• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Humanitas Family

Humanitas Family

Homeschooling Ontario

  • Homepage
    • The Making of Un-Machine Minds
    • About
    • Contact Us
  • Articles
    • Look at the Forest not the Trees: Abysmal Literacy Curriculum Failure
    • Homeschooling: Know your Rights
    • Amo, Amas, Amat….A Case for Latin
    • Why are homeschoolers academically immune to pandemic lockdowns?
    • Comparing Grade 9 English Courses: How are students being prepared for post-secondary study?
    • WANTED: Teachers Who Face Termination Because of Their Vaccination Choice
    • Finding Strength in Numbers: The Benefits of Homeschool Co-ops
    • Homeschooling: Answer to an Uncertain Time
    • Generation Mask: Wagering Our Children’s Future?
    • 2+2 ≠4 New Ontario Curriculum States That Math Can Be Subjective
    • Life After Homeschool – 15 Years Later
    • What to do if parents disagree on homeschooling
    • Pandemic Learning Gap
  • How to get started
    • Sample Homeschool Curriculum Plan
    • Simple & Sane Schooling
    • Online Schools
    • Conferences
  • Resources
    • Pandemic Homeschooling Toolbox for Non-Homeschooling Parents
    • Pandemic Resource Ideas
    • Find a Teacher
    • Online Schools
    • CO-OP
    • Memorization in the Age of Google
    • To Learn You Must Play
    • Free Resources
  • Curriculum
    • Sample Homeschool Curriculum Plan
    • Teaching Math
    • Curriculum providers
    • Classic Vocabulary Study
  • Books/Audio
    • Why Bother with Classics?
    • Books: New Release
    • Books to Guide and Inspire
    • Tech
    • Reading Lists
    • Radio
  • Freedom Short Story Contest
    • Freedom Short Stories – Age Category 9-12
    • Freedom Short Stories – Age Category 13-16
  • Sketches by Mateo

Simple & Sane Schooling

Many parents are facing frustration, tears, and learning challenges as their young children engage in online schooling. The Ontario Education Act states that children of compulsory school age should receive no less than 5 hours of daily instruction (minus recess); however, spending this much time in online instruction has become torturous for many young students who yearn to move about, learn in smaller increments, touch, explore, and create. How much daily instructional time do Kindergarten to Grade 1 students really need? (Take a guess before reading on….)

In about thirty minutes per day, plus informal teaching as you go about your daily life, you can easily teach your child beginning reading, writing, and math concepts, all without workbooks or teacher’s manuals.

Susan Wise Bauer, author of “The Well-Trained Mind”

Yes, you read correctly – not three, or four, or five hours, but just thirty minutes a day! Indeed, in Switzerland, which can be regarded as a country with very high educational standards, students are not taught to read, write, or do math in Kindergarten at all, but rather focus on developing social skills. Reading, writing, and math are only started in elementary school around age 6 to7.

So if you would like to embark on ‘simple and sane’ schooling with your student, here are some concrete ideas which have worked for us and countless other homeschooling families:

Reading

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons – We used this classic (which has sold over 1 million copies) to teach all three of our children to read. If you would like to start this with a younger child, you can divide the lessons into even shorter chunks of 10-min each. Keep in mind your child’s readiness for learning; it is better to offer a very brief lesson with a feeling of success and satisfaction, rather than pushing through and ending in frustration.

This clear, step-by-step, scripted program is very easy to follow and divided into 20 min. lessons. This is a perfect guide for parents who would like to teach their children how to read, but are note quite sure how to go about it. All you need to bring to this is a comfortable reading spot, love, care, patience, and 20 minutes a day. “Twenty minutes a day is all you need, and within 100 teaching days your child will be reading on a solid second-grade reading level. It’s a sensible, easy-to-follow, and enjoyable way to help your child gain the essential skills of reading. Everything you need is here—no paste, no scissors, no flash cards, no complicated directions—just you and your child learning together. One hundred lessons, fully illustrated and color-coded for clarity, give your child the basic and more advanced skills needed to become a good reader.”

Writing

Handwriting Without Tears Grade 1 / Handwriting Without Tears Grade 2 This writing curriculum does what it says – no tears here! We used this program for our kids and the instruction was very child-friendly. The instruction is clear and logical, the letters are instructed in a way that a child can easily remember, and there is not so much practice that children feel overwhelmed.

Math

Right Start Math Games – When my daughter was around six years old, a friend asked me “Do you love doing math?”. My answer was “No, it ends in tears and frustration too often….”. She then told me about Right Start Math games and it changed the way we learned math and also how we felt about it! This games set is not a curriculum per se, but it contains 300 games that provide practice in learning the concepts and facts. It includes number sense, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, money, clocks, and fractions. This can be used with any math program or simply as a way of getting a solid foundation in mental math.

History

The Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer Vol. 1 This is a perfect read-aloud for snack time – that is how we have used this history series for years (we have read it two or three times over by now).

Science

If you would like to add some natural science into the mix, take one of these guides on your walks and learn to identify flowers, trees, and birds.

Peterson First Guide to Birds and/ or Peterson First Guide to Trees and / or Peterson Guide to Wildflowers

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe to School of the Unconformed

A Newsletter on Education, Family, and the Upheaval

In the News

The Making of Un-Machine Minds

- Family, education, and non-conformity - Fatherhood is a form of insanity, a state in which love … [Read More...] about The Making of Un-Machine Minds

Death to Academic Language – Long live ‘hey, what’s up?’

A California teacher made it onto the woke watch list with this TikTok post. Don’t feel the need to … [Read More...] about Death to Academic Language – Long live ‘hey, what’s up?’

An Introduction to Classic Books – for Adults!

The Well-Educated Mind provides a solid introduction to the classics, with book recommendations and guidance through the reading process.

Exogenesis: A Dystopian Novel of a Benedict Option Future

We are anticipating the publication of Exogenesis in 2023. If you want to be among the first to read the novel, send us an email at humanitasfamily@protonmail.com
with “Exogenesis” anywhere in the subject line, and we’ll let you know once it’s published. Read more about the novel.

Humanitas Family on Radio

HF talks with Richard Syrett about Home Education every Tuesday at 4:50 pm on 960 AM Radio in the GTA!

Footer

Our goal

To build up and support what it means to be human through knowledge, relationship, and faith.

Recent Posts

  • Death to Academic Language – Long live ‘hey, what’s up?’
  • TikTok Brain Cure with Three Ingredients
  • TikTok – Time is running out for saving our children’s brains
  • Family Traditions: Why baking cookies, snowy walks, and read-alouds matter
  • Rethinking School – Susan Wise Bauer – Part I

Search

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in