Home schooling is one of the finest options for students who need special needs, certain educational beliefs that do not go well with traditional lesson plans, or regular scheduling issues. Majority of parents are not satisfied and happy with the performance of their children at school. Home schooling is regarded as the best tool to observe the progress of a child in making him or her capable of handling the educational pressure and also to provide the complete learning cycle in class.
Home schooling skills are specially acquired skills to reach out to troubled children and help them in every aspect to do well in their studies. You can add so much of experimentation and philosophies into the study methodologies to make it a real fun. With so much variety to the home school methods and practices, children will realize their worth and will able to learn fast. Let's take a look at some of these methods.
Structured Home schooling
This particular method is also known as "School-at-home" or "Traditional", where students are taught in a traditional school setting. Here, parents act as initial teachers and try to help their child in their studies or curriculum. Nowadays, packaged curriculum materials are also available and parents can easily purchase it from the market.
Classical Education
The expert resources in this method teach subjects through main three ways:
Grammar: In this phase, grammar or concepts are being taught to get the basic clearly.
Logic: Here, critical thinking is given importance and children are expected to apply logics fro solving problems.
Rhetoric: In this phase, proper evaluation of information is done by students, which is followed by healthy information.
The Montessori Method
In this process of learning, students are understood as both teacher and student. Here, learning is considered as a natural and self-directed process. Also, this method tells that children are free to experiment and learn with the results.
The child is free to learn at his/her own pace by interacting with and responding to the environment. The parent or teacher, acting as "keeper of the environment," is supposed to create an engaging setting that encourages the child to explore and react with the surroundings. For younger students, this even includes providing child-sized learning tools such as small chairs and tables.
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Children's Easel In The Home
A Children's Easel is a wonderful gift to give your child. They are especially nice for the younger children, because they are easily set up and put away for those who tend to want to do something one minute and something completely different the next. In comparison to art on the kitchen table a Children's Easel will save you time in preparation and cleanup. Many children's easels or creation stations have tubs or trays at the bottom for art supply storage. Some even come with wheels which makes taking it in and out a lot easier. Children need some time everyday set aside for creativity and a children's easel gives them a safe and isolated place to do that.
Small children are very bouncy and full of energy which can make it hard for them to sit down and focus on a project. With a Children's Easel your child will be able to color till they can't focus anymore, then go play and come back whenever and color some more. With this age group, it can be a hassle setting up you dinning room table with breakfast and cleanup, then a project and cleanup, then lunch and cleanup. A Children's Easel offers the child their own separate little space to do their thing.
Use your children's easel regularly. This way when they see their Children's Easel coming out, they get excited to paint or color or do what ever project out have in store for them. When you bring it out try different spots like out side in the yard or in the kitchen while you prepare dinner. The Children Easel makes it so they don't associate being creative one place. They can express themselves about more of the world around them when they are actually seeing the world around them. Take a small foldable easel and a pack of crayons or pastels with your child on a hike. Watch them try to draw trees and squirrels and bears that they haven't even seen. Their imaginations can be inspired in many different ways.
Using a Children's Easel also gets a child used to the correct way of making art. From a full standing uninhibited position. If children find their potential as artists and want to become one when they grow up, they will be one step ahead having already learned to express themselves with their full bodies and learning to step back and look at their work from farther away. This process helps an artist to view the piece as a whole, an object of beauty, and not simply focus on the details that you see from up close.
When searching for the right children's easel try to find one with a clear plastic surface. There are so many more things you can do with this type of Children's Easel, especially a double sided clears plastic easel. With a double sided easel your child can draw with a buddy and with a see through easel they can have a lot of fun looking at each other and perhaps even tracing each other through the easel. If you have a lot of kids there are 4 sided easels and even six station space saver easels.
Small children are very bouncy and full of energy which can make it hard for them to sit down and focus on a project. With a Children's Easel your child will be able to color till they can't focus anymore, then go play and come back whenever and color some more. With this age group, it can be a hassle setting up you dinning room table with breakfast and cleanup, then a project and cleanup, then lunch and cleanup. A Children's Easel offers the child their own separate little space to do their thing.
Use your children's easel regularly. This way when they see their Children's Easel coming out, they get excited to paint or color or do what ever project out have in store for them. When you bring it out try different spots like out side in the yard or in the kitchen while you prepare dinner. The Children Easel makes it so they don't associate being creative one place. They can express themselves about more of the world around them when they are actually seeing the world around them. Take a small foldable easel and a pack of crayons or pastels with your child on a hike. Watch them try to draw trees and squirrels and bears that they haven't even seen. Their imaginations can be inspired in many different ways.
Using a Children's Easel also gets a child used to the correct way of making art. From a full standing uninhibited position. If children find their potential as artists and want to become one when they grow up, they will be one step ahead having already learned to express themselves with their full bodies and learning to step back and look at their work from farther away. This process helps an artist to view the piece as a whole, an object of beauty, and not simply focus on the details that you see from up close.
When searching for the right children's easel try to find one with a clear plastic surface. There are so many more things you can do with this type of Children's Easel, especially a double sided clears plastic easel. With a double sided easel your child can draw with a buddy and with a see through easel they can have a lot of fun looking at each other and perhaps even tracing each other through the easel. If you have a lot of kids there are 4 sided easels and even six station space saver easels.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
The Future Of Education Eliminates The Classroom
This probably sounds familiar: You are with a group of friends
arguing about some piece of trivia or historical fact. Someone says,
“Wait, let me look this up on Wikipedia,” and proceeds to read the
information out loud to the whole group, thus resolving the argument.
Don’t dismiss this as a trivial occasion. It represents a learning
moment, or more precisely, a microlearning moment, and it foreshadows a
much larger transformation--to what I call socialstructed learning.
Socialstructed learning is an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards. The microlearning moment may last a few minutes, hours, or days (if you are absorbed in reading something, tinkering with something, or listening to something from which you just can’t walk away). Socialstructed learning may be the future, but the foundations of this kind of education lie far in the past. Leading philosophers of education--from Socrates to Plutarch, Rousseau to Dewey--talked about many of these ideals centuries ago. Today, we have a host of tools to make their vision reality.
Think of a simple augmented reality app on your iPhone such as Yelp Monocle. When you point the phone’s camera toward a particular location, it displays “points of interest” in that location, such as restaurants, stores, and museums. But this is just the beginning. What if, instead of restaurant and store information, we could access historical, artistic, demographic, environmental, architectural, and other kinds of information embedded in the real world?
This is exactly what a project from USC and UCLA called HyperCities is doing: layering historical information on the actual city terrain. As you walk around with your cell phone, you can point to a site and see what it looked like a century ago, who lived there, what the environment was like. Not interested in architecture, passionate about botany and landscaping instead? The Smithsonian’s free iPhone and iPad app, Leafsnap, responds when you take a photo of a tree leaf by instantly searching a growing library of leaf images amassed by the Smithsonian Institution. In seconds, it displays a likely species name along with high-resolution photographs of and information on the tree’s flowers, fruit, seeds, and bark. We are turning each pixel of our geography into a live textbook and a live encyclopedia.
So look beyond MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in thinking about the future education. In our focus on MOOCs and how they are likely to disrupt existing classrooms and educational institutions, particularly colleges and universities, we are missing the much larger story. Today’s obsession with MOOCs is a reminder of the old forecasting paradigm: In the early stages of technology introduction we try to fit new technologies into existing social structures in ways that have become familiar to us.
MOOCs today are our equivalents of early TV, when TV personalities looked and sounded like radio announcers (or often were radio announcers). People are thinking the same way about MOOCs, as replacements of traditional lectures or tutorials, but in online rather than physical settings. In the meantime, a whole slew of forces is driving a much larger transformation, breaking learning (and education overall) out of traditional institutional environments and embedding it in everyday settings and interactions, distributed across a wide set of platforms and tools. They include a rapidly growing and open content commons (Wikipedia is just one example), on-demand expertise and help (from Mac Forums to Fluther, Instructables, and WikiHow), mobile devices and geo-coded information that takes information into the physical world around us and makes it available any place any time, new work and social spaces that are, in fact, evolving as important learning spaces (TechShop, Meetups, hackathons, community labs).
We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) that, for better and worse, have served as the main gateways to education and social mobility. Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows.
Instead of worrying about how to distribute scarce educational resources, the challenge we need to start grappling with in the era of socialstructed learning is how to attract people to dip into the rapidly growing flow of learning resources and how to do this equitably, in order to create more opportunities for a better life for more people.
Socialstructed learning is an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards. The microlearning moment may last a few minutes, hours, or days (if you are absorbed in reading something, tinkering with something, or listening to something from which you just can’t walk away). Socialstructed learning may be the future, but the foundations of this kind of education lie far in the past. Leading philosophers of education--from Socrates to Plutarch, Rousseau to Dewey--talked about many of these ideals centuries ago. Today, we have a host of tools to make their vision reality.
Think of a simple augmented reality app on your iPhone such as Yelp Monocle. When you point the phone’s camera toward a particular location, it displays “points of interest” in that location, such as restaurants, stores, and museums. But this is just the beginning. What if, instead of restaurant and store information, we could access historical, artistic, demographic, environmental, architectural, and other kinds of information embedded in the real world?
This is exactly what a project from USC and UCLA called HyperCities is doing: layering historical information on the actual city terrain. As you walk around with your cell phone, you can point to a site and see what it looked like a century ago, who lived there, what the environment was like. Not interested in architecture, passionate about botany and landscaping instead? The Smithsonian’s free iPhone and iPad app, Leafsnap, responds when you take a photo of a tree leaf by instantly searching a growing library of leaf images amassed by the Smithsonian Institution. In seconds, it displays a likely species name along with high-resolution photographs of and information on the tree’s flowers, fruit, seeds, and bark. We are turning each pixel of our geography into a live textbook and a live encyclopedia.
So look beyond MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in thinking about the future education. In our focus on MOOCs and how they are likely to disrupt existing classrooms and educational institutions, particularly colleges and universities, we are missing the much larger story. Today’s obsession with MOOCs is a reminder of the old forecasting paradigm: In the early stages of technology introduction we try to fit new technologies into existing social structures in ways that have become familiar to us.
MOOCs today are our equivalents of early TV, when TV personalities looked and sounded like radio announcers (or often were radio announcers). People are thinking the same way about MOOCs, as replacements of traditional lectures or tutorials, but in online rather than physical settings. In the meantime, a whole slew of forces is driving a much larger transformation, breaking learning (and education overall) out of traditional institutional environments and embedding it in everyday settings and interactions, distributed across a wide set of platforms and tools. They include a rapidly growing and open content commons (Wikipedia is just one example), on-demand expertise and help (from Mac Forums to Fluther, Instructables, and WikiHow), mobile devices and geo-coded information that takes information into the physical world around us and makes it available any place any time, new work and social spaces that are, in fact, evolving as important learning spaces (TechShop, Meetups, hackathons, community labs).
We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) that, for better and worse, have served as the main gateways to education and social mobility. Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows.
Instead of worrying about how to distribute scarce educational resources, the challenge we need to start grappling with in the era of socialstructed learning is how to attract people to dip into the rapidly growing flow of learning resources and how to do this equitably, in order to create more opportunities for a better life for more people.
English as Language of Global Education
PARIS, April 7 — When economics students returned this winter to the elite École Normale Supérieure here, copies of a simple one-page petition were posted in the corridors demanding an unlikely privilege: French as a teaching language.
“We understand that economics is a discipline, like most scientific fields, where the research is published in English,” the petition read, in apologetic tones. But it declared that it was unacceptable for a native French professor to teach standard courses to French-speaking students in the adopted tongue of English.
In the shifting universe of global academia, English is becoming as commonplace as creeping ivy and mortarboards. In the last five years, the world’s top business schools and universities have been pushing to make English the teaching tongue in a calculated strategy to raise revenues by attracting more international students and as a way to respond to globalization.
Business universities are driving the trend, partly because changes in international accreditation standards in the late 1990s required them to include English-language components. But English is also spreading to the undergraduate level, with some South Korean universities offering up to 30 percent of their courses in the language. The former president of Korea University in Seoul sought to raise that share to 60 percent, but ultimately was not re-elected to his post in December.
In Madrid, business students can take their admissions test in English for the elite Instituto de Empresa and enroll in core courses for a master’s degree in business administration in the same language. The Lille School of Management in France stopped considering English a foreign language in 1999, and now half the postgraduate programs are taught in English to accommodate a rising number of international students.
Over the last three years, the number of master’s programs offered in English at universities with another host language has more than doubled, to 3,300 programs at 1,700 universities, according to David A. Wilson, chief executive of the Graduate Management Admission Council, an international organization of leading business schools that is based in McLean, Va.
“We are shifting to English. Why?” said Laurent Bibard, the dean of M.B.A. programs at Essec, a top French business school in a suburb of Paris that is a fertile breeding ground for chief executives.
“It’s the language for international teaching,” he said. “English allows students to be able to come from anyplace in the world and for our students — the French ones — to go everywhere.”
This year the university is celebrating its 100th anniversary in its adopted tongue. Its new publicity film debuted in English and French. Along one of the main roads leading into Paris loomed a giant blue billboard boasting of the anniversary in French and, in smaller letters, in English.
Essec has also taken advantage of the increased revenue that foreign students — English-speaking ones — can bring in. Its population of foreign students has leapt by 38 percent in four years, to 909 today out of a student body of 3,700.
The tuition for a two-year master’s degree in business administration is 19,800 euros for European Union citizens, and 34,000 euros for non-EU citizens.
“The French market for local students is not unlimited,” said Christophe N. Bredillet, the associate dean for the Lille School of Management’s M.B.A. and postgraduate programs. “Revenue is very important, and in order to provide good services, we need to cover our expenses for the library and research journals. We need to cover all these things with a bigger number of students so it’s quite important to attract international students.”
With the jump in foreign students, Essec now offers 25 percent of its 200 courses in English. Its ambition is to accelerate the English offerings to 50 percent in the next three years.
Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño, dean of the Instituto de Empresa, argues that the trend is a natural consequence of globalization, with English functioning as Latin did in the 13th century as the lingua franca most used by universities.
“English is being adapted as a working language, but it’s not Oxford English,” he said. “It’s a language that most stakeholders speak.” He carries out conversation on a blog, deanstalk.net, in English.
But getting students to feel comfortable speaking English in the classroom is easier said than done. When younger French students at Essec start a required course in organizational analysis, the atmosphere is marked by long, uncomfortable silences, said Alan Jenkins, a management professor and academic director of the executive M.B.A. program.
“They are very good on written tasks, but there’s a lot of reticence on oral communication and talking with the teacher,” Dr. Jenkins said, adding that he used role-playing to encourage students to speak. He also refuses to speak in French. “I have to force myself to say, ‘Can you give me that in English?’ ”
Officials at Ewha Womans University in Seoul are also aware that they face a difficult task at the first stage of their Global 2010 project, which will require new students to take four classes in English, two under the tutelage of native English-speaking professors. The 120-year-old university has embarked on a hiring spree to attract 50 foreign professors.
At the beginning, “teaching courses in English may have less efficiency or effectiveness in terms of knowledge transfer than those courses taught in Korean,” said Anna Suh, program manager for the university’s office of global affairs, who said that students eventually see the benefits. “Our aim for this kind of program is to prepare and equip our students to be global leaders in this new era of internationalization.”
The Lille management school is planning to open a satellite business school program next fall in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where the working language will also be in English.
“Internationally, the competition is everywhere,” Dr. Bredillet said. “For a master’s in management, I’m competing with George Washington University. I’m competing with some programs in Germany, Norway and the U.K. That’s why we’re delivering the curriculum in English.”
“We understand that economics is a discipline, like most scientific fields, where the research is published in English,” the petition read, in apologetic tones. But it declared that it was unacceptable for a native French professor to teach standard courses to French-speaking students in the adopted tongue of English.
In the shifting universe of global academia, English is becoming as commonplace as creeping ivy and mortarboards. In the last five years, the world’s top business schools and universities have been pushing to make English the teaching tongue in a calculated strategy to raise revenues by attracting more international students and as a way to respond to globalization.
Business universities are driving the trend, partly because changes in international accreditation standards in the late 1990s required them to include English-language components. But English is also spreading to the undergraduate level, with some South Korean universities offering up to 30 percent of their courses in the language. The former president of Korea University in Seoul sought to raise that share to 60 percent, but ultimately was not re-elected to his post in December.
In Madrid, business students can take their admissions test in English for the elite Instituto de Empresa and enroll in core courses for a master’s degree in business administration in the same language. The Lille School of Management in France stopped considering English a foreign language in 1999, and now half the postgraduate programs are taught in English to accommodate a rising number of international students.
Over the last three years, the number of master’s programs offered in English at universities with another host language has more than doubled, to 3,300 programs at 1,700 universities, according to David A. Wilson, chief executive of the Graduate Management Admission Council, an international organization of leading business schools that is based in McLean, Va.
“We are shifting to English. Why?” said Laurent Bibard, the dean of M.B.A. programs at Essec, a top French business school in a suburb of Paris that is a fertile breeding ground for chief executives.
“It’s the language for international teaching,” he said. “English allows students to be able to come from anyplace in the world and for our students — the French ones — to go everywhere.”
This year the university is celebrating its 100th anniversary in its adopted tongue. Its new publicity film debuted in English and French. Along one of the main roads leading into Paris loomed a giant blue billboard boasting of the anniversary in French and, in smaller letters, in English.
Essec has also taken advantage of the increased revenue that foreign students — English-speaking ones — can bring in. Its population of foreign students has leapt by 38 percent in four years, to 909 today out of a student body of 3,700.
The tuition for a two-year master’s degree in business administration is 19,800 euros for European Union citizens, and 34,000 euros for non-EU citizens.
“The French market for local students is not unlimited,” said Christophe N. Bredillet, the associate dean for the Lille School of Management’s M.B.A. and postgraduate programs. “Revenue is very important, and in order to provide good services, we need to cover our expenses for the library and research journals. We need to cover all these things with a bigger number of students so it’s quite important to attract international students.”
With the jump in foreign students, Essec now offers 25 percent of its 200 courses in English. Its ambition is to accelerate the English offerings to 50 percent in the next three years.
Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño, dean of the Instituto de Empresa, argues that the trend is a natural consequence of globalization, with English functioning as Latin did in the 13th century as the lingua franca most used by universities.
“English is being adapted as a working language, but it’s not Oxford English,” he said. “It’s a language that most stakeholders speak.” He carries out conversation on a blog, deanstalk.net, in English.
But getting students to feel comfortable speaking English in the classroom is easier said than done. When younger French students at Essec start a required course in organizational analysis, the atmosphere is marked by long, uncomfortable silences, said Alan Jenkins, a management professor and academic director of the executive M.B.A. program.
“They are very good on written tasks, but there’s a lot of reticence on oral communication and talking with the teacher,” Dr. Jenkins said, adding that he used role-playing to encourage students to speak. He also refuses to speak in French. “I have to force myself to say, ‘Can you give me that in English?’ ”
Officials at Ewha Womans University in Seoul are also aware that they face a difficult task at the first stage of their Global 2010 project, which will require new students to take four classes in English, two under the tutelage of native English-speaking professors. The 120-year-old university has embarked on a hiring spree to attract 50 foreign professors.
At the beginning, “teaching courses in English may have less efficiency or effectiveness in terms of knowledge transfer than those courses taught in Korean,” said Anna Suh, program manager for the university’s office of global affairs, who said that students eventually see the benefits. “Our aim for this kind of program is to prepare and equip our students to be global leaders in this new era of internationalization.”
The Lille management school is planning to open a satellite business school program next fall in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where the working language will also be in English.
“Internationally, the competition is everywhere,” Dr. Bredillet said. “For a master’s in management, I’m competing with George Washington University. I’m competing with some programs in Germany, Norway and the U.K. That’s why we’re delivering the curriculum in English.”
Child-Led Education
Child-led Education
There are many different forms of home education. One of the forms that is gaining some popularity is child-led education. Child-led education is a method by which the children are allowed to study and learn what interests them. Some people also call this type of education unschooling. Part of the reason that this type of education is labeled unschooling is because it does not follow the traditional education model of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
In child-led learning the children determine the direction and intensity of their education. They follow their interests. For example, an elementary student with an interest in volcanos might research more about them on the internet, check out books from the library about lava, and build their own volcanos out of materials provided by parents. The parent is there to facilitate learning, but does not necessary plan lessons or give lectures.
Because the student is following their own interests they are often move involved with the subject, and they consider the subjects less dry or boring, because the subjects are of their own choosing. Students may study one subject at a time, or
may move from interest to interest throughout the day. Again, this would be determined by the student’s own interests.
Understandably, child-led education may leave some parts of the child’s education lacking because each student will not be interested in all subjects equally and therefore will not study all subjects with the same intensity. For a student with no
interest in math the argument against child-led education is that the student will choose not to ever study math.
This is not a correct assumption however. While the student might not ever undertake official education in math, at some point it is presumed that the student will want to learn something that requires math, and in order to follow the interest that they have will undertake math to facilitate that subject.
A direct example of that might be the child wanting to build a mathematically correct pyramid as part of their study of Egypt. The student will need three dimensional geometry to build the pyramid correctly, and since the student has an interest in the pyramid, they will then learn the geometry.
One might also argue that unschooling or child-led education will not prepare students adequately for real world learning, or employment. While a student’s education might not be complete with child-led education there is a theory that the students will have intense knowledge in some subjects and a curiosity and desire to learn that will allow them to fill in the missing information when they desire to.
Many homeschooling parents, having been educated either in traditional schools, or homeschooled using traditional education as a model, will be uncomfortable allowing their children to lead the education. For these parents there are modifications to child-led education that can fill both traditional sensibilities about education as well as student-led learning.
One way to modify the child-led model is to teach traditional course work during part of the school day, and then allow the student to use that knowledge to enhance their own learning and follow their own interest for another part of the day. By allowing special projects, or electives of the student’s choosing, it is possible to get not only the benefits of traditional education but also the benefits of allowing the child to follow their own interests.
By providing an education rich environment for the student, parents are able to maintain some control, and also allow the student to made determinations about the direction of their education. As students get older, this flexibility in learning might pay dividends beyond what either traditional education, or child-led education might pay if used separately.
There are many different forms of home education. One of the forms that is gaining some popularity is child-led education. Child-led education is a method by which the children are allowed to study and learn what interests them. Some people also call this type of education unschooling. Part of the reason that this type of education is labeled unschooling is because it does not follow the traditional education model of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
In child-led learning the children determine the direction and intensity of their education. They follow their interests. For example, an elementary student with an interest in volcanos might research more about them on the internet, check out books from the library about lava, and build their own volcanos out of materials provided by parents. The parent is there to facilitate learning, but does not necessary plan lessons or give lectures.
Because the student is following their own interests they are often move involved with the subject, and they consider the subjects less dry or boring, because the subjects are of their own choosing. Students may study one subject at a time, or
may move from interest to interest throughout the day. Again, this would be determined by the student’s own interests.
Understandably, child-led education may leave some parts of the child’s education lacking because each student will not be interested in all subjects equally and therefore will not study all subjects with the same intensity. For a student with no
interest in math the argument against child-led education is that the student will choose not to ever study math.
This is not a correct assumption however. While the student might not ever undertake official education in math, at some point it is presumed that the student will want to learn something that requires math, and in order to follow the interest that they have will undertake math to facilitate that subject.
A direct example of that might be the child wanting to build a mathematically correct pyramid as part of their study of Egypt. The student will need three dimensional geometry to build the pyramid correctly, and since the student has an interest in the pyramid, they will then learn the geometry.
One might also argue that unschooling or child-led education will not prepare students adequately for real world learning, or employment. While a student’s education might not be complete with child-led education there is a theory that the students will have intense knowledge in some subjects and a curiosity and desire to learn that will allow them to fill in the missing information when they desire to.
Many homeschooling parents, having been educated either in traditional schools, or homeschooled using traditional education as a model, will be uncomfortable allowing their children to lead the education. For these parents there are modifications to child-led education that can fill both traditional sensibilities about education as well as student-led learning.
One way to modify the child-led model is to teach traditional course work during part of the school day, and then allow the student to use that knowledge to enhance their own learning and follow their own interest for another part of the day. By allowing special projects, or electives of the student’s choosing, it is possible to get not only the benefits of traditional education but also the benefits of allowing the child to follow their own interests.
By providing an education rich environment for the student, parents are able to maintain some control, and also allow the student to made determinations about the direction of their education. As students get older, this flexibility in learning might pay dividends beyond what either traditional education, or child-led education might pay if used separately.
Home Education : Pros and Cons
In every situation there are pros and cons. Homeschooling is no
different. It is important for parents who are considering
homeschooling to see both sides of the picture as well as the options
available to them.
The Pros
1. Educational freedom: Homeschooling allows parents to choose what their children will learn. There is growing concern that parents of children in public schools will not be allowed access to the curriculum that their child is learning. When parents choose to homeschool, they are making a decision to be actively involved not only in their children’s lives but in their children’s education.
Parents may choose to include religious education in theirchild’s studies. Parents will make decisions about the age children will be when they are instructed in sexual education, alternate lifestyles, and social injustices. Rather than children being presented material that they are not ready for, homeschooling parents can judge when the student is ready emotionally.
2. Individualized education: In some ways the idea of individualized education is a natural outgrowth of the idea of education freedom. No one should know a child better than a parent. And no one should be a better advocate for a child than his parent. When you take that into consideration, homeschooling is great because it allows the education to be tailor-made for each child’s learning styles, abilities, and gifts.
Homeschooling allows students the benefit of learning at their own pace, as opposed to learning at a pace determined by teachers, based on the needs of 20-30 other students. If a student needs more time to learn a particular topic, then homeschool allows that time. This also applies to asynchronous learning. Students are not always on the same level in each subject.
Homeschooling allows for the student to be in one grade in math, a different one in science, and yet another in social studies.
3. Personal freedom: Homeschooling offers a level of personal freedom that is not accommodated in the traditional school system. Schedules for school time are based on what works for each family. Vacations or breaks can be taken any time
because the timing is determined by the family, not by the school system. Homeschool can be accomplished anywhere, and because of that it allows families to move for jobs when needed without worrying about children having to adjust to a new school. Homeschooling also means that families are not tied to housing in a particular neighborhood because of the school district.
This personal freedom extends to trying family circumstances as well. Homeschooling allows flexibility in education so that life can be accommodated. Sickness of a relative or the student, birth of a baby, injuries, etc., can be worked into homeschool schedules more easily than into traditional school schedules. Essentially, homeschooling makes it possible for the family to be in control of their time, rather than having a schedule dictated to them.
The Cons
1. The Stigma: Many people who are against homeschooling think that all homeschoolers are religious fanatics, or odd in some other way. Because this is a long held belief, and because at one time it might even have been truth, most homeschoolers are looked on as outside the norm. Homeschoolers are considered to be socially inadequate, and isolated.
Because the belief that homeschoolers are weird in some way persists, families who choose to homeschool will have to deal with doubters, and people who will question not only the ability of a parent to homeschool, but the wellbeing of the children as well. While the stigma is not entirely true, homeschooling families must deal with the prejudice. If their conviction
to homeschool is not strong, such negative views will often prevent a family
from choosing homeschooling.
2. Financial concerns: For one parent to stay at home full time to educate the children, the potential income of the family is reduced. In today’s uncertain economy, with lay-offs common and reduced work hours more likely, some families are not comfortable with only one income coming into the house. In fact, some families will be unable to make ends meet if both parents are not working.
Sacrifices may have to be made for a family to homeschool. There are a number of things that might help mitigate the financial impact of losing one income. Some of the pros of homeschooling might also weigh to counteract the financial concerns.
3. Emotional concerns: Emotional concerns are both a positive and a negative where homeschooling is concerned. On the
negative side, some children who are homeschooled feel isolated and lonely, as do the parent who is the primary instructor.
Also a potential negative, remember that homeschooling is a lifestyle, and places you in contact with your children for many hours every week that might otherwise be spent apart. If you do not think you can stand the emotional strain of being in your children’s
presence 24/7, homeschooling might not be a good option for you. Consider also the possible stress between parents when one parent spends many hours a day educating children as well as homekeeping.
Homeschooling can have positive emotional impacts as well. Family bonds are strengthened, peer pressure is reduced. Anxiety of
parents and students about safety in the school are also reduced when children are homeschooled. Students do not have to deal with bullying in homeschool, so that stressor is removed.
The pros and cons listed here are just a few of the things to consider if you are thinking about homeschooling. It is important to do your own research and see if homeschooling is a viable option for your family. There are as many situations in homeschooling as there are families who homeschool. Things that might be a con for one family might be considered a pro in a different situation with a different family. Make your own pro and con lists, talk to families who already homeschool, look for support groups in your area, and decide if the pros
outweigh the cons of homeschooling for your family.
The Pros
1. Educational freedom: Homeschooling allows parents to choose what their children will learn. There is growing concern that parents of children in public schools will not be allowed access to the curriculum that their child is learning. When parents choose to homeschool, they are making a decision to be actively involved not only in their children’s lives but in their children’s education.
Parents may choose to include religious education in theirchild’s studies. Parents will make decisions about the age children will be when they are instructed in sexual education, alternate lifestyles, and social injustices. Rather than children being presented material that they are not ready for, homeschooling parents can judge when the student is ready emotionally.
2. Individualized education: In some ways the idea of individualized education is a natural outgrowth of the idea of education freedom. No one should know a child better than a parent. And no one should be a better advocate for a child than his parent. When you take that into consideration, homeschooling is great because it allows the education to be tailor-made for each child’s learning styles, abilities, and gifts.
Homeschooling allows students the benefit of learning at their own pace, as opposed to learning at a pace determined by teachers, based on the needs of 20-30 other students. If a student needs more time to learn a particular topic, then homeschool allows that time. This also applies to asynchronous learning. Students are not always on the same level in each subject.
Homeschooling allows for the student to be in one grade in math, a different one in science, and yet another in social studies.
3. Personal freedom: Homeschooling offers a level of personal freedom that is not accommodated in the traditional school system. Schedules for school time are based on what works for each family. Vacations or breaks can be taken any time
because the timing is determined by the family, not by the school system. Homeschool can be accomplished anywhere, and because of that it allows families to move for jobs when needed without worrying about children having to adjust to a new school. Homeschooling also means that families are not tied to housing in a particular neighborhood because of the school district.
This personal freedom extends to trying family circumstances as well. Homeschooling allows flexibility in education so that life can be accommodated. Sickness of a relative or the student, birth of a baby, injuries, etc., can be worked into homeschool schedules more easily than into traditional school schedules. Essentially, homeschooling makes it possible for the family to be in control of their time, rather than having a schedule dictated to them.
The Cons
1. The Stigma: Many people who are against homeschooling think that all homeschoolers are religious fanatics, or odd in some other way. Because this is a long held belief, and because at one time it might even have been truth, most homeschoolers are looked on as outside the norm. Homeschoolers are considered to be socially inadequate, and isolated.
Because the belief that homeschoolers are weird in some way persists, families who choose to homeschool will have to deal with doubters, and people who will question not only the ability of a parent to homeschool, but the wellbeing of the children as well. While the stigma is not entirely true, homeschooling families must deal with the prejudice. If their conviction
to homeschool is not strong, such negative views will often prevent a family
from choosing homeschooling.
2. Financial concerns: For one parent to stay at home full time to educate the children, the potential income of the family is reduced. In today’s uncertain economy, with lay-offs common and reduced work hours more likely, some families are not comfortable with only one income coming into the house. In fact, some families will be unable to make ends meet if both parents are not working.
Sacrifices may have to be made for a family to homeschool. There are a number of things that might help mitigate the financial impact of losing one income. Some of the pros of homeschooling might also weigh to counteract the financial concerns.
3. Emotional concerns: Emotional concerns are both a positive and a negative where homeschooling is concerned. On the
negative side, some children who are homeschooled feel isolated and lonely, as do the parent who is the primary instructor.
Also a potential negative, remember that homeschooling is a lifestyle, and places you in contact with your children for many hours every week that might otherwise be spent apart. If you do not think you can stand the emotional strain of being in your children’s
presence 24/7, homeschooling might not be a good option for you. Consider also the possible stress between parents when one parent spends many hours a day educating children as well as homekeeping.
Homeschooling can have positive emotional impacts as well. Family bonds are strengthened, peer pressure is reduced. Anxiety of
parents and students about safety in the school are also reduced when children are homeschooled. Students do not have to deal with bullying in homeschool, so that stressor is removed.
The pros and cons listed here are just a few of the things to consider if you are thinking about homeschooling. It is important to do your own research and see if homeschooling is a viable option for your family. There are as many situations in homeschooling as there are families who homeschool. Things that might be a con for one family might be considered a pro in a different situation with a different family. Make your own pro and con lists, talk to families who already homeschool, look for support groups in your area, and decide if the pros
outweigh the cons of homeschooling for your family.
Preschool Network Puts 'Innovation' Grant to Test
At the start of the school day at
AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School
’s campus in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, the 20
wiggly students in Monique Twyman’s preschool class are as attentive as a
group of 3-year-olds can be.
Ms. Twyman leads the children through a brisk review of letter sounds and tells them the plans for the day: Some will choose to dig through a sand table to discover dinosaur “fossils,” while others may play with classroom toys, like blocks. Still others can choose to work with clay, or stamp paper with the letter E with the help of the classroom’s second teacher.
The day also will include monitoring the progress of students at the school, one in a network that has received a $5 million Investing in Innovation grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Children will be pulled out of the classroom individually for quick assessments designed to gauge their mastery of the building blocks...
Ms. Twyman leads the children through a brisk review of letter sounds and tells them the plans for the day: Some will choose to dig through a sand table to discover dinosaur “fossils,” while others may play with classroom toys, like blocks. Still others can choose to work with clay, or stamp paper with the letter E with the help of the classroom’s second teacher.
The day also will include monitoring the progress of students at the school, one in a network that has received a $5 million Investing in Innovation grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Children will be pulled out of the classroom individually for quick assessments designed to gauge their mastery of the building blocks...
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