College Planning: Preparing Your Home Schooled Child For College
By Mimi Rothschild
Many parents, whether they have home schooled their child or sent him to traditional public or private schools, hope that their child will attend and succeed in college. Many students struggle with the transition from public and private school to college level coursework. That transition can be even more difficult for home schooled students. There are a variety of ways for parents of home schooled children to overcome these problems and use their home schooled background as a stepping stone to success in college instead of a blockade.
One thing that home schooled children don't have to worry about anymore from colleges and universities is discrimination based on their home schooled status. It used to be the case that admission committees would be leery of home schooled students' credentials and potential. However, research shows that home schooled children are often just as intelligent and just as ready, if not more so, as their peers who were educated in the best public and private schools in the country. Indeed, in many universities, home schooled kids are highly sought after for their time management skills, organization, curiosity, and heightened ability to synthesize information.
These are the same skills that students in traditional public and private schools struggle with that will help make your home schooled child among the most successful at his college or university. However, your home schooled child may lack some practical skills that are vital for success at college. Your child may be very neat and organized, but being a home schooled child, he probably participated in a fair amount of experiential learning where you discussed ideas with each other. As a home schooling parent, you have probably never lectured your child. Your child may not have ever taken lecture notes or learned how to pick out the important pieces of information from a lecture. There are easy ways for a home schooled child to overcome these difficulties. By utilizing the organizational skills that were vital to his success as a home schooled student, your child can easily learn to take effective lecture notes. If there is a method of organizing information that works well for him, he can simply use that. This is simply building a new school; there is no need to re invent the wheel.
You may want your home schooled child to practice sitting through lectures and taking notes in their junior and senior years of high school. Have the student prepare for lectures by reading material in advance and asking questions when he doesn't understand a point. A home schooled child, given the right tools, can be very successful in college and at a university.
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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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