By Mimi Rothschild
As your home schooled child enters teenage years, learning to drive will be one of the top priorities in your home schooling plan. While the requirements of achieving a driver’s license vary from state to state, most states call for your teenager to take a driver education course. Education courses for new drivers should include book study as well as driving exercises.
As a home school parent, you can facilitate their learning to drive by spending time with your teenager behind the wheel as part of your home schooling agenda. Your own instruction, coupled with driver’s education, will result in the development of safe driving skills and will have a constructive impact on the way your teenager drives.
As a home schooling parent, you have determined yourself as a role model for your teenager. It goes back to that “monkey see, monkey do” reasoning. Your teenager has spent years watching you drive, picking up on your good and bad driving behaviors.
Learning to drive a car takes practice, no matter what age, and that practice should be supervised by a licensed driver—it’s the law. By driving with your teenager and reinforcing a positive experience, your teenager will be a safer driver.
Ways that you can make your teenager’s driving experiences with you as part of your home schooling a confidence building and encouraging experience include:
Plan the route that you will take on your trip before you begin driving. Discuss hazards, road conditions and landmarks to help your teenager’s home schooled driving practice be as informative.
Allow your teenager time to get to know your car before driving. Have them adjust the steering wheel, seat, and mirrors to their needs.
Begin with a short drive and progressively increase their time driving as they gain confidence and experience.
Give lessons when the vehicle is stopped—this will allow your teenager to be home schooled on driving and concentrate on your words instead of getting flustered or not paying enough attention to their driving and thusly creating further hazards.
Allow your teenager to drive in varying settings, including weather, times of the day and different types of roadways.
Be patient and stay calm.
Reinforce the good points of your teenager’s driving and discuss any hazards or issues after the drive is over. Driving can be integrated into your home school agenda in many ways, look for opportunities to have your home schooled teenager drive and gain positive experience.
By Mimi Rothschild
It is difficult enough to keep a teen interested and motivated without the temptation to drop the books and head outside. It is natural for your homeschool teen to become distracted and restless, even if they choose their own learning environment. There is no cause for concern, your teen is quite normal. There are some warning signs for negative behavior patterns that the homeschool parent should be on the lookout for. If your homeschooler begins to display some of these signs, it is time to make a change. Homeschoolers will often respond favorably to one or more of the ideas set forth below.
Ask your homeschool teen to write down his or her long term and short term goals. Once they have their list, sit down and discuss it with them. Talk with them about the best path to take to achieve their goals. If college is one of these goals, start touring early to motivate and inspire them. Replace some of their lessons with discussion. This will not only improve their interpersonal skills but may also help them with public speaking. These discussions may also help you and your homeschool student decide what their goals might be and how to proceed.
Let your homeschooler choose their own study time and environment. Try to offer them some alternatives or variation once in a while. If the weather allows, move the lesson outside. You can also select work and volunteer experiences to enhance the lessons.
Mix the lessons up a bit. Mix reading with projects, experiments and crafts. You can also use art and music to illustrate math concepts. Music can also be used as an aid for lessons. Take field trips when your teen’s motivation seems down. The change of venue will be welcome.
Use strategy oriented board games as a way to promote memory and logical thinking. The change of pace will be a welcomed alternative to their books. Provide encouragement and structure to the lessons to help your homeschooler see their progress.
Another way to break things up is to join and participate in homeschool support groups. They are a ripe environment for activities, ideas, and social interaction. You can also find a neighbor or relative who can act as mentor to your homeschooler. A local musician or business executive could be a good mentor for your teen.
Help your homeschool student to rediscover their love of learning. Emphasize your teen’s strengths and learning style. Public schools often focus on linguistic and math intelligences only, and learn by rote memory. You can create a classroom that fosters visual or environmental skills.
By Mimi Rothschild
Home school allows your child and your entire family to escape the many bad things about traditional school. For example, in a home school, you can decide what the important content areas are, emphasizing the areas you think are important and deemphasizing other areas you think are less important in your home school curriculum. In addition, you can decide what sorts of experiential learning and field trips are appropriate, and you can set your own hours according to the needs of your child, you, and the rest of your family. Perhaps one of the best things about home school, however, is that you can teach your child with the way that she learns specifically in mind. At a traditional school, the teachers have to teach a standard curriculum in a specific way. All the learners in the classroom with a different learning style are just sort of pulled along. In your home school, however, you can tailor any curriculum to meet your child’s learning style and needs.
Before you can do this in your home school, however, you will need to figure out just what your child’s learning style is. The easiest way to go about doing this is to watch your child do what she likes to do. Is your child a hands on-sort of learner, does she learn by doing? Or is she more apt to read the directions carefully before trying something out? Does she draw things out or use a lot of diagrams? Or does she spend time pondering a problem before she starts working on it? Observing your child in a more natural state and doing the things that she wants to do, can give you significant insight on her learning style. As a home school parent, you have many tools at your disposal to figure out how your child learns best. Many child development books by respected authors, online tools, tests, and manuals can help you get the most out of your home school curriculum for your child.
By taking the time and effort to make your home school and home school curriculum meet your child’s specific needs, you can make the entire experience better for both your child and yourself. Creating an environment that is perfect for your child’s growth and development is a key aspect of creating a successful home school. When you get to know how your child learns and customizing your home school curriculum to that end, you lay the foundation to help your child succeed in both learning and life.
By Mimi Rothschild
Summer is supposed to be a relaxing time. However, the constant family vacations, social events, sports and lessons can make it seem stressful. Making literature and writing a part of your homeschooled child’s summer can alleviate the boredom and stress of summer.
When the sun is at it’s peak and it’s too hot to go outside, this is a perfect time to plan a family afternoon together. Select a theme, such as Native American folk tales or ancient Egypt to bring out your child’s natural curiosity. Teaching history and culture through narratives is a good way to draw them into a different time and place.
Learning about a specific location, such as a planned vacation destination is a great way to liven your homeschooler’s interest in reading. Have them study up on the places you plan to visit. This will give them some insight into the location and its culture as well as familiarize them with the various activities they might participate in, such as nature hikes or rafting trips.
Have your homeschool child bring along a sketch book to document their trip. By stopping to sketch a particular scene, the trip will be much more personal and memorable and the small details will be retained for years to come. They can also write short descriptions to go along with the drawings to really bring the memory to life.
Hikes are a great way to begin a journal. Have your homeschooler write down detailed descriptions of the hike, not only what they see, but how they feel as they take the trip. The journal will not only bring them closer to their subject, but will also be a prized possession later. A journal is a great way to cement the memory of their vacation in their minds. A trip to Washington D.C., for example, could inspire many great experiences and feelings, which, once written down, could be relived later as your child grows older. NOt only will the memory of that trip be preserved, but the thoughts and feelings of the child as well.
After visiting a site, have your homeschooler write empathically about the experience. Empathic writing is about writing from the viewpoint of the person who had lived at the site. For example, if you visited a Civil War site, your homeschooler could write from the viewpoint of a Confederate soldier or a citizen of the town or city the battle was fought near.
Summer is a great opportunity to include reading and literature to your homeschool student’s lessons to break up the monotony and pressure of the summer vacation. Your homeschooler will not only enhance their education and learning, but will also have some great memories preserved.
By Mimi Rothschild
Families in the military living overseas decide to homeschool for the same reasons families in the states make that decision. Much of the time, it is so they have the freedom to teach their children in a Christian atmosphere without the restraints of public school policy. In a 2002 policy memorandum, the Department of Defense Education Activity released a memo that essentially stated that it neither encouraged nor discouraged military families from exercising their right to homeschool their children.
Military families tend to move rather frequently and with all the other adjustments there are to be made it makes sense to preserve the continuity of the homeschool environment. There are positive sides to this situation as well. Imagine the field trips the homeschool family can take assuming the family is stationed in a safe area. Landmarks that most children only read about can be visited by the family who decides to homeschool overseas.
Even if the children of a future homeschool family are yet to be born or are not old enough at the time the family is stationed abroad, the experience can still be rich for the children. Mom and Dad can pick up souvenirs, take photographs and keep journals of places visited. Future history and geography lessons can come alive with the personal experiences the family encounters.
This would be an excellent time to teach culture differences to your homeschool students. Different foods, different customs, different kinds of stores can all be lessons brought to life for the home schooled children of military personnel. When the family is back in the states, think of the lessons your kids can teach others. Your child could have a lesson in public speaking without even realizing it by sharing his overseas experiences with other home schooled children.
You can most likely meet other families who homeschool while you are overseas and learn from each other as well. Think of the scrapbooks you and the children could make together. Even though this could be an extremely stressful time for the entire family, there are things you can turn into positives simply by turning them into learning experiences. For example, are you able to publicly worship as you choose or do you have to hold church services in your home? Are you able to get the same food and supplies you would normally purchase in the states or is your shopping trip radically different? Whatever the answers to these questions, turn them into learning experiences for your homeschool class. One day, the hardships will be but a distant memory, but the lessons learned will last for a lifetime.