Archive for July, 2007

by Wade Robins
One of the biggest problems facing public schools in America is the lack of qualified teachers to provide individual attention to each student in often overcrowded classrooms. Many children who need some extra help in a particular subject are often left to struggle on their own as a result, and may even begin to fail in their schoolwork. The only way you can be certain that your child is getting one-on-one attention with his or her studies is to home school.

Locating Your Home Schooling Resources
If you’ve already come to this realization, and are ready to remover your child from public school in favor of teaching at home, you will get off to a much better start by investigating all the home schooling resources available to you.

One of your best home schooling resources is the advice of parents in your area who have already taken on the responsibility of educating their own children. Perhaps some of them will even let you sit in on one of their schooling sessions, so that you can get pointers about how to organize materials and time, and keep the kids interested. If you see other children enjoying their learning time, it will give you confidence that you can make home schooling a real pleasure for your kids as well.

Home Schooling Resources On The Internet
The Internet is an absolute treasure trove of home schooling resources; there are hundreds of websites and put up by groups of parents already home schooling their children. Their homes schooling resourced range from weekly newsletters, which you can receive by e-mail, to information on the best home schooling videos, and even recipes and grocery lists for school night dinners, so Mom or Dad can get all the week’s shopping done at once.

Other home schooling resources online are blogs written by individual parents who are home schooling; they offer an honest look at the ways different families handle the experience of home schooling and can give you lots of helpful insights from parents and kids who have been there and done that.

If you’ve decided to go the home schooling route, but do not think you are up to the task of teaching your kids yourself, you will have to hire a teaching-certified tutor. The Internet is a great place to locate tutors in your area, and other home schooling resources which can help you find tutors are local colleges. Even if you will be teaching your children your self, having a tutor for subjects in which they have a special interest, like art or music, can be a real treat fro them, as the required home schooling curriculum does is not likely to cover those subjects.

You can also find more info on Home School and Christian Home Schooling. homeschoolresults.com is a comprehensive resource to get information about Home School Results.

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by Rebecca Walker
Falling out of favour in recent years, home schooling used to be considered a great way to monitor and enhance your child’s intellectual development. Theories about poor social development and emotional exposure led to a downturn in the frequency of home schooling, despite the numerous educational advantages it can bring. By nurturing your child within the home environment, learning and education can seem more of a natural process, whereby your child gains the skills and knowledge required during the course of his daily life. In this article we will consider further some of the advantages of educating your child in your home, and why this form of education may be considered superior to traditional schooling.

One of the major advantages that comes with home schooling is the ability to tailor education to the needs and stage of development of the child. In the classroom, there is little in the way of individualised tuition and bonding for most of the children with the authority figure, which can stint and hinder development. Of course the child is exposed to a more social environment, which is certainly beneficial. The problem comes with the lack of direct tailored tuition, which can repress a child’s intellectual potential. Secondly, regular schooling cannot move at the same pace, nor can it move at the pace required for the student. A class of pupils can only move as quickly as the slowest pupils, which leaves many more developed students bored and lacking intellectual stimulation. With home schooling, on the other hand, the parent or teacher is free to move at the pace of the child, and can devote one hundred percent of his or her attention to the intellectual needs of the child concerned, making for an overall more productive environment for the child.

Another advantage of home schooling is that it is more flexible than traditional schooling, catering for the needs of the child concerned rather than the general needs of a class of children. If the child has particular difficulties in any given area, these can be sourced and assisted promptly, without having the burden of thirty other pupils to worry about. By allowing the teacher to focus on teaching the pupil at his own pace, home schooling creates a more flexible environment for intellectual development, which can provide the child with a greater understanding of reason and logic, as well as the basics of elementary arithmetic and literacy.

Home schooling seems to be losing popularity in recent years, despite the fact that it still provides much academic and intellectual merit. Children educated in the home environment tend to be more attuned to life-long learning, considering knowledge and information as important assets. Indeed, this form of education allows the child to develop at his own pace where this may otherwise be restricted within the classroom environment. For these reasons, the process of home schooling is particularly worthwhile, and something that should be a consideration of parent everywhere, with the means and ability to educate their own children.

The author Rebecca Walker writes articles for childfont.com. He also gives valuable information about child development, home schooling & reading, child development & learning to read, active white board are accessible on the internet.

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by Wade Robins
While the idea of home schooling has some very strong points in its favor, it is not an endeavor to be entered into lightly. Home schooling will require a total commitment from the teaching parent, who will have to be personally present for all the experiments, reports, and lessons each day; prepare the week’s lessons; take the kids on relevant field trips; and even supervise recess. Home schooling offers no teacher’s lounge to which one can escape for some adult conversation and sympathetic ears.

What To Expect
Most state home schooling statutes require that a parent spend at least four and one-half hours a day home schooling; while not all of that will be in actual teaching, it does require that you be present in case your children have difficulty with a lesson. So you’ll have to find a way to work in some alone time, and time for your spouse or partner if there is one present in your home.

While home schooling will certainly not cost a great deal of money, it can mean the difference between being a one-income, and two-income family. And home schooling means that even when you and you kids are not in the home classroom, you’ll have to be making the effort to see to their social development. You’ll need to take the initiative in scheduling group activities like scouting, church groups, or after-school play dates with other kids. On the other hand, because you are home schooling, you’ll have much more control on the kinds of activities to which your children are exposed.

Will Home Schooling Work For Your Child?
The person whose cooperation is absolutely essential if you are to succeed at home schooling is, of course, your child. If your child has been having a difficult time academically or socially in a public school, you job may be much easier. If, on the other hand, you are pulling him or her out of a situation which you see as unhealthy, but which was your child’s entire world, you may have a struggle on your hands. But you can always promise that you will only try home schooling for a year. If it simply doesn’t work, return your child to public school.

There’s no great mystery to teaching, and especially to teaching your kids: you’ve been doing it since they were born. If you are literate, you can home school; and if you are in need of guidance as to the best techniques, there are numerous home schooling manuals and teacher lesson plans to help you. If you can’t teach math because you never understood math, get a certified math tutor to step in.

The luxury of having one-on-one attention when they are learning, coupled with a realistic social schedule of enjoyable activities, will give your children the best educational experience they are ever likely to have, and all from the comfort of home!

You can also find more info on Home School and Christian Home Schooling.homeschoolresults.com is a comprehensive resource to get information about Home School Results.

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by Samantha Gibson
Preschool educational toys can be as simple as blocks, puzzles, memory games, and plastic food. They can also be more involved with the newest technology where you child sits down to watch videos and follow along with books. The choice is yours. Below we will be looking at how a few of these Preschool Educational Toys can be helpful in getting your child ready for school.

Blocks are perhaps the simplest Preschool Educational Toys you can have. Blocks help build the child’s mind from discerning shapes to figuring out how to build something. While blocks are simple, they allow your child to develop the fine motor skills it takes to stack and stack without collapsing. They also enable your child to use imagination and start a project and finish it. This is also true of puzzles and the memory game. With puzzles, even the most simple, enables your preschooler to visualize the piece and how it will fit within the rest of the shapes. They also get the joy of seeing the picture complete. You will be amazed how many times they will do puzzles over and over again. Memory games allow the child to see the pictures and match them up with the corresponding piece.

The newest technology for Preschool Educational Toys involves children’s laptops as well as videos to watch. These can be helpful as your child gets older, but there is nothing like playing. Arts and crafts seem like a messy waste of time, but it can be huge in watching your child grow and develop. By all means get some LeapFrog Videos and even some Baby Einstein but make sure you don’t let those take the place of play.

The idea behind Preschool Educational Toys is to help your child develop their five senses as well as help them develop the use of their brain. A young child’s brains has the power to soak up as much information as you can supply. Whether you choose a Preschool Educational Toys or just some scissors and paper, choose them and allow your child the chance to develop while having fun.

Written by Samantha Gibson. Find the latest preschool educational toy at Inspire Bright Minds.

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by Samantha Gibson
Are you interested in educational learning toys that you can find for your child that will enable them to learn as they play? There are many different types of toys you can buy for your child that will help them learn while they are having fun. Preschool is an important time of life because children are soaking up tons of information and they love to play. They learn through play and it is important to allow your child the time to play, as well as learn discipline, nurture and rest. The best way to find educational learning toys your child will enjoy is by going online to educational toy stores as well as looking at your local toy stores. You want to choose , a Preschool Educational Toys that will have some basis for helping your child enhance the use of their mind and five senses. Blocks, puzzles, imaginary play, lacing toys, memory games, arts and crafts, and letter games will help prepare them to read and do the school tasks that will be required of them.

When buying a Preschool Educational Toys choose a variety of toys that use different parts of the brain as well as different senses. You want to help them expand their learning abilities even if they are already school age. If you have questions about the best toys to buy you can always speak with a teacher about your child’s development. Other ,Preschool Educational Toys that can be helpful are coloring books that teach them about different animals, characters, people, history, and clocks. There are toy clocks you can buy to help your child to read the time. The idea behind educational learning toys whether you create them or buy them is to help your child be prepared for school and learn while having fun. It is a blessing to have a child in school who enjoys learning. Why not start that early, by showing them that we can learn all the time. It is fun to watch our children learn and grow. Be deliberate in the Preschool Educational Toys you place in front of them and you will be amazed at what their brains will soak up!

Written by Samantha Gibson. Find more information on educational learning toys at Inspire Bright Minds.

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by James Hunaban
When people consider teaching their children at home, without any structured curriculum, they may think that the home schooling costs will be able to be kept down to a reasonable level. But this is not necessarily the case at all. If you try to ensure that your children get a state of the art education so that they can compete on a level footing with regular school goers, the costs can skyrocket. In actual fact schooling a child at home can turn out to be quite costly.

A computer, current textbooks, course materials, all these things cost some amount of money, also there are extra costs for any tutors the parent decides to bring in to teach subjects that they cannot teach themselves, such as science or higher level maths. These costs can be minimised when several children are able to reuse the materials.

Another point to consider is that the requirement of having one of the parents tied to the home on a full time basis can deprive the family of an extra wage packet. This can, of course have a substantial impact on the family’s income.

Having a membership in a public library, various outside activity classes and other cultural events can also help in keeping the costs down. One idea is to barter expertise or services. For example, the parent of a nine year old has dancing classes; her daughter gets drawing classes in return.

However much it costs, the devotees of home schooling state that the benefits more than outweigh the drawbacks. When you are in control of what knowledge your child receives, and what subjects he or she should be taught and to what level, it can give you loads of freedom and a lot of power. The children and also the parents can benefit greatly from this mutually enriching experience.

James Hunaban is the owner of http://www.home-schooling-advice.net/ a site full of information and advice about Home Schooling.

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by Donald Saunders
Although the history of homeschooling can be traced back for many hundreds of years, and you will often here Aristotle quoted as being the father of homeschooling for his efforts in tutoring Alexander the Great, it was not really until the second half of the twentieth century that homeschooling as we know it today was born.

During the 1960s people began to speak out openly about the problems of the public school system and three people in particular were heard above the crowd.

The first was an Ivy League graduate who had sought to change the system from the inside but, when he discovered that this a case of bashing his head against a brick wall, he began what was to become a twenty year period during which he wrote extensively on the subject of education in general and homeschooling in particular.

John Holt was perhaps the most influential voice in those early days and his many books, starting with ‘How Children Fail’ in 1964, are still in print and are widely read today. Proposing a system which moved away from the authoritarian attitude of the public schools and the importance of curricula and schedules, John Holt focused his attention on the innate curiosity of the child and sought to structure learning around the interests and talents of each individual child.

But John Holt was not a lone voice and others too made a valuable contribution to the debate.

Raymond Moore for example, a devout Christian and ex-missionary, voiced the concerns of many parents about the lack of spiritual and moral guidance being given by our public schools and about the growing level of violence. Moore proposed that parents should take control over the education of their children and should focus not simply upon academic achievement, but should also upon ensuring that their children are taught the values which they will need if they are to be productive and valued members of our society.

There was also a third extremely influential voice raised at this time. Ayn Rand, a novelist and philosopher, did not speak or write specifically on the subject of homeschooling at any length but gave birth to the modern libertarian movement. Out of this movement a political party was born which, amongst other things, opposes a state sponsored education system and espouses an education system which focuses on the child as an individual and seeks to develop that child’s innate creativity.

These three voices together, while stemming from very different philosophies, were all singing from the same hymn book and gave birth to the idea behind modern homeschooling. This is s simple idea which places the intellectual and moral development of our children at the center of modern education.

Parenting4Dummies.com provides information, advice and articles on all aspects of parenting including parenting teenage children and many parents consider it their best homeschooling resource.

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by Brenda Geier
Phonological awareness is the ability to discern sound units smaller than a single syllable. It is imperative that children learn these small sound units at an early age and it is not an easy task. First, the letters of the alphabet must be learned, but the sounds of the letters must be taught next. Teach children as early as age 3 and 4 each individual sound that each individual letter makes. This process is the base children must have to be able to learn the next sequence of sounds. Resources such as picture books that show the letter and an accompanying picture work well.

Vowels (short first, then long) must be taught next. By making a game out of this learning process, the child’s interest is not lost. Parents and teachers alike can be very creative. Now is the time to use that creativity to make learning and child development fun for the child. Most of the short vowels are fairly easy for children to learn with the exception of the short /e/ sound. I have found in my years of teaching that many children have problems discerning between the short /e/ and the short /i/ sound. They do sound a lot alike. One way I make the difference clear is to use the edge of a desk or table. I run my palm along the edge of the table and say /eh/ for edge, which is the short /e/ sound. Then, each time a child comes across a word that has the short /e/ sound, I remind them with my hand on the desk, but do not say anything. They quickly learn to discern the difference. Use models as often as possible to aid in learning and teaching.

Teaching blends as in two-letter and three-letter blends must be taught after the vowels (short and long) are mastered, but that’s another paper.A child’s level of phonemic awareness on entering school is widely held to be the strongest single determinant of the success that he or she will experience in learning to read, or conversely, the likelihood that he or she will fail )Adams 1990). Parents who home school their children and teachers in the business of educating our students should be aware of this research and seek counsel from Reading Specialists to assure our children do not fail to learn to read.

Your child’s development is important and here at child font, each lesson builds on skills from the previous lesson; home schooling has never looked brighter: Child Font - the art of reading and writing.

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by James Kronefield
It’s hard to believe that just 25 years ago home schooling was almost unheard of. Today there are millions of children learning at home, and the number increases each year.

Why are so many families choosing to teach their children at home? Does it require a special degree or something? Can anyone do it? These are the questions that will be answered here.

Some families choose home schooling because it gives the parents control over what the children are taught. This might offend some people, but it is what our country was founded on: freedom. If the government is allowed a monopoly in education they will be free to completely control what children are taught. If carefully considered, that is a frightening thought.

Another reason parents have chosen to teach their children at home is that children naturally learn better under a tutor system of learning. If one adult is teaching one to six children the children will learn better than if they are in a classroom of 30 children with one adult. Some people might disagree, but the studies show that the more personal attention a student gets the better they learn.

There are also parents who want their children to be able to learn at their own speed. It has been shown that children learn at different rates. Any parent and teacher will agree with that statement. Some are ready to read at a younger age than others the same as some are ready for arithmetic at a younger age than others.

It does not mean those who are ready at a younger age are smarter than the others. There are home school graduates at Harvard who did not learn to read until they were ten or older. But by learning at home these students were given the wonderful opportunity to learn at their own speed, whether that meant finishing high school by 14 or 15, or not beginning formal academics until they are 10.

Thankfully there are places in the world where anyone can teach their children at home. In the United States all 50 states allow anyone to teach their children at home.

However, not everyone should home educate their children. It requires a fair amount of patience and persistence. Also, the parent needs to be able to enjoy being with their children all day, as well as enjoying all the mess it can create. It is kind of like experiencing summer vacation all year long in that the children are always home.

It also requires a certain degree of dedication and the ability to be calm. It helps if the parent can model a love of learning, can make learning fun, and can relax and enjoy this time with their children instead of feeling pressured to produce a bunch of Thomas Edison’s.

Home schooling might not be right for everyone, but it is a wonderful opportunity for many families to grow close, allow the children to learn at their own speed, and give each child individual attention in a tutor and student setting.

The author is the publisher of the Our Time Now retirement Blog (http://www.ourtimenow.com) and the Online Christian Shopper (http://www.onlinechristianshopper.com) Christian T-Shirt and Jewelry site.

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