We’ve been quiet about our foray into teaching the kids at home.  This was intentional. We knew there would be ups and downs and we felt that talking about it, or blogging about it, would hinder our ability to figure it all out.

It’s been 10 weeks now and we’ve had our rocky moments.  Some nights with a teary daughter, we truly felt that perhaps we made the wrong decision.  It’s been most difficult for our oldest, Katie, who is approaching 13, and who misses the social life she had with friends at school.

But when we took the plunge Chris and I pledged to stay the course when it became difficult, and to always remind ourselves of our reason for embarking on this educational adventure, which was simple.  We wanted to be with them every day we could.  We adjusted our work life to free up our time and suddenly we found ourselves sending them off to “work” only to be waiting for the bus to give them back to us at 3:30.

We realized over the last year that it won’t be long before Katie will fly the coop.  Approximately 2/3 of her time with us had already flown by!  Stephen, at 11, isn’t far behind, and even Helen, who is approaching 10, will only want to stay with us for a blink of an eye longer than her brother.

When we decided to teach the kids at home I met with their principal and reassured him that neither the quality of teaching nor the social atmosphere of the elementary school prompted our decision.  We are grateful he understood and actually offered to include our kids in many of the school’s activities this year.  I can’t begin to express our gratitude for this response to our decision, by him and his staff.

Not everyone responded so positively.  One of the first questions that was fired at me when our decision made the rounds of friends and acquaintances was, “Which teacher pissed you off?”   I was quite taken aback at this, and quickly reassured people, that this simply was not the case.  I don’t think everyone believes us.

The second most common response has been, “Oh, I could never have the patience to do that, I’d kill myself or my child.”  I can identify with this reaction personally, as I have said it myself in the past.

I realize now that it was easier to dismiss the idea of homeschooling when our lives simply excluded any possibility of it.  How could we do it when we both worked 12 hours a day, paid a sitter to look after the kids and were exhausted all the time?  No kidding I’d kill someone!

It was an amazing feeling to know we finally had a choice.   We weren’t chained to our jobs to pay the mortgage (because we no longer had one) and the choices we’d made for our family naturally led to many educational possibilities, including continuing with public school, or not.

When we finally decided we were in a position to explore schooling at home, I dove in and learned how education is funded in British Columbia. I discovered that the kind of schooling we wanted to embark upon wasn’t actually home schooling at all!  In BC there are essentially two delivery methods of education: Distributed Learning and Home Schooling.  Public schools are one way to distribute learning and INDEPENDENT distributed learning schools are another.  We are enrolled with an independent distributed learning school, called Self Design.

Public Distributed Learning Schools, such as the kids’ former school, receive approximately $8500 per child from the Ministry of Education.  Independent Distributed Learning Schools receive roughly half that.  From this amount each school must deliver education; pay teachers, janitors, textbooks and other costs associated with their schools, whether physical buildings or online communities.

Lots of independent schools allow the child’s family to determine the learning materials that are best suited to the family.  A yearly amount is given to the family to spend on textbooks, curriculum, and sports activities.  Lots of people think that this money is a “handout” when in fact it is replacing what the child would be getting from a public school. The money we receive has been reissued to a different school and assigned to our children through them.  The remaining money that independent schools hold back is used to pay administrators, programs and teachers.

Yes, independent distributed learning schools employ BC-certified teachers. We enrolled our kids with SelfDesign (based out of Vancouver) and we were able to choose a teacher.  Her name is Mandy and she also had the opportunity to decide if she wanted to work with US.  She gamely drove up from her home in Kelowna in early September and climbed to the barn loft to see the kittens, admire the lambs and see the chicks.

We had lots of questions for her that day and she has been incredibly responsive ever since.  In the ensuing weeks we came up with a curriculum for each of the kids. Each week we send in a learning report and she scours it to identify learning outcomes appropriate to each of our kids’ age and abilities.  This is exactly what a public school teacher does, except he or she has one curriculum for an entire class and organizes activities to best suit 20 or more kids.  Mandy also talks to the kids on the phone periodically to get a first hand snapshot of what they are learning.

It came as a surprise to me to learn that TRUE homeschooling only requires that families register with a school (so the government knows where they are).  The rest is up to the parents. They receive no funds, but they are also not accountable to the Ministry of Education.

Chris and I really wanted the security of having a teacher on board so we chose SelfDesign, which was also one of the few secular options available to us.

Once we had a curriculum in place, we started school!  Or thought we would.  We had a HUGE list of items we wanted to get for the kids.  We were so EXCITED about this list.  A telescope, books about astronomy and the Greek gods, French books, math programs, a globe, an atlas, tickets to the theatre, swimming lessons, piano lessons, a dirt bike manual, cotton yarn for knitting…the list was huge, but the money wasn’t slated to arrive on our re-loadable VISAs until October 21.

Our mornings started with three kids and two parents entirely used to routine, with no routine available!  SelfDesign is a program very much geared to unschooling (just letting kids do what they want) but very open to introducing as much structure as each child needs. Chris and I knew that we wanted the flexibility of both routine and spontaneity.  But without a math workbook, how do you teach Grade 6 math?  We printed off worksheets from the internet, did experiments on our solar house model, printed out free resources from SelfDesign as well as taught the kids about building an earthship (which is huge in terms of learning outcomes.)

What we found was that without a routine, life was a bit weird, sort of like an extended summer.  Chris and I got frustrated with each other.  The kids, without the routine of school, desks and friends, got mad at us.

So, while we waited for our education funds, we flew a bit on faith and plowed ahead.  We went to the grand opening of the Kamloops Astronomical Society.  The kids (and us, too) got to look through lots of really high end telescopes and see Jupiter’s moons.

We bought tickets to the play, Shirley Valentine. I had become acquainted with the actress, Canadian Nicola Cavendish, through freecycle – I received her mother’s canner – and through a series of coincidences like being married to a Christopher Newton (also a famous Canadian theatre director), Nicola offered to meet with us backstage if we came to her performance in Kamloops. The kids were thrilled to meet her, despite Stephen being almost asleep by the time the play ended!

Our piano teacher gamely agreed to wait for our school money for the kids’ lessons, but when it became apparent the money wasn’t going to show up in the first six weeks, I cut her a cheque for the first two months.

We bumbled along, wrote learning reports (which I did every Sunday evening, spending at least 1 to 2 hours on them) and somehow we made it to October 21 without killing each other.

When the money finally arrived from Self Design on Nov 1, we had a flurry of spending.  First stop was purchasing an online math program, called Aleks, then subscribing to Canadian Geographic magazine.  We picked up some French workbooks, a book on Greek Gods , membership to some online kids publishing sites, a dirtbike manual and some just-for-fun reading books that were too recent to be in the library system.  I’ve also requested a cheque for the next two months of piano lessons.

What we’ve learned from keeping the kids at home is that it is way more expensive then sending them to public school!  The money allotted to them doesn’t cover everything we want them to do.  But we kind of knew that would happen, too.

With funds came a bit more routine.  Chris sends the kids to the “office” in the shop at 8:00 every morning to do “Quick Tables” which is fun games to learn multiplication tables.  Following this is about 40 minutes of their grade level math.  We had been doing an hour but we quickly learned their limits.

The Aleks math program is quite good. It first does a student assessment, places them, lets them practice, assesses again and shows what they’ve learned and how fast they are progressing.  At the other end, somewhere in the U.S. are live tutors, who can intervene.  The kids are pleased to learn that in somewhere between three to 10 weeks they will each be done their math grade level and can move on!

The rest of the day varies with science, current affairs, writing, French, geography, house building, knitting, crocheting, working on a dirt bike, woodworking, baking, quilting and chasing animals around the farm.  With me just a little busier with work, Chris has taken on the role of both planner and teacher. He is incredibly good at engaging the kids in current affairs discussions and leading them through other activities.

For instance, all the kids have read the young readers’ edition of Three Cups of Tea.  Chris has printed out the teaching curriculum from the Central Asia Institute’s website and has been leading many interesting discussions and activities.  As I’ve been doing month ends for my clients I’ve listened to discussions about Pakistan, Afghanistan and how the Taliban made it harder for girls to go to school.  There’s a world map printout from Chris’ engineering printer (2’x3′) of the world, and Darfield and Pakistan are shaded in red pencil.  There’s a calculation showing how many people are in Canada and how many are in Pakistan, and a fraction reduced to six!  Pakistan sure looks a lot smaller than Canada to be housing six times the people!

Stephen has been asking lots of questions about Greg Mortensen’s time as a hostage and the girls, to varying degrees, are interested in Greg’s Pennies for Peace Program.

The Holocaust played a huge part in school around Remembrance Day.  We talked about my grandfather who fought in WWII and about Jewish stories and the Holocaust.  The kids all read a book called Hana’s Suitcase and this had a huge impact on them.  Chris talked about how economic times, religion and other cultural factors led to Hitler’s rise in Germany and in Europe.  We talked about the war in Afghanistan and the difference between supporting soldiers and opposing war, a distinction that is often difficult for children to make.

4-H plays a significant part in their education. The record books they keep for their project during the year are good for five Learning Outcomes a week!  It’s an incredibly diverse program that, in many ways, is even more rich than a standard school curriculum.  I’ve taken on the role of administrative leader of our 4-H club and have done so because I believe in its built-in educational enrichment.

Lately, my job has been to keep everyone organized. The girls go to Fiber Group in Barriere on Tuesdays-where they are doted on by women mostly in their 70’s and 80’s!  I hope to take them to quilting again every other Thursday.  I’ve volunteered to deliver a Grade 7 Junior Achievement business program at the kids’ former school and Katie is taking part in it.

All the kids are making crafts to sell this year as a way to raise money for Christmas and other goodies.  They are looking forward to taking “holidays” from school, just like their friends in public school.

Probably our greatest fear – after realizing that we were capable of teaching them – was that having the kids at home would slow down house construction.  We could see no way around that. We knew how much we could accomplish in eight distraction-free hours.  We discussed putting off the decision to homeschool until the house was completed but we also knew things take longer than we think.  In the end the kids came first.

The kids will tell people that our decision to homeschool was simply to get free labour!  It is true that they work and contribute to house construction.  But by including them we actually have to slow down.  It would be easier and faster to do it ourselves, but we try to never underestimate the need for them to learn it themselves.  And this takes time!

My initial assessment is that our lives are richer since we’ve had the kids at home. We laugh more, we plan more together, we talk more about the world around us. The kids spend more time with older role models; my Dad and Gail, our friends Mike and Linda, and my brother Tom and his wife, Stephanie, when they visit their cabin on non-weekend days.

We are still feeling our way and haven’t excluded the possibility that our children may end up back in public school at some point.  However, with the house closed up and the push on to finish and move in, all sorts of opportunities will become available to us.  Having alternative learning situations gives us confidence that we can pursue unusual work and travel opportunities in the future, too.

So we continue to feel our way.  Not too many people are asking us how it is going and that’s probably a good thing right now.  How I feel about it depends on the day and I know Chris sometimes feels this way, too.  It does seem, however, that we are finally having more good days than not.  And that’s definitely the direction we want to be going in!