Costs and Benefits of Home Schooling

Education plays an important role in your child’s life. It will determine how prepared they are for the future and influence the kind of opportunities that they are given. Three different ways to educate your child include public, private and home schooling. This article is designed to give parents an idea of the costs and benefits associated with the home schooling option.

Costs

The costs of home schooling can be broken up into two main categories: time and money.

Time — For most mothers with school-age children, public or private school provides a precious window of time in which they can focus on a career, personal interests, errands or simply relaxing. When parents choose to home school, that large block of time becomes allocated to the task of teaching and supervising. This means, for one parent, that there is less personal time in every day and there is little or no opportunity to hold a full-time job.

Money — Consequently, home schooling may equate to a smaller family income. The cost of one parent staying home to teach and supervise is much higher than any of the materials you will need. Still, a budget should also be made for supplies like pencils, paper, a curriculum and books.

Ways to Defer the Costs

Buying a pre-made curriculum package will save you both time and money just because you won’t have to prepare and gather all the materials yourself. Without a pre-made curriculum, you might spend countless hours just brainstorming all the topics you want to cover, creating lesson plans and looking for the right resources. And, if you do want to add supplementary material, it will be much easier if you have a basic skeleton of subjects to guide you.

The library is another resource that can help you home school economically. As long as you get your books back in time, you will have a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips that is absolutely free and just making the trip is a great way to get out of the house.

Another way to cut the cost of home schooling is to use some common sense. When you do buy materials, make sure that they are needed. Don’t go overboard or try to recreate the wheel. After all, you don’t need to purchase the same kind of resources available at a private or public school to foster a good learning environment in your home. Work with your children at the kitchen counter or the dinner table rather than buying a “home school desk,” use a small dry erase note board rather than buying a huge chalk board and take good care of your resources so that other children can use them as their education moves forward.

Benefits

There are clearly some costs associated with home schooling, but it is important to remember the benefits too. Because of the one-on-one attention that children receive through home schooling, it is a very effective tool for teaching. Parents often find that their children understand subjects better and faster so they can cover more ground than public or private schools.

Home is also a safe environment for learning. Children feel comfortable there and you can be sure that there are no bullies, drugs or alcohol causing damage.

As the teacher, principle, secretary and nurse of your own little home school, you get to decide your child’s schedule too. This means that family events like reunions, vacations, pictures and holidays are much easier to plan because you are very flexible.

And best of all, parents who home school regularly find that they develop strong relationships with their children as they sacrifice their own time to teach them and play with them.

Home schooling does require time, money and sacrifice, but it yields better educations, safer learning environments, stronger relationships and a lot of flexibility. So the next time you ask yourself if you can afford to home school your children, you might want to ask if you can afford not to.

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Deciding to Home School – The Do’s and Don’ts

If the idea of home schooling is something that you and your family are considering there are a couple of important things to make sure to decide before you make any decisions. This decision is something that will affect your children for years and needs to be taken seriously and not on a whim or when you are upset with a current situation. Following are a couple of do’s and don’ts when making the decision if home schooling is right for you and your family.

Do’s:

Learn the laws for home schooling in your state. The home school legal defense group, hslda.org is an important stop to make while you are making your decision on home schooling. Another great support system to find is local home school group in your area, visit some and find one that you feel comfortable in. One last stop in helping you make a decision is to find and visit a home school conference, there will be a lot of information presented to you and lots of different schooling options. Just don’t bring your checkbook, make no purchases. You will be tempted but that is not what you are there for, its education for you to make a decision you need to seek right now.

Make sure you and your spouse both agree on your decision. For the most part if you make the decision to home school there will be only one income coming into the home. Even if only one of you do the teaching you will need the support of your spouse. There will be naysayers about your decision so you will need to present a united front.

This can be a very exciting time for you and the kids. But before you do anything else write down a mission statement. What are your personal reasons for deciding to home school? What are some goals you want to accomplish the first year what are your long range goals for your home schooling. You will need this statement to fall back on when you are having rough days. There will be times when you doubt yourself and the decision you made to school at home. Believe me, there were times that if I hadn’t of had that paper to look at I would have quit many times.

Don’ts:

Decide to home school and work outside of the home. This is the education of your child; they deserve your attention and leadership for their education. This will be especially important the first year of home schooling no matter what grade your child is in they will need your help in knowing how to adjust to this new phase in their lives. And mom and dad this will be new for you and you will need to do some learning about how to home school yourselves.

Jump right into textbooks. I know this sounds like I’m now giving you the conflicting advice but as you will soon learn on your home schooling journey there is so much more to education they textbooks. If you have little ones play games that will teach them, read books and play. If the kids are older and have been in public school they may need some down time, some time away from textbooks, maybe some educational computer games, sports. Some free reading time, spend some time connecting with them and forming a relationship. Find their learning style so you can use it to help them love learning again. Warning: this is not permission to let the kids turn on the TV and zone out all day.

So I hope that these tips will help you and your family in making the right decision about home schooling. It will be a wonderful experience if you make the decision to do this. But if you can’t honestly say that you can make this the most important thing in your life, before your job, what others say about your decision or anything else, then maybe home schooling is not for you.

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Second Language Benefits – How Language Learning Can Benefit You Mentally

By mastering a second language, you mind and eyes are opened for a new world, enable you to be promoted in job or find new opportunities for your personal development or you business. These advantages of learning a new language are indeed true.

But they are already publicly known and people don’t like to be preached. You must have been trying to avoid them.

Language learning improves your mental activity.

Don’t take learning languages as a torture or a damage of your brain cells. On the contrary, the reactivity of our brain cells can be improved. The reason is that the blood will gather into the head when we use our brain to learn things. Blood brings oxygen with it. Oxygen is not only necessary for our body but also good in activating the cells.

Therefore, language learning acts like an oxygen pump for our head. That’s why people say, “The more you learn, the cleverer you will be”.

For this reason, you might say that any learning can do that to you. That’s right. But learning languages is something meaning more than just learning.

Learning a second language means a complete change of reading, listening and speaking habits. If you are learning a language that is completely different from your native language, it means more of a change than the difference in word composition. It means a whole turn over of the way of thinking. That’s probably why old people with the foreign language speaking ability are reported to delay in suffering from senile dementia.

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