What are the Basics of Home Schooling

Home schooling is a concept that allows a child 6 to 16 years of age to be educated by the parents, at home! The concept and practice is not new. In fact, it is a concept adopted to educate children much before the traditional schools were established. The parents are the first teachers of the child. The home schooling method enables the parent-child relationship to flower further and enriches the child with knowledge. Parents need to consider some home schooling basics before they plunge to teach the first lesson to their child.

First, you need to take a firm decision to home schooling your child. It is not a decision to be taken today and re-considered tomorrow. The decision to home school your child is a personal one. There are a number of online resources that could help you to reflect and take the right decision. You also need to know how to act on your decision in the right direction. You could even take the help from the available and accessible home schooling community online and support groups.

Basically, you would need to consider the syllabus, available subject options, the child’s natural aptitude and the resources to acquire material to educate the child. You also need to meet and tie up with a local school board of your choice for the desired certification and final integration. The local home schooling support group is your best bet to start off on the right note. It takes time as a new home schooling parent to identify the journey ahead and the right path. To set a time-table for each subject, to identify the best time frame during the day and subject related activities are all part of home schooling basics.

It pays to conduct extensive research and only then embark on the home schooling exercise. You need to carefully consider the laws and home schooling requirements applicable within your state or region. You need to be a part of a support group for encouragement and help, as you move on from one phase of home schooling to another. Professionals run the support groups, who help you to choose the curriculum, maintain scores and adhere to the state laws. The support groups also help to provide opportunities for great indoor and outdoor activities for the child.

The home schooling basics also include to select unit studies and final curriculum. These have to be in accordance to the grade specific recommendation by the traditional schools. Home schooling also requires some serious record keeping. You cannot treat home schooling as anything of less important. The annual records of the child need to be maintained for him or her to be promoted to the next grade. These records also need to be produced at the time of integrating the child into a college, later.

The records could be simple journal entries or elaborate notebook entries on the computer. You would also need to carefully consider the method and schedule to follow. The advantage of home schooling is that you can work with whatever best suits the family. There are a number of online and offline resources that help you in the endeavor. A little prior research goes a long way to understand the system to follow and to keep in touch with the trends. Once you have your basics right, the application cannot go wrong.

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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Home Schooling – Opportunities and Challenges

Children usually ‘Walk’ to school and ‘Run’ when they return home. This is a universal phenomena and is tested and proven over time – from our grand parents to possibly our grand children – we see that during our initial days (formative years) we do not enjoy schooling like the way we enjoy during our school ending years (adolescence years). Home schooling provides great opportunity to children with learning disabilities and other ‘hesitant’ children

The merits of home schooling are many – the primary being that you are not compared even inadvertently with anyone around you – thereby saving a huge embarrassment and guilt. A child can learn at a pace that can be decided mutually between the child and the guide. A child can study what is appealing on that day. In a classroom, a child can’t expect or get individual attention and therefore the time it takes to complete a lesson is much higher when compared to a one on one session. In addition to all these advantages, a child need not go for ‘tutions’ which is an inevitable evil in Indian education system. Tutions are no different from Home schooling.

When we talk of tutions, I used to wonder about this concept. Typically, the tution teachers are the same individuals who teach in classrooms. Even the students are same. Even today, I fail to understand that if a child has to attend tutions after the school hours, then what is the purspose of going to school and attending to classes. No magic is taught in private tutions. Then why is ’tutions’ so important in today’s education system? If tutions are inevitable, then is schooling necessary? Is schooling needed only to the extent that any educational board demands an association with a school?

These thoughts are not new. These thoughts have been haunting educationists and socialists for a long time. So, new methods of home schooling have started getting recognised. The first of its kind is the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS). A child need not attend classes at school – can continue to make arrangements to learn from home  – and can appear in the board examinations. A wonderful opportunity for children who can’t afford to spend their time and money in traditional school system. This type of education is economically affordable for the masses and for children closer to poverty line. The population in NIOS has kept a steady increase in these years and it is glad to see many children have fulfilled their dreams of completing their school education from home. We all know that at the university level, we have distance education program (Correspondence courses) where students can afford to join these courses without attending to colleges – and instead of wasting their time, such children employ themselves and earn their fees for such courses.

So?? am I driving to a point where we conclude traditional schooling is bad? Am I saying that schooling is a waste of time and energy? No- certainly not. No system can replace a traditional schooling model where a child learns to be a social being. A child undertstands the importance of good over bad, magnanimity, role modeling, leading, sports, games, competition and many more. But these should not stop education to a child who can’t afford to come to school – may be because of financial burden or due to any other reasons.

Home schooling is certainly a very good alternative to traditional schooling and paves way for many students to pursue graduation at affordable fees and time lines. We should be thankful to open schooling or home schooling systems without which we would have lost so many young minds in their formative years. Home schooling is therefore a wonderful opportunity and wherever possible, I would request the responsible people of the society to support and patronize home schooling.

Thanks and regards,

Dr. PM Anavaratham

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