Victoria Botkin is the wife of Geoffry Botkin, the maker of The League of Grateful Sons. A couple of years ago we were able to meet the Botkin family and I was struck with how articulate their children were and at how much they had done in their young lives. While I thought I knew what their educational philosophy must be before asking, I just had to ask Victoria any way. I asked her what curriculum they used in their homeschool. I am sure now that she has had many people ask that same question, but she was gracious enough to talk with me briefly. The only curriculum they use is Saxon math. Nothing else. No other curriculum, but lots of reading, writing and one-on-one discussion time with each other and as a family. Knowing this was so very freeing for me. We struggle between wanting to educate our children according to their individual bents and focusing on Scripture or educating to the world's standards with a college degree being the goal.
We recently met up with the Botkins again and, to my mortification, Jeff shared with them that I was experiencing some homeschool burnout (oh, the shame!) A few weeks later we received a package including all of the Botkin family cd and dvd products. We already had everything with the exception of the Curriculum Advice by Victoria. Jeff and I were both convicted as we listened to this two cd set on our recent trip. The Lord has been showing us a better way for our family to live and learn together in the last few weeks and this was just one more glimpse into what that could be.
3 comments:
Wow, that is freeing. As I have been preparing for the school year, I have been thinking about how to get the information to "stick" and now I think I will have them tell me what they learn by reading about the subect and then I will fill in with any missing pieces I want them to know.
WOW! Knowing nothing yet about this curriculum, it sounds so liberating. Being new to HOMEschooling, I've not yet encountered the Botkins information. I guess I'll have to do some searching. I taught in the public schools a while and know that this is NOT how we want our children to learn. We want our CHILDREN'S involvement, to explore THEIR interests, to allow THEM to think and decide things. And we want to do all of this with FULL faith that they will learn all that's necessary in the right time. It's very much an unschooling approach with a tad bit of standards thrown in for MILD measurability.
Right now we're diving into finding resources for a thematic approach, using ideas our daughter is interest in. First, how businesses work. She wants to know all about how someone owns and operates a business. We'll search it through history from money to taxes to opening, closing, cleaning, networking, you name it--there's tons there. We're also going to be studying cancer in children. Sadly, we've found almost nothing at our local library so we'll be ILLing much of what we can find. But there is a world of lessons there that cover every subject area fully.
Anyway, thank you for this post. I'll go Google this and see what I can come up with. We're a somewhat low-income family but if we can find the CDs used, I bet we can swing it. Sounds like it's worth at least listening to before completing our yearly outlines!
Thanks again!
~2Shaye
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