Homeschooling - film studies class

Rear Window

Today is the first day back to school for my two homeschoolers!

My daughter is starting 8th grade this year and has been totally loving her secular, literature-based curriculum from Bookshark. This year it's based on science (rather than world history) and includes books like the wonderful, Longitude. The Bookshark curriculum covers all the core courses, but we still search for other courses to round out the school year. Last year, she did a year of American Sign Language and got quite good at it.

This year we are taking a break on the languages and doing PE (mostly running) and a Film Studies course that's based on a two-year high school curriculum by Tim Marklevitz.

One of the benefits of homeschooling is that we don't have to wait for high school to cover topics of interest (assuming they were even offered at our local high school). I can adapt the curriculum to her age level as well as the content of the movies, although she already watches movies way above her age range. I would definitely not recommend this movie list to younger children or high schoolers who are uncomfortable with scary movies or adult themes.

Some of the movies we'll be watching are:

• Rear Window (1954) - unit on mise en scene
• Do the Right Thing (1989) - unit on color and light temperature
• Citizen Cane (1951) - unit on cinematography
• The Conversation (1974) - unit on sound
• Psycho (1960) - unit on editing and will be during the week of Halloween
• Run Lola Run (1988) - unit on split screen and parallel editing
• The Wrong Trousers (1993) - unit on stop motion animation

This is Spinal Tap

There are 26 movies covered in the first year of the curriculum. We'll see if there's interest in the second year when she starts high school next year and, assuming she's still homeschooled. She has expressed an interest in one of the local, alternative high schools.

I have seen most of the movies in the list, but it will be fun to rewatch them again with an eye towards cinematography, structure, pacing and the like.

I'm using two texts along the way:

1. The Film Experience - An Introduction (Second Edition - it's cheaper and the content is similar to later editions)
2. Film Studies: An Introduction (Teach Yourself) 

For a full list of the films covered (as well as the topics touched on from each movie), you can view the list on IMDB: Movies for Teaching a High School Film Course.

Warning: There are Amazon affiliate links in this post.

Full time homeschooling middle school

Howdy! Sorry I've been MIA this last week. School started on Wednesday and, on Monday, I made the executive decision (with support from my husband) to full time homeschool my 7th grade son.

He was scheduled to do 2 classes at his middle school this year, but the times they wanted him to take classes messed up my work schedule too much. So, I figured adding 2 more subjects didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. But, it did leave me scrambling a bit to cover my work schedule with a sitter and add a few more things for him to work on.

As far as our decision to homeschool our son, we meet about 8 of the reasons shown in the graphic at the right. I'm still freaking out a little bit about this decision, but I know he could step back into the part-time schedule at school if it doesn't work out. However, at this point, I don't think he's going to want to.

I've spent a lot of time reading about different homeschooling techniques. Last year we basically did school at home. We followed the 6th grade curriculum for the most part. I think it was good for a transition, but ended up being relatively uninspiring and there was still a lot of struggle and resistance. I have become much more interested in the idea of unschooling, but have settled on something in between for now. More of an eclectic, student-driven homeschooling within the general guidelines of a 7th grade curriculum. In other words, I'm going to offer the material and let him spend as much time on something if he's interested and sweep quickly over things he's not interested. Plus a whole lot of other fun stuff that doesn't involve sitting at the kitchen table all day.

My son's big resistance is with math, which is surprising because he's naturally extremely adept at it. I don't know what happened in public school that made him hate it so much, but we are taking it slow. I'm using the Life of Fred math books and I've already determined that he's going to need a lot of review work. I, frankly, don't think he did any work in 6th grade math at school last year, so we have a bit of catch up to do. But, that said, I want it to be a positive experience. It's also a huge lesson for me to give up the fear and control of having to do "such and such work in x amount of time".

So far, the first couple of days have gone well. I think I've got things organized enough at this point that it will get easier as we go along. And, with more of a gradual focus on unschooling, it should get easier altogether. Most importantly, he seems to be much more relaxed and happy about school. And, for once, I don't have to worry about issues at school for the first time in 8 years, which is a huge relief.

Part-time homeschooling for full-time working parents

This school year started off extremely bumpy for my 11-year-old. The transition to 6th grade middle school for the H-man just wasn't going very well and his anxiety has been completely off the charts. He spent the first week+ hunkering down at home while we came up with Plan B and Plan C. Plan B was to homeschool him full-time, which neither my husband nor I was ready to commit to.

His middle school came back with a plan to have him slowly integrate into the mainstream classes. What this ended up being was him starting out with 1 class a day and working his way up to 3 classes over the course of several weeks. We'll call this, Plan C. It's where we currently are.

How does this work? Well, he does part-time at school (3 classes) and part-time at home (3 classes). We get the coursework for those afternoons by coordinating with the other teachers for what he should be doing. Since I work full-time, I've hired a tutor to pick him up from school, take him home and work on the missed material until I get home from work in the late afternoon. We've lucked out because his tutor is a certified WA state middle school teacher who is familiar with the material (although from a different school district) and really enjoys the one-on-one with him.

The benefit of doing this is that he still goes to school but at the comfort level he can manage. While I can't say that he is entirely comfortable even with 3 classes, it's better than nothing. I also can't say that it's working super well, since the curriculum for those 3 classes isn't exactly geared towards home study so we'll be discussing that with his teachers at his IEP meeting to see what other options we have.

The one thing I'm hoping that will come out of this is that we will follow a homeschool plan and drop trying to match the school assignments - it's just too hard to keep up with 10 hours a week of missing instruction. I'd much rather have his tutor design the material and instruct him based on what she usually teaches for those classes.

If I didn't work, I would certainly do things differently, but I'm constrained with having to keep my job due to my husband's cancer and his treatments. Plus, I love my job. At this point, I joke that he's getting a public school education at private school prices, but it's better than that. He has the comfort and freedom of doing schoolwork at home with a tutor who can cater to his learning style.

I'll let you know how it goes as this evolves. If you are interested in learning more about part-time homeschooling for kids with special needs, you can check out this book, Autism and Flexischooling: A Shared Classroom and Homeschooling Approach. If you want to read more about how to juggle working and homeschooling, read this great new book, How to Work and Homeschool: Practical Advice, Tips and Strategies for Parents.


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