Education from a Parent's Perspective... Part Four: Supplemental Education

Dual-Educational Families, Doing Both, Supplemental Education, At-Home Enrichment...  These are all names folks have come up with to explain what it is they’re doing when much of their child’s learning is happening with a parent at home while a child is concurrently enrolled in a school.  For some families, this is simply their lifestyle.  For other families, it feels like survival.

When children are struggling and a school does not have the resources to support the student adequately, parents have, for generations, sought out additional ways to help.  Many have asked if teachers can stay after school, or sat down and worked with their child, or hired a tutor.  As a fifth grader I changed schools and found myself very confused and behind in math, and I had a teacher willing to tutor me.  In high school we found a local tutor who was really, actually, wonderful and she ended up helping me study for my regents exams (I grew up in New York State).  I was lucky we found these resources, and that my family could afford them.  I know a family who temporarily took their child out of school, studied up on the specific learning disability their child had, found alternate methods of teaching and strategies the child could use and then returned to school much better off a couple years later.

What do we do when a child is bored at school because they’re not being reached or not being challenged?  The answer is not always so cut and dry.  Often, the situation is widely ignored, downplayed or disregarded.  In middle school, my dad told me, “Just hang in there till college.  You’re going to love college.”  Six years is a *long* wait for a middle school kid.  He was right, but it was a long wait.  Some parents decide to supplement their kids’ schooling at home with additional educational activities, involvement with experiential learning such as 4H or robotics clubs, or they try to help by switching the focus to sports.  

It is really quite common to face these issues, and some of choose to face it, some to ignore it, and all in our own ways.  It is important to remember that what takes place within the home of an educational nature varies widely, and for an equally wide variety of reasons.  I have a lot of privilege in terms of my position in all of this, because I’ve been able to work part-time around my kids’ schedules (and that is *neither* easy to arrange nor to maintain), I have education and experience in working with children and specialist knowledge in many areas because of a variety of other work and life experiences I’ve had, and perhaps most importantly, I know how to navigate various systems to find and utilize resources.  I get to be home when the kids are home some of the time, and I have ideas about how to help foster a love of learning.

For example, we know most kids can absorb a great deal of information and process many experiences and all of this counts as learning.  So, at our house, learning has become just a part of how we do things.  We read nonfiction and fiction with the kids (and for ourselves), we always visit at least one museum or educational institution if we’re traveling to see family or friends in other parts of the country, we involve the kids in the housework (helping prepare their own lunches is something they actually enjoy!), and when an issue comes up we talk about it.   

Knowing kids have an amazing ability to learn languages  up to the age of 7, I’ve tried to teach my kids as much as I can.  The net result here is that my kids know about 30 words in French, 10 Spanish phrases and can say, “I am taking a walk to the post office to buy stamps,” in Slovak.  They may remember how to say some phrases in Irish as well, as we did a free trial of Rosetta Stone over a summer a couple years back.  It didn’t stick with me, the only Irish I remember currently is Irish my parents would rather I’d never learned.  Our family work with language would *not* be a point of pride nor would I call it a successful endeavour at this point, but we have plans to continue expanding our efforts in this area.

On the other hand, I’ve met several moms in playgroups and at schools who make a point of speaking to their children in their native languages and the kids are bilingual.  I wish I could give a language to my children in this way.  And I have hopes that we can find other parents who are willing to share their languages with my kids as we become closer.  

There are many other things people do outside of the school to keep their kids learning, to support them, to motivate them.  For us “doing both” has been an just a part of our lives.  We didn’t fall into family literacy and learning at home.  We fell into formal schooling.  The one thing we do that I believe is rather unique is that we formalize our at-home learning, at least for one of our children at present.  We use Clonlara’s home-based education program with our child who was born seven hours too late for the cut-off date, because we could enroll her where she “belongs” academically through this accredited distance learning program.  Stay tuned for more on this next week!