Slashdot Mirror
Home-Schooling and "Open Source" Materials?
Deagol asks: "After we registered our daughter for second grade yesterday at public school, I began to ponder (yet again) the question of homeschooling. There's certainly not a lack of sites out there about the topic, but I was surprised at the lack of public domain materials out there. I would think there'd more collections of public domain 'courses' since the K-12 core knowledge base is so stable and well understood. Sure, there are tons of places that will sell you kits of course materials, and quite a few home-schoolers who made their own courses (but only offer them for a fee). I assume there's more than a few homeschoolers out there on Slashdot. Are there any good sources of free home-schooling materials (including software) out there?"
Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/) has some of the best literature ever written, from Alice in Wonderland to Emile Zola; you can download the complete works of Mark Twain as a single zipped archive :)
...
I wonder if anyone can suggest good analogs to PG for music and / or spoken-word materials, things like classic radio broadcasts, famous speeches, audio books with appropriate licenses, etc
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
As a former special ed teacher (in elementary, but also in high school for a while), I'd first suggest you ask yourself why you want to homeschool. I've worked with a number of homeschooled students. While I find that, in many cases, they are well educated, that does not make up for the social issues I see almost all of these students develop. Homeschooled students simply do not get the myriad of opportunities to interact with peers and authority figures that they would in school. In one school the valedictorian had been homeschooled for most of his life. When he graduated, he was not emotionally ready for college, and would not have been able to handle making all the personal decisions living away from home requires. He did not know how to interact wit hthe other students who frequently laughed at his attempts to "fit in." Now that I'm in the business world, I see he is also not someone I would want to hire. While homeschooling may have helped him academically, his social skills were so poor, I could not see him interacting well with other employees or working with a team in a beneficial way. He simply did not have the experience at interacting and working with people.
While I have seen some homeschooled students do quite well, the majority I've seen (both in and out of special ed) are too much like the student I described above to be a coincidence. The parents are so thrilled Junior is thinking like them and acting the way he's been told to act, they don't see this. The few students that did well had EXTENSIVE social activities (I mean way more than non-homeschooled students had), such as playing on a soccer team AND acting in community plays AND ballet going on all at once -- which often would also lead to burnout.
On the other hand, I have another point to help. Schools go through textbook adoption in cycles. For elementary, one year they're working on Language Arts, then Math, then Science, etc. See if you can work with other parents in the area that want to homeschool. As a group go to school districts in the general area and see if you can obtain used copies of books they're discarding when they adopt new books. Do this with private schools as well.
The curriculum is not as set as the question makes it sound -- there are constant changes in elementary education (the very fact that statement was in the question leads me to ask if the person who asked the question knows enough about learning and what teachers are actually doing when they teach to be an effective teacher -- reading, for example, is not an easy subject to teach effectively). I only taught for 10 years, but the way reading and language arts was taught in that time changed enough so I would not have wanted to use textbooks available at the beginning of that time 10 years later.
well... she says that for grade/elementary school if you joined a public or private school you'd get either placed by age or by evaluation... and after 3rd grade you have to take a state certified test every other year to determine that the student is meeting certain aptitude criteria if they are homeschooled.
So the curriculum isn't actually doing anything but making sure that the student achieves a certain skill level set by the state education organizations (I think you can check the websites for your state government, find the education dept, and then find listings of what they state are the required things/levels that the student should know). Which would imply that you don't NEED to buy a curriculum... it is however much easier than coming up with all the work sheets, etc, that most students are going to need to ensure that they are learning the proper things...
Most of the curriculums actually ARE open source... in that they are simply workbooks, etc, teaching the basic stuff that everybody knows (their source of information is open)... not some special formula for education. They however are not free...
So for a DIY kind of person you could theoretically take those state requirement listings and base what you're teaching on those, rather than purchasing a curriculum. There are also local home schooling groups, which will aid you in getting started.
I think one of the main reasons there aren't any really totally free ready-to-teach curriculums out there, is that most of the people who are home schooling have given up one income in the household, and are either teaching with other people's curriculum (or an amalgam of several company's materials) or are selling their own custom designed curriculum as a method for supplementing their family's income...
wordtrip.com
In addition to helping with the various legal hurdles some states impose on home-schoolers, the HSLDA also provides a clearing house for home-schooling information.
Another group you may find interesting is k12.com, which is an internet-based classroom for homeschoolers, founded by former US Secretary of Education Bill Bennett.
It is true that you won't find a great deal of actual courses freely available. The information being taught in any course/curriculum is public domain; you're paying for the time and effort it took for someone to arrange that information for you.
However, do you need actual courses? The information you're seeking *is* out there for free. It is possible to pull together a fantastic curriculum with little effort.
One book you should immediately look at is "Homeschooling Your Child for Free." I forget the author, but you can find it on the shelf at any Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc. I found a copy at my local library. It is filled with free educational resources on every subject. If there are free courses available, this book will list them.
Another useful book is "Home Education Year by Year" by Rebecca Rupp. This book will walk you through pulling your own curriculum together.
There are literally thousands of free lesson plans for teachers on the web.
All of the phonics and reading materials I use to teach our kids can be found at the library. So far all of my science material has come from the web or libraries. My kids learn handwriting from worksheets I print off the web. Most of our citizenship and art projects come off the web too.
I did purchase math and history programs, but I could easily teach those subjects using free resources as well.
Finally, go grab any books you can find by John Taylor Gatto and John Holt. Anyone who is considering homeschooling should read what they have to say about education.
~medcalf's wife
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
They also present "real-time science" events which are lesson plans and activities based on current events or special activities. For example, they teamed with CSA to do a webcast from the International Space Station to demonstrate some physics in space and build a educational units from it.
Many parents homeschool for regligious reasons, but no state requires homeschoolers to join a church or profess the Christian faith. (And you don't pass or fail the SAT, either.) Secular homeschoolers will easily find plenty of other people who aren't just putting their kids through religious indoctrination. For the last ten years the most growth among homeschoolers has been non-religious families.
The best reason to homeschool your kids: to be closer as a family. Too many parents don't know their kids, don't know what their kids are doing, and leave almost every aspect of their child's education and growth to total strangers. Nothing can replace spending time with your kids every day. Numerous studies, not to mention common sense, show that kids who spend time with their parents and are part of a family do better in life.
The socialization issue is really a non-issue; people with don't like homeschooling for one reason or another always trot that out. Spend some time in a public school and say with a straight face that most of those kids show healthy socialization. Do you really want your kids to spend 12 years in an artificial, opressive, regimented, and cruel environment that--at best--prepares them to do what they are told, to blindly accept arbitrary authority, and to jump whenever a bell rings?
Some homeschooled kids are spelling bee geeks. Some are jocks. Some are social butterflies. To me they mostly seem like well-adjusted versions of schooled kids, minus the toxic amounts of peer pressure and grade anxiety the schooled kids carry around. And I don't have to wait for the 10th grade skills test to find out what my kids know or don't know.
The "professional teacher" argument is another red herring favored by teachers and "education professionals." Kids know how to learn on their own. Almost everyone learns the single hardest skill they will ever learn--speaking their own language--with no professional help at all. Believe in your child, and yourself. If you don't know how to teach your child something you can easily find someone who can. Many homeschooled kids we know attend some classes at private schools or community college, to learn things like languages or music that are best taught by an expert.
I have three homeschooled kids and my wife and I are involved in various city and state groups of homeschoolers. Social activities dominate the calendar: skating, teen dances and activities, camping, museum trips, 4-H, soccer and other sports, various clubs and study groups, etc. etc. Lots of kids have part-time jobs. Most will go to college: homeschooling conventions and curriculum fairs attract recruiters from Ivy-league schools now, and homeschoolers have higher college admission rates than public school kids.
Don't accept random opinions from slashdotters to decide something so important. Find a local group of like-minded (secular or religious) homeschoolers and attend some activities. Read about it: John Holt's two excellent books How Children Fail and How Children Learn will open your eyes.
If you still think public school has something magical to offer, or that the folks who run the school and choose the curriculum know more than you do, read John Taylor Gatto's excellent essay The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher at:www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
My wife selected a few links from her homeschooling bookmarks, where you can find lots of free material:
Homeschool Central - Study Resources
TeacherFeatures.com
Homeschool Support on the Internet
HomeworkCentral.com - Lesson Plans by Subject
NGA: Teaching Resources: Loan Programs
Novel Study Guides for the Classroom Teacher
Outline Maps
100 Top Map Sites
Unit Studies (huge site!)
Lesson Plans & Teacher Helps
Newton's Apple
MathWork -- Math worksheets you can create in your browser
S.C.O.R.E.
homeschooling.about.com
A to Z Home's Cool - Homeschooling Web Site
Jon's Homeschool Resource Page
Well, Cliff,
There's plenty of good stuff out there, but you'll have to do some editing. As somebody who grew up around teachers and has worked in textbook publishing I can assure you that teachers all have to do it too. Their stuff sucks far worse than anything referenced here.
While Project Gutenberg is great, you should also check out on-line encyclopedias like NuPedia, and Everything2 which are all open source, as is The Open Directory Project . A great source of fiction, which can be a wonderful learning tool, is Baen Books who have put hundreds of book online and are eager to have them downloaded and spread around.
For science materials, there are lots of great sites for kids done by educators pursuing whever they're into. All of which you'll want to use to spice up access to sites like Science Daily that are handy but a bit too serious some days for young minds.
Which brings me to Make Stuff which should fill in quite nicely for the "arts and crafts" part of most school curricula.
For biography I'ld check out American National Biography and for history a good start can be made with pages like Anyday which can be amazing or useless, all based on where *you* go from the starting point that they provide. Places like Colonial America are designed just for this but again, check out more than one.
For reference material you should check out Theodora which, while not meant to be open source, is very handy, Geographic.Org, which is open source and student-oriented, should do the rest. I've found that the CIA sourcebook is terrible, as folk should have long since figured out. Biased, misinformed, and sometimes just wierd; leave it behind. However if you hunt you'll find that within various.gov sites there's tons of great stuff, from manuals on camping to stuff on solar panels.
The space science community is very kid friendly, from NASA down to the local Mars Society chapter, having plenty of materials on quite a range of topics that you're free to reproduce and spread around. If you can handle it, the neopagan community is reliably eager to provide information and links on ancient indo-european history, from the government of Sumeria, to Celtic ironwork. (You might be surprised at how many neopagans have advanced degrees in history and/or literature.)
Speaking of limits, you'll always have to be careful that your kids aren't ending up places they shouldn't be but again, every teacher and librarian faces that one.
Lastly, the reason that I've got all this ready to hand is that I took it from my source database, more of which can be found on my web site, which is primarily oriented towards adults and older kids but does have plenty of other links like the ones here.
Best of luck to you and be sure to post back to slashdot in a few years about how it's going.
Rustin H. Wright - Information Geek
"It's all about the information, Marty. Little ones and zeros!"
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.