Home Schooling, Is It For You And Your Child
You might be considering home schooling for a number of reasons, perhaps you feel that the traditional school environment is not benefiting your child’s development or perhaps your child is suffering bullying at school. Whatever the reason, you will need to make sure that home schooling is the right step for yours and your child’s future before you make the big step.
So before you make that step, consider the following thing:
1. Do You Have Support from both Parents? – As with any household decision, it is important to have the buy in from both parents. It’s extremely difficult to homeschool with one parent fighting against it. If your partner is not in agreement, work on them before getting started – You’ll need their support.
2. Do You Have A Willing Child? – You may consider this to be your decision, but it will be very difficult with an unwilling child. Talk to your child/children and understand what they want and try to help them understand what you want to achieve and why.
3. Do You Have Time? – Home schooling is more than just sitting down with books for a couple of hours, there are projects, science experiments, field trips and physical education not to mention lesson plans & marking, it’s not really feasible to consider homeschooling your child or children if you have other work responsibilities.
4. Personal Space – Parents who home school their children are often with their kids from dawn until dusk every day. This works for some, and not for others, it’s really up to you to decide whether you need that personal/adult time or can do without it or if you have outside support to allow you time to do your own thing.
5. Can You Finance It? – Homeschooling itself, can be fairly inexpensive, however, it will mean that the teaching parent will not be able to hold down a full time job, so your family would need to survive on one income.
6. Child Socialisation – Don’t underestimate the importance of interacting with other children as part of your child’s school education. With homeschooling, therefore, it is very important to ensure they don’t miss out on this, so lots of effort will need to be given to getting your child together with other children. With homeschooling, the advantage is you have more control of the social contacts your child makes.
7. Mess – Home schooling can create a degree of mess and clutter. Therefore, it is important that you are able to deal with that. If you are a stickler for a clutter free and spotless home, you may be in for a bit of a shock, particularly during science and art lessons.
8. You Can Trial It – Homeschooling doesn’t have to be a lifetime commitment. Try it for a year, see you, your child and your family get on, if it works for you, continue another year.
Hopefully, that’s given you some food for thought about home schooling. So, if you’re ready to make the next step, try referring to A Home Education for more information on how to get started.
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