Scholars in Training
As a student, I thought of my lessons as plain, hard work, but now I realize my sisters and I were scholars in training under the guiding hand of our parents. We were not just “getting through” the homeschool curriculum. No, we were being trained for a lifetime of exploring the works and words of the God of the universe.
Scholarship. What is it? In my mind the word is synonymous with study skills. The concept is tightly tied up with discipline and attention to detail.
Scholarship. What is it? In my mind the word is synonymous with study skills. The concept is tightly tied up with discipline and attention to detail. The scholars of old were known for their academic excellence and thorough knowledge of a subject area. It may be an antiquated term, but the concept need not be relegated to a museum. We can—and we must—train scholars in our presentday homeschools.
Scholarship is foundational to a good education. Sure, our children need a grounding in scriptural principles, the fundamentals of the three Rs, and even social skills. But if we don’t approach these subjects in an orderly, self-disciplined manner, we may as well not touch upon them at all.
Study skills (or the lack thereof) will make or break an education. Discipline, time stewardship, persistence, dependability, and accomplishment all arise out of early formation of good habits. A child’s major work is to prepare for adulthood. Since schooling is a big part of that preparation, it follows that study habits must be given attention in these formative years.
Start with the Basics
Have no fear! Though it’s true that you can’t take such an all-encompassing subject and fit it into a neat curriculum package, implementing a study skills program is possible with some determination on the part of the parent combined with some straightforward concepts of which you are already familiar.
Perhaps reading would be a good place for you to begin. Make family reading a habit. We’ve found that it adds nice structure to our days and forces us to set aside work and enjoy some together time. As soon as your children’s skills are developed, they should begin to read on their own as well. Maybe you will have to schedule a reading hour or assign books. If you want outside motivation, nation-wide reward programs are available that give an incentive to set and attain personal reading goals. Then make sure that your children are getting a varied diet of books. You could have them read a biography for each piece of fiction and make sure that classics are read. A little bit of a plan in this area, and your child will be a better person.
I doubt there is any subject that shows off a person’s ability to reason in an orderly way as well as writing. Whether or not you use a published curriculum, be sure to have your child write regularly. You know what your child can handle, but I would aim for daily writing practice. The beginner can start with sentences, and before long these lead naturally into paragraphs. You might start by having them keep journals and write letters and book reports. Be sure to also include summaries, essays, and research papers in your lesson plans. The earlier your child becomes comfortable with these forms of written communication, the more free he will be to learn and share what he is learning.
� It was evident early on that I wasn’t going into a field requiring a lot of math, but I had to work painstakingly on my lessons for hours a day anyway. I might have been a perfectionist and allowed my thoughts to wander, but most of that time was spent on straightforward work. There were many times I didn’t enjoy it, but looking back, I’m thankful for the high standard set before me. I had math every year through high school, and I was expected (within reason) to finish a book a year. One way my mother helped me to accomplish this was by stressing that we did our math in the mornings when we were thinking best. This organizing of a day’s schedule according to my freshness and the difficulty of the task is a skill I still use in my adult life. Another requirement of the math lesson was that our notebooks be kept neat and orderly. The exercise of showing each step of our work helped us to learn the vital lesson of orderly thinking. And as we were reminded by our parents over and over, it would pay off in college where grades may not be based only on our answer but rather on the work done correctly and concepts grasped. Math tended to be a struggle, but I was becoming proficient in much more than that subject.
Formulating a Plan
The study skills learned along with the three Rs can be applied to all subjects. You can’t hold scholarship back. What is learned in one place makes an impact in other places, and soon every area of life becomes more ordered. I challenge you to give scholarship a try! But don’t attempt it without a plan.
Written goals hold it all together. A good place to start is with a mission statement for your homeschool. It may help to have in writing that you desire to pass good study skills on to your children. Then develop a yearly plan by answering questions like these.
- What will my school calendar look like? (Beginning, ending, vacations)
- When will the school day start?
- How much material should we cover in the school year?
From there, divide your material by the number of school days, and you will come up with an approximate amount of work that must be accomplished per day. Some days you’ll exceed that, and realistically there will be other days you will fall far short. So plan periodic check-ups throughout the year to re-evaluate. You may even want to do this weekly to keep the “I’m behind!” thought from becoming a nagging burden.
Writing lesson plans in pencil is a good idea, for somehow or another life seems to just happen! Still, discipline yourself and your children to reach goals despite these “interruptions.” If you miss a day of school or don’t get a subject done, find a way to make up that work the next day or certainly within a week or two. Don’t let undone work pile up and get out of control. Everyone will be happier when work is being accomplished and odds surmounted.
There is no need for you to have a degree in management to pull off scholarship training. The key is to honor your children by expecting a lot of them. When we were old enough to do some of our work independently, my mother would sit down with each of us individually at the beginning of the day. She’d look through our books with us and write down assignments in the daily planner. That book was always available for us to look up page numbers, and there was no excuse for work left undone until the next day. When we were older, the responsibility of assigning work in that planner came upon our own shoulders. We knew the system and the expectations, and we were trusted to accomplish our work.
When should you begin introducing study skills? At the very beginning! According to my experience, it is painful to break old, sloppy habits and replace them with new ones. I remember the day my mom came home and announced that we were going to embark on a new language arts cur- riculum. Don’t get me wrong. We already followed a curriculum systematically, but it was determined that there were gaps to fill. We would be required to change the way we held our pencils, formed our letters, and even said the alphabet! As a junior high student, I flew off the wall! Now I look back with gratefulness that my mother stuck to it and didn’t give up. The extra skills of scholarship that I gained from that program have been of huge benefit to my daily living. Just like I began something new as a teen, you can embark upon a road of scholarship starting partway through your child’s education. But remember, you can save them a lot of pain by starting from the beginning.
If your children seem to thwart your best efforts at shaping them into scholars, there are ways to help them along. Turn their daily assignments into checklists breaking those assignments down into smaller steps if needed. Require your student to write down the time it took to accomplish a project. Schedule times throughout the day when they will check in with you. Hold them accountable. Set goals and rewards, and teach your children to do the same. By this I mean something as simple as deciding that an assignment completed in a determined time earns the student the privilege of playing with a toy for three minutes or reading a couple of pages in a favorite book. When working on my long math lessons, I’d sometimes tell myself that I could get up for a drink of water after finishing a section, or I could eat an M&M® or piece of popcorn after each completed problem. As silly as this may sound, it works, and it is building habits of self-discipline for life.I write passionately about study skills because I believe it is an eroding foundation on the modern homeschool front. One of the biggest culprits is over-scheduling. Extra-curricular activities and outside opportunities are so numerous that homeschoolers are often strangers to home. Private lessons, sports, speech, debate, service opportunities, homeschool support group events, co-op classes, and more often get in the way of what we set out to accomplish. We try to give our children everything at the expense of giving them excellence in nothing. As the parent in today’s world, you have the opportunity to model scholarship to your children by saying “no.” This takes focus and determination, but that’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it?
Your children will benefit from your foresight to prepare them for life starting today. The result of your efforts to introduce study skills to your home will be children of order and purpose. They will reflect the order of their Creator to a world caught up in a hopeless, haphazard, undisciplined existence. And someday your children will thank you. Scholarship is hard work, but it’s worth every bit of grit it takes to get there.
©2009 Homeschooling Today magazine, Nehemiah Four, LLC