Carolyn22 said:
I was under the impression that the kids that were home schooled received a better education than those children that were not. I remember years ago, when was living in Rochester NY, I worked with a woman that was home schooling both of her children - I believe this was about 1985-87. She told me about what she had to do in order to educate those kids and what type of criteria she had to meet, although I was also under the impression that different lessons learned could feed into multipls subjects -
What I do not know is if the criteria for home schooling back in the mid 80's has changed any - why do I think it has?
Each state can have their own laws, but the basics of the law is that homeschool children will receive a comparable education as if they attended the public school in their district (most will receive a superior education). The laws in my state have gotten easier since the mid 1980s due to court cases regarding the parents rights to educate their children.
For my district, I met with the super's office once a year, every June, for about an hour. I kept a binder of work samples and tests for each subject, per child, with notes of any additional programs or field trips they may have attended that year. which they would keep to review for a couple of weeks,, and then call me to come pick the material up when they were through. At that same meeting where I brought in their portfolios, I would provide a LOI (letter of intent) for the new/coming school year, that identified each child by name, date of birth, grade level, and the intended materials I intended to use (it did not need to be detailed, but since we worked from textbooks, I supplied the name/publisher of each book, as it made it easier for me) ... So when I would go back to pick up their previous work, I would also receive a new letter, documenting we had met the districts approval to homeschool another year.
As far as "different lessons could feed into multi subjects" ... those are called Theme Units, or Cross Curricula activities. More common at the lower levels. You can buy specific workbooks like this (usually about 60 pages or so), but unless it was something of special interests, we rarely did those, as standard textbooks do this throughout. Nearly all subjects interact. Math word problems are not just numbers, but reading, rationalization, and common sense ... you cant touch a science book without doing math ... cant read any of the textbooks without reading and writing skills ...
The sun is in my eyes right now, so the sun ... A themed unit at a mid-upper elementary level could be about the sun ... It can become an art project, a science fair project, a math project relating to size or distance, it could be a lesson in photosynthesis, chemistry, a report (that covers language/grammar skill development, science, etc) ...
I did a lot of travel up/down the coast for dog shows ... our kids learned basic map skills first from AAA trip maps ... they would tell me where to go, when gas was coming up, known radar trap areas, if there was construction ... all three had this mastered by the ages of 6-8 ... as we passed through a state or an area, the environment could suggest what industries were in the area, talk about state capitals, the state nicknames, population ... if it was rural, suburban or city, and on and on ... I wasnt trying to TEACH during these trips, it was just conversations to entertain them while we were on the road.
