Home Education Magazine

May-June/97 - Articles

I confess! I'm guilty! I use... dare I say it aloud? Workbooks. The word has been blacklisted by homeschoolers, unschoolers and school-at-homers alike for years. In fact, if you're ever at a gathering of people whose children aren't in school it's a good ice breaker. How about those workbooks, huh? Glad we don't have to use those anymore! Everybody in the homeschooling community seems to agree that workbooks are taboo, the quintessential school tool and embodiment of all that's vile about institutionalized education.

Boring, dreary practice pages with boxes lined up like little soldiers just waiting for the right answer to be filled in (and checked against the key, of course). Chapter reviews, drill exercises, skills practiced over and over and over ad nauseum. Such are the stuff of the creative, freewheeling homeschooler's nightmares.

Well I'd like to state clearly for the record - I Love Workbooks! Workbooks are Great!

My 6-year old daughter Carolyn and I use workbooks as part of our homeschooling "thing" we do. There's very little structure, save for the constancy of workbook time. And during last summer we did them almost every day to jump-start Carolyn's reading skills. Now she's reading or trying to sound out just about every printed word she meets - something she did not care to do until we practiced vowel sounds and consonant combinations Using - you guessed it - workbooks.

Workbooks have been a tremendous help, sort of a stabilizing, organizing force in our homeschooling efforts. They follow the school system's annual curriculum requirements for content so I know we can at least handle what the school kids are doing. From that basis, we explore and discover new things with science experiments, models of ancient civilizations, field trips all over creation, visits to grandmom's house, bike rides and especially plenty of playtime with her brother Harri and friends when schedules permit

Modern workbooks are colorful cheerful things filled with stickers, funny characters, animal stories and in some cases really very creative ideas for reinforcing concepts. Instead of "Dick and Jane run down the hill" we now have "The silly hippo climbed up a tree." In some books there are theme characters, in others they vary from page to page. Now I will admit that phonics and writing skills books are a tad ho-hum... but hey, how many different ways can you pronounce S or write the letter T?

We use workbooks for some part of our daily schooling (when we are schooling that is). But Carolyn picks the subject and the particular book for the day and most importantly - we skip what Carolyn already knows. Carolyn once confessed to me that she thought school was hard because we always had something new to learn. So we stopped skipping pages and tried progressing section by section in the books. By week's end Carolyn whined "Not number lines again!" Needless to say we're again skipping pages.

We've used a variety of workbook titles from various publishing houses - from the $1.99 Golden Series of books to Brighter Child to Bob Jones University Press books - and all work equally well for us. The real value to workbooks is that they keep us progressing. Sure, Carolyn probably learns as much by playing and traveling around during her day as from the half hour or so we spend doing workbooks. But I know her basic skills level is improving and for me that's important. And as soon as Carolyn's language skills develop sufficiently to allow independent reading and writing projects we'll stop workbooks altogether. Then the sky's the limit!

Whatever the outcome, we've had a really good start, a really solid foundation using workbooks Maybe they don't work for everybody in the homeschooling community, but then again, what does? © 1997 Joanne Billmers

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