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Homeschooling: A Story of Family and Faith

Amanda Mattson sought a quality education for her six children, so she decided to do it herself.

With less than one month left of summer vacation, many moms look forward to the start of school and the ten-month respite from being the entertainment director, taxi driver, educator, and referee for their children for eight hours a day.

That is, unless, you happen to be a mom who home schools. For Woodbridge resident Amanda Mattson, mom of six, being a home educator is a full time job, and work always follows her home.

Mattson’s initial reaction to homeschooling was revulsion. “My husband was doing a research paper on the topic for college, and I thought, “How awful! How can anybody do that to a child?” Then she started to notice a pattern at her oldest son’s preschool.

“Teachers were telling me, ‘He’s a very good kid, but we have to constantly bring him back to task,’ or ‘He’s a great kid, but he forgot this again.'" Mattson did not want to medicate her oldest son, diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, so she decided to try to work with him one on one.

After watching her sister homeschool her children and meeting other homeschooling moms, she understood what homeschooling really was, and what it could mean for her family.

“Watching them took away my prejudice,” Mattson said.

A Day in the Life of a Homeschooler

“I am not a field trip homeschooler,” she confessed. “We do so many things in the community that if I add field trips on top of that, I’ll never get our coursework done.”

The children spend about six hours on academics before heading out for after-school activities. “Five and six-year-olds don’t need 6.5 hours of school per day that they would get in the public school setting,” Mattson said. “There’s something to be said for having them help around the house, and playtime when they’re done with their studies.”

Mattson and her children have been actively involved with the Catholic homeschooling organization, Lumen Christi. The organization, which supports over eighty families in the area, offers activities such as physical education, drama club, Latin club, a Lego club, just to name a few. Most recently, Mattson put her musical talents to use and led the group in the full length play, “Pirates of Penzance.”

“The homeschooling community becomes like a family for the kids,” she said. “And we’re friends as families.”

Does Mom Make a Tough Teacher?

Grading systems for homeschoolers is very individualized, Mattson said. “For myself, it’s either complete, or it needs to be redone. I’m much more interested in quality of work than hung up on their letter grade.”

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Homeschoolers participate in standardized tests because it fulfills county requirements, hones their test-taking skills, and enables parents to see how their children measure up.

When her son transitioned back into the public school system, Mattson submitted her son’s homeschool grades, qualifying him for acceptance into the competitive Cambridge program at Potomac High School.

“I didn’t just say, ‘You did great; I think you deserve an A!’ They were reasonable grades, but I’m also a believer that you get an ‘A’ on a test or retake the test until you get an ‘A’, because it’s cumulative,’ she says. “Why would I move on before he got the material? The goal is mastery.”

A Classical Approach for Teaching

Like many homeschooling parents, the Mattsons had several reasons for choosing to homeschool their children.

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“My husband's was more the religious and social aspect and mine was more academic,” Mattson said.

With six children and Catholic school tuition costing close to ten thousand dollars a year, “while we want our children to have a Catholic education, we really couldn’t pay for it.”

The Aquinas Learning program fit Mattson’s desire for a Catholic foundation for her children’s education, and introduced her to the classical approach to teaching.

“Classical [curriculum] teaches facts, of course, but it’s more of an integrated approach, so history and literature will be together, and pulling in religion is nice too. Classical education seeks to bring the child to what is good and true and beautiful and instills virtue through the subjects,” Mattson said.

“One beauty of classical education is that all of my kids will be studying one time period in history this year the same time in history,” she said. “You expect more from your older students, but they’re not all studying different things and the mom’s not spinning her wheels bouncing from workbook to workbook.”

The approach provides more time for discussion with her children. “If you follow the Socratic discussion, you are asking questions throughout and after the story. It’s now, ‘Should So-and-so have done this?’, and, ‘What kind of character do you think this is?’ It helps them make connections and think critically.”

Mattson made up her own curriculum using different publishers, but said it’s difficult to develop a classical program by yourself. The Mattson children attend classes through the Aquinas Learning Center, held once a week at Nativity of Our Lord in Manassas.

During the classes, homeschooled children meet to do things that are difficult to do as homeschoolers: group activities such as Socratic discussions, oral reports, and art and science experiments. The classes are led by paid “mentors” or “tutors," with the parent being the primary teacher. The other four days a week support their assignments at the center.

This fall will be much like the previous ones for Amanda Mattson. She will be teaching 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, and now Pre-K for her youngest child.

Mattson said moms look at homeschooling and they think, “Oh, I could never be patient enough,” or “I’d kill my kids,” or “I don’t want to mess them up!” or, “What if they don’t learn a lot?”

Even veteran homeschoolers have moments of doubt too, Mattson said. Moms have to have faith in themselves. “Just trust in yourself and pray a lot; we have more talent and more capabilities than we give ourselves credit for.”

Mattson herself is starting a new Aquinas Learning program in Woodbridge starting this fall. For more details about the new program, you can contact her at wamattson@aol.com.

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