One of the crucial components in any homeschooler’s household is the homeschool classroom. This is the center of learning, the place where your child’s education and love of learning begins, and as such, it deserves careful planning and attention.
Choose an Area
Setting aside an area is one of the first things you will need to do [...]
Creating a Homeschool Classroom
Advantages of Homeschooling Over Public Education
Are you considering homeschooling your children? If so, you are probably trying to find out the advantages of homeschooling over public school. There are actually many advantages associated with homeschooling, but here are some of the top ones.
The flexibility of the schedule allows for homeschoolers to take advantage of many opportunities that are otherwise closed [...]
How to Socialize Your Homeschooled Children
It’s the first question your mother asks when you tell her that you’re homeschooling the children, and the first thing the alarmed grandmother who asks why your children aren’t in school and hears that they are homeschooled will say to you. “What about socialization?” you hear, and have to resist groaning.
The idea is an integral [...]
How to Find “Me” Time When Homeschooling
One of the major challenges of homeschooling isn’t actually teaching your children, figuring out the legal implications, or structuring a school day. It’s simply finding some “me” time, or downtime from homeschooling. The importance of “me” time is clear: a burned-out parent is not a good teacher!
One Parent Homeschools
When one parent homeschools, it’s easier to [...]
Four Reasons to Homeschool Your Children
It started as an obscure and unusual phenomenon, and has since grown to become a veritable trend. Homeschooling is reaching the stage of acceptance where you won’t have to answer many questions from the public about what it is, but many people still aren’t sure why you would do it. After all, they reason that [...]
Is Homeschooling Right for You?
Perhaps you have just learned about homeschooling, or perhaps you’re in the process of researching it to see if you like the sound of it. You have probably already determined that homeschooling is not right for every family, as some families simply can’t manage to pull it off, while others do spectacularly and raise well-adjusted, [...]
Choosing a Homeschooling Curriculum
If you’ve decided that your children will learn at home, congratulations! You’ve taken the first step to giving your children a great education that will help them for the rest of their lives. Now, you have to decide just what they’re going to learn at home.
All-in-One Curricula
There are some homeschool curricula that come as complete [...]
Motivating Your Homeschooled Student
Every parent knows that getting their children to do something they don’t want to is a difficult chore. When you’re a homeschooling parent, this can be even harder! You end up playing the roles of parent, teacher, and principal all in one, and your child can’t appeal to any higher authority if he feels you’re [...]
Surviving Your First Homeschool Year
Maybe you’re considering making the big move and actually pulling your children out of public school to homeschool them, or starting them at home rather than enrolling them in public school this September. The prospect of facing your first year of homeschooling can be daunting, but here are some tips to help you survive your [...]
Creating Homeschool Lesson Plans
One of the biggest advantages and disadvantages of public school is the fact that lessons are pre-structured. You never have to worry about there being no plan for what your child should learn next. Yet this is also limiting, as you have very little control over what your child learns, and if there is material [...]
Homeschool English Projects
One of the many advantages of homeschooling is the ability to create your own lesson plans. Even when you are following an established curriculum, there is usually some room for deviation, and there’s always after-school time that can be used for homeschool activities. English is one of those subjects that can be taught in everyday [...]
Homeschool Art Projects
For a non-artistic parent (or even an artistic one), the thought of teaching a child art can be very intimidating! Many people make art out to be a mystical sort of discipline that is difficult to impart to a student, and while many technical skills sometimes require a skilled teacher to teach, students can also [...]
Homeschool Math Activities
A subject like math can be hard to teach at home, because it’s so abstract and seemingly complicated. If you aren’t confident in your own mathematical ability, it’s even harder. Hands-on activities are a great way to reinforce the lessons your homeschooler is learning, and teach them practical ways to use the abstract concepts and [...]
Homeschool Biology Experiments
A great way for parents to teach kids biology is through homeschool biology experiments. Reading from a textbook doesn’t have the same impact on most students as actually exploring the subject first-hand, and your child may even discover an interest in the sciences.
Kids are naturally curious about other people and themselves. There are a variety [...]
Homeschool Chemistry Experiments
One of the many challenging parts of homeschooling is properly conducting experiments for science classes. For parents who don’t have science degrees or teaching credentials, chemistry experiments are an intimidating prospect that hints at kitchen explosions or burn scars on the walls. Fortunately, not all chemistry experiments have to involve dangerous chemicals, and some are [...]
How to Keep Track of Homeschool Activities
With the many opportunities that homeschooling provides for activities outside the normal school curricula, it can be hard to keep track of them all. Nevertheless, doing so is important, not just on a calendar to maintain your sanity, but to help with scholarship and university applications later on in your student’s academic career.
Some scholarships are [...]
How to Do Sports Activities as a Homeschooler
As you probably have found out on your own, homeschooling your children can be challenging sometimes. One of the subjects that can be particularly hard to teach without a group of fellow students to participate in activities is PE, physical education, or quite simply, sports.
Homeschool Leagues
As a response to this difficulty, homeschool sports leagues have [...]
Homeschool and Volunteer Opportunities
Among the many opportunities homeschoolers find themselves provided with as a result of their schedule, volunteering is one of the best to take advantage of. After all, not having any structured school day opens up just about any volunteer position that is appropriate for your student’s age, and the benefits of volunteering are enormous, if [...]
Home Ec for Homeschoolers
When you are homeschooling, it may seem that one of the trickier classes to plan is home economics, or home ec. Despite how intimidating it may seem to plan, it’s actually fairly simple, and in some ways made easier by the fact that your schooling takes place at home! This means that everyday chores and [...]
Finding Homeschool Activities to Do
For a homeschooling family, field trips are a part of everyday life. Your child probably accompanies you on grocery store visits, vacations, and day trips and learns a lot during all of this, but it’s always good to look up opportunities especially for educational purposes.
Homeschool email lists or groups are a particularly great way of [...]