Save time and simplify
your homeschooling life...
Learn from experienced
homeschoolers how to write your own curriculum.
It really is that easy!
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. Feedback and comments welcome. 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 which will also be reproduced in a reasonably priced handy reference booklet from our Practical Homeschooling Series. |
|
"Congratulations on a terrific website. It's a great resource." Steven "By sharing your experiences, we are into our third year of homeschooling and enjoying it thoroughly." Marina "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 |
Teaching History - Why We Need An Overview of What We Want Our Children To Know
© Beverley Paine, Feb 2007
History, like geography and cultural studies in general, are embedded in the society and environment curriculum. It hasn't been taught as a distinct subject for a couple of decades that I know of... which makes sense as it's hard to separate history from geography anyway. How people behave is usually determined by the lie of the land they find themselves in... Our whole way of life is derived, in one way or another, by the way we use the land. If the land we have isn't as useful as we need or want people usually migrate... This creates the history of the world!
Gaps in knowledge and understanding in the school system (or homeschool) come from the teacher not having a good overview of the whole curriculum and then making a sensible and practical plan to achieve curriculum goals and objectives.
There are many ways to teach the same material: we used excursions and shared reading to cover what we considered to be important learning in the area of history. As well as being very efficient and catering to different learning styles, the children enjoyed learning in this way. Homeschooling lends itself to such an approach. You don't have to spend a lot of money, although some museums, etc are expensive, but they only need to be visited once or twice during the primary years and again during the high school years.
We also did a lot of walks around towns and cities and talked about the architecture, how people use the space, why they use it this way, imagining what everything looked like 50, 100, 150, 200 and even thousands of years ago....
I found it useful to read the outcomes based SA curriculum because rather than telling me what knowledge the children should learn it offered a guide to the kind of skills and abilities I wanted my children to achieve. Most of all I wanted my children to understand why people do what they do in the way they do, and for them to value diversity while developing their own values. I wanted them to understand that there are things that we and they do in their everyday life because of our cultural heritage and that patterns of migration meant people, nations and cultures change. I wanted them to understand the impact that technology has on how people live and how they use the land so that they can make sensible choices for themselves as they grow.
Television documentaries and current affairs programs played an important role in our curriculum. We also listened to the radio - usually ABC Radio National - as there are a lot of programs that offer a great deal of information and insight into Australian history and culture, as well as providing a limited insight into the rest of the world.
In our early years of homeschooling I had a chart that roughly followed children's development in the areas of society and environment. It began with the child and family at the centre and focussed in the early childhood years with learning about family and relatives, the function and role of people in society that they come into contact with, learning rules like road safety and for playing games, where they live, different people's occupations. This grows as the child grows and can grasp a better sense of time and place. It's no good teaching a child something he can't grasp conceptually yet.
It is possible for children to learn history and geography without being taught it in incremental doses, but I think that if we want our children to have a comprehensive understanding and knowledge base then it's up to us as homeschooling parents to have some kind of overall plan of what we want our children to know and the set of skills they need to be able to use that knowledge to enhance their life and the lives of others.
on this website is of a general
nature only and is not intended as
personal or professional advice.
Getting Started Manual Unschooling Books Educational Games Natural Learning Practical HS Booklet Series Curriculum Reports/Portfolios Homeschool Diaries Conference DVD 
More questions?
JOIN the FORUM
Time to spare?
Browse our extensive
ARTICLE
LIBRARY
Feedback is always welcome
on our websites!
Join the HEA in 2008
and receive 2 FREE Booklets!
A percentage of sales
goes to Trees For Life
|
|
We welcome
advertising inquiries
from educational suppliers.
Email
ALWAYS LEARNING BOOKS
ABN 17 503 397 443
Beverley and Robin Paine
PO Box 371 Yankalilla 5203
SOUTH AUSTRALIA
Thank you for visiting!
Pioneering members of the home education movement in Australia,
Beverley and Robin Paine
are passionate advocates of true educational choice for families.
They began homeschooling in 1986 and three years later started the
South Australian Home Based Learners
network. Beverley continues to write for homeschooling newsletters
and magazines as well as hosting several websites dedicated to promoting
and supporting home education in Australia. Her aim is to demystify the
education process and make it accessible to all parents. Enjoy Beverley's
wealth of practical knowledge, homeschooling and unschooling tips and
ideas through articles and books and online at
www.homeschoolaustralia.com.
Since the late 1990s Robin and Beverley have been building their home education
publishing business - Always Learning Books - from home with the help of their son Thomas.
"Education is not a preparation for life. Education is life itself." John Dewey
Please note that the opinions and articles included in the suite of Homeschool Australia websites are not necessarily those of Beverley and Robin Paine, nor do we endorse or necessarily recommend products (other than our own) listed in contributed articles, pages, or advertisements.
Please visit the following websites for information on homeschooling in Australia:
Homeschool Australia : SAHEN : Australian HS Curriculum : About the Paine Family
Text & Images on this site
Copyright © 1999-2008 Beverley Paine.
All rights reserved.
Help | Disclaimer | Copyright | Privacy