Schooling Children Close in Age

I often hear people asking about homeschooling kids close in age. This is a topic near and dear to my heart since Josh and Megan are only 21 months apart. For us, it was an easy decision to school them together. Josh has always been a little less interested in all things academic and Megan a bit more, so it was easy to meet in the middle.

Since we already do many subjects -- Bible, science, and history, for example -- as a family, that only left things like reading and math for the kids to do individually or, in Josh and Megan's case, basically together. Josh is really good at math, but Megan has managed to hang in there with him. We've always played games together to learn concepts and I've taught them new concepts together. Just recently, Josh has started to pull ahead and is now about thirty or forty lessons ahead of Megan, but we still do practice problems, clock, calendar and thermometer practice, skip counting and patterns together, either aloud or on the dry erase board.

Reading is where it's really been convenient to school them together. Josh has always struggled a bit with reading, while it comes easier to Megan. Every day we play games together to practice reading, such as fishing, bingo, tic-tac-toe and board games (see my post today at The Homeschool Classroom for more ideas).

I always take Josh and Megan, one at a time, to a separate room for actual reading practice. Josh is aware that Megan reads better than him (a fact I've tried to downplay), so, in order to take away some of the self-consciousness and comparison issues, they don't listen to one another read. The biggest struggle for me in this area has been not letting myself fall into the trap of holding Megan back while waiting for Josh to catch up.

One simple idea that has been a blessing to me for schooling together kids who are at different levels is to use different sets of cards to play the same game. For example, if we play a board game to practice reading, each child can have his or her own set of word cards from which to read. Right now, we're on a new group of words, so Josh and Megan are reading from the same set, while Nim's cards are alphabet cards for letter recognition. If Megan needs to move on, I can give her a different set of word cards from Josh and each child can read from his own set of cards when his turn comes. If it were math, one child might have addition problems, while another had multiplication and still another had dots for counting.

Another worry that parents often have, to which I can relate, is having a younger sibling who is passing an older sibling in skill level. While this can simply be a character-building moment, teaching children that each person is gifted with different skills and abilities and everyone learns at a different pace, this often doesn't matter to a child who feels inferior to a sibling. There is another simple solution: different curriculum for different children.

If one child uses, say, Horizons for math, another could use Miquon. If one child uses Abeka for language arts, another could use Easy Grammar. Also, many curriculum vendors don't use put grade levels on their books. For example, Math-U-See uses names such as alpha, beta and gamma; Learning Language Arts Through Literature uses "the red book" or "the purple book."

Schooling children together has its benefits and challenges. For us, the benefits have outweighed the challenges, though, and schooling our younger two together has been a tremendous time- and sanity-saver for me.

Have you schooled closely-spaced children together? Did you find that the benefits outweighed the challenges? What tips could you offer to parents of closely-spaced siblings that I may have left out? Are there any questions or challenges that you've faced on this subject that I didn't cover here? I'd love to hear from you!