Homeschooling fun
My wife and I plan to homeschool our older daughter. I guess technically we do this with both though I think calling it schooling for our baby doesn’t really make sense. Anyway. Some people in our lives think this is weird. We have doubts too, but then, parenting for me has involved a ton of doubt (and fear and guilt). Here’s the cool part of homeschooling for us: it’s fun. The way we’re approaching it so far, we learn about stuff and talk about it and do things together. It’s basically the same as an adult intellectual life driven by intellectual curiusity, except set in an appropriate way for our daughter’s age. Here’s a concrete example.
My wife and my daughter are reading a book together at bed time, a book set in the north of England (she and I are reading a different one when it’s my night to do bedtime stories). This has made my daughter interested in that region. We showed here where it is on maps and told her about when we traveled there. We looked up pictures of the city, and learned about the history of York. She was especially interested in the old Roman walls and has decided she’s going to draw pictures of those walls. We watched a video about regional accents and older dialects of English in that part of England and now she’s practicing her Yorkshire accent. Today or tomorrow we’re going to cook some regional food (she’s excited to experiment with inventing new kinds of sweet sauces) and I’m going to help her write “York.” Friends have suggested some educational videos to watch, and I’ve been playing her some music from northern England (I’m a big fan of music from there from the 80s and 90s, I’m going to look up some older music from there). We’ve previously learned some French together and read about and looked up pictures of Paris and now she knows that France and England are really close together, separated by the English Channel. We might try making up some stories set there.
So, in terms of school curriculum categories, we’ve got history, geography, music, art, cooking, creative writing, and handwriting. And all of these opens onto interesting further avenues, like the history of the Roman conquest of Britain (I now want to know more about Hadrian’s Wall, and my daughter’s interested too) and learning more about other regional English dialects (my wife’s currently reading a book on the changing history of English spelling and pronunciation) and regional recipes. So, we follow interests together, cultivate intellectual enthusiasm individually and share them together in an age appropriate way (there are things I’m learning about the history of Manchester now in the book I’m reading on the Smiths that I won’t be sharing with my kids until they’re older), and this feeds both the enthusiasm we each have and the content knowledge we learn (my daughter and I learned that part of the wall in York is almost 2,000 years old, and then she told my wife, who was really surprised to learn that, stuff like that allows my daughter some time to be an expert on some things sometimes too).