S/O Please help me be an informed advocate!

[crstarlette]

After reading the Waxing Philisophical thread, it occurred to me how ignorant I am about afterschooling/afterschoolers. I may even be guilty of the errant, "Don't those kids get any time to play?" thought (for which I quickly scold myself, I swear). So, could some of you please enlighten me?
What do you personally do as an afterschooler?
Why do you do it?
How long do you spend on it?
Does the general public tend to respond positively or negatively to your decision and what comments do you hear again and again?

I could guess at some answers to many of these questions, but as with so many things I suppose that if you don't live it you can't really understand it.

[LibrarianMom]

After reading the Waxing Philisophical thread, it occurred to me how ignorant I am about afterschooling/afterschoolers. I may even be guilty of the errant, "Don't those kids get any time to play?" thought (for which I quickly scold myself, I swear). So, could some of you please enlighten me?
What do you personally do as an afterschooler?
We do lots of things and yes, my kids get plenty of time to play! In the mornings, evenings, weekends, and whenever we have time, I read to the kids. We have used a math curriculum in the past although I'm changing direction there. We are going through Story of the World. We do science experiments and read science books. We practice phonics. We listen to great music and view great works of art. We write stories and do light grammar work. We use critical thinking and logic books and play lots of games. We take walk and look for birds, wild animal tracks, and enjoy nature. When appropriate, we talk about geography, the world, and current events. I'm hoping to add foreign language but can't decide between Latin and French. Oh, and we also try to do art and crafts and a heavy dose of life skills as well. Family devotions and Bible study are included too. In short, everything!

Why do you do it? Just because my husband and I have chosen to send our children to public school doesn't mean we are uninvolved in their education. There are things that are important to my family that aren't covered to the depth we would like in the public schools or aren't covered until the later grades. There are also some items we want to make sure are cemented and there are some things where my kids need some enrichment. It's also more worthwhile than spending time in front of the TV or computer although we do that too sometimes.

How long do you spend on it? It really depends on what else is going on during a particular evening. Sometimes, if the kids are really interested and involved in what we're doing, a couple of hours. More often, I'm lucky to get an hour's worth of work out of them. Sometimes I'll work with the both kids together and other times I'll work one on one.

Does the general public tend to respond positively or negatively to your decision and what comments do you hear again and again? Very few people know we do this. I have some homeschooling friends who know I do. At times I've asked my children's teachers what we can work on at home and have always received favorable responses. I think what's different between how an afterschooler approaches this versus a parent who helps their child with homework, is that an afterschooler tends to have a specific plan in mind, uses a specific curriculum or method, or is at least more intentional about what they are doing.

I could guess at some answers to many of these questions, but as with so many things I suppose that if you don't live it you can't really understand it.

[MBM]

What do you personally do as an afterschooler?

Subjects the school does not teach well or with enough depth or subjects that might be interesting to learn.

Why do you do it?

To help strengthen and develop my child's academics and non-academic interests.

How long do you spend on it?

It varies. Summers and weekends usually involve more studying than school nights. We always allow for free time, too. All work and no play...

Does the general public tend to respond positively or negatively to your decision and what comments do you hear again and again?

It's not uncommon for parents in our area to supplement. IIRC, no one from school has responded negatively. The comment I hear most often: "What math program did you say you're using?" :D

[burckeri]

I have a 5-year-old son who attended junior kindergarten last year (we live in Ontario, where public schools start at age 4) and will be in senior kindergarten this fall. I started teaching him at home when he was three, because he was ready to learn--he was asking questions about reading and days of the week and so forth. It was a difficult decision for me because I worried about people thinking that I was a pushy mom trying to raise a super-kid. I don't go around broadcasting that I afterschool; only people who know me reasonably well know. I also worried about my son being bored in school when he already knew the material (I found school exceedingly boring when I was a kid). I ended up deciding to do it anyways because I feel that his needs are better met with my active involvement in his education. I didn't see a reason to withhold knowledge from him until he reached a more conventional age for beginning academics. So far, afterschooling is working out well. He attends a French-language school and we speak mainly English at home, so he gets plenty of new material at school in terms of French vocabulary, exposure to French grammar, French phonics for reading, and franco-ontarian culture. I figure that because he's in a French school, it's helpful for him to learn concepts at home before they're introduced at school, so that at school he only needs to learn the French vocabulary and not the concepts themselves. For now, I think afterschooling gives him the best of both worlds, the individualized attention of homeschooling and the opportunity to become bilingual and bicultural that is offered by his French school. Plus, I work part-time; homeschooling would mean giving up that income, which would be a strain for us financially at this point.

As far as what we actually do, on school days we do read-alouds before bed. I read fiction and my husband reads Sonlight history/geography books; some days we both read and some days only one of us. On non-school days, we do reading and math lessons, and I try to do science once a week. Over the summer, we do more, but we spend maybe 45 minutes to an hour a day on lessons. My son still gets plenty of time to play. :) Our read-alouds enrich his play; he oftens plays imaginative games based on whatever book I'm reading him.

For now, afterschooling is working for us. We are covering pretty much everything that I would do if we homeschooled (reading, read-alouds, math, science, social studies), but it's not really a strain to fit it all in around school. I know that will change as he gets older and as we have more kids (we are in the process of adopting), and we'll adjust. We may keep him in school and drop some subjects or we may reach a point where we decide that it would be better to homeschool. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. The main thing is that we are ensuring that he gets a high-quality education that meets his individual learning needs.

[thescrappyhomeschooler]

We will be homeschooling full time for the coming school year, but for the past two years, we were afterschooling.

I taught both of my kids handwriting because they were expected to start writing in journals from day 1 of Kindergarten, but they were not provided any handwriting instruction. I guess I was unaware that I needed to teach them how to write before they began school. They knew how to write their names, and they had gone to a play-based preschool, but they didn't know how to form the letters correctly. That started the afterschooling.

Then, when I saw the ridiculous math they were doing, dh and I started doing math facts, flash cards, teaching them the value of coins, etc. We taught them how to add and subtract.

My sister had been homeschooling her kids and I saw Story of The World at her house and thought it would be a fabulous addition to what we were already supplementing. I bought the CDs for Book 1 and we listened to them in the car over the course of the school year. I chose library books to supplement the topics about which we were hearing.

Science at school was nonexistent for ds1 and minimal, at best, for ds2, so we found library books about science and did several little experiments at home. We read lots of books about animals and practically every Magic School Bus book ever written!

This summer I had been planning to do certain things before we decided to homeschool full time. I wanted to re-listen to SOTW and do some activities from the Activity Guide. We have been steadily working our way through. I wanted to start Math-U-See with them this summer, but I've held off until the new school year is starting for us. Each kid picked an animal to research over the summer, and they read several books about their animals, looked up info online, and we will be visiting the animals at the zoo. They have written fact sheets about the animals and collected pictures from magazines.