Bringing Public School Ideas into Homeschooling
While homeschooling is considered to be a superior learning experience to attending public schools, there are some things that are a regular occurrence in public schools that can be incorporated into home-school. These activities break the monotony of the day and give the kids something to look forward to. When you home-school, you can arrange these activities whenever you want.
How Public School Ideas Works?
One such activity is a trip to the public library. All schools maintain libraries and the kids usually have a set day and time that they’re allowed to visit it. This is a dream come true for those children that love reading. They can spend time browsing books and choosing the ones they want to read. Then the rest of the hour is spent reading those books.
When you home-school, you can load your kids up any day of the week at any time and head to the public library. Instead of being limited to just 2 books per week, the public library typically allows 5 or more to be checked out at a time. Your little readers can go crazy in the library choosing books by their favorite writers.
If your children are pre-school age, you’ll need to help them choose their books and spend some time reading these books to them at home. In addition, you and your children can stay at the library as long as they want. You can even make Library Day a half-day experience and have lunch out.
Music is something else that most kids really enjoy. Whether it’s singing, playing an instrument, or dancing, kids simply love music. This is another activity that usually happens only once a week in public schools. You can make it an everyday occurrence when you home-school. Choose music that’s appropriate to the age of your children and let them enjoy learning the songs every day. You don’t have to be on a time table so if the kids seem to be having an exceptionally fun time, you can just keep going.
Even better is if you happen to play a musical instrument. You can spend part of the music time giving your children music lessons. However, this isn’t an area where you should ever force your child. For instance, if you play the piano but your child has no interest whatsoever in learning to play the piano, you should drop that idea. Find out if your child wants to learn how to play another instrument and see what you can do about making that happen.
One of the very best things about homeschooling is that you can set your own schedule. Math doesn’t have to be done every day at 1 PM. Language doesn’t have to happen at 10 AM every day. Switch things around to make it more interesting, unless your kids happen to respond better to a regimented schedule. In that case, then write out the day’s schedule and post it where it can be seen. They’ll know just what to expect. But that’s the beauty of it. When you home-school, you have the freedom to do what works best for your children.