How to Plan Your Homeschooling Effectively
Homeschooling allows you to tailor a specific education to your child’s individual needs, something that is often lacking in the public or private school systems. Homeschooling also allows you and your child to learn together, creating not only a valuable learning experience but strengthening family bonds.
Clear Plan and Goals
Before you dive into homeschooling your child, it is important to come up with a clear plan and set of goals.
One of the greatest aspects of homeschooling – its complete flexibility – can also be the most difficult if it is not handled properly. Without a clear plan, you run the risk of creating a scattershot education that puts your child out of place with his or her peers.
When you begin homeschooling, you should come up with a clear set of general goals. Think about why you want to homeschool your children, what you want them to get out of the experience, and what do you want your child’s education to encompass.
Once you have answered these general questions for yourself, begin to split your child’s education into various subject areas. For each subject area, you want to come up with a timeline and set of goals.
Establish a Timeline and Curriculum
A good place to start in terms of a timeline would be to look at the standard curriculum for your child’s grade in a public or private school. While it is almost certainly true that one of the reasons you’ve opted to homeschool your child is to go beyond and outside this standard curriculum, you also want to make sure that your child does not fall behind his or her peers in a given subject area.
Come up with your plan by looking at the standard expectations for a given subject level and then working backwards: How do you want to achieve that level of knowledge? What are the targets for each week? By setting these targets you can establish a timeline and curriculum that allows for effective homeschooling.
Of course, this does not mean you need to stick to a plan in a completely rigid manner. After all, one of the advantages of homeschooling is its relative flexibility.
But don’t let this tempt you into avoiding making a plan. Although it may seem wonderful to have an entirely “organic” education for your children, this can easily go awry. If you constantly let your child’s learning be dictated exclusively by his or her interests, gaps will appear in her knowledge.
Instead, make a clear educational plan that allows for flexibility. Plan what your child is going to learn, but leave the “how she will learn it” some breathing room. As you begin the process of homeschooling, you will learn how your child learns best, and you can begin to incorporate this into the lessons.
Last Updated on 17 September 2024
Community Ambassador; as someone who was raised in a rather privileged family, I hope to address the inequity in educational outcomes based on the circumstance of birth. Bounced around between Australia and Singapore a fair bit.
You might also like
