We all start learning about our world as soon as we’re born, and the opportunities for gathering knowledge, sharing information, and learning new things continues throughout our lives. Amy Maze incorporates learning into her children’s daily activities, and at her website she’s got tips and suggestions for homeschooling parents to help them make education a valuable and enjoyable part of everyday family life.
US: What made you decide to homeschool your children?
AM: Growing up, I attended first a public school, and then later a private Christian school. My experiences in both of those places were pretty good, but after I got married, I realized that I wanted something different for my family. The main reason that my husband and I homeschool is that we want to be the ones that train our children. I want to be with my children, shepherding their hearts, strengthening their minds, and guiding them along the way. I honestly can’t imagine being away from my kids for more waking hours in a day than I am with them. Of course there are difficulties along the way, but for us, the pros heavily outweigh the cons, so we choose to homeschool.
US: How would you describe the Classical method of homeschooling?
AM: As I started to research homeschooling (even before having children), I came across a style of learning called the Classical method. I loved what I read and decided to use the method for teaching my own children.
The Classical method of homeschooling focuses on teaching using the trivium, which is a way of explaining each subject in a developmental appropriate way. There are three stages in the trivium: grammar, dialectic (or logic), and rhetoric. To explain it briefly, in the grammar stage students are taught the building blocks of each subject. In the dialectic stage, students begin to make connections between all the facts they learned in the grammar stage. In the rhetoric stage, students are challenged to formulate their own opinions based on the knowledge and understanding they gained in the previous two stages.
A classical education teaches history chronologically, giving the children an understanding of how everything fits together. It also encourages you to tie as many subjects as possible to what you are studying in history (literature, writing, art, science, etc.) At the heart of classical education is teaching your child how to learn.
To learn more, you can visit a series I did going through The Well Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home.
US: Your website’s “Living” section has planning tools and schedulers that people can download and use for free. Why is it important to focus on creating a plan and following a schedule, and not just for a homeschool curriculum?
AM: I love to be organized. Now that I have kids, I’m not nearly as organized as I would like to be, but using tools for planning and scheduling helps! For me, having a schedule brings peace and creating a plan ensures that nothing gets missed. Following a pre-planned schedule makes each day go more smoothly. If I have to scramble in the morning to figure out what needs to happen that day, nothing seems to get done. Each person will have their own way of organizing their responsibilities, but for the sake of peace and efficiency, it is worth taking the time to plan!
US: “Copywork” is where children write out and copy exactly a word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph. You mention that this helps children learn to write, and that they also learning spelling skills by observing and duplicating correctly-spelled words that they’re given to copy. It’s an old-fashioned tool for learning, even though it’s still useful in the modern world – but don’t kids get bored easily when doing this type of work?
AM: Great question! What I love about copywork is that it that it is such a simple and effective way to teach grammar, spelling, and handwriting all at the same time. As a bonus, it aids children in the memory and understanding of any passage they are copying.
The idea behind copywork is not to have children copy random collections of words, but to select passages from what they are studying, verses they are working on memorizing, inspiring quotations, beautiful poetry, etc. When these types of passages are chosen, copywork is not boring. Copying lists of random spelling words is what is boring!
Feel free to visit my other website, Classical Copywork, if you would like to learn more and see ready-to-use copywork.
US: You have several book list recommendations, both for parent/teaching resources and as reading material for children. When did you first start focusing on reading with your kids?
AM: It is such a joy to see children begin the process or learning to read! I may not be in the majority, but I think “the earlier the better” is a good choice for lots of childhood things. I like to encourage my children in many areas as soon as I see awareness about the subject. This way the child is excited, less likely to push back or be scared about trying something new, and hasn’t been given the feeling that they cannot succeed (perhaps someone saying, “oh, you’re too little for that!”)
As far as reading goes, for both of my children I began teaching them letter recognition at age 2. Along with showing them the letter, I would say the sound that the letter makes. Children at this age soak up information at an incredible rate. With both children, I was amazed at how quickly they could not only recognize each letter, but also recite the sound that each one makes. As soon as they are sounding out letters, it is time to begin reading! At age 3, we begin systematically learning to read. We learn the phonograms and rules outlined in The Writing Road to Reading, and practice reading out of the McGuffey Primer. My daughter is 3 and in this stage right now. My son is 5 and is a beautiful reader. Once he got the basics down, I gave him an hour to read by himself each day, which greatly improved his confidence. Now he loves to read and often has to be pulled away from his books. The biggest advantage to teaching reading before officially starting the grammar stage, is that the child won’t be held back in their learning because they can’t read for themselves. Teach a child to read, and a world on information is at their fingertips!
(Disclaimer: I know every child is different. This is just what we have done and has worked well for us!)
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