Verity's Book 2.0

Homeschool Career

Long ago, in the dawn of time...

Okay, it wasn't the dawn of time. It was July 2019. It was right about when the speed button on my life got pushed to 2x and didn't slow down for the next three months. And it was when somebody we all know told me to write about my homeschooled experience.

Now it's October and I'm crossing things little by little off my to-do list, and getting supreme thrills out of crossing two things off and having one new thing show up instead of crossing one off and having two show up.

So here I am, at midnight, reflecting on a power-outage, Caitlin's Adventures, and my homeschool career.

I did write part of this earlier buuut it was long and super rambly and I don't know if I'll bother to find it again. If Night wants it she can ask for it and I'll send it to her of course.

I probably forgot about fifty things worth mentioning. Writing about a homeschooled life is hard because where does the homeschooled part leave off? Nobody knows.

***

ACADEMIC OVERVIEW

I learned most of school through reading. My mom read to me (and my dad to a lesser extent) my entire babyhood and through middle school, until 10th grade or so when I started taking most of my classes on myself. I'm told I learned to read when I was four, but I don't actually remember a time when I couldn't read. I remember my mom teaching me words in the phonics book and glancing to the very end of the book to see something about Julia, not knowing I was "reading", but simply seeing and understanding. (She told me I wouldn't be able to read those pages yet, and not knowing that what I was doing was reading, and being a four-year-old with implicit faith in my mother's judgment, I believed her.)

After she coached me through the phonics book, I was a hopeless bookworm, and I would read anything anyone gave me. Within a year or two, virtually nothing was beyond my comprehension level or interest.

When I was five, my mom started a curriculum called Sonlight with me, which our family continues to use to this day. It takes a literature-based approach to learning, which worked perfectly with me. Sonlight itself focuses mainly on studying history, literature, and creative writing, but also lists varied math, handwriting, and elective sources in its catalog to complete the schooling prep.

Our school days were not highly structured. I would listen to my mom read history and stories and answer a couple comprehension questions. Sometimes go over a bit of vocab. Sonlight had a teacher's guide for suggested comprehension questions and word study. Our history books (written by Susan Wise Bauer) also had teacher manuals that I loved looking through for all the alluring crafts within their pages. Sometimes my mom would send the manual with my dad to his workplace, and he would copy her requested page and bring it back so we could color a map of England, or make elaborately costumed paper dolls of Justinius and Theodora. My own assigned reading, of course, was a joke. I blew through a year's worth in a few days. The day of the year that the schoolbooks came was a highlight because it meant I would have new reading material for a week.

None of this ever felt like an effort, a competition, or even a game. It was life. And it was fun.

I think I was six when I had the first inkling that school was something with expectations. In the middle of answering comprehension questions, something so routine that this is the ONLY memory I have of it, I suddenly realized that I was supposed to know these things, and that there was a great deal more out there that I would need to know by a certain time. The concept of needing to keep pace was born.

Typically, it didn't bother me. Being a kid who liked to listen to grownups, especially if I was the subject of conversation, I realized that I was highly competent in everything I was learning. But a niggling fear sometimes surfaced: What if there was something I needed to know about, but didn't? What if I missed one of those need-to-check boxes en route to... whatever adult life held?