A School Motivated by Interest

There've been a lot of schools of thought about what works in home schooling and what doesn't. A lot of debate in fact. But there has been some first-hand account where children of home schooling parents have really excelled in primary school exams and college entrances. Many think that what motivates is simply having the freedom to learn what interests them. In this day and age learning at home is not as hard as it seems with all of the resources in technology and communication.

Finding Motivation

Children have a varying degree of concentration and sense of curiosity. With home schooling, the parents can find out how their children best learn. Some studies have found that some children learn well by enforcing discipline and structure. Others may work best with more slack and freedom to explore on subjects they take to.

As a parent and as a new teacher, you have the greatest impact on setting the stage to learn. One of the methods you can use besides the curriculum to teach is simply teaching by example. Take the spotlight off of them for a bit and show your ambition to learn. Of course, you have to learn the material to teach it, still show the desire to learn things on your own.

Reading books, going to the library for yourself, watching the Discovery channel or whatever you feel like doing to learn, is a great way to share this with the children. Games are good, think starting a backgammon challenge match every Friday. Get the competitive juices flowing a little.

The basics and curriculum can be bought, structured and fed to your students, but without the natural curiosity stimulus it's harder to get the information through. Plus, this sort of defeats the purpose of home schooling if you are just emulating the motions that are gone through a state school.

Working with the Curriculum

Of course you'll need to have some kind of structure. There needs to be routine grading and updates on progress. However, since you conduct the direction of the course material, you can dedicate more time to what interests the student most during the teaching. For instance, if you are teaching a physics problem and you are using real life examples of how the principals work, and you notice at the same time your student getting excited to find the answer it may be something you can have them explore more.

For instance if you watch a discovery channel show and see some police doing forensics on a car crash, maybe ask how a car's skid mark and inertia relates to the equation you studied dealing with rate and time. With more time to go into a subject's depth the more special skills they can walk away with going into college and ultimately getting a nice job when they move out.

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Heritage Home School (www.heritagehomeschool.com) is an online home schooling site that offers curriculum and start up essentials for parents who decide to teach their own. K-12th grade modules are offered with a touch on Christian principals. The author, Art Gib, is a freelance writer.

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