Advice from Home-Schoolers

It’s been several weeks since the 300,000-plus students in the Clark County School District, the fifth-largest school district in the nation, were sent home.

It’s been somewhat chaotic, from teachers learning how to use Zoom to parents navigating Google Classroom with their kids. Add in job losses and limited contact with others, and these have been some of the roughest weeks for parents across our Valley.

Since many have become unwitting home-schoolers, we reached out to actual home-schoolers, to get their tips. After all, they’re the experts on how to manage kids 24/7, which can be bewildering to those used to happily dropping their offspring at school for six-plus hours a day.

Karen Kennedy, a mother of two in Washington State who started a Facebook group called Accidental Home-schoolers, says a routine is the linchpin that holds the day together. She makes the distinction between a schedule and a routine, however: A schedule is a fixed accounting of the hours, while a routine is more fluid.

“Sometimes it’s enough to know what comes after the next thing. Like, when you get up, what’s the first thing you do? And then after that, what do you do?” Kennedy says. “Having some kind of routine helps us in having a balance of independent work time and working-with-a-parent time. Kids need to have something that they can do independently on their own for an age-appropriate amount of time.”

One of the advantages of home schooling, Kennedy says, is the student’s flexibility in choosing to study what interests him or her, rather than following a hard-and-fast grade-appropriate curriculum. The shutdown could actually represent an opportunity for students to break away from a rigid structure.

“You’ll never learn everything, so you might as well choose something to learn that everyone’s psyched about learning,” Kennedy says. “This is the time to pick the passion projects—the things your kid is interested in that they just haven’t had time to do. Let them do a deep dive into that.”

Jody VanderBaan Jarvis, from Fallon, Nevada, home-schooled her two children, now grown, from elementary through high school. She reminds us that parents should be forgiving of themselves and their kids.

“Don’t expect this to be home-school. This is crisis school,” she says. “Let go of your worries. And then make it fun because you’re stuck together, loving each other. You don’t want to be yelling and stressed out.”

Dr. Yolanda Hamilton, head of school at Nevada Virtual Academy, which offers virtual education for students in grades six through 12, says her students haven’t seen a gap in their education since the shutdown, since they do the majority of their schoolwork online anyway. But with the school’s closure, NVA has had to temporarily suspend its blended program, in which students who are in need of extra support come to campus and meet with their teachers.

As for CCSD parents, “The most important thing is to establish some kind of normalcy,” Hamilton says. “Try to keep students on schedule, try to keep them reading every day. … If they can still have a reasonable bedtime and get up and get dressed, that helps students right now in this time of uncertainty. They’re already kind of fearful and anxious, and keeping things as normal as possible will definitely help during this time.”

One upside to all this: Parents can actually see what their kids are doing throughout their day. And while there’s so much up in the air, it’s important to keep everything in perspective, Hamilton says. “There are people out there who are really suffering from the coronavirus. And if you are not in that group, I think we really need to count that blessing.”

Home Tested Resources

The internet is a giant classroom for home-schoolers, with resources readily available for just about any subject, mostly for free. Here are a few you can check out while the kids are home from school. –Genevie Durano

Khan Academy Addressing K-12 with some college prep mixed in, this free site is one of the most comprehensive learning resources for home-schoolers. Math and science are the focus, but Khan Academy also covers computer programming, economics, arts and humanities and more. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Khan Academy is also offering daily lesson plans. khanacademy.org.

Duolingo An invaluable home-school resource for language learning, it has more than 40 languages on offer. With its bite-size lessons and gamified structure, it appeals to kids and adults alike. Free (ad-free premium plan available), duolingo.com.

826 Digital The online learning arm of nonprofit 826 National—the largest youth writing network in the country, co-founded by author Dave Eggers—826 Digital provides a wide array of projects and writing prompts designed to get kids of all ages writing. Free but donations are encouraged. 826digital.com.

BrainPOP BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. animate a wide range of topics and make learning fun for kids K-12 with interactive quizzes and games. The monthly subscription usually costs $25 after a trial month, but access is free while schools are closed. brainpop.com.

The Learning Network Get kids interested in current events with this New York Times blog, featuring daily lessons in civics, social studies, history and more. There are also quizzes, activities, writing prompts and a student version of the NYT crossword. nytimes.com/section/learning.

NASA for Students This free site is out of this world, with articles, activities, videos and games for K-12 students on topics related to STEM, aeronautics and space exploration. nasa.gov/stem.

Project Gutenberg This library is never closed, offering parents and kids access to more than 45,000 free eBooks, including a large collection of classic children’s literature. gutenberg.org.

The Activity Mom The collective knowledge of the moms on this site—former classroom teachers sharing resources and educational activities—can especially keep younger kids occupied and enriched. activity-mom.com.

MOOCs Home-schooled students often leap ahead of their normal grade level. Coursera and edX are MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that offer college-level coursework from universities like Harvard, Yale and MIT, minus the steep tuition. coursera.org, edx.org.

TED-Ed The topics covered by TED Talks can educate a person for a lifetime. This site builds on those talks with animated segments, discussion questions and more for a deeper engagement with kids. ed.ted.com.

How to homeschool

Educating children at home has deep roots in American history dating back to colonial times, declining only in practice when compulsory attendance laws were implemented in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the 1970s, modern homeschooling came to the fore with the publication of Better Late Than Early by Dr. Raymond Moore, a pioneer in the movement.

After a long career in California’s public school system, Moore came to the conclusion that children’s critical emotional development from age 8 to 12 should take place at home with their parents, rather than on a school campus.

Another pioneer in the movement, John Holt, published a newsletter called Growing Without Schooling for parents who adopted his homeschooling philosophy, which sees learning as a natural, experiential aspect of life, not a separate entity. “Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places,” according to Holt.

During the 1980s and ’90s, the homeschooling movement took a more antagonistic turn as some evangelical and fundamentalist Christians engaged in culture wars that viewed public schools as evil. Battles ensued at the local, and then the state, level as to the legality of homeschooling. In 1993, Congress made homeschooling legal in all 50 states, though oversight varies from state to state. (Nevada is one of the least restrictive states, requiring parents only to file a one-time “intent to homeschool” letter; no curriculum plan or standardized tests are required.)

Today there are some 2.5 million homeschooled students from K-12 in the U.S., and that number grows every year. Offering customization to a child’s needs and strengths, home-based education is no longer the domain of just the religious or the reform-minded. Here are some of the most common approaches to homeschooling.

Classical Learning is divided into three different stages: grammar (the elementary years), logic (the middle school years) and rhetoric (the high school years). welltrainedmind.com.

Charlotte Mason Emphasizes high-quality literature, nature study and narration, in which students repeat learned information in their own words. simplycharlottemason.com.

Waldorf A holistic liberal arts method placing strong emphasis on child development and educating the student as a whole person—body, mind and spirit. waldorfanswers.org.

Montessori Focuses on nature, play, hands-on experience, movement and an orderly learning environment. livingmontessorinow.com.

Leadership Education (AKA Thomas Jefferson Education) Teaches students how to think, as opposed to what to think. It emphasizes reading classics and finding a mentor. tjed.org.

Worldschooling (AKA travel-based learning) Uses travel as a starting point for the educational experience, in which children learn about place and culture firsthand. wanderschool.com.

Unschooling The least structured of all the methods allows children’s interests and natural curiosity to form the basis of their studies. johnholtgws.com.

Eclectic (AKA relaxed) This popular method takes a bit from other methods, including curricula from traditional schools. educationcorner.com.