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Use this website with Beverley Paine's Getting Started with Home Schooling - Practical Considerations to help you develop your own educational curriculum to suit your family situation, beliefs and lifestyle. The checklists can help you identify your children's current educational skill level in each subject area, as well as find any 'gaps' in their learning, plan what they need to cover or keep track of what has been learned. As you can appreciate this website is continuously under development... It's our aim to add pages on a regular basis in all curriculum areas: check back frequently. We hope you enjoy the articles and activities and find the links and recommended resources useful. Over the next year we will be working our way through each subject area and writing fresh, new content. |
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"Thank you so much for your wonderful website! I was getting quiet frustrated with finding appropriate information on homeschooling - thanks to your website we are now on the right track... Using your checklists for reassurance helped me to have the confidence to come up with my own programme that suits our needs." Rachael "I'm a frequent visitor to your website... I gain valuable knowledge from your website, luckily recommended in the very early stages of our homeschooling journey." Geradine "I checked out your website today and was incredibly impressed by it. I can tell it will be a great resource for our family for many years. THANKS for all the hard work that has gone into making homeschooling easier and much less isolating for families like us." Cynthia |
Home Schooling In Practice - Introduction
excerpt from Getting Started with Homeschooling, Practical Considerations
© Beverley Paine, 1997
Mention home schooling to most people and they immediately think of ‘school at home’, with a parent playing the role of teacher and the children behaving as students between nine and four each day. In practice home schooling is very flexible, offering a different kind of education from that available in school.
Some families manage to achieve ‘school at home’, but most children reject the model of parent as ‘teacher’, especially when they have already spent some years as students in a school classroom. For them parents and teachers have very separate and clearly defined roles.
Parents have a special place in their children’s lives and hearts, and can seldom achieve the objectivity required by teachers in schools. This does not mean parents can’t ‘teach’ their children. Although children tend to reject parents role playing ‘teacher’, they are more than happy to welcome them as mentors and tutors when the occasion demands. It is all a matter of balance and sensitivity, and tends to flows naturally from a flexible approach to education in the home.
When a family decides to home school, there is a shift in the focus of family life, as parents become inevitably more involved in their children’s day to day lives, interests, curiosities and activities. Often what begins as an adventure in alternative education becomes a deeper and more meaningful adventure in parenting. After many years of educating children at home it is difficult to separate the ‘educational activities’ and those that occur naturally as both parents and children seek to live full and interesting lives.
All home schooling families experience a period of adjustment to this new lifestyle. It can last months or even years. Most often families who seek and find support from other home schooling children living near by, adjust relatively quickly, learning from offered advice, understandings and past experiences. Being aware of how home schooling effects family life will help prepare families for this transition, and lessens the urge to try to replicate ‘school’ in the home, with its unnecessary pitfalls and problems.
Considering carefully how it will impact on both parents and children, and life at home in general, is an important first stage of home schooling.
There is a growing trend to home school adolescent children, and in these cases special consideration must be made for adjustment to differences in learning styles and methodologies between school and home learning. Educating young people at home can be very rewarding, offering a wide range of opportunity and experiences.
on this website is of a general
nature only and is not intended as
personal or professional advice.
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