7 Tips on Homeschooling Your Kids ...

There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to teach your child something you don’t understand yourself. This can become a common issue when the school years become more advanced. I did come across it when teaching my son Montessori math methods. It wasn’t the way I learned to do math and the various rods and cubes were confusing. I had to find a resource to help me learn how to teach this math method, which ended up helping me learn it along the way.

You might not think there are any other homeschoolers in your area, but I bet there are at least a few, if not an entire group of individuals homeschooling their children. Gathering together to share ideas is a great way to get new information and have lots of support in your endeavor. Sometimes each parent can spend a day teaching something to the entire group, which allows other parents to have a day off that is often much needed.

If you’ve never tried homeschooling before, it will definitely be very different than anything you’ve experienced in education. There are always new teaching methods being created and some of them can be a bit confusing. I found that trying a new way to teach something was often beneficial to both my son and I. If he wasn’t able to understand the concept I was teaching before, changing the way I presented it often was the answer.

This is important, not matter what you are teaching. When kids are having fun, they often don’t realize they are actually learning something. Making school exciting is the best way to get kids to absorb information quickly and to retain it for later use. I used to do lots of hands-on activities with my son. We would identify plants and birds in the woods, use lots of manipulative for math lessons, and even reading lessons were very active. I would write sight words on index cards and lay them all over the house. They were far enough apart for him to step from one to the other, but only if he could tell me what the word was. He soon realized that the more words he knew, the more he got to jump around!

One of the biggest issues with homeschooled children is socialization. Too many parents think that homeschooling means keeping a child at home and never letting them socialize with other children. Even learning how to socialize with adults is important. This is extremely important for very little kids. Enabling them to interact with others teaches great skills in handling problems, dealing with other personalities, and basically being able to function normally in society later one. Too many kids are stereotyped as being recluses and completely anti-social when they are homeschooled. This isn’t always the case, but it’s up to the parent to help their child learn the necessary social skills.

If you intend on placing your child in a public or private school later on, then you’ll need to keep track of the daily hours you put into homeschooling. Most states require a log to be kept of the hours and a copy of daily lesson plans to be written down. This is so they can check that parents are actually teaching their children something and not simply keeping them home from school. I’ve seen this happen in my area. Parents keep a child at home because they don’t like their school and say they are homeschooling the child. Years down the road, the child is on welfare and can’t even read; stuck in the same town because he/she can’t get a job anywhere else due to lack of education.

Homeschooling provides parents with the ability to teach subjects in any order they wish, but it’s still a good idea to have a schedule of some sort. Small children really need some sort of structure. You might need to experiment a few times to determine the best order of subjects for your child’s needs. My son wasn’t a morning person, so we couldn’t do math first thing. Instead, we would go outside for science. This got him moving and breathing in fresh air right away. I found this to be a much better way to wake him up in the morning.

While most of these tips are basically common sense, a couple of them came about due to trial and error. I think it made my son the well-rounded person he is today. If these 7 tips on homeschooling your kids have inspired you to take a deeper look into this type of educational experience, then I wish you lots of success. Have you recently been turned off by the idea of homeschooling due to homeschoolers you know?