Introduction to Home Schooling

Home schooling is not easy and most parents that do home schooling will admit to you that it is a lot tougher. It is for this reason that many parents who do home schooling get together with home schooling groups, which does make it easier. When home schooling groups get together they help all the parents do better with the home schooling. However, it is not easy to get together with all the parents and therefore the home schooling groups must do public relations and develop community goodwill.

If you live in an area that doesn’t have a strong home schooling presence, you may need to develop your own home schooling curriculums. Fortunately, there are a lot of books and resources on the subject. Check your local library as a starting point. You also may find general home schooling curriculums online. Once you find a home schooling curriculum to work with, you will need to figure out how much leeway you have with it. One of the advantages of home schooling is you can allow your children to gravitate toward subjects that interest them.

There are many ways you can home school online. Some traditional high schools offer online programs. An advantage to home schooling online in this manner is that a local school system is available to make sure your child is receiving the proper testing and studying the proper subjects. They usually supply a curriculum and have a system of checks and balances to make sure your children are studying required subjects. Home schooling lets your children learn about things that interest them, but it doesn’t mean they should ignore other skills.

Tips On Home Schooling

Let’s face it but you have to realize that during the past few years home schooling has become increasingly popular. This is in addition to the more accepted arguments for or against home schooling. The reasons behind many families choosing to homeschool are many. It has to be remembered that before public schooling was considered the norm that home schooling was. Closer family relationships have also been found to be a result of home schooling.

Home schooling is legal in the United States, even if there have been and still are many controversies on the issue of whether or not the child is benefiting from this procedure; this issue if still being debated and even a banning of this practice may be applied if enough evidence is found that children do not actually benefit from it.

Home Schooling Disadvantages

Many parents eager to begin home schooling their children have though long and hard about the benefits home schooling will bring to their children. But unfortunately they often fail to consider the home schooling disadvantages which can also play a big part in their children’s academic and social development. While parents may love the idea of allowing their kids to learn at their own pace without being pressured to keep up or labeled “dummies” if they need to spend more time than most of their classmates in mastering a subject, one of the home schooling disadvantages which they may not be factoring into their home schooling decision is whether or not their skills as teachers are up to helping their kids learn difficult material.

Expertise in each subject area and the art of teaching are among the biggest disadvantages in home schooling. Certified public school teachers take several courses on teaching methods, strategies, and learning disabilities. Heavy content area specific classes are taken as well.

Required Subjects

The basic home schooling curriculum, however, is similar in all US states. It includes math, science history, and English, and children will of course have to learn how to read and write. Parents whose children show aptitude for other subjects like music, writing, or art can include those if they wish. The parents will be required to maintain a daily log of their childrens’ lessons, and the children will be required to progress at least as quickly as their public school counterparts. But the specific rules for home schooling may very from state to state.

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Any school district, whether it serves the tiniest of rural communities, or the students of a huge city, must effectively communicate with its parents. Individual schools stay in touch with families most commonly through newsletters, web pages, and sometimes via e-mail. Teachers in Orlando Schools conduct parent-teacher conferences a minimum of once a year, make phone calls as needed, and send home comments about their students’ progress on report cards and mid-term reports.

Orlando Schools do all of this, and even more. The district has implemented a mass telephone service so that it can communicate any pertinent information to Orlando Schools parents almost immediately. Ronald Blocker, Orlando Schools Superintendent, describes the program: “Since March 2006, the school district’s Connect-ED system has dialed more than 3.8 million phone numbers with community outreach and emergency notifications. The system supports multi-language communications that are specific to school communities. Notification of school closures, hurricane makeup days, updates on incidents at Orlando Schools, test dates and reminders of important meetings are just some of the topics that have been covered. Many of you (parents and community members) have already raved about our use of Connect-ED. It is an effective tool that allows district officials and Orlando Schools’ principals to prepare messages that are dispatched within minutes to people who need to hear them.”

A second service available in Orlando Schools is an anti-bullying program. The program aims to prevent students from being bullied or bullying others. In academic classes at Arbor Ridge High School, for example, students are given bullying lessons that may include reading assignments or questionnaires on their personal experiences with bullies. 46% of Orlando Schools students have said they had been bullied. Students are learning how to prevent situations where they or others may be bullied. A key lesson is that bullies escalate their actions the more they get away with it.

A third, and very exciting program just launched this summer (2007) is The Big Red Bus. Orlando Schools students who reside in Seminole County can now take advantage of a summer reading program that is truly ingenious. All students in Orlando Schools can board the bus and check out as many as three books a week. They can return them to the bus the following week, or they can keep them! The bus’ seats have been removed and replaced with wooden shelves to hold the 4,000 brand-spanking new books that officials have purchased. Orlando Schools will be using $40,000 in donations from CFE (Central Florida Educators) Credit Union, and the Foundation for Seminole County Public Schools. Anna Marie Cote, director of instruction in Orlando Schools says the program will especially benefit students who may not be able to get out to the library on a regular basis to get books. “We are trying to get it into places where it might be a bit harder for kids to get out and get books,” she says. When Orlando Schools students have finished reading books picked up from the Bus, they can log them on the Let’s Read website and have a chance to win prizes. The site also offers reading list and access to online books, including some that the computer will read aloud.

Fossil information sites are abundant on the web. But not all sites are created equal. Some sites are scholarly and may be over-the-head of the first-time or casual fossil collector. At the other end of the spectrum are sites that are a collection of links with no real information. Their sole purpose is making money from their google ads. There are plenty of sites in between that offer every form of fossil information you can imagine and for every audience.

Focused Sites
The scholarly sites often delve deeply into one fossil information topic. Dr. Sam Gon III’s site- http://www.trilobites.info/ shares just about anything you would want to learn about trilobites. His site is easy to navigate because it links logical topics, but also because it has a long list of the topics covered on the home page. Elasmo- http://www.elasmo.com/ covers sharks: fossil sharks, modern sharks, classification and disputed classification. This site is usable by the novice, but has enough depth to bring you back over and over again.

General Sites
Sites like UCMP- http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/ approach the fossil information topic from a broad perspective. They have a huge amount of information on fossils. They include fossil-related topics like geologic time and classification (phylogeny) of both fossil and modern species. Fossils-facts-and-finds’- http://www.fossils-facts-and-finds.com/ target audience is teachers and pre-college students. The topics covered relate to both fossils and geologic time, but additionally include tips and lesson plans for sharing the information with students, and there are projects that students can do on their own.

Especially For Kids
Since fossil information is often needed by young students, there are sites feared toward short, quality information about specific species. Enchanted Learning- http://www.enchantedlearning.com/Home.html gives a little information about LOTS of topics?not just fossils and dinosaurs. Their approach gives good starter information.

No Help Here
Watch out for “links-only” sites. These sites contain long lists of linked sites that MAY contain pertinent fossil information, but you can waste huge amounts of time following these links and never really find what you are looking for. (Of course, that’s what these sites WANT you to do, because for every click, they make money!)

Fossil Directories
Good niche directory sites, on the other hand, can be of great help. Bob’s Rock Shop- http://www.rockhounds.com/ is a good directory of fossil information sites because Bob has looked at the sites and puts a short note about the information you can find at each linked site.

Read the descriptions! With a little scrutiny, you’ll save yourself time, avoid the “no information” link sites, and get on to the business of getting REAL fossil information!