It can feel very rewarding to give your students classes yourself. You can give your child a focused education and make sure that they are taking everything in. The tips below will help you become a great teacher.
If your family has a baby or young child, homeschooling an older child will be much more difficult. Make time during the day to give your complete attention to each child. Try to find activities that they can both participate in. Take time every day doing something developmentally appropriate with all of your children together.
Speak with other homeschooling families and plan field trips together. This simultaneously provides hours of fun and socialization time. It keeps costs down due to bulk rates, too!
Before you begin the difficult task of homeschooling your child, give him an advantage by doing your homework first at conferences or training sessions. It's not hard to become overwhelmed when you're a new home school teacher. You can better any homeschooling experience by using classes as well as seminars. Even if you are already homeschooling your kids, attending these events can help you continue your own education.
Rather than jumping into homeschooling on a whim, attend some workshops or conferences first, for your child's sake. It's easy to become overwhelmed by everything you need to take care of as a teacher. Seminars and classes offer hands-on guidance and inspiration for nearly every aspect of the homeschooling experience. Even if you already home school your children, you can still get helpful advice from these events.
As you teach the kids, get them involved with hands-on experiences. For instance, when learning about foreign cultures, consider cooking traditional recipes from those areas. For example, when teaching your children about Italy, you could allow them to cook pizzas and pasta, or make some ice cream. If the lesson is on World War II, cooking a meal that is reflective of all of the countries involved would be a good idea. This will make learning more fun and help your children understand which resources are available in other countries.
You should establish a list of advantages and issues for homeschooling and public schools. This list will ensure that your child is getting effective homeschooling. You will find that this list becomes key in deciding how to go about homeschooling. Place it someplace safe, where you can easily reference it.
Every state has a Homeschool Association which can guide you through the rules you'll have to adhere to. You may find that your state mandates that you must register appropriately as if you're a private school, or you may learn that you only need to make sure that your children pass certain tests appropriate for their grade. So as not to be charged with truancy, be sure the school district knows that you will be homeschooling your child.
The advantages that your children will have through homeschooling are great in comparison with those of public schools. You might want to gauge progress by utilizing standardized tests from the state from time to time. If they are testing below the standard in any area, then it might be time to hire a tutor.
Now that you see how to implement homeschooling, it's time to use it with your children. Keep contacting other homeschooling parents to learn from them, get online and join forums and groups and learn all you can from the experiences of others.