Parents! Effective Tips for Homeschooling
If you’ve decided to or found yourself forced with homeschooling your kids, you might have an image in mind of cozy days at home where you facilitate your child’s moments of understanding about the world around them. Parenting media often make homeschooling seem like the ideal; what parent wouldn’t want to be able to share in the special moments when your child makes connections and learns? Yet, as any homeschooling parent can attest to, there is much more that goes into the process of homeschooling than those magic moments with your child. Not only is the endeavor of homeschooling your own children quite a bit of work (you’ll gain a new appreciation for teachers), but it’s also an extremely detailed process that requires much more than simply a room and your teaching materials.
The National Center for Education found that a whopping 48.9% of parents chose to homeschool primarily because they believe they can provide a better education at home. Make no mistake, homeschooling your children can absolutely be a rewarding and highly productive effort. No one will take a deeper interest in your child’s needs than you and having control over the curriculum you teach your child gives you a wonderful opportunity to make sure they get a robust education. However, homeschooling is a serious choice and if not done appropriately, can lead to your child falling behind the average student and lacking other important skills. Parenting is already a full-time job — for this reason, we’ve compiled a list of the most effective homeschooling tips for providing your child with a quality education from home without running yourself ragged.
- The three most important factors in successful homeschooling are routine, routine, and routine.
When beginning to homeschool your child, a lot of your focus will naturally go towards the location you teach in and the materials you teach. You might put in extra effort to create a classroom in your home and spend hours making lesson plans and devising fun but teachable activities. These aspects of homeschooling are certainly crucial, but neither go neglected as often as setting up a routine does.
Children thrive on routine just as many adults do as well. Having a strict routine for when homeschooling begins, where it begins, and how it begins, are all crucial details that help set your child up for a successful homeschooling experience. By creating a regular routine around homeschooling, your child automatically knows what to expect when the time comes for that homeschooling routine to begin. If your child is used to starting their day at a certain time, having breakfast, then starting their lesson, they will be much less resistant to complying than a child whose homeschooling schedule is more variable simply because they know what to expect.
Just like Pavlov’s dog associated a bell with food and prepared to eat upon hearing it, human beings also associate things with actions. Creating a steady routine lets your child get into learning mode much more quickly than a child who doesn’t know if they’ll be playing first, eating breakfast, sleeping in, or starting their lesson.
- The power of homeschooling: customize your child’s lessons.
Part of what makes homeschooling such an impactful method for educating children is the flexibility it provides, allowing lessons to be tailored to a child’s needs. In a traditional classroom setting, there are too many children with varying needs to allow for truly tailoring the lesson to each one. With homeschooling, you’ll be able to take advantage of the freedom that allows for giving your child exactly what they need.
Your parenting experience will be useful in understanding what your child is interested in and what captures their attention best when teaching. Incorporate whatever you know to be the best methods through which your child stays engaged and learns through, be it hands-on work like building models or visual learning like watching videos. Customizing your lessons and teaching style to what works best for your child will not only make learning easier and faster for them, but it will also make learning more enjoyable.
If you’re not sure how your child learns best and what keeps them most engaged, run mini-experiments by trying several different methods of teaching a week at a time and holding a quiz on the material at the end of each week. This quick experiment will give you a better understanding of how to reach your child most effectively when crafting your homeschooling lesson plan. You can then research the many different schools of thought that other homeschoolers follow, such as unschooling, where parents let the child’s natural interests and inclinations guide the curriculum taught, or roadschooling, where lessons are taught on location, such as a biology lesson that takes place at the zoo.
- The famous rule of real estate is also one of the best homeschooling tips: location, location, location.
Homeschooling lists one of the major obstacles to successful teaching right in the name — home. Our home is where we do many different activities and the same goes for our children; home is where they play, sleep, get scolded and spend time with family and friends. Needless to say, there are many competing impulses at home and this is why the location from which you homeschool is integral to successful lessons.
The perfect homeschooling location can certainly be right at home among all the distractions, but it’s best to carve out a specific area of the home where lessons will always be taught. It’s even better to make sure that the area is distraction-free, always quiet, and always available. Remember the first of our homeschooling tips — routine. Your homeschooling location should be part of the routine your child will associate with lesson times, which means no constantly-revolving-classroom unless it’s a subject related on-location lesson.
Many parents turn to homeschooling their children with excitement about the potential memories and exciting moments they’ll be able to share with their children. Being able to homeschool your child certainly provides parents with opportunities to take part in an amazing aspect of their children’s lives but it is no easy task. Homeschooling requires plenty of planning and consideration to ensure children are still receiving the robust education they need to compete in the world and grow into the best versions of themselves. With our top homeschooling tips, Premier Martial Arts wants to help parents give their children a top-notch education right from their own home.
