Homeschooling Overseas Part 2

It’s high time to continue with my series of posts on homeschooling. In this post I’d like to talk about our journey to becoming a homeschooling family. In the last post I highlighted some of the options that might be available if you’re living overseas. For us we only have two options here: either sending the children to local school or homeschooling ourselves. I’m not saying that one is better than the other. There are some ex-pat families here who send their kids to local school, and some who homeschool. It’s a decision that each individual family has to make. I’m just describing how we decided that homeschooling would be best for our family.

Our journey started when we came across some friends in England who had decided to homeschool. Both were Christian families, and both had different reasons for chosing that path, but I was interested to know how they were thinking about going about it. They recommended reading “For the Children’s Sake” by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, which is I think where the journey starts for many families homeschooling today! Both my husband and I read the book, and were really struck by the ideals represented there. Not only did we feel that homeschooling might be something positive and beneficial for our family, but we were also impressed by the educational methods of Charlotte Mason described in the book. As many of you probably know, Charlotte Mason was a British educator who lived about 100 years ago and developed a philosophy of education based on Biblical principles and her observations of children over her years of teaching and training new teachers.

I started reading more books and doing more research, mostly on the internet. The more I read and studied the more I felt that God was calling me to do this. The thought of homeschooling didn’t terrify me, like I know it does some people, partly because I am a teacher myself by profession….a maths teacher, to be precise, which seems to be the one subject that scares off potential homeschooling mothers the most! I had a bad experience in my former life as a teacher, which put me off teaching in mainstream schools and led to my change of career that eventually brought me here, but I had always loved the heart of teaching: imparting ideas and knowledge to children and the satisfaction that comes from seeing ‘light bulbs’ go off in their heads as they make connections and finally ‘get it’. Surely it couldn’t be too difficult teaching my own children! At least I would only have a class of 3 rather than 36 to manage!

We did investigate the local kindergarten. The main advantage of sending our children to local school would certainly have been the fact that they would become fluent in Russian much more easily and quickly. We liked the school very much. The teachers were ever so friendly. We expressed concern at the long day (in Russia children typically go to kindergarten from 8am to 4 or 5pm, having breakfast, lunch, afternoon nap and sometimes dinner there from as young as 2 years old) but they assured us that it would be fine if we wanted to take Sophie home at midday. They invited us to the ‘end of year performance’ which was an afternoon of dancing, singing and poetry recital by the children to wish the 6-7 year olds well as they went off to ‘proper’ school in September (Russian children start school at age 7). We were very impressed by the seriousness with which these small children undertook the dances, and at the bravery of even quite little ones taking the microphone and reciting a poem off by heart to a fairly large audience of parents and relatives. However, I remember my main thought being “Look at those outfits the little girls are wearing. We could never afford to deck Sophie and Charis out in one of those at the end of each year!”. Indeed, these little 6 and 7 year olds looked more ‘done up’ than I did on my wedding day! Their gowns must have cost a fortune, and it looked like they’d spent at least 2 hours in hair and makeup that morning.

I think it was the dresses that swung it for me, but there were other reasons too. In this culture there are a huge amount of hidden costs behind seeing your child through school education. Teachers get paid very little and so unfortunately it's quite normal to give 'extra monetary gifts' to ensure good marks.There’s also all the paperwork and red tape that would be involved, partly because we’re foreigners but also partly because that’s the system here, and I really hate that kind of thing. Finally, Sophie’s personality is such that we didn’t think she’d do well being thrust into that kind of environment at a young age.

And so, to cut a long story…well…not very short, we started planning on homeschooling. To be honest, the more we thought about it the more we thought that this is a route we may well have taken if we’d back in England. It just seemed to fit what God had in mind for our family.

In my next post I’ll talk about how to respond to local friends and neighbours when they ask why we choose to homeschool.

Qu: If you homeschool, what was it that led you to that decision? I'd love to hear your stories.

Abide in Him!

Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 11 - Tree Study

I'm actually writing this entry having come to the end of our year long tree study project. We chose trees as our family focus last year when we started doing these Outdoor Hour Challenge and followed eight trees, two in our garden and six in our town park. I think, however, that I was a bit more interested in doing the study than the girls were, but I'm hoping they'll be interested when I put all the photos together and they can see how the trees have changed in the photos.

Here are some pictures of the apple tree in our garden, which was our particular focus back in this post.

May

June

August

 

November

December

January

Outdoor Hour Challenge No. 10 - Picnics

This challenge is about picnics. Maybe it's something about being British, but I've always loved picnics, whatever the weather. I remember when we first moved to our town here in Russia, a local couple took us up into the foothills of the moutains for a picnic, which involved making a fire from scratch and cutting up our own cucumbers and tomatoes there on the grass. It started to rain. "Oh, we're so sorry about this," they said. "Don't worry," we smiled, "We're British. A picnic wouldn't be a picnic without the rain!".

Anyway, for this challenge I wanted to write about two picnics we've recently taken(although perhaps not quite so recently since it's taken me a long time to get round to writing this post!). When dh's parents were here for a visit we took them to our favourite picnic spot up in the foothills (actually, that very same spot where we were taken in the rain 9 years ago). I like to do picnics English-style, i.e. have things already cut up and made beforehand. Dh prefers picnics Russian-style, where you bring everything along and cut it up and make it there and then. For a compromise I cut up the cheese and veggies at home but bring the breadboard and breadknife to make the sandwiches later. One of the things I enjoy about picnics is that the children can run around us while we stay in one spot, instead of, say, going on a walk, where I'm usually dragging one or more of them along by the end because they got 'too tired' at quite a distance from where I parked the car. Russians never picnic too far away from their car (for fear of it being stripped for parts if it's out of sight), which even means them driving over rough terrain to get as close as possible to the picnic site.

Our kids really enjoy picnics up here in the foothills. Perhaps because it's something different. Perhaps because they get to eat loads of crisps (potato chips) without me batting too much of an eyelid. But they particularly enjoy the clambering about on the rocks afterwards looking for interesting clumps of flowers or following the horses that are grazing in the area.

Looking at mountain flowers

     We nearly always find beautiful mountain flowers that I can't identify in my 'Europe' wild flower guide.




The second picnic we took in the extensive town park where we live. The kids enjoyed playing hide and seek behind the trees and running down the little slopes of grass together. On the path on the way back Sophie and Charis discovered hundreds of little striped snails on the gravel path near the man-made lake. We tried to identify which shells no longer had owners and took them home to join our nature collection box on our school-room table. The girls noticed that these snail shells were very different to to the small black snails we tend to find in our garden. This interest led to a quick looking up of some information about snails in the Handbook of Nature Study and on the internet.

Snails from the picnic spot

Small black snails from our front yard