Worldschooling in 5 Easy Lessons: A Primer for Petrified Parents

Twice this week I’ve gotten the question from parents angst ridden about the negative experiences their kids are having in school. We’re not talking about kids suffering through active shooter drills, or worse, the need for them. Not kids who are severely bullied, or whose learning differences are a chasm almost too wide for the parents and teachers to bridge with the resources at hand. These are parents who are ahead of that curve. Parents who, with tiny people, are noticing the light behind their eyes fade, one Tuesday morning at a time. Parents of active kids who are watching them assimilate the messages that they are “too …” something to succeed. Parents who have been feeding their baby birds as fast and furiously as they can from birth only to have schools ask them, actively, to put the brakes on so that their kids aren’t “too…” something else in the classroom.

The question they reach out to ask is, “How did you do it… and… do you think I can do it too?”

The “it” they are referring to is educating my own four children, birth through university, without the benefit of unlimited funding or infrastructure, while traveling full time for a decade, building a business, and, you know, getting laundry done most days.

When I embarked on this journey with little people, mostly, I only knew what I didn’t want. That was gleaned from my short time on the teacher side of the desk in public school. However, “not that” isn’t a particularly productive educational philosophy, so Mama had to dig a little deeper, read voraciously, and find the path forward, tweaking it, of course, for each individual learner.

Twenty years in, having watched “homeschooling” morph from a suspect and somewhat fringe community, into the worldwide vibrant mosaic that it is blossoming into, I have a confidence in parents and children that, at the beginning, I only hoped hard that I might one day have.

Of course it’s also blossomed into an “industry.” Anyone who has been to a homeschool conference knows that there are a panoply of voices shouting over one another in competition for your time and money. Often, they’re preying on your insecurities, offering to solve the problems you don’t even know you have yet.

I’m here to reassure you that it’s not that complicated.

In one medium length read, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about “How I did it,” from babies to university entrance. And I hope very much that the take away will be a deep sense of, “Yes, I can do this too.”

Kelly, Sarah, Jess, Paula, and the hundreds of others who ask, this is for you…

Beginning with Babies

First: relax.

Second: ignore anyone who tells you there’s a right way to parent little people.

Third: acknowledge your limitations and honor the personalities and factors in your family.

Fourth: know that those things are going to change, and that’s okay.

This year’s formula won’t be next year’s.

If you’re inclined to read parenting books, I recommend The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.

It doesn’t say a damned thing about kids, but if you get your head around the core messages, you’ll be a much better parent for it.

In my experience and observation, the best thing you can do for the tiny people is to communicate clearly to them that they are loved and are welcome members of the family, but not the center of it.

Help them discover that there is order to the world and order to our days. Spend more time on developing good habits than you do on making sure they are doing “all the right things,” whatever all the right things might be in your community. Less busy, more playing, plenty of naps. For the parent, that is.

Do your best not to look at the neighbor kids and congratulate yourself, or worry too much, as the case may be with the neighbor kid.

Definitely don’t compare siblings.

I thought my second kid was seriously developmentally delayed. Went to the pediatrician, worried second time mama…

“This one’s fine,” he told me, pointing at the drooling black haired 18 month old. “That one? I don’t know what to tell you. She’s the weird one.” He assured me with a smile. Right. They’re all different. Ahead isn’t ahead. Behind isn’t behind. There’s not a finish line. Keep going.

Don’t freak out. Just keep going.

Another useful bit of wisdom with small children, handed to me by a mentor mama years ago: “If you aren’t shooting for “normal,” then quit worrying about whether they’re normal.”

For the trolls who are already preparing their lengthy commentary for the end of this piece (not trying to dissuade you, fire away, I’m used to it, and I’m equipped to reply, I assure you) understand that at no point in my experience with my children, from before they were born to now, with three adults and only one minor child remaining, have I EVER been aiming for normal. So bear that in mind in your criticism, won’t you?

With that… here’s how to do it:

The Basics: Reading and Math

Once you decide that you’re ready to begin “schooling” in some format, or when “concerned” harping from well meaning friends, family, or grocery store ladies becomes too much to bear, start with the basics.

Anyone who is paying attention knows that I’m not an unschooler. That means I do believe that sitting at the table with a pencil and notebook is something worth “forcing” a kid to do, as a fun and mutually gratifying growth proposition, of course.

Will they cry sometimes? Yes.

Will you cry sometimes? Yes.

This is okay. You’ll both grow through and live. The habit of self discipline and perseverance is what we work on those days. It’s far more important than the times tables.

If you’re wondering where to start, start with Language Arts and Math.

There are about a billion resources out there, across the spectrum of budgetary possibility. I’d never venture to guess what will work best for your kids. Pick something you think might, in each category. Do a little bit, every day.

(Every day meant four days a week at our house. We sat at the table Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. I’ve never believed kids of any age need a 5 day per week job. Plus, we have to do laundry in there somewhere.)

If your kids are under ten, you will not spend more than about thirty minutes on each “subject” per day. Repeat after me: We will not spend more than a half an hour on each of the “basics.” We will stop, and we will play.

Okay. You may continue.

So, once you decide they are ready: Math and Language Arts. Four days a week. Not more than 30 min each per day. It can be less.

That’s easy. You can do that.

PLEASE NOTE: That thirty minutes need not be thirty. If they can accomplish a reasonable chunk in 15 minutes, great, let ’em off the hook and reward efficiency in work, that’s more important than dipthongs. If they are squirrelly, like two of mine were, then it’s totally fine to work in five to ten minute chunks with calisthenics in between. I swear my sons did not learn one single basic fact without the aid of… a mini-trampoline. You thought I was going to say flashcards didn’t you? WRONG. Get a mini-trampoline. Bounce them through everything they don’t actually HAVE to be sitting to do. That’s my actual best tip. You’re welcome.

VERY rare is the child under ten who should be sitting for a full hour working on “the basics.” That kind of attention span will come. It will. Start where you are and stretch ’em in thirty second and one minute chunks with enthusiastic celebration of successes. Don’t push ’em for an attention span that makes them hate life and feel like a failure.

We’re not aiming for normal, remember? Repeat that mantra.

Teaching Writing to Young Children

Okay, before we go any further or get into any of the fun stuff. Let’s take this one right off the table to begin with, shall we? I hear you freaking out about teaching kids to write. Because you “can’t” write. Or you hate writing. Or you just know your kid will. Or you hated it in school. Or some ridiculousness that has nothing to do with just how really fecking simple it is to teach almost any kid to write as long as you aren’t some freak who thinks its fun to bully ten year olds with circles of red pen. (Breathe through it teacher friends, I’m kidding. Mostly.)

I’m going to teach you, in three paragraphs, how to teach any developmentally normal child (and most of the struggling ones too) to write. Any child. Are you ready. This formula will always work, if you are patient. Always. Are you ready? Here we go.

1. Read

You must read to the child. Good books, not just Captain Underpants. Books that have the kind of writing that is interesting to children, of some nutritional value, and that you would be happy if they emulated in their own writing one day. The Burgess books were fan favorites at our house. Harry Potter works in a pinch. Aesop’s Fables, fairytales of all sorts, the Rudyard Kipling books, are all perfect.

Read. Every day. This is the first and most important building block for writing. DON’T make them read. YOU read to them. That’s step one.

2. Narration

There are two pieces to “writing.” There is the telling of a story, which any four year old can do with the kind of perfection that makes anyone with in hearing distance need a drink.

You know what I mean.

Little people can TELL ad nauseum, and they will hold forth of the discovery of the breathing pore on the side of a snail face with delight and enthusiasm for longer than we wish they would.

Then there is the mechanics, the shaping of letters, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing and semi-colon navigation that leads most children to the weeping and gnashing of teeth that causes mere mothers to cower with dread.

Pour the kid a glass of almond milk and send him out to hug a tree while I break this down for you and solve the problem forever.

Narration is another Charlotte Mason-ism that just means, “telling something.” Here’s how it works.

• You read something SHORT and INTERESTING. (How the Elephant Got His Trunk, for example).
• You close the book.
• You ask the child to TELL YOU back what they heard.

You sit up, you look interested and encouraging, not critical and miserly. You enthusiastically WRITE DOWN in very neat and nice printing, double spaced, and easy to read, every single word your brilliant child tells you, while nodding, smiling, and “wow” ing.

If you have done your job properly you now hold in your hands your child’s “paper” on the subject at hand, written with perfect mechanics (assuming you can spell and use a semi-colon yourself). This is your child’s authentic “writing” because every word is his.

3. Copy Work

Now, hand the paper to your child and get them to copy this into their own notebook. This won’t be too hard to do if you haven’t beaten the love of writing out of them already by forcing some craziness on them too early. If you have accidentally already goofed this up, no worries. Apologize. Tell the kid you didn’t know better, but now you do so you won’t be a jerk about writing any more, and ask, kindly, for not more than two sentences. Less if the child is under seven or seriously traumatized by your previous efforts.

Presto! Your child has just produced a quality piece of writing.

“Yes,” you say, “But I did the spelling and punctuation, that’s not their work… how are they learning that?”

By osmosis, obviously.

Which is the easier way to learn sentence structure: by trying and failing, knowing all the while you’re failing (children know what they don’t know) only to have your best effort returned marked all to hell with red pen and being forced to re do it, maybe several times, with stress and disapproval being the associated emotions, OR by copying your own brilliant words perfectly at the first pass and noticing that every sentence ends with a little dot. Those who hated writing growing up, go to the head of the class.

Once your child is successfully copying, it’s an easy matter to point out how GREAT it is that they started every sentence with a capital letter, most people do that. (Not e.e. cummings, but we can get to that later.) Then play hide and seek in their own work with nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. They’ll gradually learn what “looks right” and they’ll learn to name the conventionalities in ways that will eventually shut your sister-in-law, the fourth grade teacher, up. Eventually. Be patient with her too. She can’t help it.

You can add to this by having them copy interesting science or history bits they find into a notebook, right out of actual books. Or a poem they like. Or whatever. Copy work. Learn to love it.

How to start: SMALL. Don’t ask a child who can’t form all the letters yet to copy more than five words at a time. And only include letters that they’re already friends with. Then, around six or seven let them copy the first sentence or two of their narration. When that is painless, go for a third sentence. Work up to a paragraph.

Here’s what happens eventually: You’ll catch them writing for fun. With one of my kids, this happened at about five; but remember, the pediatrician told me that one was weird. Another kid was pushing 11 before there was any writing for fun observed from afar (with great relief, I’m not gonna lie, I was wondering if this really would work with any child, cuz that one… whew, he was a tough nut).

After they write for fun, THEN you can say things like, “Why don’t you write me a paragraph on…” pick a thing. THEN you can start teaching the editorial process and three paragraph formation, and the three part essay (my friend Nancy, an expert teacher and worldschooler, says this is the single most important thing we teach our kids, I agree with her, but then I usually do.)

So there it is. Teaching writing to any child. Rather more than three paragraphs, I confess, but three segments, so let’s not quibble.

Onward:

The Non-Linear Subjects

Okay, so there’s math and language arts, done and dusted. Now what about everything else? What about the non-linear things (stuff that doesn’t have to be taught in order) What, exactly, is everything else? Well, that’s up to you to decide. For us it included:

• History
• Geography
• Writing
• Literature
• French
• Spanish
• Latin & Greek (yes, really, and before they were ten, not after)
• Science
• Art Appreciation
• Art Experience (Hands on making art)
• Music (History and experience)
• Health and Nutrition
• Physical Education

“But how do you get it all in?!” my almost hysterically worried friend asks.

Let me pour you a glass of wine. Breathe. Your kid is four. You have time. Keep reading. I’m going to make this so easy for you. You won’t believe how “not hard” it is. I promise.

There are two secrets to “getting it all in”

• Make a plan
• Read your ass off

1. Make a Plan

So, every August I sit down and make a plan for our year. With the kids, we decide what will be learned. We’ve found it simplest to break world history into a four year rotation, and we study one segment in a given year (three times over before they’re done). This is borrowed from the Classical Education model.

• Ancient History
• Medieval History
• Renaissance History
• Modern History

We then choose a region to study for Geography for the year.

The history and geography choices inform our Literature selections.

The languages are learned in four year chunks too. Four years of French was followed by four years of Spanish, then it got a little messy. Because, Thai, Malay, Bahasa, Arabic, German, Czech, and Italian happened, because we were traveling. But that’s okay, right? Because the result was bi-plus-lingual kids. Which is what I call it when you can communicate well in two languages but can get the job done in a handful of others.

Latin and Greek I taught for word roots, not so they could show off at frat parties. Although reading the monuments has been a fun party trick at various stages. Ez was picking the words we knew out of the Vulgate Bible on display at the Library of Congress years ago. That gobsmacked the guards. The kid in question was balanced on my bent knee so he was tall enough to look through the glass.

I don’t care about that. I care about above average literacy, which we also managed over the long haul. If you think teaching Latin and Greek to seven year olds is dumb, that’s cool. You don’t have to. It was just my thing. You know your kids best, teach what they need. You’ll figure it out for them.

Health and nutrition are easy: cook together, eat together, talk about food. Stick the food pyramid, or whatever they’ve updated it with on the fridge and point at it sometimes. Don’t buy junk food too much. Give them part of the grocery budget and let them make some choices. (Wait, that’s math too… but that’s real world education, nothing fits too neatly into boxes… I’m okay with that, neither does real world life.)

Phys. Ed.: Don’t over think this, mmmkay? Get them moving. Put them in little league if you want, personally I’d rather jump off something high than sit through little league practices and games, but I’m weird that way. Put them in gymnastics when they are driving you mad in February. Teach them to SCUBA dive maybe. Climb stuff. Run.

Kick them out of the house and use that voice you remember your mom using that went something like, “Don’t come back in this door unless you are bleeding or hungry! And take care of each other!”

Have the “condoms are your friend” talk with enough regularity that they don’t freak out when you say the words in front of their friends. Yeah, start when they are small, when it’s still funny, and not at all serious, and doesn’t matter even a little yet. Trust me on that one. Even if the rest of this stuff doesn’t resonate at all. That one matters. A lot.

So yeah… make a plan for that stuff. Pick your history segment. Pick your geography segment. Pick a LOT OF BOOKS that look interesting.

Not textbooks.

Please don’t buy a kid under high school age a textbook for anything but math. Please don’t.

Living books. You want living books. Go have a chat with Charlotte Mason about that, because she’s genius on this point.

What are living books? Books written by one person, who is passionate about her subject, and who is, as a result, INTERESTING. Pick a whole gob of books to cover the basics of your history and geography segments with literature. Non-fiction and fiction too. Factoid books and literature, poetry and gorgeous sweeping stories that capture the imagination.

Picking these books, finding these books, is work. I’m not going to lie about that. Start with the Database of Award Winning Children’s Literature if you need help. I love that you can search by country. Super helpful for us as we were traveling and wanted age appropriate books pertinent to our current “classroom.”

Don’t miss the Holling C. Holling books. These babies are gold for North American geography and history rolled into one gorgeous packaged decorated in every margin with detailed and interesting drawings. My kidults still call hermit crabs “Pagoos.”

2. Read Your Ass Off

This is, like, the whole secret to educating your kids if you want to know the truth. Read aloud. All the damned time. Every time they aren’t running, read to them. Why? Because they want to know stuff, and reading is still hard and frustrating to them, so cut out the middle man. And for heaven’s sake learn to do voices.

Here’s what that looked like for us, for about a decade and a half:

Breakfast: Read poetry

Lunch: Read history

Dinner: Read literature

Bedtime: Read “fun” book

If you read only 15 minutes in each block, you’ve just added another full HOUR of content input to your day without making them sit for “school.”

Did you notice the really sneaky thing: Mealtimes. Captive audience. And they’re reasonably quiet because they are chewing. This is such a no brainer. Read at mealtimes and you’re pretty much done.

Now, what will happen, of course, is that they’ll get into the book and you won’t be allowed to stop at 15 minutes. Our meals averaged 30 min of reading each… two hours per day. Easy peasy.

And yes, if you’re reading between the lines you’ll see that I didn’t eat a meal without interruption for a decade and a half. So what? It got the job done painlessly. Small price to pay in my book.

In the age of iPods and phones, my kids have all had access to our entire Audible library (which I assure you is extensive) and so other people read to them a lot when I’m doing other things.

For the kids who are more of an auditory learning style, this has been key to getting through the “classics” which would have taught them to hate reading and hate literature (like it did their dad).

Instead, Moby Dick is a laugh out loud fan favourite at our house. We skip the whale biology bit every time… he does bang on a bit about whale anatomy in that section. Dickens was a favourite by 11 years old.

Reading aloud. Secret weapon. Wield it like the bad ass parent you are.

The Arts

You know, if I could hug Charlotte Mason in person for this one, I’d hug the woman. When you see how easy it is to have high level classical arts and music literacy, you’re going to cry with relief. Particularly because we all know how important the arts are to life and mental and emotional health, and yet they’re the first thing cut from school curriculum as “non-essential,” every damned time. Any parent can fix this at home with almost zero effort (okay nothing is zero effort, but this is stupid easy.)

Divide your school plan up into 8 week chunks. We had four, because I need a third of every year to do other stuff. Like beach days and blueberry picking. That’s important education too.

Music

For eight weeks play one hour of music by one composer. The same composer, every day, for eight weeks. I did this during arsenic hour… you know that hour of the day where everyone is losing it and you’d either give some, or take some… arsenic that is. Classical music calmed everyone down, particularly me.

Play Chopin every damned day for 8 weeks. Then, without warning, switch to Beethoven and watch what happens. The four year old will say something, I promise.

If you really want to up your game, say the name of the composer once or twice during the hour. Ask a kid what he likes in the music and what he hates. Ask him what it makes him feel like. Dance around like that thing for a while. This can be a lot of fun, as well as arsenic hour detox.

Art

On the first day of the first week, stick a piece of art by your chosen artist on the fridge or wall, on day three of the week, put up another piece, same artist. Two pieces a week, 8 weeks, same artist. Start with Monet if you want. Then on the first day of week nine, throw them a curve ball by putting a Dali next to Waterlilies. “WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED TO MONET?!”

“Meet, Dali, children…”

Ask the questions about color, form, feeling, light, dark, emotional response. Heck, get crazy and MAKE ART in the form of the artist in question. Leave them up if you have the space for the whole school year and see what happens.

Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s truly that easy.

I had a certain six year old that held forth on the intricacies of Monet in L’Orangerie, in Paris, to an amazed group of other museum patrons because, “It was his favourite.” Proud mama moment right there.

How could he possibly have a favourite and articulate intelligent things about it by six? He was paying attention to what was happening on the fridge in the four preceding years, for the benefit of his older siblings. Little genius. You’ve got at least one too. Stop wasting fridge space.

Dover Publications offers affordable, postcard sized art prints. Buy them.

In this way you’ll get through at least four composers and four artists per year, if you’re lazy about it like I was. And over the course of even an abbreviated decade of an education, that’s FORTY composers and FORTY artists that your kid will become seriously friends with. Can YOU name forty composers and artists? Or recognize the difference by sound and sight? Don’t worry, that’s the best thing about worldschooling, you’ll “fix” your education too.

The Magic of a Learning Journal

Herein lies the magic, friends.

So, you’re doing some basic stuff every day. And you’re reading. And a couple of times a week you’re writing down what your kid says, verbatim. And you’re playing some music and pointing at what’s on the fridge a lot. Good for you. You’ll cover a lot of ground that way. But you’re doing far more, and we can prove it, even if by Friday you can’t remember what happened on Tuesday. That’s life with kids; I get it.

Get a journal. Every evening, write down what the kid learned that was not one of the above. Maybe you went to a museum or a performance. Maybe you were at a collective class, or a drum circle. Perhaps you spent three hours on Youtube watching endangered animal videos, or diving deep into the ocean of plastic, or watching that video on planned obsolescence.

Maybe you did art or built a trebuchet in the back yard, or hiked half of the Freedom Trail. Write that stuff down!

Label it under subject headings: Science, Art, History, Music, etc.

On the last pages of the journal keep a running book list of every book you read and every book the kid reads.

This will take you less than five minutes of an evening. Less than two minutes once you get good at it. Super simple record keeping that will shut down naysayers and give you a leg up when it comes time to make it all count.

(Not) Lost in Translation

The second most popular question (after, “What about socialization?!”) is “What do you do about college?” As if this is some sort of giant obstacle, instead of just one of the panoply of opportunities afforded children who have had a world class (literally) education.

What do you mean what do I do about college? If they want to go, I send them. And I remind them that at “contrived school,” (because what we do is “real school”) they have to remember to sit in their seats and raise their hands. What does everyone else do? Probably less on the reminders.

Getting alternatively educated kids into college (or back into mainstream school, or a specialty school that’s particularly awesome) is not hard. There are a number of options.

Go the usual route

One is to go the usual route, take the appropriate tests, prepare a transcript, and enter as with a freshman class where the scholarship opportunities are more likely to abound. If you’re sending kids in the USA this can seriously matter. There are reasons NOT to send them in the USA (price being only one) but that’s for another article.

Skip straight to college (yes, really)

Another option is to let the kid start taking classes, online or at a local college, as soon as they are capable. Once a student has passed a few university level courses, as a “non-degree seeking” student, they have a college level transcript and anything they did in high school no longer matters that much. No kidding. At that point they can enroll full time, or transfer into another university on the strength of their credits.

Note that there is no guarantee that transfer credits will be accepted by another institution, but they DO circumvent the high school transcript and freshman entry rodeo.

Take a Gap Year

A third option is to take a Gap Year program that offers university credit and then follow the recommendation above. This works too.

Getting them in looks like this:
We’ve gotten three out of four kids into college this way. The fourth is just 15, so stay tuned. (2022 Update – He’s in commercial flight school… it went fine!)  Here is how I do it.

• Identify the college the kid wants to attend
• Research to see if they have special policies for home ed students
• Identify the persons who have power in admissions (by name and email)
• If at all possible, make an IN PERSON appointment

To that appointment, take:

• The child
• The high school transcript (which you have created from your excellent records
• The college transcript (if you have one)
• An exhaustive book list of every book read by the child since they turned 14, and every book read TO the child or on audio
• An exhaustive list of museums and educational opportunities availed
• An exhaustive list of extra curricular activities and volunteer work
• Shut up and let the kid do the talking

If you cannot make an in person appointment, file all of that (except the child, of course) electronically directly to the decision maker at the admissions office.

Both times we’ve gone in person (once to a top tier school and once to a solidly average school) we’ve been in and out of the office in under twenty minutes with a guarantee of admission in hand. When we did it electronically, it took about three weeks of back and forth with little stuff. In the age of the virtual, there’s still something to be said for the face to face meeting.

The secret sauce here is your learning journal. Just keep tossing stuff in there and you’ll be amazed when you put it all together, how much you’ve covered.

What’s next?

What to do with questions & an invitation.

There you have it. The essence of what two decades on this subject has taught me in fewer than 5000 words. Easy right? You can do this. You really can.

I know the next round of questions are going to be about specific methods, curriculum recommendations and “What to do about high school.” All fair, and all impossible to answer on the macro level. I’m happy to help on the individual level.

If you’re ready for more help, shoot me an email to jennsutherlandmiller(AT)gmail(DOT)com. I’ll write back, I promise.