Field Trips: Shaking Up Your Home-school Routine
By Mimi Rothschild If you are currently home-schooling your children or are seriously considering it, you may be dreaming of freeing yourself from the hassles and headaches of your local public school system. However, you may not be looking forward to spending hours every single day going over monotonous, grueling minutia. Perhaps just the thought of it bores you and your child to tears. However, home-schooling is not just school at home. Home-school is, instead, education designed by the parents to meet the needs of their children. It doesn't have to take place at home and it certainly doesn't have to look like traditional school. Indeed, the less like modern traditional public school your version of home-schooling is, the more likely your child is to benefit from it.
Of course, you will probably sign your child up for sports, music lessons, and other activities to help round out their education, but even the more mundane things in your life can be made into lessons. Take, for example, a trip to the grocery store. If you weren't home-schooling your child, you may never think to turn the grocery store into an educational experience, but it certainly can be. Money and economics may be the more common lessons we associate with a trip to the grocery store, but what about physics? The car moves with gravity, inertia, friction, and the laws governing motion. What about taking a stroll down the aisles of your store devoted to ethnic foods? Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, and kosher foods: you can talk to your home-schooled children about each of these traditions and perhaps prepare a meal in the tradition of these various cultures. For the home-schooled child, there is no separation between education and real life, it can all flow together seamlessly.
For many students in traditional schools, long summer and winter breaks let children forget what they are learning. For home-schooled children, this is a time of active leaning, not knowledge atrophy. Trips to historical sites and natural forests can yield science, history, math, language and geography skills. Camping trips can teach more practical survival skills while trips to famous landmarks may teach both geology and architecture. As a home-schooling parent, you can make everything a chance to learn for your child to grow and explore. Learning should not be confined to a certain number of hours throughout the year. Research shows that this integration of knowledge is very beneficial for children. Indeed, many home-schooled children out-perform their traditionally schooled peers in any number of objective measures. If that is an indication of anything, it is an indication that home-schooling parents need to take the home out of home-school and start making every activity a learning opportunity for their home-schooled children.
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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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