Curriculum plays a varied and interesting role in Janna’s homeschooling story. When Janna began homeschooling her girls, she immediately purchased a structured online curriculum, Time4Learning.
"It’s an online curriculum, but it’s private pay. It’s not through a Cyber School or anything like that. We did that the first year because I was worried about keeping track of everything too…It’s a full curriculum.
I wanted something we could just use out of box, ‘out of computer’ [laughter]… I wasn’t really sure where Sacha was in terms of, I feel like she maybe wasn’t exactly at second grade, like maybe there were things that she needed to catch up on and also some things that maybe she was above…Their [Time4Learning] bill is that the curriculum adjusts for where you are. So, if you’re doing something on the computer and you’re making a lot of mistakes, then it will just automatically back you up."
Here she comments on the preponderance of religious curriculums.
The thing I liked about it, well it’s secular, which is a big thing for us; we are not homeschooling because of religious reasons, and we’re not a religious family. So that eliminates a bunch of homeschooling curriculum. We weeded out a lot, because I didn’t want to, I mean I know some people will just skip those parts or whatever, but I just didn’t want to be picking and choosing."
While Janna and her daughters loved the program, as the school year progressed their use of the program slowly diminished. They began doing their own writing and reading and math and didn’t need the curriculum. Their learning became more organic.
"We loved it (Time4Learning). We really did. The kids loved it. I loved it. It keeps track of everything for you and tells you exactly what they have done and haven’t done and so it’s like easy-peasy at the end of the year. And we probably would have continued with it, there wasn’t anything really negative about it. But I just decided that we, I, didn’t really need that anymore. We were using it less and less because we were doing other stuff more. We were doing more writing on our own. We were doing more reading on our own. We were doing more math stuff on our own, and I just decided I didn’t need it any more.
Actually, we were talking this year about going back to it just for the math component, cause the kids really liked the math component on it, but it’s expensive to pay for the whole thing just to do math.
So, yeah, it was really more that, that I just decided I wanted to be more interactive with them. And I was more comfortable, like I wasn’t as worried about the rubric anymore, about checking the boxes and I think I settled down and got more comfortable."
Janna became less reliant on someone else telling her what her kids needed to learn and also, she wanted to be more personally involved in the homeschooling experience. However, she did target certain skills and subjects they were interested in and accessed or purchased certain programs, like Brave Writer for language arts and writing.
"Love it (Brave Writer). It can be online, or it can be boxed. I just boxed it. I love it. I’m the kind, you know, I wrote a lot in school. I read a lot. I’m all about the reading and writing. And I just love the whole thing, and I really wanted us to do it because the spine of it is sharing books together and then doing some like copy work and short writing on the books. I just really loved the framework.
I realized that nobody was going to come and tell me that my kids weren’t learning enough. After I got over kind of all of that, I realized that that’s like the beauty of all of this. And that’s like why we keep homeschooling is that it’s super fun. I mean I get to do all this cool stuff. Like history, I never was a history person really. I never really got a good grasp of it…Read all this stuff, learn all this stuff, all is fitting together in a way it didn’t fit together for me before."
The second year of homeschooling began.
"At the beginning of the year… we did kind of what we’ve always done. Which is we do a little bit of everything. We do some book work, umm more math, writing, book work. They both had their classes that they took. Ruby is my science kid, so she took Franklin classes, Wagner institute classes. She does a science nature class at Aubrey down the road. That’s why we come here. And Sacha was doing art and that kind of stuff. "
Then Janna was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had surgery and was often sick from the treatment. What to do with the children? Janna’s father suggested that the girls go back to school because Janna was often unable to help them. Janna wanted to have them close by and they wanted to be with their mother.
"In the spring I worried more about them having something. Not because I was worried about them academically. I always feel like you can catch up with that stuff. But I wanted them to have something that they could do in the house when I wasn’t feeling well. So, I signed them both up for Time4Learning (Online curriculum they used when they first started homeschooling.)
We used bits and pieces when they are wanting to do something and I’m not available. But for the spring it was really useful because that’s exactly what it is, especially for Ruby, she really had times when she needed to have structure, wanting to learn things. I wasn’t as available, and it really was useful for us. So I’d get annoyed with why am I paying thirty bucks?!? But that’s how it changed in the spring. We definitely relied on it more. They used it more, and I think they did get a lot out of it."
Janna also used Khan Academy; it was a good fit for Ruby and it was free. Ruby was particularly interested in computer science and coding. She taught herself JavaScript through Khan Academy. Janna explained, “I mean I’m involved. I know that she’s doing it, but she knows more than I do at this point.”
Having her kids learn at home captured Janna’s imagination and pull her into a new way of life. She thrived on new ideas and wanted to be involved in family learning.
"One of my homeschooling friends talks about strewing materials, and strewing ideas, and I just love it, like it gives me this little mental image, and I just love that idea…throw a bunch of stuff around, see what we love, what we don’t like, what’s interesting. What works? What doesn’t work? Oh, we tried to learn some math this way. That didn’t really work. Let’s try to learn something this way. I don’t know? But I just love that idea, like this whole different curriculum."
Once Janna was recovered from her cancer and life seemed to settle a little, Sacha learned about a new opportunity – a brick and mortar fine arts academy that combined with doing regular schooling through Cyber School. She quickly prepared an audition at the end of the summer and was accepted. Now life involved taking Sacha ‘to school’ two days a week, and then Sacha labored through Cyber School three days a week while Janna and Ruby carried on with their own particular brand of homeschooling. Sacha loved the fine arts brick and mortar classes.
"There’s a theme for the year, they do all things art around that theme. Last year it was Women and Arts. So, they did dance, they did music, they did history, they did live performances, they did all kinds of stuff, awesome."
The Cyber School was very trying. Sacha found it to be very challenging and time-consuming. Even though they only did it for three days they were expected to complete five-days-worth of classes. The question of whether Sacha would continue in the program became moot because the family decided to move to New York because of dad’s job.
The family was challenged to build up their knowledge of a whole new state and environment in which to homeschool. The only curriculum reported to me after the move was that they use something called Build Your Library.
"We’re using that as a kind of the frame, so I am changing some things. It purports itself to be an everything but math curriculum. It integrates history, literature, reading, writing, and history, and science. It integrates them together… It’s a five day a week curriculum to get through a year. And we don’t do curriculum five days a week, so I cut and paste."
I look forward to hearing from Janna each year. What new approach will they be trying this year?
Photo by Ben White on Unsplash
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