Classical education vs homeschooling for Jacob

My hats go off to homeschooling moms. It must be the hardest job out there! Our original plan was to homeschool the boys, and we still may end up doing it again at some point. I never realized how time consuming the task would be. Nor did I realize how much my patience would be tested daily. A homeschooling mom gives up any bit of free time she has. The day is taken up with school work and household chores. After the kids go to bed, you prepare lessons and projects for the next day! For kindergarten it was a daunting task, I can only imagine as you get into upper grades!

Last fall, I started doing a kindergarten curriculum with Jacob. There were so many aspects of schooling him that I loved. I loved that I got to start our lesson with a time of prayer and devotion. I loved that our science lesson pointed to our Creator and taught him to view the world through the lens of scripture in looking at science and the world. I loved seeing his eyes light up when he learned something new or seeing his mind just turning as he pondered a new discovery. I loved being able to be the one to be his primary influence and put more of a focus on what I saw he needed. I loved just being with him. We got to have conversations that wouldn't have happened had he been in school and not with me. So you can see that it was a hard decision when we decided to enroll him in school for this upcoming fall.

With all the benefits of homeschooling, there were aspects of him being in a school setting that I didn't want him to miss. We wanted him to experience going on field trips, developing lasting friendships, being in group settings where he is forced out of his shell. But we would only consider school if we had the ideal setting for our family. There is no right solution. I think schooling is a decision that is different for each family and each child.

We found Redeemer Classical School http://www.redeemerclassical.org/ through a homeschool enrichment program that Jacob enrolled in last year. Steve and I both fell in love with the school at first sight. You feel Christ in that school. My initial meeting with the kindergarten teacher left me with a sense of absolute peace about what was best for Jacob.

I am a huge fan of the classical curriculum. I wanted to homeschool off this model and finding a private christian school near us that is a classical school was so exciting to me. Below I will paste a link and information on the classical model.

RCS is the closest thing to homeschooling we could hope for. Class sizes are very small so there is lots of attention that is able to be given to the individual students. What I loved most about RCS when I visited is that they don't just have Bible time or Bible class. Everything relates back to Christ. Teaching about God is so intertwined in the teaching that the students can't help but see God in every situation. Each time the teacher would need to speak to a student about behavior, she lovingly showed them Christ in helping them to see on their own how they are to behave. After my visits and time at the the school, I was able to have complete peace about giving up our idea of homeschooling Jacob in the early years.

When we made the decision for Jacob to go to Redeemer, I stopped our formal schooling at home. I didn't want him to get too far ahead for next year and I wanted to enjoy my time with him just playing. But now he is begging me to continue with his reading. He can read a little, but he is ready to move on. So I have started back our reading lessons for the summer. It was a reminder to me why I will not be the best teacher for him. As I'm trying to teach Jacob, Zachary is begging for my atention. He is full of excitement to show me what he is able to learn. I find myself going back and forth saying "Hold on, let me finish with jacob or zachary." "Be quiet, you are distracting your brother." "I'll help you in just a minute." I don't know how the moms do it that school multiple children. What a challenge! By the time our session is over, I'm in need of a break and so are they. As I walk away thinking they did not enjoy that or they didn't learn anything, I hear them telling each other they can't wait until we can do it again tomorrow!

I'm so excited to see his growth next year. Here we are at the very beginning of summer, and each morning I cherish this time. I know that in just a few short weeks, we will be entering a whole new world. I will never again have Jacob with me all day every day! So this summer, I have prayed that God helps me to remember to slowly enjoy each day with Jacob and to use it to the fullest potential.


Here is a link that gives some great insight into this educational model. I have cut and pasted below the link from the site.
http://www.welltrainedmind.com/classed.html

TAKEN FROM THE ABOVE LINK
What is classical education?
Classical education depends on a three-part process of training the mind. The early years of school are spent in absorbing facts, systematically laying the foundations for advanced study. In the middle grades, students learn to think through arguments. In the high school years, they learn to express themselves. This classical pattern is called the trivium. The first years of schooling are called the "grammar stage" -- not because you spend four years doing English, but because these are the years in which the building blocks for all other learning are laid, just as grammar is the foundation for language. In the elementary school years -- what we commonly think of as grades one through four -- the mind is ready to absorb information. Children at this age actually find memorization fun. So during this period, education involves not self-expression and self-discovery, but rather the learning of facts. Rules of phonics and spelling, rules of grammar, poems, the vocabulary of foreign languages, the stories of history and literature, descriptions of plants and animals and the human body, the facts of mathematics -- the list goes on. This information makes up the "grammar," or the basic building blocks, for the second stage of education. By fifth grade, a child's mind begins to think more analytically. Middle-school students are less interested in finding out facts than in asking "Why?" The second phase of the classical education, the "Logic Stage," is a time when the child begins to pay attention to cause and effect, to the relationships between different fields of knowledge relate, to the way facts fit together into a logical framework. A student is ready for the Logic Stage when the capacity for abstract thought begins to mature. During these years, the student begins algebra and the study of logic, and begins to apply logic to all academic subjects. The logic of writing, for example, includes paragraph construction and learning to support a thesis; the logic of reading involves the criticism and analysis of texts, not simple absorption of information; the logic of history demands that the student find out why the War of 1812 was fought, rather than simply reading its story; the logic of science requires that the child learn the scientific method. The final phase of a classical education, the "Rhetoric Stage," builds on the first two. At this point, the high school student learns to write and speak with force and originality. The student of rhetoric applies the rules of logic learned in middle school to the foundational information learned in the early grades and expresses his conclusions in clear, forceful, elegant language. Students also begin to specialize in whatever branch of knowledge attracts them; these are the years for art camps, college courses, foreign travel, apprenticeships, and other forms of specialized training. A classical education is more than simply a pattern of learning, though. Classical education is language-focused; learning is accomplished through words, written and spoken, rather than through images (pictures, videos, and television). Why is this important? Language-learning and image-learning require very different habits of thought. Language requires the mind to work harder; in reading, the brain is forced to translate a symbol (words on the page) into a concept. Images, such as those on videos and television, allow the mind to be passive. In front of a video screen, the brain can "sit back" and relax; faced with the written page, the mind is required to roll its sleeves up and get back to work. A classical education, then, has two important aspects. It is language-focused. And it follows a specific three-part pattern: the mind must be first supplied with facts and images, then given the logical tools for organization of facts, and finally equipped to express conclusions. But that isn't all. To the classical mind, all knowledge is interrelated. Astronomy (for example) isn't studied in isolation; it's learned along with the history of scientific discovery, which leads into the church's relationship to science and from there to the intricacies of medieval church history. The reading of the Odyssey leads the student into the consideration of Greek history, the nature of heroism, the development of the epic, and man's understanding of the divine. This is easier said than done. The world is full of knowledge, and finding the links between fields of study can be a mind-twisting task. A classical education meets this challenge by taking history as its organizing outline -- beginning with the ancients and progressing forward to the moderns in history, science, literature, art and music. We suggest that the twelve years of education consist of three repetitions of the same four-year pattern: Ancients, Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, and Modern Times. The child studies these four time periods at varying levels -- simple for grades 1-4, more difficult in grades 5-8 (when the student begins to read original sources), and taking an even more complex approach in grades 9-12, when the student works through these time periods using original sources (from Homer to Hitler) and also has the opportunity to pursue a particular interest (music, dance, technology, medicine, biology, creative writing) in depth. The other subject areas of the curriculum are linked to history studies. The student who is working on ancient history will read Greek and Roman mythology, the tales of the Iliad and Odyssey, early medievial writings, Chinese and Japanese fairy tales, and (for the older student) the classical texts of Plato, Herodutus, Virgil, Aristotle. She'll read Beowulf, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare the following year, when she's studying medieval and early Renaissance history. When the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are studied, she starts with Swift (Gulliver's Travels) and ends with Dickens; finally, she reads modern literature as she is studying modern history. The sciences are studied in a four-year pattern that roughly corresponds to the periods of scientific discovery: biology, classification and the human body (subjects known to the ancients); earth science and basic astronomy (which flowered during the early Renaissance); chemistry (which came into its own during the early modern period); and then basic physics and computer science (very modern subjects). This pattern lends coherence to the study of history, science, and literature -- subjects that are too often fragmented and confusing. The pattern widens and deepens as the student progresses in maturity and learning. For example, a first grader listens to you read the story of the Iliad from one of the picture book versions available at any public library. Four years later, the fifth grader reads one of the popular middle-grade adaptations -- Olivia Coolidge's The Trojan War, or Roger Lancelyn Greene's Tales of Troy. Four more years go by, and the ninth grader -- faced with the Iliad itself -- plunges right in, undaunted. The classical education is, above all, systematic -- in direct contrast to the scattered, unorganized nature of so much secondary education. This systematic, rigorous study has two purposes. Rigorous study develops virtue in the student. Aristotle defined virtue as the ability to act in accordance to what one knows to be right. The virtuous man (or woman) can force himself to do what he knows to be right, even when it runs against his inclinations. The classical education continually asks a student to work against his baser inclinations (laziness, or the desire to watch another half hour of TV) in order to reach a goal -- mastery of a subject. Systematic study also allows the student to join what Mortimer Adler calls the "Great Conversation" -- the ongoing conversation of great minds down through the ages. Much modern education is so eclectic that the student has little opportunity to make connections between past events and the flood of current information. "The beauty of the classical curriculum," writes classical schoolmaster David Hicks, "is that it dwells on one problem, one author, or one epoch long enough to allow even the youngest student a chance to exercise his mind in a scholarly way: to make connections and to trace developments, lines of reasoning, patterns of action, recurring symbolisms, plots, and motifs."