Oh my! My heart just about stopped before July 4th when I saw school supplies already making their appearance! Crazy stuff I tell you!!!! But, now that I think about it, it's already mid-July....for some, school will be starting before we know it! It really does just blow my mind though! I'm holding out for the Tax Free weekend though! Bring on the tax breaks baby!!!!!
****Since I reread this....I'll just preface this to say that...uh oh!!! Big fatty soapbox! You are now warned! :D ****
I've talked to several friends about homeschooling and formal education lately. People quite often ask what our reasons behind choosing to keep our children home. There are many! One thing that really was my 'setting off point', after many many years of saying I would NEVER homeschool....was just HOW EARLY the department of education was wanting to start kids in school! The year C turned five we were hearing more and more that Kindergarten was required, and kids start at 5 years old, yadda and etc. Kids are SO NOT READY for that, and I really feel like (my own opinion mind you!) that that is why SO many kids are diagnosed with ADD. Kids still have LOADS of energy at that age!!! They don't need to be sitting behind desks doing busy work at FIVE! And Kindergarten is VASTLY different than when we were kids! Now we are pushing kids to read and write and starting math problems in Kindergarten, and sometimes even preschool is way more formal than necessary. Kindergartners are bring home HOMEWORK now!!!! It's insane!!!!! My parents didn't really 'do' kindergarten with me. Not in the sense that typical kindergarten was. We went to the library, sometimes 2 or 3 times a week! Mom was reading chapter books to me when I was YOUNG!!! I remember her reading ALL of the Little House on the Prairie books when I was like...6 I think! Those and the Boxcar Children books. We went to the zoo and the science museum regularly. And they are things that I remember to this day! I know I know....I'm a big soap box here. I have a point...really I do! When we were still making our decision, the thing that kept weighing on my brain was letting kids be kids when they are....KIDS!!! The learn at such an early age to be competitive, and get stressed. It's no wonder kids get burnt out! OKOK...on with my point! haha!!!!
How to teach with low stress, low cost, high success and behavior
REALITY
If you doubt student or teacher burnout or your own ability, join in any Moore seminar or read The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook, (The Handbook). It's not mostly from intellectual or spiritual problems, as some suggest, but from wrong habit or method. We help you avoid or cure fear, frustration, boredom, stress, pain, despair, heavy expense. Teaching should be mostly fun: relaxing, healing, inexpensive, low-stress yet successful like Tom Edison, Abe Lincoln and Christ.
A BETTER WAY
After 55 years of teaching teachers and students, and managing education at all levels, we give you here and inThe Handbook secrets of all the ages to avoid or cure burnout and failure, to bring success beyond normal hopes. To our knowledge, we have no failures! Even drill can be fun. Allow for individual differences, follow the principled and balanced Moore Formula, and your normal children will excel in head, hand, heart, and health, proven as it is by history, research and common sense.
THE FORMULA
1) Study from a few minutes to several hours a day, depending on the child's maturity.
2) Manual work at least as much as study.
3) Home and/or community service an hour or so a day. Focus on kids' interests and needs; be an example in consistency, curiosity, and patience. Live with them! Worry less about tests; we'll help you there. With the Moore Formula, if you are loving and can read, write, count, and speak clearly, you are a master teacher.
STUDY
Moores' free-exploring curricula are largely self-teaching: Math-It, Winston Grammar, etc. Use fewer workbooks and textbooks. Generally parents are the best teachers for their children. The Smithsonian Institution's study of twenty world-class geniuses stressed three factors: 1) warm, loving, educationally responsive parents and other adults; 2) scant association outside the family, and 3) a great deal of creative freedom under parental guidanceto explore their ideas, drilling as necessary. These ingredients for genius are a mixture of head, hand, heart, and health. Mixed in with balance, and your sound example, they bring out great characters and personalities. So we encourage you to unite 1) study, 2) work (and entrepreneurship) with 3) home and community service.
HOW TO BEGIN
First, don't subject your children to formal, scheduled study before age 8 to 10 or 12, whether they can read or not. To any who differ, as their evidence let them read Better Late Than Early (BLTE) or School Can Wait (SCW). In addition to our basic research at Stanford and the University of Colorado Medical School, we analyzed over 8000 studies of children's senses, brain, cognition, socialization, etc., and are certain that no replicable evidence exists for rushing children into formal study at home or school before 8 or 10.
Read and sing and play with your children from birth. Read to them several times a day, and they will learn to read in their own time-as early as 3 or 4, but usually later, some as late as 14. Late readers are no more likely to be retarded or disabled than early ones. They often become the best readers of all-with undamaged vision and acute hearing, more adult-like reasoning (cognition) levels, mature brain structure and less blocking of creative interests. Yet late readers are often falsely thought to be in need of remedial help. If you have any doubts about your youngster, have specialists check vision and hearing; possibly see a neurologist. If there are no problems, relax.
If your children are early readers, 15 or 20 minutes at a time is enough for children under ages 8 to 10. They can use a kitchen timer. Then take an hour or two for distant vision play. They can first use crayons or chalk on large paper or blackboards before developing finer muscle coordination required for pencils or detailed drawing or sewing. More on this in BLTE, SCW, and Home Grown Kids (HGK). For ultimate assurance you may want to enroll in the Moore Academy-a low-stress, low-cost, high achievement program that leads homeschooling everywhere. The program for high school students provides them with a transcript and/or diploma if desired.
When your children seem ready, play oral games with phonics, numbers, etc., but authorities from Columbia to Cal-Berkeley say avoid study pressures until they are at least 8 to 12. At that time a few minutes a day may be all that is necessary for the drill or practice in basics they need. Just as important-or more so-is to identify their interests such as bugs, gardening, cooking or baking, astronomy, cars, sewing, cottage industries, economics, history or politics.
Whatever their interests, open the door wide to knowledge. Don't give them mostly textbooks/workbooks nor try to keep ahead of them; let them do original reading along the lines of their interests and watch them grow! A child's motivation is more educationally productive than the most skilled teaching. And let them sample old standardized tests or manuals to lose fear of testing.
Instead of toys, give them tools (kitchen, shop, yard or desk), encyclopedias, magazines; use libraries, etc. Don't be shocked at their interests, even if they are guns or motorcycles! From these they can learn chemistry and physics (internal combustion motors), economics, math, history, geography, languages, cultures and manual skills (at local repair shops or in home businesses). Girls are usually a year or so ahead of boys, at least until late teens.
The "antennae" sprouting from the brains of most students are blocked by mass-education's cookie-cutter substitutes for life that destroy creativity. Kids come out uniform-sized cookies, or sausages. Better to learn history realistically by reading biographies rather than textbooks. Let creative interests expand to other learning. As they mature, they teach themselves, learn at their own initiative-as few now do!
WORK
Constructive, skill-building, entrepreneurial work builds children's self-confidence, creativity, and self-control, and does it more quickly. It is the most dramatic and consistent cure for behavior and personality problems. If you give children authority to manage your home to the extent that they can accept responsibility, they mature rapidly and naturally. Make them officers in your home industries. There is no more certain key to happy home education-or other schooling-regardless of institutional level. We've seen no one fail, rebel, or burn out.
Begin small. Start your children to work when they start to walk. Add freedom as they accept responsibility. No cash allowances! Let them earn their way, helping you make or grow and sell cookies, muffins, bread, wooden toys, vegetables, or service lawns, baby-sit, etc. By 6 or 8, many can run businesses. See Minding Your Own Business (MYOB) for more than 400 cottage industries. Do comparison shopping: apples/oranges, Grapenuts/Sugar Pops, etc. (nutrition, frugality, and math lessons). Let your kids use your checking account to pay your bills. The bank corrects their "math papers."
SERVICE
This begins at home and neighborhood with daily/weekly visits to needy neighbors, nursing homes, pediatric wards or other community or personal service. It makes self-centered kids self-less and moderates any tendency their businesses bring toward materialism. Family, community and church provide fruitful ways of building great-hearted children. Some schools now use service as a wholesome activity. Children with bouquets of wild flowers or crayon drawings are usually welcomed in nursing homes even when they are too young to be allowed to visit in pediatric wards.
This is the Golden Rule in practice. Our children once had a secret society ("SOS"-for Service Over Self) that specialized in secret good deeds for the aged, poor, sick, or handicapped-like washing or repairing a car, chair, or washing machine, or painting fences, shoveling snow, or weeding gardens. Great fun!
Some ask why more families don't follow this Formula. Most parents are uncomfortable with the unconventional ideas. They teach as they were taught, unaware that such methods are responsible for many of today's school problems. So they pay heavily for books which tie them, and their children down and burn them out. To them, we as professionals say, "It took us awhile to believe too." Certified teachers often have the hardest times. Moore students average near the top in student achievement, sociability, and behavior and at low stress and cost. Carefully read The Handbook and view the professional HGK video, read MYOB, then Home Made Health, Home Built Discipline and BLTE. You will have both security and joy!
GENTLE WARNING: Properly done, home education offers low-stress, low-cost, and high achievement and sociability from a balance of study, work, and service. Few curricula do this!
Insist on proven research and experience. Patiently study methods and materials before you send your check or credit card number to anyone. Question closely all testers, lecturers, and entrepreneurs. Insist they prove their quality. Homeschool leaders like those in pro-life and anti-porn fall into two groups: 1) Selfless laymen and professionals and officials who sacrifice money and time to elevate homeschooling to new heights; and 2) A few lacking professional background or ethics, or both, who urge stressful, costly school-at-home materials, programs, or services on unwary parents who then burn out and come to loathe homeschool. Some fought homeschooling until the 1980's. Some authors, editors, and speakers know little of research, and persuasively misuse Scripture to convey an image of a bigoted Christ to secular friends. They are homeschools' most divisive influence. For your sake and for your friends' sake, study to know the difference.
STUDY (Daily)
Warm responsive parents who know their children's interests. Drill to develop their phonics, writing, and math when the children are ready in senses, brain, and reasoning. More association with you than with peers.
Encourage them to freely explore their ideas with few restrictions by workbooks and school methods, reaching out as interests expand.
WORK (Daily)
Children combine household chores (from the time they learn to walk) with home industries in which they share management. They learn math, etc. by earning money and accounting for it.
They also become well and positively socialized as they buy and sell. And they build character as they work and serve.
SERVICE
(On a regular basis at variable times)
Service begins at home and in the neighborhood, with daily or weekly visits to nursing homes, pediatric wards or other ventures in community or personal service.
NOTE: The time you devote to study, work, or service should depend upon children's maturity and interests. Teens are easiest of all with Moores' Formula.
One day Proverbs 31 popped into my head, so I got out my Bible and read the chapter. Verse 24 says, "She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes." Well, I'm not really adept at making 'garments', I thought. And then it came to me! I can crochet pretty well! I pulled out some old skeens of yarn I had sitting around, and hopped on the internet and found a couple of goodies that I wanted to try my hand at. I discovered that making cotton wash cloths in cute colors was pretty easy, and after exploring a little bit discovered it could be kind of lucrative too! One day when we were in the store, I was stocking up some supplies to get started and found this nifty sparkly yarn-like material. I remembered a friend of mine in our co op making these super cute scarves out of it, so I picked up a skeen of that and thought I would try it out! I made one in one evening and Diva Dancer and I thought they were SO pretty! So, from that Baubles & Sashes was born, and we began a small inventory!
Since then, D.D. has learned how to make friendship bracelets and has wanted to add her wares to the inventory. We have also pinned several Christmas ornament ideas that we are going to try out as well! I have made my first sales and have quite a little following over on our Facebook page! I'm excited about the possibilities and hope that business will increase as the Christmas shopping months approach. 
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