Confessions of a Homeschooler

A week ago we finished another school year in Kazakhstan but as opposed to the first two years when our kids went to the local public school, this past year we decided to try homeschooling. We were very glad the kids had an opportunity to study in Russian and to experience life the way local kids do, and public education here has a lot of good in it but the system itself, and the bureaucracy of the administration drove me crazy. It got to the point that I would get frustrated pretty much every day about this or that but the daily school life our girls experienced was mostly good.

There were three main reasons we decided to switch to homeschooling. First one was the schedule. The schools here are overpopulated and so they run them in two or sometimes three shifts. Having four kids means that we always had someone go in the morning, and someone go in the afternoon. The kids ended up not seeing each other throughout the week. Second, they have school on Saturdays, and I am really against it. Last year the government announced that they will start switching to a 5-day school system but it will take years. Third, even though the school our girls went to was a linguistic gymnasium and they studied English starting in 1^st grade, most of English teachers did not know English very well except the one Veronika had in 5^th grade. Our kids were excused from going to English classes (mostly because the teachers didn’t want to be corrected by them) and this situation continued for two years. We noticed that while their Russian was going up, their English vocabulary and grammar wasn’t improving even though we were speaking English at home. And we couldn’t do extra English ourselves because the kids would get so much homework every day, they only had time to sleep.

Anyway, after a lot of pondering and praying, we came to a conclusion that we needed a change. Spencer’s work would reimburse for needed homeschool supplies, so we decided to give it a try. We got most of the curriculum from Timberdoodle.com and the math curriculum came from Singapore Math (it is a lot more advanced and is close to what they use here), and dove right into it.

All of the curriculum for all 4 kids. Yauza!

Now, the school year is already behind us and here is the report: overall we all loved this experience and we are going to homeschool again this next year. The kids loved the flexibility and the fact that when they were done with the tasks, they moved on (they didn’t have to wait for the rest of the class). They loved that they had new things to work with like robots. They especially loved free Saturdays, we all did! And they had more time to be with friends. At the beginning they didn’t like so much that they had to pass everything to me. At school if they didn’t know something, they could go unnoticed. It was never the case at home (I always knew what they were supposed to be doing), and they finally got used to it.

It was a challenge for me too. Teaching kids of different ages was a challenge but I learned (or sometimes relearned) right alongside of them. My biggest concern was if they would have enough socialization. Well, I shouldn’t have worried. They had a lot more socialization than when they were at school! They had a lot more time in the evenings to play with friends, and so they found a lot of new friends, friends of different nationalities (we live on NU campus, and there are families from all over the world here). Every afternoon they went to Children’s Palace where they had guitar, flute, sculpting, track and field, and figure skating classes with other Kazakh and Russian kids of different ages. They made a lot of friends there and they had an opportunity to use their Russian since all of the teaching there was done in Russian.

And probably the most important skill the kids learned this past year was independent learning.

Here are some pictures from our school year. They mostly show "fun classes", not the ones like grammar, and math! :)

First day of school. Lexa decided to wear her old school uniform.

Nika is helping the twins with their science project. That is another thing the kids didn't get to do at their public school here (there were no science experiments, all the learning was done through books)

Lexa is working on her Critical Thinking skills from the comfort of our couch!

Lina is doing Robotics (at this stage it was learning about mechanical energy) 

And this is her little creation that can move 

Here she is working on the one that uses a battery.

Twins learning coding with Ozobot

And here is the little guy in action

Nika is working on coding with her Sphero robot

That's her little guy.

Lexa working on her Spanish

Sophia learning typing

Lina had a Perspecto and Architecto programs that were teaching critical thinking skills and spacial awareness. Here is one of her creations. 

And here is another that was pretty cool.

One of the hardest classes this year for Nika and Lina was US History. It was very intense but at the end of the school year they got to complete this fun project - US over History 4D Puzzle. It has 4 different layers with famous monuments being on top but only the bottom layer is pictured here, and this bottom layer had over 950 puzzle pieces!