When homes and the world serve as classrooms

Click to Enlarge Browse and Buy Summit Daily Photos Seven-year-old Ruth Hunsinger looks up for the solution to a math problem while mother, Ann, looks on in the family's kitchen Wednesday. Summit Daily/Reid Williams Get News Feeds

JULIE SUTOR
summit daily news
February 5, 2005

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SUMMIT COUNTY - At 8:15 a.m. on an average weekday, the vast majority of Summit County elementary students are bundled up in hats, coats and mittens, waiting for buses or climbing into parents' cars to make the daily trek to their neighborhood schools.

But in a sunny home near the top of Ryan Gulch Road in Wildernest, the three Hunsinger children are gathered around the kitchen table with their mother, Ann, immersed in the morning's Bible study. They are dressed comfortably in jeans, casual shirts, slippers and Birkenstocks, as Peak One gleams white behind them, visible through the room's expansive picture window.

At 8:30, they break for breakfast, and by 9 a.m., the kitchen table is covered in math texts, workbooks and worksheets.

Seven-year-old Ruthie, the youngest of the three, rehearses a tune on the piano in the living room while Ann gets Henry, 10, and George, 9, started on their daily problem sets.

"How many millimeters in a centimeter?" Ann asks George, first in French, then in English.

"Ten millimeters equals one centimeter," George answers aloud and records it on his worksheet.

Once the two boys are hunkered down into their work, Ann calls Ruthie back into the kitchen for a lesson on mixed numbers, using colorful pattern blocks of hexagons, trapezoids and rhombi.

The children will spend an hour or more on math before moving onto a cello group-practice session, language arts, French, reading and social studies, taking occasional breaks for snacks and lunch, finishing up just about the time their peers are stepping off the school bus.

If the children don't finish their math in the allotted time, Ann requires that they complete it later in the evening as homework - a term that loses a little of its bite in this setting where all the work is, by definition, homework.

The Hunsingers' approach to education may not be typical in Summit County, but it's far from uncommon.

The number of homeschoolers in Summit County has grown in recent years, roughly in proportion to the overall student population. The Hunsingers are part of an extensive network of dozens of homeschool families stretching north past Kremmling and south beyond Breckenridge.

Local parents' motivations for homeschooling are myriad. The majority view homeschool as the best way to thread Christianity through their children's educations, but others' interests in the practice are purely secular.

Many feel that the one-on-one attention and individually-tailored lessons students receive in their homes just aren't possible in public schools with classrooms of 15-25 students and one teacher.

Many relish the freedom and flexibility homeschooling provides, allowing for month-long field trips to Europe or intense athletic pursuits. Some regard the work as an opportunity to strengthen parent-child and sibling relationships, setting the family up as the child's social foundation.

And just about all homeschool parents you'll come across view homeschooling as the most important work they could ever hope to do - shaping the hearts, minds and futures of their children.



Homeschooling's flexibility turns the world into a classroom

Homeschoolers describe Colorado as very friendly to their brand of education. In comparison with many other states, the practice is loosely regulated.

According to Summit School District data, 36 local families homeschool their 46 children, spanning from elementary to high school levels.

That number of homeschoolers is equivalent to 1.6 percent of the school district's total enrollment this year, but the figure may be on the conservative side. State law requires homeschool parents to register with the local school district, but not all do so.

Nationally, homeschooling is on the rise, both in sheer numbers and as a percentage of the total American student population. In 1999, an estimated 850,000 K-12 students (1.7 percent of the school-age population) were learning the three R's at home, according to the U.S. Department of Education. By 2003, the number had risen to 1.1 million, or 2.2 percent.

Homeschool programs must include a minimum 172 days of instruction, averaging at least four hours per day. Families are free to decide which days and months they'll hit the books.

That was a major selling point for the Mattson family, who live just outside Frisco. And it allows them to take their learning far beyond their Summit County home.

"I'm a United pilot, so I have an odd schedule," said Paul Mattson, father of four. "I'm not home on the weekends on a regular basis, and homeschool allows us certain flexibility. I wanted to have the opportunity to spend time with my kids."

The Mattsons have criss-crossed the globe with their geography, math, music, foreign language and reading lessons in tow. They have traveled as far north as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and they spend at least one month each year in mother Angela's native Germany, breathing life into the couple's dual-language approach to instruction.

"It deepens their understanding of cultures in general," Angela Mattson said. "Last year, we went for six weeks during Christmas. If the kids were in school, that would have been impossible."

The Mattson parents feel the hands-on jet-setting has opened new doors in their children's minds.

"Because we travel a lot, we have not had to cover geography. They have an amazing knowledge of the world: distances, time zones, places, people, climates, latitude, longitude, hemispheres, glaciers. It's not something we have to do formally - it just sort of happened," Paul Mattson said.

Silverthorne resident Tyller Lindblade, now 18, traveled to England to study Shakespeare and to Thailand for an up-close look at global economics in her homeschool days. She also had the freedom to dedicate considerable time to riding show horses in the U.S.

Lindblade, spent two months each year on the road for competitions and vaulted into the national spotlight for her age group.

But homeschooling doesn't just open doors to learning through interstate or intercontinental travel. A trip across town or a segment on the evening news can often serve as opportunities to apply formal lessons. And because homeschool parents are so involved with the formal academics, they're well equipped to make connections to the outside world.

"When the news is on, they want to know, 'Where is Iraq?'" Paul Mattson said. "You take out the globe, talk about politics, talk about oil, talk about the Tigris and Euphrates, the history of Mesopotamia. All that comes from 'Where is Iraq?'"

"We're always having an ongoing discussion about things they're learning," Hunsinger said. "We'll be driving in the car and hear something on the radio that starts a discussion. When Henry was in first grade (at Summit County Christian School), only a small fraction of what they did came home. I didn't know what books he was reading. I realized I had no idea what he was doing in school."

Colorado law also allows for relative flexibility in instructional content. Parents must cover reading, writing and speaking, mathematics, history, civics, literature, science and the U.S. Constitution. Children must take biannual tests beginning in third grade to assure they're at grade level, but otherwise, each homeschool family determines what its children learn.

Lindblade explored history, science and psychology through the world of horses. Now she has her sights set on a career in equine medicine and is months away from earning her associate's degree in science at Colorado Mountain College.

"The beauty of homeschool is that you can take a subject they're interested in and take as long as you want," said Lindblade's mother, Nancy.