Month: December 2013

If you’re considering homeschooling, here are a few considerations before you begin. First, you need to know the homeschooling laws in your region. You’ll need to be very clear about what studies your child needs to do and to what level. You will be responsible for ensuring that your child fulfills all of the requirements.

Look for a home school support group in your area. You can either meet with these people or chat with them online. This will allow you to share ideas with others and to exchange concerns, tips and challenges. It’s very important to be able to share your frustrations and concerns with other parents experiencing a similar process.

Make plans for field trips. This is a large part of the home school experience. Go outside of the house and break away from the school furniture to experience real world educational opportunities.

You can find a wealth of information online about home schooling. You’ll find many online resources that will allow you to print out materials, order workbooks and much more.

You may find the term funny, but unschooling is actually a branch of homeschooling. Inspired by John Holt, the basis for this movement is to promote nonstructured, child-led learning. It includes no set curriculum or schedule. As one mother doing this program, Colleen Paeff, explained, “learning is not the main objective [of unschooling], it just happens as a side effect of living your life with passion and exploring our interests.”

One mother, Sandra Dodd, explained that “You can only learn things that you are interested in. My best definition of unschooling is creating and maintaining an environment in which natural learning can flourish.”

Unschoolers argue that children will learn on their own. They will learn to read when they want to decode a word or figure out instructions for a video game. They will learn math by counting the coins for their allowance and geometry with woodshop.

Unschoolers have a word called “deschooling” which is the process that children go through when they start to unschool. They have to get used to not having worksheets, school chairs, tests and other structured school requirements.

As the winter sets in and the days get colder, the home schooler may wonder how to keep the kids busy indoors. In reality, while it may not be as exciting to spend the entire day inside, there are still plenty of things to do indoors to educate children. Here are a few suggestions to start out the window.

* Make fairy wings and learn about fairies.

* Create a family artwork on a large canvas or work on a mosaic together that you could put on the front of the house.

* Print coloring sheets online and let the younger kids color and learn their colors this way.

* Make a robot out of cardboard boxes.

* Make a treasure map and tie this into reading a book about pirates.

* Make boats out of milk bottle lids, a straw for the mast and paper for the sail and learn about boats

* Make sock puppets

* Make a long paperclip chain