Homeschooling For Dummies - Jennifer Kaufeld

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      Teaching in small blocks

      When you begin with littles, use small chunks of learning time. Ten or 15 minutes at a time is plenty. Ten minutes of playing with math blocks every day for a week is decidedly better than attempting to teach math to a young learner once each week for 50 minutes. Both of you will end up in tears.

      Sometimes one activity can work for several things. Did you locate a great drawing of springtime or autumn for coloring? You can talk about the seasons, the flowers, the weather, and clothing changes. Taking it a bit further, you can use that page to talk about color selections, primary colors, secondary colors, and the various colors of the sky. All kinds of subject matter can fit into that one coloring page.

      

Remember that play is part of the package. Children learn through play. A good playtime will lead them to exercise and process what they’ve been learning at the same time. When you’re finished with your coloring page and your counting blocks, your read-alouds and your letter formation, send the child to play. Young learners should spend most of their waking hours playing rather than schooling. It helps their imagination and their creativity, and you’ll see the benefits of that during schooltime.

      Using the objects you own

      Homeschooling from the beginning doesn’t have to break the bank. Want a puppet to help you tell a story? A favorite stuffed animal works just fine. Need objects to demonstrate how to count, add, or subtract? Anything you have in quantity will work: buttons, pennies, peanuts, or even your child’s massive collection of little rubber ducks.

      Maybe you can do it all. Maybe you happen to have advanced degrees in mathematics, English, engineering, and chemistry. (If you do, I need your phone number because I could use some of your expertise.) Does that sound ludicrous? By the time we’re old enough to juggle life, work, and family, plus get dinner on the table most nights, we know to the depths of our soul that nobody can do it all. I can’t do it all, and you probably can’t either.

      Speaking to your strengths

      You do, however, have some pretty great strengths. Maybe you play soccer well, exhibit a flair for flower arranging, or balance the family’s financial books effortlessly. These abilities trace back to specific skills: in this case, an athletic ability, design skill, and prowess with numbers.

      These are the things that you can pass on to your children. Although they may not be born with extreme athletic ability, you know enough about soccer (and probably some other team sports) to get them started in the right direction. You know that regularly moving your body for a period of time makes you feel better and enhances your general health. These are tidbits of knowledge that you share, and you don’t need a textbook to do it. To you, this probably qualifies as part of life, but in the school setting they call this “education.”

      And if something is important enough to you that you spend the time to excel at it, you probably want your children to at least have a nodding acquaintance with the skills involved. Your child can learn to balance a checkbook and follow the stock market without needing to declare finance as a college major; there’s a big difference between developing a life skill and a vocation. (Some skills and talents may develop into that vocational specialty, but they don’t have to.)

Sometimes it’s those things you learned the hard way that you want to pass on the most — I learned to cook from my college roommates, so I make a concentrated effort to teach my children nutrition, meal planning, and basic cooking skills. On the other hand, my mother taught me to make pies, so that’s important for me to pass along as well.

      Teaching them what you don’t know

      What? You don’t specialize in calculus functions and genetics? Let me tell you a secret: neither do I. Yet these are subjects I may want to cover, especially when my children reach high school. Thankfully, resources are available outside of running to the library and cramming for the calculus course that I might need to teach four or more years down the road.

      A couple of my available resources live and breathe — maybe yours do, too. Many non-teaching homeschool parents who opt out of daily tutorial time with the children feel like they can’t relate to elementary subjects, such as beginning addition and grammar. The closer you get to high-school-level courses, however, the more comfortable adult members of your family and adult friends may feel with sharing what they know with your soon-to-be-in-high-school children. They then function as some of your most valuable resources, as they help by teaching what they know (which, in turn, keeps you out of the library till the wee hours of the morning researching a subject about which you have no clue).

      Use the people and organizations around you to fill in the gaps that you perceive in your own knowledge. The help may be as simple as a self-teaching textbook that guides your learner into the knowledge he needs, or it may mean locating a personal tutor. Here are a few ideas to get you started. Hopefully they’ll jump-start your thinker and point you in the right direction:

       Turn to local athletic groups such as the YMCA or parks department for courses. These organizations teach tennis, swimming, fencing, basketball, aerobics, and a host of other sports and athletic skills.

       Engage a volunteer homeschool parent who specializes in what you don’t. Maybe that mom across the city majored in biology, exactly the subject that you need for your ninth grader. Give her a call.

       Trade skills and accomplishments. Although your homeschool friend feels confident teaching advanced grammar, you love to teach various needlework techniques. If you need an English tutor and your friend wants someone to teach a home economics class, a trade is in order. Meet at one person’s house and trade children for an hour or so until all the children learn the skills they lack. COPING WITH HELP THAT YOU DON'T THINK YOU NEEDWe all come up against it sometime: that well meaning yet annoying help from those around us. Generally, it comes from family members indoctrinated into the educational scene, such as your sister the public school teacher or your father the assistant superintendent. Once in a while, you hear the horror stories that come from Aunt Mathilde who just loves to pass along anything gory, and bizarre homeschool stories top her favorites list.Helpful family members and neighbors are enough to drive you crazy, especially when they’re helpful in that nonhelpful sort of way. Demeaning your choice to homeschool and privately telling your children that their parents are wrong does not classify as helpful. This only places a wedge between parents and the antagonistic adult.Your best bet is to quietly stand your ground and let time speak for itself. Anytime you walk outside of someone’s frame of reference, you’re bound to hear interesting comments from people. The bottom line is that this is your child and your child’s education, which makes it your prerogative if you want to teach them at home. As your child makes progress, others will see it. It may take several years, but eventually they have to face the truth in front of them: Your child is learning, and she does it outside a traditional classroom setting.Be patient with family members who truly try to be helpful but consistently miss the mark. They want to support

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