Saint Monica’s Podcast | Episode 3: Getting Started on Your Home School Journey
Getting Started Home Schooling Your Teenager
SHOW NOTES:
So you’ve decided to homeschool your teenager, What now?
1. Pray and establish your purpose / overarching goal for your homeschool.
--BEGIN BY SELECTING A BIBLE VERSE THAT SPEAKS TO YOU OR EMBODIES WHAT YOU ARE TRYING TO DO IN YOUR HOMESCHOOL
“It’s easier to have a Christ-centered homeschool, than a Christ-centered traditional school.”
SOME EXAMPLE VERSES / GOALS WE’VE USED...
GOAL SETTING IS THE MOST CRITICAL FIRST STEP IN HOMESCHOOLING, ESPECIALLY AS CHRISTIANS BECAUSE,
Every future decision you make will be guided by your overarching goals
We always need to choose “the one needful thing.”
Your homeschool journey must have direction
Without goals, you will not be able to withstand the challenges of this walk
Otherwise, “the urgent pushes out the important.”
ONCE YOU’VE ESTABLISHED THE OVERARCHING GOAL OF YOUR SCHOOL, THEN YOU CAN ADD ON THE SUB GOALS. HERE ARE SOME COMMON GOALS:
that your child become self confident and independent
develop the ability to make life choices that are filtered through a Christian world view
that your child learns to be of service to others
to learn how to learn and to love learning/reading/problem solving
that your child is prepared for college?
to becomes virtuous?
will you help your child overcome learning deficits?
will you support a gifted learner?
that your family becomes immersed in the church calendar
that your family have flexible time for travel or sports
HAVING A HIERARCHY OF GOALS IS IMPORTANT
Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau provide resources for honing the skill of setting prioritized goals.
Here are our goals this year:
Angie – our goal this year is to provide a Christ-centered, classical education for our ninth grader that’s rich in literature and provides opportunities for us to serve in the community and spend time together.
Noelle – Our goal is to stay the course with the challenging humanities program and to be intentional about spending time together as we see the end of our homeschool years coming quickly. Having conversations about the topics of cultural indoctrination that social media seems to be intent on pushing.
2. Once you’ve established goals, then it's time to determine your school year
--when will you begin school?
--when will you take breaks?
--when will you end the school year?
*If you choose to participate in a program or co-op, many of these decisions will be made for you, but keep in mind that one of the reasons we might choose to homeschool is for flexibility, so be willing to take a trip when you need to and plan in the extra effort beforehand so that you will not fall behind the accountability group. This is a life skill that will be valuable!
3. Consider your approach or teaching philosophy
Here is a great website overview of the most common homeschool philosophies:
https://thebestschools.org/magazine/homeschool-style-right/
*Consider which of these approaches best fit your personality as a teacher, the needs of your student and the makeup of your family.
*there is considerable overlap between these educational models
*get a good understanding of the philosophies you’re after before you begin to splice them together.
WE WILL PROVIDE A BRIEF OVERVIEW HERE: We will go into more detail on some or all of these approaches in future podcasts.
--school at home – students study the same stuff at home as they do in school (K-12,Georgia Virtual School, etc)
--traditional - recreate a traditional classroom by yourself at home, not using an online program.
--classical - using the Trivium, a cycle of four historical eras studied at each of three learning levels - grammar phase, logic phase, and rhetoric phase. Emphasis on classical languages - Latin and Greek. At the high school (rhetoric) level this may also look like a Great Books program. (Well-Trained Mind, Bauer)
--Charlotte Mason - a “gentle,” literature- and arts-rich educational philosophy. CM was an educator in England in the 1800s (??) who wrote quite a bit about how she set up her school and led her students. (Ambleside Online)
--Unit studies - diving into a couple of topics deeply for a shorter time rather than covering a lot of topics every day for the whole school year. Can be largely student-directed, but may need some guidance if you also want to cover the topics needed to satisfy a set of graduation requirements.
--eclectic study - mix and match
--unschooling (on the farm, apprenticeships, on a job) If your student suddenly sees that they need to have algebra to pass the entry exam to plumbing certification courses, then algebra will be important enough for them to study and master it quickly. No need to push it on them before they need it!
4. Once you’ve honed in on a philosophy or model of education that works for you, then its time to select a curriculum or course of study. We’ll get to that in our next episode.
St. Emmelia Homeschool Resources Page - https://antiochianprodsa.blob.core.windows.net/websiteattachments/Orthodox%20Homeschooling%20Links.pdf
That’s it for today. If you like what you are hearing or know someone else who would benefit from these discussions, please share our podcast online. We’ll see you next time.
God bless, Noelle and Angie