This is part two to the post I wrote yesterday. Today, I will focus on the program I followed to educate my eldest daughter. I will likely follow the same steps with Ashleigh, although I will likely have light changes to the regimen due to differences in their personalities. Maddie was a very strong reader at an early age and thus she started writing reports on the classics at a very early age. To give you an idea of her reading abilities, Maddie read Harry Potter at the age of four. Even so, the first classic I gave her to read didn't turn out too well! At the age of seven, I gave Maddie Black Beauty to read. I always thought children loved that story, so I thought it would be a pretty safe way to introduce her to the classics. How wrong I was! She ended up hating the book, and didn't want to read any more classics because of it. The next few books she enjoyed, though, and she quickly learned that not all classics were as droll or boring as Black Beauty. The Wizard of Oz, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and nearly all of the Sherlock Holmes stories were some of her early favorites. Huckleberry Finn was another disaster for Maddie since she had a tough time reading it due to Twain's habit of writing in the vernacular of the South. It wasn't to a few years later when I had her take a college level course on Twain that she learned to appreciate him. Blogging & WritingAs Maddie was growing, we did a number of age-appropriate projects to help her learn. Blogging played a large part in her education. Over the years, Maddie had at least three blogs that were dedicated to learning. Her first, was maddiesthinkathought.blogspot.com. The blog only shows posts going back to 2011, but I think we started the blog in 2008. We started it as a writing exercise for Maddie. Each day she had to write something down. It could be about anything she wanted. After writing on the blog for a few years, it morphed into a poetry blog. One of my proudest achievements in Maddie's education is that I successfully passed on a love for poetry to her. Both Sharon and I wrote poetry, and I love to read poetry as well. If you would like to read some of Madison's early poetry, follow the link above. In 2010, We started a second blog to help Maddie learn about animals. This blog was called Absolute Animals, and it was a site where Maddie wrote a short post on a new animal each day. Although she no longer writes on this blog, her write ups are still there along with pictures of the animals she wrote about. Maddie's Minerals soon followed. This site was a blog where Maddie wrote about all of the elements on the elemental table, as well as about gem stones, since she really found those interesting. I found blogs were a fun way for Maddie to learn, and I often gave her writing assignments that required her to place them on a blog. One creative project I gave her involved the book "Around the World In Eighty Days". After reading the book, I had Maddie start a blog where she had to write a blog post as if she had to go around the world in 80 days. The trick was that she could only travel a few hundred miles per day, and she could not fly. If she took a ship, and reached her travel limit while out in the ocean, she then had to write a post telling what she did on the ship that day! Maddie was determined to not have to write about being stuck on a boat, so she came up with some creative places to go on her journey. You can follow her journey here: 80 Days. The last blog I'll mention here is called The Book Stack. The Book Stack is the blog where I had Maddie post most of her book reports I had her write. Being able to communicate is a very important skill, and my teaching style required Maddie to read a lot and then write reports explaining what she read. Unfortunately, many of the above blogs seem to be erasing some of her older work, or deleting some of the pictures she used. Thus, some of the older posts have blanks where the pictures used to be. If you are looking for ideas on how to home school your children, I think you may want to browse through the different blogs I linked to above. The Great Courses & Coursera
good grasp of the subject. Other times, I would give her topics that I already knew well to make it easier to tell if she was learning. I particularly liked to use the Great Courses for history and math. Some of the courses Maddie studied are in the picture at the top of the page. After researching on the web, I found a second resource to use with Maddie... Coursera. Coursera is an organization that offers online courses from many of the major colleges across the globe online for free. At first, I was a little skeptical that these were real college courses, so I decided to take a class myself to see how tough they were. I enrolled in, and passed a course on the Python programming language from Rice University. I can tell you that these are definitely college-level courses! Soon after, Maddie signed up for, and passed a course in Songwriting from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Maddie passed her first college course at the age of 12. She has passed eight others since, including courses from Rice University, The Georgia Institute of Technology, SUNY, and Duke University. Although none of these courses gave her college credits, they gave her experience taking challenging courses, and more importantly, the knowledge she gained from taking the courses. VLACsAlthough Madison is still being home schooled, most of her learning is coming from a home-learning program for high schoolers set up by the state of New Hampshire. A friend from karate had told me about VLACs and I looked into it. There were two things that I found very appealing about the program. 1. Maddie could continue to work from home, and would still receive a high school diploma if she successfully completed the required courses. The second point that I liked was that if Madison was accepted into an accelerated college program, she could graduate high school with both a high school diploma and an associates degree from Southern New Hampshire University.
We signed Maddie up for freshman year in high school last year, even though she technically should have been starting eighth grade. They allowed her to start as a ninth-grade student and the lowest grade she had in her first year was a B+. Maddie has started her sophomore year now, and has signed up for her first official college course. Although I am no longer teaching her, I do keep in touch with her teachers and monitor her progress. She also continues to write on our family blog daily. To me, nothing I have done in my life has been more rewarding than teaching my daughters. I sometimes miss the discussions Maddie and I used to have about the books I assigned to her. The look on her face when she first discovered that there were layers of meaning in some stories (The Swimmer by John Cheever) will be etched in my memory forever! I will also cherish some of the interpretations of poetry that she did. I am happy that we both share a love for the poetry of Robert Frost as well as for Shakespeare's sonnets. I look forward to teaching these subjects to Ashleigh as well. When I was younger, I often wondered what the meaning of life really was. Sometimes, I still wonder. Other times, I think that the meaning of our lives can be found in the meaning that we make for ourselves. And for me, a large part of that meaning is to find how I can best help my daughters to find that meaning for themselves. I think the best way I can do that is to teach them how to think for themselves in a logical manner. I hope that the education that I have given them... am giving them goes a long way towards achieving that.
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