S/O Does your public library welcome home schoolers?
Aug 14, 2014 13:35:40 GMT
freebird, scrapqueen01, and 3 more like this
Post by grammyj64 on Aug 14, 2014 13:35:40 GMT
After a comment was made in the Laura Ingalls Wilder thread about the public library acting suspicious of home schooling families, I'd like to discuss a bit more. I retired early from a position as a school librarian to escape an intolerable situation with an intransigent administration and inflexible faculty who only saw the library as a place to dump their kids while they had coffee. But I was still a teacher at heart, so I accepted a public library position and became the children's librarian. Early on I met with some representatives of the local home schooling community and found them to be great people, with a variety of reasons to home school. Granted, there were some who did it poorly because they had jumped on a bandwagon of church friends and really didn't have a clue, but there were others who were very organized and methodical, yet quite creative in their approach.
I enjoyed the flexibility of planning and "teaching" a series of lessons that interested me without a principal or state board hanging over my shoulder to see if I was covering the essential elements. The parents decided how they would include my sessions (2 hours a week) in their curriculum - some called it art, because we always had a hands-on component, while others found it fit their objectives as social studies or literature. They were free to come to any or all of the sessions - usually about 4 weeks. Some of the parents stayed, while others spent their library time reading or searching for other materials.
Some of the units I recall (it's been a while since I did this, so the memory is hazy): The silk road - based on a children's book about Marco Polo; Ancient Egypt (the last session in costume and we used eyeliner to create the Cleopatra eye, even on the boys, then took pictures.) A history of our town, in which we brought microfilm readers to the children's room and looked up the local newspaper for the day they were born and ended with a walking tour of downtown led by a local historian/storyteller. "No Walmart on the Prairie," which jumped off from the LIW stories and included a lesson on sections with each student designing their own farm on a grid as the midwest was laid out. A favorite authors unit, during which we read 4 books by such authors as Gary Paulsen, Beverly Cleary and several others I can't recall at the moment, and also talked about their lives.
Unlike students attending local public and private schools, the home schooled students were able to read books that were not on the Accelerated Reader list (I came to hate that program for its restrictiveness) Granted AR gets reluctant readers to read for a reward, but the attitude of some teachers and parents restricted student to books in their grade level or forced them to read books inappropriate for their emotional maturity level - eg, a mom would come in with a 3rd grader proclaiming that the child read at 8th grade level and want to check out 8th grade books in which the content was not 3rd grade level. I fought that battle too often and finally quit trying. I didn't have that issue with most of the home-schoolers, who were readers anyway, sometimes voracious readers, and had the freedom to read anything they were interested in and, mercy! they could even re-read a book they really liked.
I need to stop now and step down from my soapbox. But I hope that you homeschoolers have supportive public librarians. The public library IS the school library for home schooled students and I hate when librarians judge someone's choice. They are missing a wonderful opportunity.
I enjoyed the flexibility of planning and "teaching" a series of lessons that interested me without a principal or state board hanging over my shoulder to see if I was covering the essential elements. The parents decided how they would include my sessions (2 hours a week) in their curriculum - some called it art, because we always had a hands-on component, while others found it fit their objectives as social studies or literature. They were free to come to any or all of the sessions - usually about 4 weeks. Some of the parents stayed, while others spent their library time reading or searching for other materials.
Some of the units I recall (it's been a while since I did this, so the memory is hazy): The silk road - based on a children's book about Marco Polo; Ancient Egypt (the last session in costume and we used eyeliner to create the Cleopatra eye, even on the boys, then took pictures.) A history of our town, in which we brought microfilm readers to the children's room and looked up the local newspaper for the day they were born and ended with a walking tour of downtown led by a local historian/storyteller. "No Walmart on the Prairie," which jumped off from the LIW stories and included a lesson on sections with each student designing their own farm on a grid as the midwest was laid out. A favorite authors unit, during which we read 4 books by such authors as Gary Paulsen, Beverly Cleary and several others I can't recall at the moment, and also talked about their lives.
Unlike students attending local public and private schools, the home schooled students were able to read books that were not on the Accelerated Reader list (I came to hate that program for its restrictiveness) Granted AR gets reluctant readers to read for a reward, but the attitude of some teachers and parents restricted student to books in their grade level or forced them to read books inappropriate for their emotional maturity level - eg, a mom would come in with a 3rd grader proclaiming that the child read at 8th grade level and want to check out 8th grade books in which the content was not 3rd grade level. I fought that battle too often and finally quit trying. I didn't have that issue with most of the home-schoolers, who were readers anyway, sometimes voracious readers, and had the freedom to read anything they were interested in and, mercy! they could even re-read a book they really liked.
I need to stop now and step down from my soapbox. But I hope that you homeschoolers have supportive public librarians. The public library IS the school library for home schooled students and I hate when librarians judge someone's choice. They are missing a wonderful opportunity.
