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What does high school look like using CM methods?
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Hello all,
I am looking for some insight, encouragement and guidance. I currrently have a 7 year old and 14 year old. Educating CM style with my 7 year old seems quite simple. it’s only our 2nd year educating her, and implementing new methods with her seems easy.
However my 14 year old, who is open to the changes I am making, still seems overwhelmed with work. Today was an okay day. Here’s what we accomplished:
At 9am, we did family Bible study for about 30-40 mins.
After that, we enjoyed a family read aloud while my daughter worked on beading, and my son worked on a small weaving loom. (the kind that has the colorful loops that you can make potholders with.)
I gave them about a 15 minute break.
I worked with my daughter, and supervised my son while he worked on Math U See and did a test.
We then ate lunch and took about a 20 minute break.
Then he spent about 45 minutes listening to and following along reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We are using Beautiful Feet Books American History.
That was it. Somewhere along the way, it feels as if we lost some time, and we didn’t even get to writing or science.
I love CM methods and desire to implement them fully in our homeschool, but cannot possibly imagine how high school should look like with CM.
Can any of you who are fully using CM in your homeschool, or are using it at least most of the time, tell me what your high schooler’s day looks like? How much time is spent doing what? And what type of curriculum/books are the best? We love literature at our house, and have always used living books to some extent in our curriculum, though we have used textbooks from time to time.
I am concerned that we will not get enough done during the day to qualify for high school credits, and I don’t want my son to be wiped out when 2pm rolls around and all he wants to do is veg for the rest of the day.
I know CM recommended free afternoons. I cannot even imagine how that happens and anything gets accomplished. I feel some days it’s all we do all day is school work.
Anything you have to offer would be of great help.
Thanks!
My homeschool is not the same as others and we do a lot of CM with traditional math and science. Once the girls got to high school, we spent about 5-6 hours on school a day doing our subjects. We do math, science and writing daily, history 3 times a week, geography twice a week and government twice a week. We do our electives on different days and craft on Mondays and Fridays. My daughters still have time to participate in the things they enjoy, but they no longer have the afternoons off – they are usually reading or studying or working on an essay or project. They are usually done by 4pm but we don’t start until 0930 as we like to start our days with exercise, dog training (new puppy) and Bible – we get up at 6am, but prefer to start school a little later after these things are done. It is working well for us now doing it this way.
From what I’ve read, I think free afternoons are for younger. Also, you must not forget that Charlotte’s schools did 6 day week. So if you’re trying to do all her subjects in 5 days, it seems a lot.
I break for lunch and then rest with my kids, but my older ones still do a couple of subjects in the later part of the day if needed.
I’m curious to see how other moms do their afternoons with older kids too. Thanks Linda for sharing.
Yes, it is impossible IMO to do all schoolwork before lunch with high school students. My students still have more free time than their public-schooled peers, but my teens also do about 5ish up to 6 hours a day at times. One of my sons takes a community college class two afternoons a week and one takes an online class three afternoons a week. They also often work on writing projects and other things in the afternoon. They do tend to do the heavy book-work in the mornings. We start about 8, after they get home from a very early morning scripture class, and typical ending time is 1 but of course longer when they have classes, or have a deadline approaching for a test or a paper.
For us, we’ve planned high school as partly continuation of earlier studies at a higher level, partly interest-driven, and partly practice for what college will be like, so we HAVE used more texts and done more things like testing and exams. I don’t want them wandering into college and encountering their first textbook chapter test, lol. I still feel the same way about what CM methods have done for our family, but these kids are getting awfully close to leaving for the “real world” and they need to know how to deal with it, too, and it is very likely that they will not get four years of all CM learning in college, lol. We feel we spend all these earlier years nurturing our children’s love of learning, and setting their feet in that big room, and watching them learn to care about many things, and then we get a time to help them prepare for midterm exams, 20 page research papers on obscure topics, and books written by committee which must nonetheless be learned. Oh, and reading sales reports and writing memos on them. LOL
My kids still have some afternoon time free from schoolwork, and they usually work on their hobbies. They spend less unstructured time outdoors than they used to; much of their outdoor time now involves things like Scouts and geocaching. They do little or no activities I would consider “handicrafts” now, but that may just be a reflection of my own tech-loving boys. They play piano, interact with friends, read blogs of tech reviewers, dream about cell phones, think about life in the near future, and try to kill each other with light sabers. 🙂 Oh, and eat. Teen boys always eat. I really have a lot less control over their schedule now, by our own design. They have a lot more input into what we study, and how and when we study it. I am much more a resource person and general helper now for them than I am a direct teacher. Probably because they are beyond me in so many things, lol. My 17yo just comes to me when he needs help or input or to show me what he has done; he definitely does his own thing. I’m more involved in the 15yo’s schedule still, and he still narrates to me some and approaches me for input more often.
These are all helpful. Bookworm- thanks for sharing. I do agree with you that we need to make sure our kids are equipped to handle the real world. So I don’t want to throw out all tests and the like. But I have thrown out the spelling and vocabulary workbooks, and we are working on more narration, written narration and dictation with our history books. We also are spending a lot of time on his pre-algebra course, which he’s doing fine with, but it’s requiring more of a time commitment for him.
I think also, that his literature has stepped up a notch this year, and we are doing more narration and discussion and it is a big adjustment for him. He’s a voracious reader, but with moving into more difficult literature I think has thrown him for a loop and he’s just trying to adjust.
Thanks for sharing your ideas all of you! I really appreciate it.
I am not there yet but am reading these posts w/great interest, curiosity and litte anxiety I must admit.
I really like the idea to homeschool for high school too, I am just wondering if I’ll be able to.
What do you do when they go beyond what you can help them with, do you get tutors, coop classes or is there online help they can get?
just curious, don’t mean to high jack, too clueless to even start a tread on this topic!!
petitemom, there are a number of options. One is you can pray to stay one lesson ahead as long as possible.
In some things, it may be OK if they are beyond you. We’ve been at that point for math for a long time. They essentially self-study, I check the answers in the book, and if they miss one they discuss it with dh and hope they can figure it out. We try to choose materials with videos if possible, or other ways to find help.
Yes, tutors, mentors, coop classes, community college or even college classes, and online classes can all be good solutions. We have no coop here, but have tried mentors, community college and online classes with good success. This is expensive, however. But it can work!
We do the same as Bookworm – try and stay ahead, my background helps with history/geography/German and language arts and hubby has an aerospace engineering/pilot background so he took math and checked on their science so it worked well that way. We also utilized Teaching Company videos and other media to help when needed. You will be surprised how well it can work when you finally get to it, just keep your eye on the ball and move along – I will never regret having them home for high school.
I have observed many families make it through highschool, as well as those that have chosen public/private. I don’t have a clue as to what we’ll do, but I hope to homeschool, that’s my goal/desire. I see the classes/work/higher-levels to be the same as what we have going on now. I do not teach my kids “everything” right now anyway. And what I mean by that is: I am not musically inclined but I do want my kids to learn if they want to (and sometimes even if they don’t;) so we have had to seek “outside” help. Same with all their sports and some handicrafts. It’s the same with any other area that I have no clue about or do not have the time learn on my own then teach my kids. For the most part, I can stay ahead of them, but if I can’t I don’t mind “contracting out”. We are still homeschooling, we’re just utilizing our community, online or in person, to get us through certain areas that we are not experts in, or don’t want to be experts in
.I do think that it will be alot of work (in different ways than it is now), but that’s par for the course 😉
thanks for your answers, I do not know anyone doing homeschooling for high school yet.
I do not have a background in anything as far as education, just did some college classes. I know a couple of languages but I don’t know how much that would help.
My husband is not the academic type, can’t imagine him help in anything. He is a successfull business man but never liked school and graduated as an orthodondist, which if you knew him is pretty funny!
I will keep an eye on the ball and see how it goes.. I never thought I could homeschool in the first place and am doing it so I need to believe it is possible even for high school, I really like the idea. We’ll see. I think even if I need to pay for a couple of classes or a tutor it will still be cheaper than Private school.
I drew up a contract with each of my highschoolers which outlined what my expectations were for a credit and for graduation. I let them decide how they would satisfy my expectations.
My dd did an almost exclusive CM style highschool program. She went through realms and realms of the college rule spiral bound notebooks. Lucky for me, at the time they sold for 10 for a buck in August. Unluckily for me, I never bought enough! She liked the Beautiful Feets study guides. She didn’t DO the study guides but used it as a reference for what to read and how fast to read it. She also might use it to formulate essay topics.
A typical day for her was reading a book, write a narration, rinse and repeat with another book. At dinner or lunch, we would sit down and talk about what she was reading (oral narrations). Each week I would assign a particular essay form ( I used Format Writing for this) and she decided the topic and subject that she would write about. Simple and effective.
She also did a traditional math program, and I required her to do the tests for Apologia science. She would outline Apologia, do written narrations from her outline, write up the experiments, and study for the tests. Free time was spent learning skills or topics that interest her. For examples, she taught herself to play the guitar and learned a music video editing program.
I had her keep a calendar with the approximate amount of time that she spent on each subject. Part of my requirements were that they had a record of time spent AND some sort of written documentation if they wanted it on their transcript. She also did a lot of independent research on a variety of topics during the highschool years some of which did not make it on the transcript since she didn’t keep track of the time or something of that nature.
During the summer, I would look over her calendar and her collected paperwork and attempt to make some sort of logical conclusion that sounded reasonable on the transcript!
As you can see, I wasn’t terribly involved in the planning or the finer parts of the day to day scheduling.However, I did have an off switch. My school day was over at 5pm so the kids knew that if they had any questions they needed to address them prior to that time. Don’t approach mama at 10pm at night with a pressing issue in algebra! I also liked to read most (not all!) of the books my highschooler were reading so that I could actually be able to have an intelligent conversation with them.
HTH
Just based on what you wrote and estimated times, it probably would have looked like this:
9-9:30 Bible
9:30-10:00 Read-aloud
10-10:15, break
10:15-11:00 worked with dd, son did MUS
11-11:45, lunch + 20 min break (do they NEED breaks every hour basically?)
11:45-12:30 son listened to story and followed along
12:30- bedtime…..??
Now, I’m sure these are probably not the exact times you did things, but if they AREN’T, then 1) maybe you forgot to include something that you did or 2) you’re somehow losing time in between things. I only wrote that based on what things you included and based on that, you still should have had plenty of time for writing and science after lunch. Can you look at what I wrote and plug in how long things actually took? That would help us to see where you are possibly losing time.
Although we have a few years before high school, I like to know where I’m going and have a tentative plan in place. Each of you shared many good points to consider.
WendyB, I would be interested in learning more about your contract between your children. It sounds like this would be a great idea for my DD. Please share more here or PM me. Thanks
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