Helping with Home Schooling

Parents who make the choice to home school often take on a burden larger than they were originally anticipating. Schools and teachers have been working for years to develop routines and activities geared toward educating children and keeping them active and learning. As parents, you may know your children best, but you might be behind the curve on learning programs, games and activities.

Going Beyond the Basics
The educational basics are simple enough. Packets and workbooks offer lesson plans for teaching the required reading, writing and arithmetic. Websites help develop a few simple science experiments and social studies topics are around us all the time. But if you wanted the basics, you would have sent your child to school. You decided to home school for a reason.

While your reasons may be complex and most likely vary from anyone else’s, you have the opportunity to educate your child at home, and this is an opportunity that should not be wasted. Trips around the country to learn history first-hand are terrific, but on a day-to-day basis, there are other ways to enrich the learning process.

Foster Creativity
One of the largest complaints about traditional school systems today is the lack of creativity in the classroom. Parents, especially those who home school, are able to foster creativity in their children and should do so as often as possible. When pen and paper ideas run out, there are many websites and materials online to help.

Online coloring pages and dress up games on websites such as TheDollPalace.com offer children a chance to experiment with color and design elements while providing an enriching recreation. These coloring pages contain pictures of favorite celebrities or other doll characters sure to interest students. The material on the website itself is fodder for creativity as dolls are created who need stories and background.

Your students can read the articles with information on history, holidays and other topics of interest to school age children. They can then design their own dolls or enter writing contests based on their creations. There are other research based contests available on the website which can aide in lessons on the proper use of the internet. Best of all, the site is designed to be a safe haven for children to practice creativity on the web.

Take Advantage of Resources
When home schooling is done properly, every advantage is utilized. Resources are all around us – at museums, zoos, parks, and even online. Parents who decide to home school should take every opportunity to enrich the learning of their children and move material beyond traditional lessons. When a child can see and feel something, the impact is infinitely more powerful than by hearing it alone. Parents have a chance to use this power on a daily basis. Don’t waste it.