Posts Tagged ‘homeschooling’

Home Schooling And The Study of History

Sunday, May 8th, 2011

Do you think that spending time in traditional classrooms is a waste of time? For many people, that is probably true. For example, a test is due and the students are asked to memorize a list of dates and names. However, after taking the exam, they will definitely forget 90% of those dates and names. That’s what the majority of students do when they have tests. If you are one of these people, you will find traditional history lessons boring, so home schooling, which focuses more on the history of the world, will surely interest you more.

Just simple memorization is not enough to realize the importance of historical, famous people and fateful events. Through home schooling in history, you can study the different cultures of the past in a different, but interesting way – that is your own way! Through the study of history, you will also realize what is happening in the world.

If you think that home schooling is the best option for your child’s learning, you must also be prepared to take on some responsibilities. Since there will be no teacher physically present, you will have to supervise your child’s educational progress yourself.

Let’s say your child supports a particular sport. You could combine history and home schooling by just putting a map on the wall of your child’s schoolroom and mark the location of his favourite sports team. Make sure that you track all the team’s games, scores, activities and schedules. Then, you could go back to history lessons by reading biographies of the various athletes, who had been famous in the particular sport that your child likes. Aside from that, you can also examine the history of that particular sport and discover where it started, its inventor, and the other things happening in that particular time in history.

For example, let’s say your child loves baseball, you could teach your child about the history baseball, government hearings on the use of drugs and other favourite pastimes during that period in time. But remember that you can apply this concept to any interest such as dancing, flight, cars or any invention. You can also have conversations with your child about current affairs or read interesting historical documents and other books. Apart from that, you can also watch documentaries together with the rest of the family. There are various resources that you can use in home schooling, such as TV, maps, newspapers, books, a globe, an atlas, and encyclopedias. Due of the enthralling adventures that you and your child will read about and see on film, your child will find it easier to remember the names and dates of the history lessons. After all, learning is better when it is done in a fun way.

These methods are recommended if the child is still young, but once your child is older, you must choose an appropriate home schooling program that is suitable for his/her age group. The programs are available at the elementary, high school, and even college levels. You simply have to search the Internet for these different programs. A good thing about these programs is that you can tailor them to fit the needs of your child. However, you must see to it that all the lessons are studied by your child.

Once you and your child have decided to go for home schooling, you must be prepared to make some changes in your life. The educational environment will now be in your home not at a school and through the various resources that you think best, such as a computer and the Internet.

If you are interested in Home Schooling then please pop along to our website at Home Schooling Information

Fear In School

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

Do you have happy memories of your school years? Do you have happy memories of teachers and school friends? If you do then you were lucky, because some children hate each minute of being in school and not because they are no good at it either. Frequently it is the clever kids who are taunted for being swots and teachers’ pets. They are safe in the class, but the travelling to and from school and the school breaks can become nightmares.

However, it is not only bullying from other children that causes fear in school children. There are other reasons for fear in school as well. Occasionally, children think that a certain teacher does not like them and occasionally children are merely frightened of failing or doing badly. Occasionally teachers are afraid of doing badly as well. It can all lead to an atmosphere of fear at school. It makes you ask yourself how anyone could have enjoyed their school days, does it not?

This atmosphere of fear can get greater in state schools because the teachers are subject to success charts and the kids are more open to bullying. Furthermore, all of the school shootings in the world have taken place in state run schools.

However, the most subtle form of fear in school comes from teachers who are afraid of missing the targets set by the state, because that will cost them their posts. This fear is passed on to their students. The regime of fear is exacerbated by over-sized classes. Why?

Because teachers can hold the attention of only so many pupils – as we all can in regular discourse. Therefore, if the class is too big, the teacher will have to switch roles from being a teacher to a controller. When this happens, education suffers for the sake of keeping order.

For all of these reasons and more, many crowd are turning to home schooling. Some of the reasons why parents are deciding to educate their children themselves are: distrust of the state education system; fear of bullying or worse of their children; a desire to educate their children in a more conventional or religious fashion.

There are education packages that parent-teachers can buy to give them a course of action on what to teach. There is also a lot of help available on the Internet. The problem facing any parents who wish to educate their own children is providing a rounded education.

People have a natural tendency to specialize in one topic or group of subjects like, say, astronomy or the sciences, which is why schools provide numerous teachers, so that every one can teach his or her favourite subject. However, if you are the only teacher you will have to teach all the topics yourself.

This is why it is best to have a program or set of guidelines to follow. It is difficult to teach maths if you have no aptitude for it, so look at your strengths but also your weaknesses before you take the momentous decision to withdraw your children from school and teach them themselves

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on numerous topics but is currently involved with Fear At School and home Schooling. If you would like to read more, please go over to our website entitled Home Schooling.

Avoid Home Schooling Burnout

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

It doesn’t matter if you are teaching in a traditional school or in a home schooling environment, there will be a time when you will come across burnout. This is something that you have to avoid so that your educational progress is not adversely affected.

Here are a couple of helpful tips that you can make use of to prevent possible home schooling burnout:

Be aware of your abilities. From the very start, you should already know your limitations and those of your child. You must be able to taking things slowly sometimes, especially if your child is still very young since you have to consider your child’s capacity to learn. Most students are average learners (obviously), so you will have to take the lessons according to your child’s learning pace. Never expect your small child to read complicated selections nor your teenager to get top marks in SAT exams.

Don’t adopt rigid schedules, as this could put undue pressure on your child. You should just set an interesting routine for your child to follow. Children spend most of their time doing routine activities like getting up, eating hearty breakfasts, reading books, practising writing, doing light jobs about the place, etc. You must insist that they complete their routine activities before they can go outside or play with the computer. Even these routine activities change from day to day, but you must ensure that your child completes these routine activities. You can add in occasional incentives or fun activities if they finish their routine tasks earlier.

You should try to enjoy home schooling with your child. This is a good method of developing a strong relationship with your child and if you and your child can relate to each other, you will find it very much easier to handle curriculum struggles and motivation issues later on. Aside from motivating and guiding your child, you can also pursue some of your own interests like gardening or cooking. If your child sees you enjoying your own interests, then he or she will also be motivated to do likewise.

Since your child is in a home schooling program, you should not try to copy a traditional schools environment. Try to use unusual means when teaching your child. Home schooling is also about flexibility and creativity, and if you can achieve an easy-going but firm atmosphere, you can more than likely prevent burnout.

Always try to remember that with home schooling, you don’t have to structure your teaching methods in the traditional way. You can just do things in a fun way especially with very young children so that they learn naturally. Just ensure you keep the day in the right perspective to avoid burnout. Although your children might forget some of the day’s lessons, that’s all right too because somehow they grow in intelligence as well as in physique.

For sure, your children will always think back on your moments together and remember fondly how well you treated them. The old song goes: “… there’s no place like home” and for little students, home is the best place to learn the first lessons of life. If your teenagers are already in high school or in college, they can still do home schooling if they so desire. That would also a good decision because you’d get to keep an eye on your children’s performance.

Parents always try to look after their children’s best interests, so, if after careful consideration, you still think that home schooling is the best option for your family, then run with it. Just follow the advice mentioned above to prevent burnout. Make time for enjoyable activities from time to time in order to prevent monotony.

If you are interested in avoiding burnout in home schooling then please pop along to our website at Home Schooling

Speed Reading – Where Do You Start?

Sunday, April 17th, 2011

Nobody honestly knows when speed reading was first used, but it might have been a long time ago. For centuries, reading was the privilege of a small group of the most well-educated people in the world, the vast majority of whom were monks and priests. This small, select group of men guarded their privilege and were loathe to teach the general populace to read. Furthermore, all through those centuries there were relatively few books to read compared with today. Books were also very expensive as they all had to be copied out by hand. Perhaps the only fact that has not altered is that the Bible was the most widespread book in existence and even now the Bible is the most prevalent book.

The world is fast devolving into a place where individuals are slowly but surely turning their backs on books and becoming fixed in front of monitors or television screens. In such a world, parents should not fail to notice the importance of developing a passion for reading in themselves and their children. Reading is a habit that should be established when the child is relatively young, so what can you do to foster this habit?

Well, there are several strategies you can employ, although one of the best to lead by example. Read with your child every day, even if its only for 10-15 minutes. Allow your child to see you reading. By this I mean, don’t only read in bed before you go to sleep, but instead of watching television from time to time and read your children a bed-time story. Encourage them to read too. You could also:

Register your child for reading lessons, if you honestly don’t have much time or your child is a little slow at reading. There are many well-structured after school reading classes that aspire to make books more appealing to children. They help children with pronunciation, idioms and phrases. These lessons can be pleasurable with animated characters and pictures, especially for young children,. They frequently use Illustrated books, nursery rhymes, comical songs and short stories to enliven the imagination of younger children.

You will have to learn how to kindle your child’s interest. If your child has a favorite character, pick a series of books that include this character. Attempt to encourage your children to read real books not comics. The style in comics typically leaves a great deal to be desired with its slapdash English and street slang. As an alternative, go for series of books like Harry Potter or Tarzan.

You should build yourself a library of your own books. This may sound a little impressive, but after all, a library is only a collection of books. Begin with a good-looking bookshelf that you can easily build on. A talent like reading cannot be learned in only one place, so you cannot afford to leave all the hard work to the day-school or even the after school curricula. You have to collect books that you imagine your child will enjoy too. Use the Internet as a source for learning about the contemporary reading games that will attract little children to the superior and ancient art of reading,

When you child is interested in reading for its own sake, you might read up on speed reading. Speed reading is best suited for informative learning and background reading. It’s immensely suited to cramming or studying for examinations. It is ideal for school and university. However, the first job, before you can think about speed reading, is to get your child reading in the first place.

Are you interested in speed reading for yourself or a loved one? If so, please hurry over to our web site focusing on Speed Reading.

Home Schooling and Learning by Computer

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

There is access to a computer in nearly every household in the West these days and the rest of the world is catching up very fast. So, it is very important for you to have one at home too, because of the many benefits it can bring, especially if you have an Internet connection. Nowadays, you need to have have some computer experience, if you want even a reasonably-paid job, so learning how to use a computer must begin at school. You and your children can have a fantastic educational experience with a computer at home. Children of today must learn about this extremely important machine at the very earliest age possible and one of the best ways to do that is through home schooling computer programs.

Currently, even kindergarten children are being taught how to use computers and their associated resources. If you opt for home schooling, you and your child will also spend most of your time making use of a computer and the Internet. Educating your children can be much more efficient when done online, because of the diverse resources available there. You and your child will have available some of the best educational resources, from which you will benefit hugely not least since employment market trends today overwhelmingly involve the Internet.

One of the largest minority groups who prefers to make use of home schooling is the African Americans because some see some society problems and they can keep themselves informed about their own heritage by home schooling. The parents of children from minority groups can help their children learn more effectively by having an Internet connection at home. Children’s education can be more strongly supported by parents and they can also assist in strengthening the psyche of their children too. Parents can educate their children about their own particular heritage through the various online resources.

It is important to remember that home schooling only works well, if the parents are willing to give their kids their full support. They must also be committed and ready for the challenges that they will come across. The parents ought to look for a rally good computer program or book to help their children to learn about using computers. Often, the lessons are separated into various parts or series in order that the children can cope with them easily. Children have different learning abilities and since too often children are not given much chance in traditional schools, the use of computers is a perfect opportunity for you to bring out the best in them.

Home schooling is not new any more, so if you think that your child is not performing well in school, talk to the teachers and get some feedback regarding your child. The guidance counsellor can also help you determine the best education for you child. Home schooling is already accepted and perhaps it can help your child learn more in the comfort of your home.

If you are prepared to commit yourself to home schooling, you will need to discuss the matter with your child. You could start by asking your child about his performance in school and then raise the subject of home schooling. See how your child reacts to the idea. Explain its advantages. Say that computer learning will be easier. It’s better if you and your child both agree to home schooling, since you have to work closely together. It might not be easy to persuade your child to give up traditional schooling, where he has all his friends, so you will have to spend time with your kid and know his/her interests. Explain that computer programs in home schooling can help a lot. Tell your child that they can learn more about their particular interest, if they know how to use the computer.

So why not start looking for the most suitable home schooling computer program now? You could talk to your friends, ask at the library or / and go online and do your research. There are plenty of home schooling programs to choose from and it could take some weeks before you can find the appropriate one.

If you are thinking about home schooling then please visit our site at http://home-schooling.the-real-way.com

categories: homeschooling,teaching,school,parenting,children,books,reading,writing,mathematics,computers,science,motivational,stress,other

The Advantages Of Speed Reading

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

What have you been reading lately? In a gathering, you can soon tell who the broad-spectrum readers are, since frequent readers are often quick thinkers and good public speakers too. They quickly win the adulation, respect, and fellowship of others. After all, reading expands the mind and many people see it as one of the most satisfying pleasures known to mankind, being a combination, as it is, of mental agility and physical relaxation well above the level offered by television or the cinema.

Reading is mostly a mental activity, since you read with your mind and use your imagination to paint the setting of the action thriller you are reading. You use your mind to imagine the pleasure that the main characters in the story are experiencing as the plot unfolds; or you contemplate the various arguments and ideas introduced by the author in that self-help book you are holding.

Learning how to read properly helps you to develop an extensive knowledge of words through reading different styles of books. A skillful reader recognizes a wide range of vocabulary. The reader may not understand exactly what every word means, but he/she will have a good idea of what the sentence is trying to convey.

The act of reading makes you more aware and more interested in new words. Some readers even develop ‘the dictionary habit’, which means that whenever they come across a new word, they attempt to work out what it possibly means from the context. If they cannot do this, they refer to a dictionary.

Similarly, reading develops intellectual curiosity by exposing the reader to a variety of subjects. He/she learns to read by reading books of increasing difficulty and variety. Just as in other kinds of education, he/she is learning by actually doing and while he/she is reading he/she is automatically learning about the subject matter of the book too – a free by-product!

Reading teaches you to have an active and open mind. Merely grasping the writers idea is not enough, you have to make a positive response to what you read. Be an active, not a passive, reader. Develop the habit of drawing your own conclusions, the habit of active thinking, of agreeing or disagreeing with the writer. Always keep your mind open; understand and consider the ideas that you read. A practical part of active reading is the drawing of conclusions.

Now let me mention the phenomenon of speed reading. All of the above applies between three and ten times over, because speed readers can read that much faster than the average reader! Consider that! – Being able to read, comprehend and remember all those books and articles. You would surely become well-read in your subject much more rapidly than others. Just think how that could help you at work, in school or in college …

Now, let me show you the four primary rules for better reading and better comprehension:

1) Try to read more and more every month. Remember the saying that practice makes perfect. 2) Develop the habit of reading for main ideas, ie look for the subject and predicate – the main ideas 3) Learn to read with focus and concentration. Think of what you are reading. Good readers read with understanding. 4) Learn to budget your time. Experiment with your reading time. Try purposely to read faster. Give yourself a time limit for a specific text that you are reading.

Reading is a wonderfully stimulating mental activity. It expands your reality and capability. You have so much to gain in discovering the joys of reading. So, go ahead and take down a book right now.

Are you interested in speed reading for yourself or a dear one? If so, please visit our website called Speed Reading.

categories: speed reading,reading,books,articles,hobbies,career,entertainment,education,school,college,self help,self improvement,homeschooling,other