for education are knowledge of faith and fluency in mathematics, language, and memory. The day to day subjects we cover--based on the syllabi from Mother of Divine Grace--emphasize those skills specifically.

While Mother of Divine Grace tells me what to teach, I have found that the Catholic Charlotte Mason approach described in Elizabeth Foss' book Real Learning: Education in the Heart of the Home and the ongoing discussions at the 4Real boards have given me the example of how. They have given me a view inside the houses of many other faith-filled, often times large, homeschool families so I can see what homeschooling can look like on a day to day, season to season, Holy Day to Holy Day basis. Last summer when I went to hear her speak, I was very happy to hear Laura Berquist say that she didn't think there is any difference between her approach to education and the Charlotte Mason method Mrs. Foss uses and which is based on Charolotte Mason's 20 principles.

And so it is while keeping all of these principles and examples in mind that I construct our day to day learning environment and schedule. Before I move on to what a typical homeschool day looks like at our house, I want to make a few notes. First, if it sounds like this was all my idea, it was. Until fairly recently, Bill's engagement in homeschooling has been skeptical, supportive and minimal. I totally appreciate that since it has given me room to grow to where I am now when he is starting to take a more active interest. My ideas are better developed now. Second, while I have many lofty, faith-based and intellectual reasons to homeschool, in the end it boils down to the fact that I love it and it's working. That's why we're doing what we do.