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The Whole Child, Issue #97 Can YOU Homeschool? September 03, 2015 |
Read this newsletter online here: The Whole Child Issue #97
Its back-to-school season again in the USA as their new school year begins. (Here where I live in South Africa, the new school year begins in late January.) I’ve read a couple of news reports online recently about how homeschooling is growing in the USA. This is actually a global trend. Here in South Africa, there is also a blossoming homeschooling community and I am a passionate homeschool activist! • For some parents, the idea of educating their children at home seems completely foreign. Most of us were raised in the school system and we wonder why anybody would do something as unconventional as homeschooling. • Other moms think it’s a great idea in theory, but they are too terrified of what they imagine it entails to consider taking it on themselves. • Sometimes a mother knows in her heart that she could do it, but her partner has doubts and misgivings and is not supportive of the idea of homeschooling. Let me just switch topics briefly. When your children were little, who taught them to crawl and then to walk? Did they practice and learn mostly alone with you encouraging them like a cheerleader? Or did you send them to a teacher for walking lessons? Who taught them to speak and understand language? What curriculum did you use? None, I’m guessing! Developing language skills is a major development of the child’s brain…and yet generally this is accomplished without any formal teaching. Parents facilitate the development of language skills just by being involved with their child on a daily basis: providing experiences that allow the child to engage in face-to-face interaction, speaking to them, listening, practicing associating words with objects and modelling correct use of the language as the children puzzle out and formulate the grammatical rules of a language for themselves. Given the complexity of language, learning to speak is an incredible achievement, which normal healthy children seem to do with relative ease! All this is usually accomplished at preschool level and yet when a child reaches the legal school-going age, so many parents mistakenly believe that only a professional teacher can teach their kids the academic skills they need to succeed in school. They think that if children are not taught in a formal classroom setting, they won’t learn. Not true! Toddlers are proof that our children are equipped with great minds and that they can learn almost anything they set their minds upon, provided they have the maturity for it. International research shows that children who are educated at home achieve higher scores on standardized academic tests than their public-schooled peers and that they are highly successful as adults, socially and in their careers. We, the parents (and professional teachers too), have been brainwashed with wrong thinking about how children learn, by the school system that we were raised in. We need to unlearn that programming and start to trust that our children can learn, do learn and will want to learn for the rest of their lives, if we don’t spoil that process by forcing them to learn things which they find irrelevant. No one loves a child as much as his parents do. No one has his long term best interests at heart like you do. In case I haven’t spelled it out clearly enough – YOU CAN HOMESCHOOL YOUR CHILD SUCCESSFULLY from preschool through primary school to high school and you can send socially and emotionally healthy kids out into adult life. What’s holding you back? ... Here are two fun activities you can do with pre-schoolers to continue to develop their language skills and set them up for academic success in the years to come.
Regards |
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