that travels together in one direction.
Generally, one parent takes the position as primary homeschool instructor or learning guide. Usually Mom fills that role, but more and more dads are stepping up to the homeschool plate and teaching their children at home. If you foresee it working best for you if Dad teaches the classes, then give it a try. Working with your children each day gives you a relationship that few men enjoy, and the homeschool dads I’ve talked to absolutely love what they do and wouldn’t want it any other way.
Sometimes the parent who doesn’t keep up with the lesson book or explain the math problems feels left out of the educational experience. Often these parents think they’re unqualified to make schooling decisions because they don’t do it every year and letting their partners do it is easier. However, they miss much of the excitement and learning that goes on when they divorce themselves from the day-to-day homeschooling flow.
Incorporating the non-teaching parent as often as possible can help. Although holding math class until Dad gets home from work may not be the most inclusive (or stress free) move you could make, you may schedule a school field trip to the nearest museum on a Saturday or the working parent’s day off so that you can all go together. That way, you take advantage of both parents’ knowledge as you tour the exhibits. If you know science inside and out, but your partner’s specialty is history, you cover both subjects in depth during a trip, which increases the trip’s usefulness for all.
Schedule vacation trips that involve some educational content. This allows both parents to help with the learning, explain what the children see, and generally enjoy the experience.
Encourage the non-teaching parent to share what he knows about a subject dear to his heart. If kites truly jazz him, then spend some time looking at kites, why they fly, and how they fly. You may even make a kite or two together from plans you can find at the library and spend an off-work day flying. One or two evenings a week for an extended period of time covers much ground — especially when the parent teaches what he loves.
Set aside an evening a week to pursue a topic you’ve always wanted to cover as a family, and make it part of your school time. If you want to dive into a subject, such as gourmet cooking or amateur radio, you’ll find it’s much more fun when it’s a whole-family adventure. And with a pastime, such as cooking, you automatically have more hands to help with cleanup when you schedule a family affair. Because parents like to learn too, this gives Mom something to look forward to after a day at the office.
Change your weekly school schedule once in a while to incorporate both parents. Although it may sound kind of strange, you can schedule a Saturday School and then take a day off the next week. Holding Saturday School once a month or so keeps the nonprimary teacher in the loop with everything you teach and gives the children the benefit of working with both parents every now and then.
Incorporate a sharing time into your routine. Remember “Show and Tell,” when kindergarteners and first graders drag their favorite items to school — hopefully to bring them home again without losing them in the meantime — to share with their classmates? You can do the same thing at home by setting aside some time to share each child’s progress with the parent who doesn’t usually teach each day. What was the neatest picture your youngest made this week? Which new fact astounded your oldest? These topics make great dinner conversation as well as after-dinner presentation time. Children love to show their progress to the people they care for the most.
Starting from the Very Beginning
One day you look into your 4-year-old’s dewy eyes and realize there’s no way you can send this baby, the delight of your life, into a cold, hard building filled with strangers. Dearest parent, you have just made the first steps toward deciding to homeschool your offspring. If you continue along this path, you will be up to your eyeballs in coloring pages and math manipulatives all too soon.
If that does happen, congratulations! When you begin with the little ones, it’s not the same as pulling them from school after three or five years of public or private education. You get to start from the start and begin from the beginning. When they learn to read it’s because you taught them that skill, or because they figured it out on their own before you got to it (a relatively rare occurrence, but it does happen). You get to see the delight in your child’s eyes the first time he realizes that two candies plus two candies equals four candies in his mouth. Priceless. Chapter 6 gives you the subject-by-subject lowdown of the elementary school years.
Teaching in small blocks
When you begin with littles, use small chunks of learning time. Ten or 15 minutes at a time is plenty. Ten minutes of playing with math blocks every day for a week is decidedly better than attempting to teach math to a young learner once each week for 50 minutes. Both of you will end up in tears.
Sometimes one activity can work for several things. Did you locate a great drawing of springtime or autumn for coloring? You can talk about the seasons, the flowers, the weather, and clothing changes. Taking it a bit further, you can use that page to talk about color selections, primary colors, secondary colors, and the various colors of the sky. All kinds of subject matter can fit into that one coloring page.
Using the objects you own
Homeschooling from the beginning doesn’t have to break the bank. Want a puppet to help you tell a story? A favorite stuffed animal works just fine. Need objects to demonstrate how to count, add, or subtract? Anything you have in quantity will work: buttons, pennies, peanuts, or even your child’s massive collection of little rubber ducks.
If you look around your house you probably have almost everything you need to begin homeschooling. You probably have read-aloud books; plenty of toys you can count, categorize, and use as drawing models; and scissors, tape, and construction paper and blank paper for creations. One of the biggest temptations in homeschooling is to fill the house with all the things you could possibly ever need to homeschool with. Trust me, that will happen whether you want it to or not, if you follow homeschooling from pre-K or kindergarten all the way through high school. (My second grader needs access to a microscope? Of course I have a microscope! I’ve already graduated two from high school.)
