Homeschooling is an Alternative Method to Deliver Quality Education
You are what you are today because of how you were brought up in your family, the type of environment that you are living, and most especially from the education that you learned in school. Academic education is very important especially that it teaches us all about life. With the different subjects offered, you are able to learn a lot of things from varied aspects. The type of education that you have determines how you deal with other people, what job you will have someday, and how you will face your life in general.
Before you plan to choose a school for yourself or for your children, you cannot deny that you are more of the quality and the cost. Practically, if you cannot afford a private school, you would definitely opt for the public schools in your own locality. Looking for the school that you need is just like looking for stun guns. You check for the producer, the features, and the cost of the product. Since education is very important, you make sure that the school administration and the school have the necessary features which are cost-effective and delivers quality education.
However, when you are not satisfied with your local public schools, you can always prefer homeschooling. There are a lot of families today that selects homeschooling than letting children go to campuses for a lot of reasons. Safety, budget, type of subjects offered and quality are a few of the reasons why people decide to let their children study at home. Though it may not involve interaction with a lot of children, it is still as effective as letting your children go to school if you will follow the correct curriculum and you have the important resources available.
One advantage of homeschooling is that you can create your own curriculum based on the capacity of your child and based on the subjects that you wish your child to learn. If there is no subject in the public school that includes a lesson about your religion, then you can include it in your own curriculum at home. You can really monitor the progress of your child and the pace of his or her learning capacity. Aside from that, it is cheaper because your references can be located in a lot of resources.
There are a lot of resources for your homeschooling curriculum. You can borrow books from the library in your own community or you can ask for books already used by some schools in your locality. Moreover, you can buy your own books in your local store. It is also very easy to look for resources through the internet, just as easy as how you buy stun gun online. You just place your topic on the search engine and there you have it. Different topics will come to you as a list. In addition, videotapes and audio training can be a good source of education. You can make use of your own television for educational purposes.
Homeschooling is also an alternative method to deliver quality education aside from that in schools and colleges. But it must be done in the right way with the up to date curriculum used.
Quantity Versus Quality For Homeschoolers
Ever notice how “the good stuff” seems to be in smaller supply than the regular stuff? This seems to be a common lesson in life. There are a lot of ordinary days, but only an occasional great day. There are a lot of regular episodes of your favorite television show, but only a rare storyline that you actually remember the next week. Many, many good books are published, but only a few classics…
The quality things in life tend to be a bit harder to come by, don’t they? There’s a reason for that. The quality things take time to develop. They don’t just happen by chance. More often, we find “filler” in life. That happens in dog food, pasta dishes, plot lines in movies, junk mail in our mailboxes, and even in education. Homeschool families have the unique opportunity to focus on the “good stuff” in their homeschooling in order to break this pattern. The expression that comes to mind is that sometimes you have to sacrifice the good for the sake of the great!
Take for example a recent trip to my grocery store. I purchased my regular box of granola cereal, “Wild Oat” flavored, but I also saw a new flavor with nuts and berries added, so I bought one of those to try, too. When I got home and put them on the shelf, what I found was that the regular box was a 17-ounce box. The box with the extra goodies was 13.5 ounces. They were the same price. The regular box had some extra filler in it, but the good stuff was valued higher. Can you guess which flavor I like better? Or, guess which flavor I will go back to next time? The good one, of course!
Homeschool families need to look at this analogy for their homeschool program. Take the time to develop a quality program, based on the “good stuff” and not on filler. Focus on the core learning and academic foundations that will give your students a strong, competitive application for colleges. Focus on teaching-learning skills so that your students will be able to teach themselves anything and know how to process information. Too many homeschool families provide their children with meaningless exercises or workbooks that spoon-feed information rather than teaching children to think and analyze information on their own.
Homeschooling families have an obligation to provide educational substance in their programs. Math, Science, Literature, Grammar, and Social Sciences should be given prime attention in the development and skills training of your children. This can be done in engaging ways, but these core subjects must be given priority over those things that only fill up our lesson plans with numerous activities yet don’t add the same value. This will take your time and your energy. It is a demanding role. But, if you take this role very seriously, you can create a quality homeschool program that will be worth the higher value.
Like my cereal, imagine the future generations you can impact if your children grow up to have such strong foundations and solid skills that they want to return to that type of quality education for their families. Many things can be good to do, but not all things will be great. Go for the great in your homeschool program! Give your children that kind of value so that they can reap the benefits of a sound education for their future.