What I’ve Learned While Homeschooling My Son

By design yesterday’s geography lesson materialized into math. I began class by having my son find a map which included a scale of miles. He chose New York State. I asked him to make a template of the scale with a peice of paper. Instead, he decided to incorporate a digital marker to measure distance with (ok I suppose).

I asked him to figure out the distance from New York to Buffalo. After coming up with a total and checking with Google he found he was off. My son quickly realized that his scale of miles was actually a scale of kilometers. Next I had him look up the conversion from kilometers to miles. Math class begins…

To my surprise he actually had fun doing the conversion. He wanted to do more measuring and converting. I suggested he convert the scale from kilometers to miles first, but, he wanted to do each distance in kilometers, converting afterwards.

The transition from geography to math was intentional, but, it could not have fallen into place more perfectly than unintentionally stumbling upon a map with a metric scale of distance.

Next I asked him if he knew what topography is. After saying the word back to me in several different augmented variations, and, giggling for a moment, he googled topography. I wanted him to attempt the meaning on his own first, but, whatever.

He quickly recognized the word graph within the composition of the word topography so we momentarily quantum leaped back into math class. I wasn’t sure how much experience he had with graphs so I grilled him. Looking at a blank graph I asked him if he could identify the x and the y axis. He then asked me why I didn’t include the z axis.

Math was my weakest subject. Now he’s teaching me 3D graphs! How did he know this? He learned it from Minecraft.

Using my memory of 6th grade, which was over 30 years ago, as a guide, is limited to recollection. Because this is only our second year of homeschooling much of our class time consists of me assessing what he already knows.

For our first Social Studies class I placed him in front of a map of the world and I produced a blank time-line. On the time-line I had him fill in historically significant events and their approximate century or decade. From this I was able to determine that he knew when Columbus landed, when the Revolutionary War happened, The Civil War, and the World Wars. Next, using his index finger, on the world map I was able to determine that he knew which countries were in the eastern and western hemispheres.

We then went on to fill in ancient civilizations on the time-line. Then we went back to the map to place the civilizations in their respective locations.

Several months of social studies in a couple hours!

History, Geography, Anthropology, Sociology, and, Political Science, are all condensed into one Social Studies class, which, through its selected readings, and, vocabulary words segue into English class.

I began to explain to him that all different levels of learners make up a class, so, he is able to spend far less time learning at home vs at school. He finished my thought for me. He said “because kids keep raising their hands saying “I don’t get it” we spent several days learning one thing over and over again. Just like me having to show you how to plot a graph.”

Thanks for Reading