There are a lot of different curriculums out there for Home-Schooling. I don't think I'm going to stick with any one curriculum. I'd like to use a variety of things, but the major style of teaching we like is the Thomas Jefferson Education by Oliver DeMille. You can visit their website HERE.
A few of the most important reasons for following the Thomas Jefferson Education style are what I'd like to touch on in this post. I'm sure I'll get to more of them in later posts.
I love how The Thomas Jefferson Education style focuses on "Everyone is created with genius." This goes against the whole "No Child Left Behind" style that the public school uses. I can understand wanting kids to be well-rounded, but everyone is different and each child's genius is different from every other kid. It is hard for one teacher to nurture 30 different geniuses. Jared can tell you a story about what a public school art teacher told him about a student that wanted to be tutored by Jared during class-time. In the end, the teacher allowed the student to be tutored but warned Jared not to make the student too good at art because the student would not be socially excepted well at school. This situation really reaffirmed our desire to home-school our kids.
I also love how TJed focuses on teaching kids "how to think" not "what to think." The more I read about this teaching style the more I realize I'm a product of a "conveyor-belt" education. Even to this day, I struggle with some of the effects of that teaching style. For example, Kendi got some Melty Beads for her birthday. She was so excited to create something with them. She loves and insists on having someone to do things with. We got out the Melty Beads and her imagination went wild. After having read about TJed, I knew that the best thing to do was to sit back and let her be as creative as she could be. After creating a rainbow and two other pictures, she noticed that I was having a hard time thinking of something to make. After panicking for a few minutes, I just decided to copy the picture of the kitty on the side of the Melty Beads container. If you know me, kitties are not my thing. TJed allows kids to come up with their own conclusions and solve problems their own way not just memorize facts and pass test to get good grades. I feel like our brains expand when we can think all the way through a problem with reasoning and that our brains shrink when we just memorize formulas and copy answers that are already laid out for us.
Another thing that I love and that is going to be challenging for me to get used to is to teach by "inspiring, not requiring." While the kids are young the only thing TJed wants you to do is to inspire a love of learning. It would be easy to just set down a pile of books and require a certain number of pages to go through, but that is not the best way. It certainly isn't very fun either. We are currently storing my sister's piano and I thought it would be fun to see if either of the girl would want to learn. Kendi was very excited and was begging me for "piano lessons." I, myself, took piano lessons for more than ten years and cannot really call myself a pianist. Piano was difficult for me and none of my four different teachers inspired me to learn. There were a lot of requirements and even when they weren't met nothing different was done. I think I would have learned better if I had gone through the books all by myself, but that didn't seem like the "normal" way to learn. After searching online for some new or just different piano teaching methods for hours, I couldn't find any that wouldn't break my bank account. I decided to go dig out the old piano books that my generation learned to play piano from. Besides, it worked for a lot of other people. Yesterday, I opened up the old books and started to show Kendi what to do. After only a few minutes she laid her head on my lap in silent protest. I thought about "inspire, not require" and decided to teach her a simplified version of Heart and Soul. She loved that. I know that all I need to do right now is teach her to love it and technique will come later.
There are many other reasons why I love the TJed style including how they handle "teenagers." To read more about it go to their site or buy their books. They are worth it!
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