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My son’s morning routine is slowly (very slowly) getting faster. It once took him an hour to go to the bathroom, wash his hands and face, brush his teeth and get dressed. Now, several years later, his current “best time” is 15 minutes. That’s how it is when you have a child with disabilities. Progress can be very slow in some areas, but you have to keep at it because the child needs to become as independent as he is capable of becoming.
The time his morning routine ate up used to frustrate me, because it cut into our academic time. But I eventually realized that dressing himself is an important part of his education. After all, what is the purpose of teaching your child? It’s to prepare him for life, and part of life is getting ready every morning for whatever your day will bring.
Like any other child, my son progresses faster in the areas he’s interested in. It’s not that important to him to get dressed or to read, so his progress in those areas is slow. But he’s all about food, so he likes to cook with me. (He would prefer to cook without me, but that’s non-negotiable at this point!) Just the other day we made macaroni and cheese for lunch and served it with a fruit salad that he helped assemble. He is a very eager cook, and is good at remembering how to use utensils. When it comes to cooking, he’s an “A” student.
But does cooking count as “school”? Sure it does. He is learning a life skill. If he attended public school, he’d be working with therapists who would teach him practical skills like cooking (only they’d call it “food preparation” or “culinary arts”).
Some people would say that activities like self-care and cooking may count as school for a child with developmental disabilities, but for most children, school should be math, reading, history, science, etc. I agree that a well-rounded education includes those subjects (although I think which subjects to include ultimately depends on the parents’ personal preferences as well as each child’s aptitudes), and I required my other children to study all of them. But that doesn’t mean that anything outside of those basic subjects should not count as school.
My 14-year-old daughter and I often walk to the post office or the public library; I count that as her P.E. Last summer she made a quilt and sent it with our church’s mission team to Mexico, where it was given to a poor family. I included that on her record as Home Economics and volunteer work (which is now required of many public high school students). Our homeschool group sponsors an annual card-making/scrapbooking workshop at a local scrapbooking store; that goes down on the books as Art.
When my older children were teens, I included more on their transcripts than just their grades in traditional subjects. I listed my daughter’s experience running merchandise tables at concerts to raise money for a pro-life organization, the Christian coffeehouse she started and ran, and her part-time job caring for a neighbor’s newborn baby. My son’s transcript included the Web site he designed and ran that was written up in Baseball Weekly, the mission trips he served on and the non-credit online IT courses he took for fun.
I listed these activities on their transcripts because they had learned at least as much (and probably more) from these experiences than they had learned studying traditional subjects. As we later discovered, it certainly didn’t hurt to put them on there: my son was accepted at all six of the universities to which he applied. (My daughter chose not to attend college.)
Once you realize that all of your child’s activities are learning experiences, you can shed that formal education mentality you were raised with that says only traditional subjects count as school. You realize that almost everything your child learns to do counts as school: reading for pleasure, writing an e-mail to Grandma, making Dad’s birthday cake. This continues on into the teenage years: the teen who learns to change the oil in her car, do her own income tax or design and sew her bedroom curtains is doing school.
It doesn’t end once the teen becomes an adult. Think of the expectant mother educating herself about the changes in her body and her unborn child’s as her pregnancy progresses, or the young couple learning all they can about mortgages as they search for their first house. Even the elderly woman studying her options for long-term care facilities is becoming educated in an important subject.
Let’s face it: life is school. Everything we do counts as school. Just because we learn something without a book or a teacher or a class does not mean we aren’t learning. I figured that out while homeschooling my older children, but it really hit home for me once I understood that my youngest son’s school day begins at the bathroom sink. Yes, it counts as school.
© 2006 Barbara Frank/Cardamom Publishers Reprinted with Permission
About the author:
Barbara Frank is the mother of four homeschooled-from-birth children ages 13-22, a freelance writer/editor, and the author of “Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers” and the “The Imperfect Homeschooler’s Guide to Homeschooling.” To visit her Web site, “The Imperfect Homeschooler,” go to www.cardamompublishers.com.
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