Home School 家庭學校


The type of school has a big influence on a child’s education. As most of you who know us already know, we home school our children. As with anything new, home schooling provokes a variety of strong emotions in the public, from curiosity and joy to fear and anger. Its popularity is a new phenomena 是這幾年才有的現象, but I feel that we are on the crest of new wave of educational change. Even in the short time we have been doing it, we have seen an enormous growth in the home school group we are a part of.

The main purpose of the schoolroom seems to have been socialization into society 主要是為了適應社會生活, whatever the prevailing norms were. With better overall education and disagreement about what the prevailing norms should be, more and more parents are taking control of their children’s education. 因為目前人家的教育程度夠高 , 所以越來越多父母覺得孩子的教育應該是在自己的掌握中. Home schooling is happening in the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and probably Western Europe as well so it is a fairly international phenomenon. We meet so many interesting parents doing interesting things, (back-to-nature types, parents of child prodigies, and cross-cultural Christian couples like ourselves) in our home school group. Home schooling allows us to give our children a good bi-cultural, bilingual Christian education.

I finally caught one of our 3 year old son’s girlfriends on video 錄像剪輯. Well, this two year old more likes to beat up on him and play with his toys, but she’s cute and it is fun to watch them interact.

Fruit Everywhere 水蜜桃

This year we have finally been blessed with a bumper crop on our fruit trees 水蜜桃成熟的時間到了! 今年樹上的水果很多, 真是豐收! This is really surprising given the bad weather we have been having this year so far.

The loquat 枇杷 tree produced a lot of fruit in early spring and now our peach tree has just produced a huge crop of really delicious white peaches. That tree has a history. I originally bought another fruit tree for that spot, but to my surprise and dismay it only produced ‘male’ flowers 公花. That means that there must be female flowers and bees around for there to be fruit. Never being one to enjoy complexity in gardening,, I returned it and bought a self-fruiting “tropical snow” white male peach which I knew would be a favorite of my wife 太太喜歡吃的.

As you can see, well maybe it is a little hard to see, this tree has really grown into a monster 這棵樹長得很快, but it is well worth it. We have given peaches away to my in-laws, to my parents, to our cell group at church, to just about any friend who wants some and we still have baskets of ripe peaches lying around. My next project will be to mix fresh peaches with French vanilla ice cream 香草冰淇淋 for a home-made ‘peaches and cream’ flavor ice cream 水蜜桃冰淇淋.

Bilingualism: Chinese and English 雙語的孩子: 中文與英文

How do kids really become bilingual or trilingual 怎麼樣才能夠給孩子有效的雙語教育? That is the questions faced by both cross-cultural and bi-cultural parents. The more I think, which is not too often, the more I realize how much of an influence social norms have on our children 環境很重要. It can of course mold their behavior and world outlook, but more important to this post, it can determine which language or how many languages they speak.

Sometimes it doesn’t even matter where they are raised. Friends of ours, American wife / Japanese husband 日本丈夫 / 美國妻子, are raising their son in Japan. They are reluctant to send their son to the American school there because the standard is to speak English only and regard Japanese as a language of “the natives.” Since children spend more waking hours at school than at school 因為上課的時間很久所以會影響孩子的態度, regardless of how much Japanese language training he got at home he would end up not really being fluent in the language because it would just not be the thing to do in his social circles. That is one reason why we home school 家校 our children and it seems to be working. Our children all speak Chinese with each other at home but they can speak English fluently as well 我們的孩子都是雙語的. We can carefully give them a blend of social environments, Chinese-speaking and English-speaking, young and old.