There really are no homeschooling curricula/homeschool products out there for Anglican homeschooling families that involve religious instruction every day.  It seems most Anglican/Episcopalian  homeschooling families piece together their own religious curriculum based upon the liturgical calendar of the Church Year, Feast days of the Saints,  and various resources. 

I have done some digging, though and did come up with a pretty fabulous FREE resource from the  Virginia Theological Seminary.  This program would work for a once a week lesson and you could easily add things so there could be  something in the form of religious focus each and  every day of homeschooling.  There are three age groups with three years’ worth of material for each age group and the resources include not only the teachers’ manual and ideas for art but much more: http://www.vts.edu/podium/default.aspx?t=122314

Some other resources to think about:

• Creating A Family Prayer Space: http://theten0clockscholar.blogspot.com/2010/04/family-altar.html
• I have also thought about creating portable prayer spaces – little drawstring bags with a cloth that coincides to the liturgical season, and icon cards or other objects that would assist the children in speaking to God. 

Here are a few other resources I am considering for Fall in addition to the Daily Office ( http://missionstclare.com/):

• The Anglican Family Prayer Book:  http://www.amazon.com/Anglican-Family-Prayer-Book/dp/0819219401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300984720&sr=8-1 
• Lessons on Christian Symbols:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0806649313/ref=ord_cart_shr?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER

Many blessings,

Carrie

I am reading these five lectures given at the West Coast Waldorf Teachers Conference in Fair Oaks, California in 1998 by Michaela Glockler, MD.  As a physical therapist and as a homeschooling mother, I am really enjoying these lectures. 

Dr. Glockler posits in these lectures some of the basic questions about Waldorf Education and health.  In the preface of this book, Astrid Schmitt-Stegmann writes:  “Doctors, educators, and therapists have a special need to meet the ever increasing illness manifesting on all levels in growing human individuals – be these attention deficit problems, behavior problems, sensory integration problems, psychosomatic disturbances, or genetic disturbances.  Whatever the manifestations are, we must understand that underlying them are physiological problems……The key task for the educator, therefore, is to insure for the child a health physical development, for this is the basis for a healthy soul-spiritual development.”

These lectures underscore the basis of Waldorf Education, and what should be the basis in concrete thought and action in all educational methods:  that children are physically growing and developing in addition to whatever they are “academically” learning and that the physical body and movement is a vehicle for learning.

We are in a situation in the United States right now where our educational system no longer seems to respect the developmental progression of children.  Even mainstream childhood developmental resources state that early six is a terrible time to teach reading and writing (and so is four!)  So how is it that our current educational system is not built upon development and ignores developmental norms?

And how is it that we can take the holistic human child and essentially boil learning down to an interaction between eyes and hand only?  We have taken away anything that would marry the body and soul of a child.  This is dividing the human being into chunks, and I think we are reaping the effects of this with the rates of suicide, violence, bullying, drug abuse and sexual abuse and misconduct.  Waldorf Education seeks to include the whole child.

We relate the physical body to the emotional and spiritual.  Dr. Glockler writes, “The whole physical body speaks a language; everything in the human being speaks about its function.”  (and my physical therapists in this audience are nodding because HOW many times in physical therapy school does one hear over and over, “Form follows function?”)  “We can take all the details and we can take the whole; it is always the same.”  (There are many detailed anatomic drawings in this book of bones, embryonic development in this book to look at whole and at parts in the upright human being)    We rightly speak of the image of the human being which reveals what it is.  I already mentioned earlier that we carry our whole body in uprightness.  What does the language of the body say though this upright posture?  Our very body says that we are upright beings.  We can take this both in the literal, spatial sense, and also in a spiritual sense in that “upright” is another word for truthful, to be upright.  So our body’s language speaks about our spiritual function, that both outwardly and inwardly we are upright beings.  Due to this uprightness we have a center between above and below, and this center is the seat of the force of the heart, of love.  Love is the center of our upright being.  The extreme polarities of our being are  wisdom and power, but the most central force is love.”

I have more to say about these lectures, but that is a great place to start today.

Many blessings,
Carrie

This is the time of year when some families are deciding to just not send their children back to school after the Holiday Break and are getting started homeschooling.  Have hope!

I have heard from parents who have taken the child they had the most difficult relationship with and brought that child home (and many parents with this same situation in the past have told me this brought the most wonderful changes and a forging of a close, intimate and healthy parent-child relationship).   Have hope!

I have heard from parents who want to switch to Waldorf homeschooling from another method of homeschooling.  The number one complaint I hear is that the other methods are “so dry”.  Have hope!

I have heard from parents who want to switch to Waldorf homeschooling because they felt some of the methods they used in the past really pushed their early grades child and now at age 9 or 10 their child is completely burned out.  Have hope!

I have heard from parents who have not yet pulled their children out of school but really, really want to.  They have collected curriculum and just need to find the confidence to get started!  Have hope!

If any of the above scenarios represent YOU and your family today, I have good news for you!

This is the good news:  you CAN do this, you will be successful, it will be okay.  Your family relationship will be stronger.  You will grow as a mother and as a human being. You will discover your children are lovely to be around.  Your family will also grow in grace and love!

This is not to say there will not be growing pains, or days of wondering why you decided to do this.  This is not say that you will not have to WORK – work in planning for your school days, work in planning how to do school and housecleaning, and this is not to say there will not be time when you have to make hard decisions about extra-curricular activities….but I am here to let you know that these growing pains will be worth it.  Completely and utterly worth it!

Have the courage to pull your children out of school, or to switch methods if that is what your family needs.

If you have been collecting curriculum, sit down and plan out a rhythm for a week and get started!  Your curriculum does no good at all sitting on a shelf.

Here are a few of my tips to get started:

• Start with planning for this week – many of you are just waiting for the right moment to start homeschooling.  There is no right moment, you must jump in and do it.  Plan a week, then plan two weeks, then plan a month.  Just get started!  I like to plan day by day for my year over the Summer, so I start early, but mothers do it all different ways.  Find the way that works for you (but in order to do this you must start somewhere!).  You are not re-creating school in your home, here is a lovely article by Donna Simmons about the bringing Waldorf Education into the home: https://theparentingpassageway.com/2010/08/25/bringing-waldorf-to-homeschooling-by-donna-simmons/
• Plan that your children may need up to a whole school year to really settle in.  Many mothers have told me that after they pulled their child from school the first year was just hard.  Don’t be discouraged.   Keep reminding yourself that what you are doing is enough:  https://theparentingpassageway.com/2010/08/05/do-you-ever-worry-your-homeschool-teaching-is-not-enough/  Homeschooling is first and foremost about family!
• Do have a support system for those hard days that you can call on (people who will NOT tell you the answer is to put your child back into school!)  Be careful what you can share with who.  Sometimes if you complain too much to family members, they lose confidence homeschooling is the right choice for your family and will start to pressure you about putting your children back in  school.  Know who you can trust with what information!
• Figure out about life and homeschooling, smaller children — errands, cleaning, meals.  How and when is this going to happen?  What will the smaller children be doing whilst you work with your older child?  How can you balance needs within your family?
• Work on YOURSELF.  I see so many mothers carrying around these really negative images of themselves – I am so disorganized, I can’t get up, I can’t stick to a schedule, ….What do you need to do to forgive yourself, to celebrate yourself, to lift yourself up?  https://theparentingpassageway.com/2008/11/27/forgiving-ourselves/ 
• What is your spiritual path and what are you doing for spiritual work and personal development?  Some mothers I know found success with this little book, I gave out several copies at Christmas because I personally liked it so much (Christian perspective, but okay for those raised in Christian faith and wanting a little jump start back into something spiritual): http://www.amazon.com/Moments-Peace-Presence-God-Morning/dp/0764207768/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294856068&sr=8-1
• If you are Waldorf homeschooling, I encourage you to actually read some Steiner.  Kingdom of Childhood is a good place to start, very accessible.  Here it is for free:  http://steinerbooks.org/research/archive/kingdom_of_childhood/kingdom_of_childhood.pdf  You don’t have to agree with Steiner’s personal worldview to use Waldorf Education; you can bring Waldorf elements to your homeschool no matter what methods you use. (Here is a post on infusing Waldorf methods into Christian homeschooling:  https://theparentingpassageway.com/2010/05/20/infusing-waldorf-elements-into-your-christian-homeschool/)  You take what resonates with you and leave the rest behind, but I think Steiner  fleshes out a curriculum so in synch with the developmental stages that also mesh with what psychologists such as Gesell and Piaget have said of the child people are foolhardy to ignore this system of education.  You can read why I personally like Waldorf Education here: https://theparentingpassageway.com/2008/11/06/wonderful-waldorf/. 
• Here is a whole post that rounds up some of the back posts on coming to Waldorf late:   https://theparentingpassageway.com/2009/12/03/coming-to-waldorf-late-2/
• Get help!  If you need help, how about using a Waldorf consultant? 

Just jump in and get started, you will be so glad you did!

Many blessings,

Carrie

(PS>  Catherine had a great point below in the comment section; this post can sound negative if you read it the wrong way!  The concerns I have listed at the bottom with three more challenging types of situations does not mean you cannot homeschool!  I mean to encourage you and say you can do this, stop collecting curriculum and START! Do what you need to do to get support, but also do the work that YOU need to do for your family!!

Love to all! Carrie)

Do those of you who homeschool have this conversation all the time?

Stranger:  Where does your child go to school?

Mother:  We homeschool.

Stranger (fascinated and horrified at the same time):  Oh, I could NEVER do that.  I am not patient at all, and my children just don’t listen to me!

Really?

Your children never listen to you?

That is going to be really difficult and make for challenges throughout your parenting lifetime.

Patience?

Yes, homeschooling mothers can be patient, but I doubt if you rounded all of us up and tested us for an extra patience gene that we would be any different than the regular population.

The secret is that we have more opportunities to work on developing our patience.  That’s all.  If I need to develop patience, I can almost guarantee I will be put in more situations and opportunities where I can work to develop that trait.  No one said growth was easy!

Rudolf Steiner once said, “This is what causes one such heartfelt concern today, that people have not the least desire to know something.”  So, if you as a family are open to striving, to learning, to trying, to growing, to persevering, then homeschooling is for you.

You will develop your own will, you will learn so much about yourself, you will develop new abilities.  You will develop your family culture like never before and the ties with your children and the ties between your children will be stronger than ever.  Your children will learn not only academics, but practical life skills and they will assimilate your family’s values at a rapid clip.

However, I do feel there are two categories of families who can homeschool but that might need extra support.

One is the hopelessly disordered and chaotic family.  You have to be able to work out time to plan, and you have to have a plan. Planning will save you every time.  Even veteran UNSCHOOLERS plan to the extent that once they have identified their children’s passions, they bring their child to the library, they strew materials about their home, they plan experiences revolving around the children’s interests.  That takes planning!  I often hear mothers say this time of year that maybe they should just “follow their child’s interests, Waldorf (or Classical or whatever) is just too hard.  We should just unschool.”  If you need a break, take a break, but don’t fool yourself by thinking unschooling is no work.  The veteran Unschoolers I personally know work hard to help their children learn.

For Waldorf homeschooling families, I feel NOW is the time you should be matching a skeleton outline of blocks you are going to teach up with a calendar and start looking at resources for the fall.  You can then order your resources around March, have time to read through it all and plan over the Summer.  You need to do this even with an “open and go” curriculum.

The second category of families I worry about with homeschooling are those parents who are truly afraid to be an authority in their home.  A nice, loving authority, not a mean dictator, but an authority who has an idea what the rules of the house are, and what is acceptable and not acceptable.  I have so many, many posts on this blog about this.  This is so important.

Where is your Family Mission Statement?  What are your values, what are your rules?  What are you doing for inner work?  Are you actually home and working on developing your patience and strengthening your family ties together or are you just running around every day?  To  homeschool, you actually need to be home! What outside activities are your children involved in and do they really need to be involved in them?  I don’t think a child under six and a  half or seven really needs classes.  Children under four and a half or five  don’t need playdates either.  Waldorf Kindergarten used to traditionally start at four and a half years of age.  This still makes sense developmentally!

The third little thing I need to throw in is that I do worry a bit about the mothers homeschooling only daughters.  I think mother-daughter relationships can get really tangled and picky.  I am NOT saying I don’t think mother-only daughters should not homeschool, I am just saying this situation may require some extra planning so the whole thing doesn’t become too intense.  In this case, some outside experiences and play time and the like within a supportive community  may be helpful.

Just a few thoughts!

Many blessings,

Carrie