Online Learning: Using Online Teaching Skills and Competencies to Make Your Home-schooling More Effective
By Mimi Rothschild
One of the great things about home-schooling is that learning never stops. Even mundane tasks can be turned into learning experiences. A home-schooled child can learn about measurements, temperatures, and even chemistry through cooking. A trip to the grocery store can turn into a lesson about money, mathematics, and economics. A family vacation can teach about culture, geography, and even physics. Because education for a home-schooled child is not confined to a particular time and space, home-schooling parents can learn a lot from the practices and methodologies employed by those who teach online classes as well as those who teach in a traditional classroom setting. Using the competencies and certifications for online instructors as a guideline, home-schooling parents can become better teachers and learn more effective means of turning everyday events into learning opportunities.
Home-school obviously involves a fair amount of time devoted to rigorous study- much of which may be analogous to what goes on in a traditional classroom. For those learning times that are less structured, the approach taken by online teachers may be more suitable for home-schooling parents. One of the key components in online learning is that the teacher must allow time for the students to absorb and really think about the material on their own. Parents who are home-schooling their children should be applying this to their teaching patterns as well. Sometimes this will mean giving your child a few minutes, a few hours, and sometimes even a few days to absorb and reflect upon a problem or question. In this way, your home-schooling will help teach your child valuable critical thinking skills that are absent from many traditional schools.
Giving the home-schooled child time for reflection does not take away the need to keep discussions about a topic alive and interesting. Your child will learn more through talking over a problem, introducing new variables and sounding out ideas. In this way, a child learns to think about a topic or an idea instead of being told what to think about a topic or an idea by a teacher. Perhaps one of the reasons why you chose to home-school your child in the first place was because you wanted to foster independent and creative thinking. Lively and active discussions are an important part in creating this type of thinker.
As the parent-teacher of a home-schooled child, you should be recording and archiving these discussions and the time used for reflection because it will become useful in later lessons. Maybe it will be next week, or next year, or in five years. You can pull out a discussion and revisit it after the home-schooled child has learned more about the subject or developed more intellectual sophistication. In this way, you can integrate the home-schooling experience and provide a sense of growth and continuity to your home-schooled child.
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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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