Of Haydn, hens, and tree forts: The diverse home education of Chiara, the PEP student

TALLAHASSEE – Joseph Haydn’s Sonata 16 filled the house as Chiara Lemmon’s fingers moved across the keys of the family’s piano. Eyes nearly closed, she concentrated on each note. Her head gently bobbed along with the music.

A few minutes later, Chiara sat in an adjoining room with her cello.

“The music room,” her father, Alan, said.

She played Luigi Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in B flat. Again, she was completely absorbed in the music – body and mind.

“I love playing beautiful music,” Chiara said.

Not long after that performance, Chiara, 14, and her brothers, Dominic, 11, and Declan, 6, walked a visitor through the three-acre wetland behind their Tallahassee house to the location of a fort they built out of branches and leaves. Along the way, the trio climbed a tree. They climbed another tree on the trip back to the house. Chiara found a stick that piqued her interest and took it home.

What range. From classical music to classic kids’ play in minutes.

This is what Emily and Alan envisioned when they decided to home-educate their four children. High-end academics with time outside to learn about nature and to decompress if need be.

Florida education choice scholarships helped them attain this goal.

“It’s been a life-changer,” Alan said. “We are so grateful for the scholarship.”

Chiara receives the Personalized Education Program (PEP) scholarships available through the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program. Her brothers receive Family Empowerment Scholarships for Students with Unique Abilities. The scholarships are managed by Step Up For Students.

PEP provides parents of students who are not enrolled full-time in public or private school with flexibility in how they use their scholarship funds. This allows them to customize their children’s learning to meet their individual needs and interests.

“A personalized version of schooling is more efficient for the kids,” Alan said. “So, I like homeschooling because each kid has different aptitudes and different deficiencies across areas. They might be great in science, but maybe not so good in math. So, you can move them at their own speed or give them extra attention if you need to pick up an area.

“Customized education is important. I think that's really a big advantage of homeschooling.”

The Lemmon children have been home-educated from Day 1, although the oldest, Genevieve, who receives the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities, enrolled at Maclay School last year as a freshman. Chiara will do the same next year.

“There aren't very many other girls their age still homeschooling that they can interact with,” Emily said. “They get kind of lonely by eighth grade, because everybody's sort of dispersing to different schools.”

Both sisters received full scholarships to the pre-K-12 private school located one exit west on Interstate-10 from the Lemmons’ Tallahassee home.

Chiara won a Head of School Scholarship to Maclay. Only two are awardees per year. The scholarship, worth $100,000, will enable her to attend Maclay. Otherwise, she would remain on the PEP scholarship and continue with her home education through high school.

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The days are filled with lessons in math, science, languages, music, and literature. The children are enrolled in homeschool co-ops, make field trips, attend summer camps, and take music lessons.

Dominic and Declan use engineering skills learned at home to build sturdy forts in the woods behind the house. Genevieve turned her love for William Shakespeare into the Tallahassee Homeschool Shakespeare Club, which rehearses and puts on Shakespeare’s plays in the stage built from drywall on the third floor of the family’s house.

Chiara has developed a love for both biology and music.

She owns 29 hens and sells their eggs to families in the neighborhood for $7 a dozen. She calls her business Chiara’s Cluckers. The hens keep her busy, producing up to 20 eggs a day.

Once, the entire flock came down with infectious coryza, an upper respiratory disease that infects chickens. A veterinarian made the diagnosis and prescribed an antibiotic. Chiara used a syringe to squirt the medicine down the throat of each chicken.

“They really hated it,” Chiara said.

But they survived. Tom Tom, Fatty, Freckles, Sunset, Princess Lea, Falcon, Boccherini, and the rest.

Emily and Alan are biology professors at Florida State University, so their children are used to collecting amphibians for their parents’ research. Emily and Alan also do not own a television, and their children do not have their own iPads. The idea was to keep their young minds free from distractions and immersed in activities that build the mind.

Books fill the house. Lots and lots of books.

How many?

“Thousands,” Alan said.

Recently, Alan randomly pulled 10 books from a bookcase that lined a wall and asked Chiara if she read any of them. She had read eight.

She loves to read and act in her sister’s plays, and she loves to raise her chickens. But music comes first.

While she also plays the violin, the cello is Chiara’s instrument of choice.

“I like being able to express myself in other ways than just words, and I especially love how physical it is to play the cello,” Chiara said.

“Cello is something that no matter how good you get, there are always more challenges. You can always push it to a new level, or even if you know a piece, you can be more technical with it and express yourself in different ways, or experiment with different things. So, there are infinite possibilities.”

Chiara’s musical accomplishments are lengthy. She is the co-principal cellist for the Tallahassee Youth Orchestra and was selected the past two years as principal cellist for the Florida All-State Orchestra’s middle school level.

She founded Sforzando Studio, a piano and cello school, and teaches the instruments to elementary and middle school students.

Chiara and Genevieve are scheduled to attend a four-week music camp this summer in Vermont.

Emily, who was home-educated herself, didn’t expect the children to excel at this rate. She hoped they could provide a strong foundation so that some topic or subject would take root in each of the kids.

“I feel like my job as a homeschool mom has been to give the kids the best education I can in every field,” Emily said.

In their home, every moment is a learning moment.

Take the stick Chiara picked up on her way back from the fort. It wasn’t long, but it was straight. In no time, she had it hollowed out. Later, she would carve some holes on one side.

“I’ve always wanted to make a whistle,” she said.

So, she did.

Roger Mooney, manager, communications, can be reached at [email protected].