General Articles: Maintaining Your Priorities While Home-Schooling Your Child
By Mimi Rothschild
Home-school can be a great experience for you and your child. As anyone who has ever tried to do any work from home will tell you, maintaining your priorities in terms of your home-school curriculum and the must-do activities can be extremely challenging. If you want your home-school experience to succeed, you will have to learn to set priorities and a schedule to get things done. This is not as hard as it may seem, and may make your home-school experience even better.
One idea is to insert all the things that need to be done first in the schedule. Of course, the core curriculum should take precedence in your home-school schedule. Making sure that the core curriculum takes precedence over everything else will ensure that your child stays on track academically throughout the year. This, of course, is of primary importance when you have set up a home-school situation for your child. In any case, there will be several things throughout the day that must be done. Schedule these weeks in advance. Indeed, they should be on your permanent schedule.
The next step is to evaluate the time you have left over and match it to other activities you would like to see your child participate in. Do you want your child in extracurricular activities like sports, music, scouting or foreign language? These are the types of activities that go into your home-school schedule next. When you home-school your child, it is essential that they participate in some type of extracurricular activities. These might not be very important, but they are somewhat important and warrant special consideration with regard to home-school scheduling.
Last, you can put other activities in your schedule. These include doing any sort of favor for a friend or taking a special mid-week shopping trip. All of the fun and spontaneous things that make memories for you and your kids are part of what makes home-school so special. Of course, these things aren't as special if they happen all the time. A reward well-earned for keeping up on the important things in your schedule is much better than constantly goofing off. By prioritizing and scheduling for home-school, you will teach your child how to prioritize and schedule. This is a skill that employers and college admissions officers admire in home-school kids, and one that you should work doubly hard to cultivate.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, children's rights activist, author, and Founder and C.E.O. of online education company Learning by Grace, Inc. Rothschild and her husband of twenty-eight years reside in suburban Philadelphia with their eight children.
Feeling that “our current system of education has broken its promise,” Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. to provide families with Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children all over the world.
In addition to her twenty years of experience as a homeschool mother, Rothschild has written a number of books dealing with education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Home Education Websites Blog consists of helpful online content and activities for Christian homeschooling families.
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