Home School
Wellesley Magazine
Fall 2018
On a recent morning, I walked into my living room at 9 a.m. as I always do, ready to start the day, only to find that my three children had already started “school” without me. My oldest child, a 9-year-old boy, had dragged a small chalkboard easel up from the basement and was demonstrating simple addition and multiplication problems to his 6-year-old brother and 4-year-old sister, who sat on little chairs behind a child-sized table. I sat down on the couch, dumbfounded.
Although I have homeschooled my children for the past three years, this scene bears little resemblance to how I teach. My method, insofar as there is one, is more open-ended—learning as a natural part of life, not the study of clearly delineated subjects. Aside from the birdsong streaming in from our open front door and a cat walking on dirty paws across the table where my younger children sat, this scene looked a lot like a traditional classroom.
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