Califoregon Living

Description from Amazon.com

Role models for a generation of homeschoolers, David and Micki Colfax are teachers turned ranchers who taught their four sons at home in the 1970s and ’80s and schooled three of them into Harvard. The Colfaxes don’t purport to be experts; they don’t prescribe a formula for their success. Rather, their experience is described as a trial-and-error effort, with some of their mistakes offered up as lessons for others.  The couple closes the book with an appendix of suggested references for building a family library and a delightful list of their children’s favorite books. –Jodi Mailander Farrell

My points of impact:

• All parents, after all, are teachers, and it is only the formal education in our children that most of us entrust to “experts”.
• Homeschooling, unlike other methods, allows parents and children to exercise control-over content, methods, timings, and personnel.
• What most educationists refuse to acknowledge is that real learning, in and out of the classroom, varies along community, cultural, and class lines, and from place to place and from era to era.
• The child who attends public school typically spends approximately 1,100 hours a year there, but only twenty percent of these-220-are spent, as the educators say, “on task”.  Nearly 900 hours, or eighty percent are squandered on what are essentially organizational matters.  In contrast, the homeschooled child who spends only two hours a day, seven days a week, year-round, on basics alone, logs over three times as many hours “on task” in a given year than does his public school counterpart.
• Most children learn nearly half of all they will ever learn by the time they are four or five years old.
• “Real things”-tools, building materials, musical instruments, art supplies, and such-have a greater appeal to children than do the various kits and miniaturizations that are so frequently given to them simply because it is assumed that children are unable to appreciate or use the general article.
• Parents would do better, it appears, not to concern themselves with the acquisition of reading skills, but to endeavor to provide their children with an appreciation for reading.
• For children to become more independent and educationally self-sufficient as they grow older, resources such as a good home library, art supplies, musical instruments, lab equipment, and hardware of various kinds facilitate exploration, creativity, and autonomy.
• More than “children’s books” should be included in the library early on, so that the read-to-aloud child can begin to understand that books are tools as well as sources of entertainment.
• Enyclopedias-The real test of an encylopedia is not how nice it looks on a shelf, but how much it is used.
• As the home library is being assembled, parents will find that books that they feel are important are being rejected by their children.  Though disconcerting, at least initially,it should be viewed as evidence that the children are developing tastes and interests on their own-and something that should be encouraged.
• Expose children to as wide a range of books as possible.
• Special interest periodicals are another rich source of learning materials.
• Provide the child with examples, opportunities and incentive to write.  Have them keep a daily journal from the time they can hold a pencil.  Have the young ones draw a picture and title it.  Expand writing entries as they become more articulate: weather reports, goals for the day, visits from friends, fragments of conversations, etc.  This is objective and not intended for private thoughts (like a diary.)
• Letter and note-writing.
• In the early years when the basics (3 R’s) are being laid down, it is more important to provide the child with a sense of accomplishment and to build self-esteem than to overload him or her with exercises that very well may provide “the basics”, but make it all but impossible for him or her to put them to good use later on.
• Children should be exposed to math very early and very gently.
• Too much of what is imposed upon a child in schools in the name of teaching him or her basics is in fact a mechanism for sorting children into organizationally manageable categories-the “bright”, “average”, and “slow”, “gifted”, or “special education.”
• Once reading, writing, and computational skills are in place-around age 10 or 12, the child is ready for new challenges. (Grammar, composition, upper math, science, history and government, literature, foreign languages,.
• Goal-educate our children, to facilitate the development of intellect and character, and not merely to prepare them for college or a career.
• A homeschooled student who does reasonably well on a few standardized tests can make a case for himself or herself, will have little difficulty attracting the attention of admission directors of most good colleges.
• Children who are given to understand that standardized tests are not necessarily valid measures of worth or competence will not be much intimidated by them when they come up against them.