Thursday, November 01, 2007
Projects
If you homeschool, do you do lots of projects with your kids? I'm wondering why lots of homeschooling parents seem to enjoy and encourage projects to help the learning process, but parents that send their children to school find them a waste of time. From what I can tell, non-homeschooling parents object to projects because the fundamentals are not being taught and the education establishment seems to be going for feel-good-but-teach-nothing projects instead of actually teaching the basics. Homeschooling parents, with their one-on-one, or close to it, teaching ratio, seem able to impart knowledge to their pupils while they work on the projects together. Is that what you see/think?
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8 comments:
Okay. . .I'll admit it. . .I'm a homeschooler who does NOT do many projects with the kids. I'm not sure if it's because I don't like them, or if it's because I always seem to have toddlers/babies underfoot.
I don't do them either, but sometimes I kinda feel guilty, like I'm a lazy homeschooling teacher. I'm satisfied with what the girls are doing though, so I suppose that's the main thing.
for me/us, it's not really *projects* that we do together, more *experiences* that we have together.
i do try to give my kiddos a wide range of adventures in the hope that something will *spark* for them and will enthuse them educationally.
well, you know me, all of life is "education", from the moment we wake up to our falling asleep. and i know for me, i'm w-a-y more inclined to learn by *osmosis*... i find an interest in something and have the resources to go off and learn about it: usually with other people... (that extrovert thang again).
i have tried a more *classical* or formal model of education with my kiddos, but find myself butting heads with them... it's easier if i wait until they show interest in learning, and then *boom* it all happens so fast.
that's the general idea, of course it doesn't happen in a vacuum. our home environment is one of Learning Together i suppose.
(as always, difficult to express myself on pooter screen, am thinking we'll have a coffee one day... probably when our kiddos are all grown up and we Really Do Know It All)
love X
While in school, my problem with projects was that they were in addition to normal homework or a test. Any project that was in place of normal homework or a test was OK, though.
And my big problem with institutional school is they are not efficient with scarece resources, not just finiancial, but also time.
I haven't done many projects with my kids either, though they have been great when I did them. I can't get past the "the house is chaotic enough without throwing something in" if we are talking about art or science, and with writing and such, I've followed the kids' lead on their abilities, and so we're just not there yet (my son is just slowly getting over his hatred of the pencil.)
Well, this is an interesting question. I'm not sure what I think about projects. I do know that my kids really remember them and what they were learning at the time we did them. From my own school experience, don't remember do many projects. What I do remember was doing big fun science projects for the science fair (which were do on my own or with the parent's help) or major papers, like the state project where we had to do a major report on the state of our choice, including drawings of the state bird, flag, flower and tree. I did Maine. I was in fifth grade. I still remember it very well. But I don't know about today's school projects. I do know that homeschooling mother tend to believe the lie that they should do projects with their kids, otherwise they are harming and/or ruining them or their education. My sister just lent me a book that is great so far. It's called Lies Homeschooling Moms Believe by Todd Wilson. I'm anxious to read it for some of the very reasons you bring up and I just said.
I don't do many official "projects" with my dd, age 5. And I do, like Sniz says, feel guilty about that, because it seems like something I -should- do.
What I do find, though, is that my husband and I tend to involve our daughter in OUR projects to a much greater extent than I see in traditionally-schooled families. Our Dd has helped do car repairs, tune pianos & organs, plant bulbs, fold laundry... you get the idea.
I'm going to go find that book Sniz mentioned!
There is no immediate gratification in conducting projects. No immediate grade, no immediate result, no immediate follow-up action.
Projects take patience. They take nurturing. They take the risk of knowing the endgame might not be what you expected, and it might have been a waste of time.
That last sentence, btw, really doesn't apply to homeschool parents, who find every experience valuable. The value just might not apply to the subject matter originally presented by the project.
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