You may be a homeschooler

There seems to be this perception that I'm in for a huge amount of work because we've decided to homeschool our kids. Yet, consider what a child is expected to be able to do (ideally) before they start kindergarten. I've collected this list from our own school district and other similar websites:

• read and write their name
• know the capital letters and preferably the lowercase as well
• count to 20 and recognize written numbers up to 20
• give their full name, address, and phone number
• tie their shoes
• sing a few songs and recite a few nursery rhymes
• recognize colors and shapes
• understand the concepts of equal, less, and more
• use crayons, markers, paint, scissors, and paste
• get dressed, undressed, and go to the bathroom unaided
• identify rhyming words
• know the general times of day (morning, afternoon, night)
• bounce a ball

If you teach your kids all that, you're a homeschooler, but you probably don't call yourself one. Some kids come to school already reading, or already adding and subtracting, or possessing a veritable library of information about dinosaurs, and nobody calls it homeschooling. I don't feel daunted by the task ahead because it's the same task that's been going on for nearly 5 years-- I already am and have been a homeschooler. Why would I suddenly decide that I am no longer a worthy teacher? (Especially when statistics show that teacher certification of parents has no effect on academic achievement, as measured by standardized tests, of homeschooled kids.)

I haven't considered it hard work to help A learn about the world so far. Most of the time my contribution consists of reading books and trying not to say "no" when she wants to get paint and playdoh all over the kitchen for the 5th day in a row. Lately, I've been hollering out "It's next to Mississippi" or "That's the capitol of Maine" while she plays her LeapPad US States game. (I didn't know that Charleston is the capitol of West Virginia-- I kept saying "It's in South Carolina!"-- and I still screw up Pierre and Bismarck, so in another week she'll probably know her capitols better than I do.) We certainly discuss the natural world and how words are spelled and so on, but if I get that "instructional" tone she changes the subject. I tried to volunteer something about the moon going around the earth a while back, and she said (rather peevishly) "I know Mom, I saw that on 'Blue's Clues' a long time ago."

At an on-line teacher's forum recently, a woman wrote in asking for suggestions to help teach 2- and 3-year-olds their colors. (Never mind that the 3-year-olds and most of the 2-year-olds probably already knew their colors.) People wrote in with suggestions like "I give them nametags of different colors, and then we read "Brown Bear Brown Bear" and when we get to the page with their color they stand up." Or, "I sing a little song where I call out a color and then sing 'If you're wearing the color I've found, stand up, turn around, and sit back down.'"

This is a bit silly. You teach a kid their colors by waiting until they're interested and then saying "This is the red one. And this one here? That's blue." What the above games really do is keep a group of small children occupied and under some semblance of control while tangentially relating it to colors, so the preschool can claim they're teaching something. (It's not clear to me that these games would be very effective in teaching colors in the first place, however.)

Yes, if I had to teach preschool or kindergarten and maintain control and gain the kids' attention, I'd be in over my head. No question. But teaching your own child is something every parent does, and it's not a Herculean effort, unless you impose an artificial schedule or try to force them to learn a topic they're not ready for. Unschooling avoids that kind of formality and externally imposed structure. Unschooling is simply a continuation of what my husband and I have done for years.