Swann Family = 10 Children with MA at age 16! Book Review & Discussion Thread

[nee1]

I've found one mom who also applied the self teaching concept with her kids and with excellent results. She has 8 kids. I'm not sure she used Robinson Curriculum, but she used the self-teaching approach. Here is her website - http://www.urthemom.com/Home_Page.php.. On this page - http://www.urthemom.com/About_Joanne.html, she explains how homeschooling burnout led her to allowing her children self-teach. Her kids have had outstanding academic results, and I quote from her webpage:

``Let's just say that my first four children are either currently away at college or have graduated from their first-choice universities on full academic scholarships! Half of them earn thousands of dollars cash back over and above their school costs even! And if you want to know about SAT, PSAT, and ACT scores? Well, they are off the charts. Two National Merit Finalists, one perfect SAT scorer, two nearly-perfect SAT and ACT scorers, and I could go on. .  If you are interested in reading about the extraordinary results my teens have had educationally, you can read about them in my new book, The Self-Propelled Advantage: How to Raise Independent, Motivated Kids Who Learn with Excellence. The truth is I did not teach my children at home through their high school years. Once they could read well, I taught them to teach themselves with excellence. The self-mastery their dad and I had instilled in them at a young age led to our ability as parents to trust our children to carry out the expectations we had for them, and then to carry out the expectations they had for themselves!

And here is an article by one of her daughters on self-teaching - http://homeschoolcoach.wordpress.com/a-students-view-of-self-education/. An interesting quote from that article:

Surprisingly, I find myself able to go at a much faster pace when I do it voluntarily. Being forced to do two math lessons in a day isn’t fun; deciding to do an extra lesson because you want to finish your book sooner makes that second lesson a lot easier to stand. It’s a strange but true principle of the human mind, or of my mind, at least.

And coincidentally, I also stumbled on a book written by this homeschooling dad on self-teaching, and how he was led to  allowing his kids self-teach through homeschool burnout. A interesting book. Here is the amazon link - http://www.amazon.com/How-to-Homeschool-ebook/dp/B00B79N0VO/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361146153&sr=1-6&keywords=how+to+homeschool

I love this self-teaching concept. The more I learn about it from parents who have actually implemented it, the more impressed I get, especially when I look at the academic achievements of their kids and their love for learning. Plus the reduced stress on the parents, especially when they have more than one child to cater for. Robinson used self-teaching to successfully educate 6 kids to PhD level, and the mom above is using it with her 8 kids, and with impressive results.

Thoughts?

[Korrale4kq]

I can't wait to check out those links. I am completely for self teaching. But I also self taught myself a lot. I still do. Ever since I was a little girl I was always doing projects at home for fun. I love to read to learn. This is what I want for my son too.

[Mandabplus3]

Well I just bought the book
http://www.amazon.com/The-Self-Propelled-Advantage-Independent-ebook/dp/B009R8DLFW/ref=tmm_kin_title_0
I really want my kids to be more self motivated for learning than I am. I want them to stick with what they start to completion. The book is supposed to have ideas adaptable for little kids (3/4 year olds ) right up to big ones and us, to encourage independant learning.

[Jenene]

I saw URthemom recommended on one of the Robinson boards a few weeks ago but didn't buy the book.  Would love to know what you think of it when you have read it. 

[Tamsyn]

I love the idea of having self-taught children too.  My problem is that I'm having a hard time defining the difference between implementing self-teaching and unschooling.  I know they aren't the same, it's just figuring out how to implement it.

In my home you could say that I was mostly self-taught through high school.  My mom and I made a list in 9th grade of what I was going to do to graduate from high school.  We talked about my goals, we talked about college entrance exams, and we talked about what my peers were learning.  Then I made a list of what I thought I should do to graduate.  My mom approved much of it, demanded more in some academic areas, and told me she would be satisfied with less in others for the sake of high school graduation.  I made my graduation requirement list under my mom's supervision.  Then I followed through and did the work and my mom corrected it as necessary.  Most of the time she would just say, "Did you do your math?  Good."  I wasn't a genius when it was time for college by any means, but I did have respectable scores and I feel I was well prepared for college.  When I think of "self-teaching", that's what I think of- my high school years.  I think I needed closer supervision when I was younger in a lot of the subjects.

I need to do more homework about this, and I really appreciate the links.  I'm just sharing my thought process as I digest this.  PokerDad, you instigate excellent discussions!

[nee1]

Jenene, please could you post the link the Robinson board you mentioned? Plus any other Robinson boards you know. I've been to the Robinson forum (http://www.commentary.net/4ums/main.cfm?CFApp=22), the one hosted at the RC website and I read all the posts there. I did not find any mention of urthemom.com on that forum. Which other board is there apart from that one and the RC yahoo group?

Mandab, please could you share details about that book when you've finished it? Thanks so much.

Tamsyn, self-teaching isn't unschooling.  Unschooling entails following the child's interests. So for example, if the child has an interest in cars, you get the child all the car books you can find, and believe that the child is learning his math, grammar, vocabulary, history, and geography, etc., from there. That is completely different from the self-teaching approach, at least that used by Robinson and the urthemom.com. In self-teaching, the parents defines what the child should learn, and provides a suitable environment and materials for the child to do the work. The child does the work of teaching himself under the parent's supervision. The supervision part is very important to ensure the work is done.  For example, Robinson recommends the parent be in the same room as the child (especially younger children) doing his/her own work, while the child does his own.  This is very different from unschooling.

More thoughts?

[Jenene]

It may have been this board
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RobinsonUsers4Christ/
As the name makes clear this is a Christian board.  It is not a particularly active board and it tends to repeat a lot of the same things.

[nee1]

Thanks, Jenene. I knew about that board. I'll have to dig up their archives to learn more.

Tamsyn, I saw this video about unschooling on abcnews: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/video/extreme-parenting-radical-unschooling-10413158. Ok, the parents later went online to defend their choice here: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/video/parents-defend-unschooling-10422983. Assuming one goes by their definition of unschooling, you see that self teaching is radically different from unschooling.

[MummyRoo]

Unschooling sounds like a lot of fun, but I can't seriously imagine leaving my son's education to the chance that he might choose to do maths instead of play computer games... I think I'll leave it for the afternoons when we've finished the day's required lessons 

[Mandabplus3]

Yeah in schooling is for parents not at all like us! 
Yes I will review the book so far it is good. She seems credible. Gives good examples of her children's achievements. She seems to have it all together and I like her writing style. Should be a good read. I hope it is all it claims as it could be exactly what I need!

[nee1]

Still to answer the question of self-teaching, I post an excerpt from the book whose amazon link I pasted above. The book is titled – ``How to Homeschool – The Self Teaching Approach'' - http://www.amazon.com/How-to-Homeschool-ebook/dp/B00B79N0VO/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361146153&sr=1-6&keywords=how+to+homeschool.

 An excerpt from the book says:

The 3 R's of Learning
We talked earlier about education and how things were done 100 year ago. The reality is, learning is nothing new. The idea that new methods have been discovered about learning is actually misleading. The fact is, these kinds of sensational claims are designed more to sell books in the academic community than they are at providing any genuine kind of solution to the problems of learning. In fact, these new fads are often the cause of many of the deficits that we  have today in the public school system.

Years ago there was primarily one approach by which most people were educated in. This was called the 3 R's method. The 3 R's refers to Reading, Writing and Arithmetic (I don't know why – but it does). It was believed that if a person learned to read, learned to write well and learned to manipulate numbers that they were educated (or at least could do the rest themselves). The addition of Geography, Sociology, Health, Government, Economics and so on were not added to the curriculum until much later. Now, calm down. I'm not trying to insinuate that these subjects are not worth studying. But, what I am saying is these subjects should rightfully take a back seat to the first three.

Knowing all 50 states and their capitals is not going to land you a good job. But being able to read and disseminate information from and with the printed word could. The most important and influential people in our society were schooled, not through some public system, but through the reading of good books. A person in this world cannot go a day without writing or communicating to someone else through the written word. Granted, most of us have horrible handwriting (which is getting worse all the time), but we still use it throughout our daily lives. We leave notes to each other. We
write papers in college. We outline projects at work on computers. We take notes in business meetings. Being able to effectively write and express your ideas is  paramount to a proper education. And this must be learned in direct connection with our learning to read.

Lastly, we must learn how to manipulate numbers. Whether we are talking about working on Wall Street or as a nurse in a hospital or at a mill making lumber – we all use mathematics. It is the language of science and it is the framework from which we base our entire civilization. Yet, how many children leave public school barely able to read let alone solve mathematical equations. I graduated high school without ever understanding fractions, ratios or square roots. My kids had to teach me about them.

I discovered the 3 R's by accident. I did not find it in a book on how to educate my kids. I did not hear about it from my child's teachers. I happened to be looking online for a worksheet when I ran across a website article that talked about the 3 R's method. But, they had taken it a step further. Their approach was to provide structure, disciple, adequate work environment and plenty of challenging materials, and then – let them go. They were required to read so many pages each
day from a reading list. They had to work through a number of problems in a given math book, selfcorrecting, and reworking the wrong problems until they got them all correct. Lastly, they were required to copy so many pages from a non-fiction  book or encyclopedia every day. This was it. This was their curriculum.

After reading this article I wandered around the Internet for awhile, not really paying attention to what I was reading. Instead, I was thinking about what I had read. How could it be possible? How could kids learn that way? Would they learn that way? No more papers to grade. No more lessons to plan. It was a crazy idea, but I had to see if it would work. And it did.

When we moved our homeschooling back home, I told the kids we would be doing things a little differently. I sat them down and gave them a list of books they could choose from. Then I gave them each a math book suited for their level and also each received a binder and a ream of notebook paper. I explained to them that they were required to read 50 pages from a book on the book list, copy 1 notebook page worth from the encyclopedia and complete 5 pages in their math book each day. Amazingly enough, after a few moments of blinking at me, our kids sat down and did their work. And, for the most part, this has been our experience with the self-teaching method.

QUOTE ENDS.

Obviously, this dad was influenced by Robinson. He refers to the  Robinson Curriculum approach (though without giving its name) in the above excerpt.  And things like removing the TV set, providing a suitable environment, etc., are other things his family did which  Robinson recommends. He found his kids were far more receptive to read when there was no lure of TV. On TV, he  said:

 Within our first year of homeschooling, we removed our televisions from our home. We did this for a number of reasons, but our children's schooling was impacted the most. When we had the television, our kids would fight with us and tried to hurry through their schoolwork so they could watch TV. They would fight with us while watching television, not wanting to start school. And they would fight with us in the evening, not wanting to go to bed.  After we got rid of the television, our kids began to seek entertainment from books and playing, rather than passively sitting through hours of mindless shows. It has opened our living room up to be a place for social gathering, rather than having a place where we tune in and tune each other out.

A interesting book overall. Again,  I see here the concept of the 3Rs and self-teaching with suitable materials in a conducive study environment.

Thoughts ?

[nee1]

And I also found this list of reasons to allow children self-teach on www.urthemom.com website. Plus the what, where, why, and when of self teaching. Link is - http://www.urthemom.com/Self-Learning.html.

[seastar]

This is such a stimulating discussion.

 I am pouring over all the info on urthemom.com - I must say,the approach sounds fantastic. I used to work in ABA ( Applied Behaviour Analysis) years ago, and with that method a child only moves on when they achieve 90-95% mastery two days in a row. I, and others, used this method to teach nonverbal children to read, among other things. Much later I became disillusioned with the approach as it is quite political and I just hate politics! However, I can see merits once more. Many of the more able children set their own goals, planned their days and corrected their own work, all to mastery.

Off now to read more on that website - karma for the link

[MummyRoo]

urthemom.com has a series of lectures on self-teaching free this month: http://www.urthemom.com/Freebie_February.html

[nee1]

urthemom.com has a series of lectures on self-teaching free this month: http://www.urthemom.com/Freebie_February.html

Thanks a lot for sharing that link, MummyRoo. Very much appreciated.

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