My book From Homeschool to Harvard Without Paying a Cent shows tried-and-tested strategies used over a ten-year period starting when I supplemented my sons’ education during their elementary school years at a public school and continuing through a complete transition to homeschooling. It provides detailed information about my sons’ academic years during elementary, middle, and high school. These strategies are designed to help parents improve their children’s education and smooth out tempestuous parenting waters, whether a child is in a traditional school or homeschooled.
Even before homeschooling, I was exceedingly involved in my
children’s education. As an electrical engineer I was trained to solve
problems, so I treated the education system’s limitations as an issue that I
had to tackle. Homeschooling was the
way to implement my ideas to ensure my children received the best education. I
spent years taking education classes to prepare myself for this new endeavor. Education and children’s development classes,
along with working in the school system, enabled me to develop innovative
ideas.
If you could do anything different when homeschooling what would it be?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your question. I really had to think about this one. :)
DeleteTeaching is an art and it takes lots of preparation and reflection to be successful. It is important to constantly question yourself and make changes to improve our children’s educational experience. I have made many changes throughout our homeschool years, but below are some examples of changes that I wish I had made and did not.
1. Sometimes I was too much of a teacher and not enough of a mom. I saw learning opportunities in everything we did. I would teach them when we were at the grocery store, restaurant, park, and even when we went on vacation. There were situations where it would had been a lot more fun for my children,if I took my teacher’s hat off.
2. I wish I had taken my son out of public school sooner. He begged me to homeschool him when he was in 3rd grade, but he had to wait a few years since I was preparing myself for this new endeavor. Because he was not the fastest student in 4th grade, his peers bullied him. After sharing his frustration with me, I immediately called the teacher and she took care of it. I told the teacher that he had a problem with his feet and that he was diagnosed with pes planus, which is the deformity where the arches the foot collapse. This experience caused him to have a low self-esteem and lose confidence on his ability to play sports. He exercised every day while homeschooling and through sports I could tell that he was gaining speed.
He eventually regained confidence and played varsity track and soccer while in high school.
Thank you for your response. I am guilty of being too much teacher. I think because we homeschool and think we might miss teaching them something they would learn in school we over do it. When in reality they are learning more in a week at home than some schools all year.
ReplyDeleteThat is true! In the beginning of every school year, I would go to the school board's website and check all the topics that the public school covered with their students for each subject. I correlated those topics with our homeschool curriculum and my kids had to learn them first. It would take about 3 months to learn everything they covered at the school all year. Then, I would spend the rest of the year working on topics that my sons were interested in. We worked on electronics, human anatomy, website design, robot programming, and science experiments. We still worked on the main subjects and got ahead of the school system. By the time they were in 7th grade, we had already covered everything required by the public schools for middle school. That is why my sons had 6 honors high school classes by 8th grade.
DeleteHi Eloisa,
ReplyDeleteHow are you? May I share this post on my blog? I usually then share with Facebook. It seems like I would copy and paste it? Just talking about you this morning to another homeschool Mom! :)
Hello,
DeleteCould you contact me via email please.Thanks