Education Cijasindikata

The decision to home school your children has been made.  Where to begin?  What to avoid?  What to do?  Here are some good starting points.

Join homeschooling clubs, support groups or co-ops.  These can be invaluable sources of information for you.  There are many parents out there with the same ideas about education and values that you have.  All of the groups may not be aligned with your values.  Keep looking until you find some that you share something in common with.
Attend a convention or curriculum fair in your state to learn about available resources.  Most states have these yearly.
Find out what is legally required in your state.  It varies.
Select the curriculum that best fits your teaching style and your child’s learning style.  Or, take what works for you from each one and become an eclectic educator!
Read, read, read.  There are many books and magazines dedicated to home schooling.
Stay organized.  Plan ahead how you are going to handle record keeping, how you are going to assess learning, how you are going to spend your days, and how you are going to teach certain concepts.  Teachers in public and private schools spend a great deal of time planning.  You need to plan as well.  However, don’t over plan.  You don’t want to simulate the school system by becoming inflexible due to plans that have been made.
A fun tip is to give your home school a name, mascot, colors, and perhaps even a logo!  Have the kids participate in this.  It will give them ownership and allegiance to “their” school.
Don’t worry so much about socialization or the lack thereof.  Kids don’t necessarily need to be in a school setting in order to have their social needs and growth met.  There are lots of home schooling co-ops and groups that hold organized activities.  Church activities, the Boy and Girl Scouts, and other community clubs can provide a much healthier social activity schedule for your children.  Many home schooling groups get together for field trips or lessons.
Sports activities do not have to end if you are home schooling either.  Look into your local recreational center, the YMCA, and local sports leagues.  Many home schooling groups have organized sports leagues themselves.  Also, check with the public school division in your town.  Some of them are allowing home schooled children to participate in clubs, bands, and interscholastic sports.  It varies from state to state and from division to division.  It doesn’t hurt to inquire.

Don’t stress, you are getting ready to embark on a pretty exciting journey with your children.  There are a plethora of people and groups willing to embrace your decision and support you in your endeavors.

To discover just how many homeschool group leaders agonize over getting their members to become more actively involved in their support groups. A whopping one-third of our readers want to know how to motivate parents to attend events regularly, to share the workload, to keep their word, and to get out of the “give-me” mode.

Even as we began speaking to homeschool group leaders at workshops, we discovered that there is nothing new under the sun—everyone is dying to know how to inspire members to willingly contribute to the life of the group.

Then it dawned on us. Why not take our combined years of leadership experience, distill them down to the very essence of what works for us and for others and put it into a power-packed resource that would skyrocket results for homeschool leaders who want to inspire their members to participate regularly and joyfully? Out of a desire to help you, this e-book, One By One: The Homeschool Group Leader’s Guide to Motivating Your Members, was born.

“Do you ever feel like the Lone Ranger, but dream of an army of volunteers to come riding gallantly in on white horses to save you from frustration, fatigue and burn out?”

Here at Homeschool Group Leader, we cheer you as an unsung hero.

Leaders like you, who have a servant heart and a steadfast commitment to quality education and values, are the backbone of a growing educational revolution that is spreading the globe.

Here in America and around the world, more than 2 and a half million children are educated at home, with the vast majority of those parents seeking an innovative support group just like yours.

We are here to say that you are too valuable to ride off into the sunset too soon. One By One has come to your rescue just in the nick of time. We reveal hidden treasures that teach leaders how to spur their members on toward willingly participating in the activities of the group and doing what they say they’ll do.
Special Features that Are All Yours With the Download of This E-Guide:
Two Experienced Coaches—We teach you, play-by-play, how to relate to each type of homeschooler in your group. It’s like having us right next to you, coaching you through every move and cheering you on.

Biblically Based—This project has been prayed over from start to finish. We have a passion for helping leaders like you reach your full potential by encouraging you to follow Christ as your Visionary Leader.

Practical Strategies for Relating to All Types of Members—From the shy mom to the occasional dad to the aloof teen to the experienced homeschool parent, and many others, we teach you proven ways to draw them each into your group, tap into their natural talents and watch them shine.
Real-life experiences from homeschool group leaders like you who’ve had success with inspiring their members are shared for you to enjoy and learn from.

This e-guide saves you the pain of wearing yourself too thin and losing valuable time making mistakes. It is designed to help you feel confident that you will have methods that work and can motivate people to action right from the get-go.

try it now

Some people will tell you about the cons of teaching children at home, but I’m here to represent the pros of homeschooling. Many parents don’t understand what goes on at their kids’ schools these days. It’s not the 1950′s anymore. Classrooms are being dumbed-down to allow the under achievers to move on to higher grade levels to keep the schools’ achievement rate high for funding purposes or conversely, to avoid being put on a watch list by their state education board. Smart students are being penalized in certain cases because they are being held back from their full educational potential and in certain instances being used to tutor the slower students. This can cause boredom and early educational burnout for the gifted student.

Homeschooling can be tailored to fit your child’s abilities and learning styles. Some kids learn better with quiet study, for example.

Not many public schools afford that kind of quiet. Others learn better with one-on-one coaching and encouragement. That’s exactly what homeschooling is about. Some students get anxious about riding a school bus for sometimes hours a day. With homeschooling, there is no commute. You’re already there when you wake up.

Another example of the pros of homeschooling is the fact that you can advance the education of your child as fast or slow as you need or want. If someone has a learning disability for example, you can go more slowly and use techniques to teach that may not be available in public school. It also removes the embarrassment that other school kids might inflict on a slow learner. On the opposite side of the argument, if your child shows gifted qualities in learning, you can feed them information as fast as they can absorb it.

You can offer a broader and deeper base of knowledge on certain subjects if your child wants it. They can begin to become experts in fields of their choice or yours.

Peer pressure in public schools can be quite overwhelming for certain students, especially in their teen years. Fitting in and being popular is somehow more important than learning at most schools. And if you happen to be a student with some sort of physical trait looked upon as being different or uncool, you’re going to suffer the wrath of the student body. Don’t we all remember someone like that in our public school experience? Even if you didn’t participate in the razzing, it was difficult to watch wasn’t it? You probably wonder like I do at times whatever happened to some of those poor kids. All they did to receive such admonishment was not be able to afford the latest clothes fashions or had ears that were perceived to stick out too much or maybe they had a little weight problem. Even the slightest variance from what the popular crowd thought was cool would bring this kind of treatment. This is another of the possible pros of homeschooling. It all goes away before it can even start. Your child won’t have to loathe going to school every day to face this sort of ill treatment. They can concentrate of the joys of learning and feel good about themselves.

There’s another point to make. If your child is experiencing this sort of treatment in public school now, take them away from it and homeschool. There’s really no reason not to. Whatever their age, get them out of that situation before it does permanent damage in the form of hating school, low self-esteem or worse. Allow them to enjoy learning again and relieve the harassment. You’ll both be happier as a result.

To me, the pros of homeschooling far outweigh the cons by a large margin. It’s more natural, it relieves the student of enormous peer pressure, it allows for a more personal teaching style and it presents an opportunity for a gifted student to excel. What could be better than that?