Home school is different than public school. Home schooled children don't just learn facts and skills; they learn to love learning. They do more than just sit in desks writing spelling words and reciting multiplication tables; they learn how to think, how to create, how to explore, how to ask questions, and how to find answers.
Therefore, the job of a home school teacher has several characteristics that are different from the average public school teacher.
Finding Resources
Some parents fear that they will not have the knowledge or skills to teach their child what they need or want to learn. "What if my child wants to learn football? I don't have the skills to teach that," someone asked me. However, the truth is that it is not our job as home school parents to teach our children everything they learn. Rather it is our job to find the right resources and to teach our children how to find those resources for themselves.
For us, the library has become a tool for learning. When our science curriculum has a handout and a short lesson on birds, we run to the library and find about twenty books on the topic. Some of those books are boring, too easy, or too hard, and then some of them are just what we need.
Friends and family are also great resources for learning new things. Perhaps Gramps knows how to fish, or Grammy knows how to sew. Perhaps your neighbor knows something about basketball, and your coworker plays the violin. When people become learning resources, you teach children about community.
Being Adaptable
Plans fail. Curriculum grow stale. Children get bored. Eventually, you will need to adjust your plans, change your curriculum, and refresh your home schooling approach. What worked for one child will not work for another. What worked yesterday, might not work for today.
Adaptability is an important trait for a home school parent. Learning needs to be a living process, always changing, always new and fresh. When it becomes old and stale, children begin to hate to learn, which is what makes public school a poor option.
Loving to Learn
If we love to learn, our children love to learn. When we take interest in books, they too love to read. When we play music, they want to learn an instrument too. When we write, they want to write. When we create, build, fix, or bake, they want to do it too. When we search for answers to our questions, they too will ask questions and find answers.
Home school teachers need to unschool themselves, living the life of the historical explorers who innovated their world, like Michelangelo, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Edison.
Author Info:
Rita Webb is a homeschooling mom for three young children, aged two, four, and six. Rita researches many homeschooling resources and writes reviews on these materials in her http://mrkreview.blogspot.com blog
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