Planning

Since it looks like we're going to try and do first grade, I started perusing our What Your First Grader Needs to Know book and found this sentence very interesting: "We know that the one-on-one tutorial is the most effective form of schooling, in part because a parent or teacher can provide tailor-made instruction for the individual child" (from the General Introduction, p. XVIII). The context is the argument for core knowledge--specific knowledge in every grade in every school in the United States (as they apparently do in Sweden, France and Japan), so that there's a strong foundation and no gaps in children's elementary school education, allowing students to perform better in high school (and one would assume, college).

I suppose that's one of the things I've started appreciated in my (very brief) homeschooling career--I know exactly what Bubby's been taught, what he knows and what still needs to be taught. Last month we talked about lines intersecting and not intersecting, right angles and different types of triangles. He's too young for me to introduce degrees, but since I know what he's been exposed to, I can build on that.

Last year in Bubby's preschool class, a mother with a sixth grader in the GATE (California's Gifted and Talented Education program) was telling me about the class' reading list and how her daughter had already read the books in fourth grade. So I suppose that's an argument for Hirsch's core knowledge agenda.