The Autodidact

On a typical day, my 8 year old is pretty busy with his education. I mean, he is at it all day. Oh, he's not sitting quietly at a desk, with a little halo hanging over his head. He's not diligently doing school work, like they do in school. He's too busy for that because he is being educated. If he has slept in a bit, he fixes himself breakfast. He makes really tasty scrambled eggs, but sometimes he just toasts a bagel or has cereal. Of course, he knows how to clean up after himself as well. Then he's off to getting dressed and making his bed and picking up his room a bit. He hops on his bike for a bit of exercise. But then he has to dash off to shoot his BB gun at an impressive array of targets he has set up in the back yard. He tried to set up moving targets using twine and a pulley system, but realized the danger of having a sibling operating the targets while down range, and scrapped that. Legos are next, and he spends quite a bit of time putting together ...

So now you find yourself with several children and the oldest is anywhere from 6 to 8 or 9 years old, and you are trying to figure out how to do school with the oldest, while taking care of the younger ones. And you think the only way around this is to make the older one do most of her school work independently. While I address the bigger picture of homeschooling while mothering little ones  here , this idea of pushing our children into independent work needs to be discussed. I have 7 children, my youngest being 6. Of all of them, only one was a truly independent learner. I really don't recall teaching her to read or do math; in fact, I rarely had the pleasure of explaining much of anything to her. But even she sat at the table with us doing her work. We would do some subjects together, and some (like math) independently, but all at the same location. Since she was an early reader, she would read on her own for pleasure wherever she chose. We all worked at the dining room table, ...