Homeschooling Thoughts?? Me??

I went to public school (and loved it) and so have all my kids. They have done well in public school. My three oldest have already graduated. They got good grades in high school (two of them were 4.0 students).  I still have kids in high school now and they are getting good grades. For the most part, I've liked their teachers and feel like they were academically challenged. All the kids excelled/excel in sports. We love to cheer for our school team and love the sense of community we feel at high school sporting events. The older kids were/are involved in school leadership and have good groups of friends. The public school system has been good for our family.

So, why am I starting to have thoughts about homeschooling? Well, there are several reasons. One of the biggest is that I feel (and have always felt) like the public schools take my young children out of the home for too long. I don't like that they leave at 7:30 in the morning to catch a bus and then don't return home until almost 4:00. When is there enough time to play? And, as a mom, I just want more time with my kids (especially during their younger years)! There just is no need for young children to be pulled out of the home all day, every day.

One of the reasons this bothers me is because I can contrast it with my childhood experience. During the 5 years my family lived in Germany, I attended elementary school in the rural town of Parsberg. I LOVED my elementary school experience!!  We had very small class sizes, wonderful teachers, and best of all, school got out at noon for grades 1-4 and at 1 p.m. for grades 5 and 6. We had a snack during recess, but lunch (or noon-day dinner) was eaten at home. Too me, this is the ideal situation. We had the entire afternoon to play on the farm, do our homework and just be with our family. And our education was every bit as good as the American kids who spent most of the day at school.
Parsberger Grundschule

I have been toying with the homeschooling idea for a few years...I tend to go back and forth on the issue. My older kids are a done deal and they're happy with their schooling situation. But my younger kids' education is still an unwritten book. Well, I had two thoughts that have helped me over my mental hump of accepting the homeschooling idea.

The first thought wasn't mine. It was a friend of mine who explained to me that I didn't have to really choose either homeschooling or public schooling. I could do whatever works best for that child for that year...meaning, I didn't have to commit!! That was a liberating thought. I can choose whatever works for us. If the kids want to do public school one year, they can! If they want to do home school the next year, they can!! This thought is what gave me the guts to seriously consider trying homeschooling. Because, if I (or the kids) didn't like it, we could always go back to public school.

The second thought (and this was the clincher for me) was realizing the potential I have to really teach the kids German. I taught my older kids German, but they weren't really "literate" in German. I didn't teach them grammar rules. They can't write, or spell, or even read that well. I did do some German school work with them when they were very young, but once they started school, we ran out of time for "German homework". It was quite an epiphany for me when I realized that if I pulled my children out of public school for a year or two, the kids could become truly literate in German. We could learn grammar, writing, reading, science, math, etc. all in German. What better use of my college degrees than truly educating the people that mean the most to me? Why else did I get a German teaching degree and a masters in Language Acquisition? Maybe I'll teach someone else's kids someday, but for now, I'm going to focus on the kids who are most important to me: mine! I get excited just thinking about it!!

In the meantime, I have my little Jonathan enrolled in (English speaking) Kindergarten in our local public school and I plan on sending the twins to Kindergarten next year. I think it's important that the kids get a year or two of English schooling. They need to really learn English. They weren't learning it at home (of which I'm quite proud). I want them to learn "Kid-English" and understand how to really interact on a playground, learn what words and phrases are acceptable, and form friendships. I want them to lose their German accents and syntax, so that they can relate better to their peers. Of course, we'll continue speaking and learning German at home during this time.  But, in a year or two, I hope to pull them out and try homeschooling them in German. By that time, they'll be a little older and better able to learn some of the concepts that I'm so excited to teach them. I'm not sure if I'll do it for a year, for two years, or more... It all depends on how it goes (I love that I don't have to commit). But either way, I am so, so, SO excited for our little homeschooling adventure, that I can hardly wait.

Here's a beautiful photo of the town of Parsberg where I attended Kindergarten through 5th grades. You can barely see the school. It's behind the church. The Kindergarten building is behind the Maypole. 

Here I am with my brother and sister, both of whom are holding their Schultueten (a dunce cap full of candy which kids traditionally bring on the first day of first grade). I'm starting 3rd grade and my brother is starting first grade. My sister wanted to walk with us and hold a Tuete, too. but she wasn't really starting school. We caught the bus at the little cluster of houses in the background.

Cute Goodnight Prayers

I just stumbled across this old video from 1997. Ben is 4 and Michaela and Kiana are two. It's a video of our bedtime routine. As you can see, we are mostly speaking German to the kids and they are speaking German to us. I'm helping each of them say their prayers. Even though we often spoke English during the day, especially when we were in public settings, our nightly bedtime routine was always in German. I would always read the kids scripture stories in German. They would say their prayers in German and then I would sing them German lullabyes.

Michaela and Kiana are super cute in this video (if I do say so myself). Michaela makes sure that we thank God for the moon (twice). Kiana is super cute as she says her prayers, because she knows her daddy is videoing her. After her prayer, she tries to tell me that she wants me to to carry her into her bed. She sais something like "Kemmy me". I understood "Kami" (which is my sister's name). Then, she still won't get into bed until she is wrapped in her blanket "superman style". And then she does a very cute "snore". Even though their language consists of both German and English words, they still understand German better. The fact that we always did our routines in German (our target language) really helped us to keep the kids' German alive throughout the years, because they always associated certain routines with German. Even today, my older teenagers (who almost exclusively speak English to each other), still say our night time family prayer in German. And when they go to bed, they say "Gute Nacht" instead of "good night." Well entrenched routines and habits make a big difference.

After-School Show and Tell

Jonathan was so excited about a book that his Kindergarten teacher gave him for Christmas. As soon as he got home from school, he pulled it out of his back pack and showed it to his twin siblings. I loved that he told them the story in German, even though the book was in English. It's a story about a man (or maybe it's a lady) who eats all the parts of a snowman (hat, coal, snow, pipe, etc.) and then sneezes to create a snowman. Well, after this video was taken, we sat down and read the story in English. They all thought that the story was very funny and enjoyed telling it again and again the rest of the day...in German, of course.

With my first batch of kids, I tried to only read German books. However, we owned many English books (gifts, hand-me-downs, etc.) and the kids wanted to read them, so I would "read" them in German (I'd do a rough translation from English into German). But after a while, I realized that I prefer to read the book in its original language--translating wears me out. The books I missed the most were the Dr.  Suess books. You just can't translate a Suess book! And I LOVE the Dr. Suess books. So I decided to start reading English books to the kids.

When you are trying to teach a minority language in a majority language environment, it helps to have solid language boundaries in order to keep the the majority language influence from overpowering the minority (target) language. I have found that books are a great "boundary". Even though I speak German to my children at home, I am still able to open an English book and read it to them, without it affecting our conversational language. I read the book in English and within the boundary of the book, we can speak English. When the book is done, we automatically switch back into German. Of course, I make sure that we have plenty of German books to read, as well. Our German books have been a big help in keeping up with our minority language.

Sloaterboat, motorboat

I came across a fun video from last summer. At the time of this video, Jonathan was 5 (almost 6) and the twins, Simon and Clarissa, were 4 1/2. We had just been at swimming lessons where the instructor had said the following rhyme while twirling them around in the water:
Motorboat, motorboat, go so slow.
Motorboat, motorboat, go so fast.
Motorboat, motorboat, step on the gas.
The kids loved it, because when she "stepped on the gas", she spun them super fast in the water. On the way home from swim lessons, they all were practicing the motorboat poem. I could tell they didn't really understand the words. I don't think Simon knew what a motorboat was and I don't think any of them understood, even remotely, what "step on the gas" meant. But they LOVED their swimming instructor and they loved the motorboat activity, so they really wanted to learn the poem. It was fun to observe how they each wanted to say the English motorboat poem. Jonathan, who is the oldest, was the "English speaking authority", so he was able to correct his little siblings. It was cute that he corrected them, even though he also didn't really know how to say the words. It was interesting that he put in the German word "Step on auf gas." They are all anxious to learn more English, but are much more comfortable using German.