The Moore Formula is a way of life in homeschooling. Not only are we teaching "academics," we are teaching Bible, character, and other skills, all of which are more important.

Most children are not ready for formal instruction before age 8 (and sometimes not even until later than age 8). This does not mean they do not receive instruction, they do, but only in an informal manner. This means helping around the home and learning through every day life.

Have your children help in the kitchen and see them start to learn and understand counting and fractions. Have them help with the laundry and let them ask how things get clean and why heat works better than air when drying. Let them see the difference in how much space folded laundry takes as compared to laundry just thrown in the basket. Let them help with the dusting and wonder why it always comes back. They will even see it in the air when the sunbeams hit just right through your windows. Let them help in the garden and learn about plants - and those little critters in the dirt. Why do we need worms anyway? Walks around the neighborhood also bring many questions as they wander.

Read to your children good books with some real meaning and learning. The Bible, biographies, nature books, and any subject in which your children have an interest.

Once your child is ready for more formal academics, let them mainly follow their interests. After all, if they have the interest, this may be what God has for them in the future. They can get a head start on becoming an expert! Yes, they do need to learn many things, like math, writing, reading, etc., but let them focus these areas as much as they can in their field of interest.

Along with academics, both formal and informal, should be service and work. Service is work without pay. Help clean an elderly person's home, visit those who are ill, bring meals for a new mother, do yard work for a friend who needs your help. Even young children can do some of this work with you.

When the interest hits, and your child is ready, let them start their own business or go to work for someone else (even apprentice work.) The lessons learned from having their own business are hard to be numbered. Dealing with people, counting money, computing a budget, costs analysis, problem solving, etc.

Study, Service, and Work are all necessary factors in anyone's overall education.

The comments in these pages are my own. I am not employed or affiliated with The Moore Foundation.

Below is "The Moore Formula" published here by permission from The MOORE FOUNDATION

The Moore Foundation, Box 1, Camas, WA 98607

How to teach with low stress, low cost, high success & behavior

The Moore Formula

Note: Raymond and Dorothy Moore are professionals know around the world; he for reorganizing colleges and universities and for establishing highly-successful work-study programs; she as a world class curriculum and reading authority; and both as child specialists who shared in the founding of modern homeschooling. The Moore Formula uses methods proven by thousands of the world's most successful families and schools to help parents who want high character, achievement, and sociability. With over 300 research associates, Moores report studies world-wide in journals and books, including the media and 1) their books Better Late Than Early (BLTE), and School Can Wait (SCW), and 2) highly successful methods for parents in The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook, (The Handbook), and Minding Your Own Business (MYOB). For low-cost, low-stress curricula and how to be a Moore Foundation Associate (MFA), send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Box 1, Camas, WA 98607.

REALITY. If you doubt student or teacher burnout or your own ability, join in any Moore seminar or read The Handbook. It's not mostly from intellectual or spiritual problems, as some suggest, but from wrong habit or method. We help you avoid or cure fear, frustration, boredom, stress, pain, despair, heavy expense. Teaching should be mostly fun: relaxing, healing, inexpensive, low-stress yet successful like Tom Edison, Abe Lincoln and Christ.

A BETTER WAY. After 55 years of teaching teachers and students, and managing education at all levels, we give you here and in The Handbook secrets of all the ages to avoid or cure burnout and failure, to bring success beyond normal hopes. To our knowledge, we have no failures! Even drill can be fun. Allow for individual differences, follow the principled and balanced Moore Formula, and your normal children will excel in head, hand, heart, and health, proven as it is by history, research and common sense.

THE FORMULA. 1) Study from a few minutes to several hours a day, depending on the child's maturity. 2) Manual work at least as much as study. 3) Home and/or community service an hour or so a day. Focus on kids' interests and needs; be an example in consistency, curiosity, and patience. Live with them! Worry less about tests; we'll help you there. With the Moore Formula, if you are loving and can read, write, count, and speak clearly, you are a master teacher.

STUDY. Moores' free-exploring curricula are largely self-teaching: Math-It, Winston Grammar, etc. Use fewer workbooks and textbooks. Generally parents are the best teachers for their children. The Smithsonian Institution's study of twenty world-class geniuses stress three factors: 1) warm, loving, educationally responsive parents and other adults; 2) scant association outside of the family, and 3) a great deal of creative freedom under parental guidance to explore their ideas, drilling as necessary. These ingredients for genius are a mixture of head, hand, heart, and health -- a neat fit into the chart above. Mixed in balance, with your sound example, they bring out great characters and personalities. So we encourage you to unite 1) study, 2) work (and entrepreneurship) with 3) home and community service.

HOW TO BEGIN. First, don't subject your children to formal, scheduled study before age 8 to 10 or 12, whether they can read or not. To any who differ, as their evidence let them read BLTE or SCW. In addition to our basic research at Stanford and the University of Colorado Medical School, we analyzing over 8,000 studies of children's senses, brain, cognition, socialization, etc., and are certain that no replicable evidence exists for rushing children into formal study at home or school before 8 or 10.

Read and sing and play with your children from birth. Read to them several times a day, and they will learn to read in their own time -- as early as 3 or 4, but usually later, some as late as 14. Late readers are no more likely to be retarded or disabled than early ones. They often become the best readers of all -- with undamaged vision and acute hearing, more adult-like reasoning (cognition) levels, mature brain structure and less blocking of creative interests. Yet late readers are often falsely thought to be in need of remedial help. If you have any doubts about your youngster, have specialists check vision and hearing; possibly see a neurologist. If there are no problems, relax.

If your children are early readers, 13 or 20 minutes at a time is enough for children under ages 8 to 10. They can use a kitchen timer. Then take an hour or two for distant vision play. They can first use crayons or chalk on large paper or blackboards before developing finer muscle coordination required for pencils or detailed drawing or sewing. More on this in BLTE, SCW, and Home Grown Kids. For ultimate assurance you may want to enroll in the Moore Academy -- a low-stress, low-cost, high achievement program that leads homeschooling everywhere. The program for high school students costs little more than for elementary level, and provides them with a transcript and/or diploma, if desired.

When your children seem ready, play oral games with phonics, numbers, etc., but authorities from Columbia to Cal-Berkeley say avoid study pressures until they are at least 8 to 12. At that time a few minutes a day may be all that is necessary for the drill or practice in basics they need. Just as important -- or more so -- is to identify their interests such as bugs, gardening, cooking or baking, astronomy, cars, sewing, cottage industries, economics, history or politics.

Whatever their interests, open the door wide to knowledge. Don't give them mostly textbooks/workbooks nor try to keep ahead of them; let them do original reading along the lines of their interests and watch them grow! A child's motivation is more educationally productive than the most skilled teaching. And let them sample old standardized tests or manuals to lose fear of testing.

Instead of toys, give them tools (kitchen, shop, yard or desk), encyclopedias, magazines; use libraries, etc. Don't be shocked at their interests, even if they are guns or motorcycles! From these they can learn chemistry and physics (internal combustion motors), economics, math, history, geography, languages, cultures and manual skills (at local repair shops or in home businesses). Girls are usually a year or so ahead of boys, at least until late teens.

The "antennae" sprouting from the brains of most students are blocked by mass-education's cookie-cutter substitutes for life that destroy creativity. Kids come out uniform-sized cookies, or sausages. Better to learn history realistically by reading biographies rather than textbooks. Let creative interests expand to other learning. As they mature, they teach themselves, learn at their own initiative -- as few now do!

WORK. Constructive, skill-building, entrepreneurial work builds children's self-confidence, creativity, and self-control, and does it more quickly. It is the most dramatic and consistent cure for behavior and personality problems. If you give children authority to manage your home to the extent that they can accept responsibility, they mature rapidly and naturally. Make them officers in your home industries. There is no more certain key to happy home education -- or other schooling -- regardless of institutional level. We've seen no one fail, rebel, or burn out.

Begin small. Start your children to work when they start to walk. Add freedom as they accept responsibility. No cash allowances! Let them earn their way, helping you make or grow and sell cookies, muffins, bread, wooden toys, vegetables, or service lawns, baby-sit, etc. By 6 or 8, many can run businesses. See MYOB for more than 400 cottage industries. Do comparison shopping; apples/oranges, Grapenuts/Sugar Pops, etc. (nutrition, frugality, and math lessons). Let your kids use your checking account to pay your bills. The bank corrects their "math papers."

SERVICE. This begins at home and neighborhood with daily/weekly visits to needy neighbors, nursing homes, pediatric wards or other community or personal service. It makes self-centered kids self-less and moderates any tendency their businesses bring toward materialism. Family, community and church provide fruitful ways of building great-hearted children. Some schools now use service as a wholesome activity. Children with bouquets of wild flowers or crayon drawings are usually welcomed in nursing homes even when they are too young to be allowed to visit in pediatric wards.

This is the Golden Rule in practice. Our children once had a secret society ("SOS" -- for Service Over Self) that specialized in secret good deeds for the aged, poor, sick, or handicapped -- like washing or repairing a car, chair, or washing machine, or painting fences, shoveling snow, or weeding gardens. Great fun! Often they told the police in advance lest they be arrested for "trespassing."

Some ask why more families don't follow this Formula. Most parents are uncomfortable with the unconventional ideas. They teach as they were taught, unaware that such methods are responsible for many of today's school problems. So they pay heavily for books which tie them, and their children down and burn them out. To them, we as professionals say, "It took us awhile to believe too." Certified teachers often have the hardest times. Moore students average near the top in student achievement, sociability, and behavior and at low stress and cost. Carefully read The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook and view the professional Home Grown Kids video, read Minding Your own Business, then Home Made Health, Home Built Discipline and Better Late Than Early. You will have both security and joy!

GENTLE WARNING: Properly done, home education offers low-stress, low-cost, and high achievement and sociability from a balance of study, work, and service. Few curricula do this! Insist on proven research and experience. Patiently study methods and materials before you send your check or credit card number to anyone. Question closely all testers, lecturers, and entrepreneurs. Insist they prove their quality. Homeschool leaders like those in pro-life and anti-porn fall into two groups: 1) Selfless laymen and professionals and officials who sacrifice money and time to elevate homeschooling to new heights; and 2) A few lacking professional background or ethics, or both, who urge stressful, costly school-at-home materials, programs, or services on unwary parents who then burn out and come to loathe homeschool. Some fought homeschooling until the 1980's. Some authors, editors, and speakers know little of research, and persuasively misuse Scripture to convey an image of a bigoted Christ to secular friends. They are homeschools' most divisive influence. For your sake and for your friends' sake, study to know the difference.

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