MorningStar’s Home Education News

By Mimi Rothschild

As your home schooled child enters teenage years, learning to drive will be one of the top priorities in your home schooling plan. While the requirements of achieving a driver’s license vary from state to state, most states call for your teenager to take a driver education course. Education courses for new drivers should include book study as well as driving exercises.

As a home school parent, you can facilitate their learning to drive by spending time with your teenager behind the wheel as part of your home schooling agenda. Your own instruction, coupled with driver’s education, will result in the development of safe driving skills and will have a constructive impact on the way your teenager drives.

As a home schooling parent, you have determined yourself as a role model for your teenager. It goes back to that “monkey see, monkey do” reasoning. Your teenager has spent years watching you drive, picking up on your good and bad driving behaviors.

Learning to drive a car takes practice, no matter what age, and that practice should be supervised by a licensed driver—it’s the law. By driving with your teenager and reinforcing a positive experience, your teenager will be a safer driver.

Ways that you can make your teenager’s driving experiences with you as part of your home schooling a confidence building and encouraging experience include:

Plan the route that you will take on your trip before you begin driving. Discuss hazards, road conditions and landmarks to help your teenager’s home schooled driving practice be as informative.

Allow your teenager time to get to know your car before driving. Have them adjust the steering wheel, seat, and mirrors to their needs.

Begin with a short drive and progressively increase their time driving as they gain confidence and experience.

Give lessons when the vehicle is stopped—this will allow your teenager to be home schooled on driving and concentrate on your words instead of getting flustered or not paying enough attention to their driving and thusly creating further hazards.

Allow your teenager to drive in varying settings, including weather, times of the day and different types of roadways.

Be patient and stay calm.

Reinforce the good points of your teenager’s driving and discuss any hazards or issues after the drive is over. Driving can be integrated into your home school agenda in many ways, look for opportunities to have your home schooled teenager drive and gain positive experience.

By Mimi Rothschild

It is difficult enough to keep a teen interested and motivated without the temptation to drop the books and head outside. It is natural for your homeschool teen to become distracted and restless, even if they choose their own learning environment. There is no cause for concern, your teen is quite normal. There are some warning signs for negative behavior patterns that the homeschool parent should be on the lookout for. If your homeschooler begins to display some of these signs, it is time to make a change. Homeschoolers will often respond favorably to one or more of the ideas set forth below.

Ask your homeschool teen to write down his or her long term and short term goals. Once they have their list, sit down and discuss it with them. Talk with them about the best path to take to achieve their goals. If college is one of these goals, start touring early to motivate and inspire them. Replace some of their lessons with discussion. This will not only improve their interpersonal skills but may also help them with public speaking. These discussions may also help you and your homeschool student decide what their goals might be and how to proceed.

Let your homeschooler choose their own study time and environment. Try to offer them some alternatives or variation once in a while. If the weather allows, move the lesson outside. You can also select work and volunteer experiences to enhance the lessons.

Mix the lessons up a bit. Mix reading with projects, experiments and crafts. You can also use art and music to illustrate math concepts. Music can also be used as an aid for lessons. Take field trips when your teen’s motivation seems down. The change of venue will be welcome.

Use strategy oriented board games as a way to promote memory and logical thinking. The change of pace will be a welcomed alternative to their books. Provide encouragement and structure to the lessons to help your homeschooler see their progress.

Another way to break things up is to join and participate in homeschool support groups. They are a ripe environment for activities, ideas, and social interaction. You can also find a neighbor or relative who can act as mentor to your homeschooler. A local musician or business executive could be a good mentor for your teen.

Help your homeschool student to rediscover their love of learning. Emphasize your teen’s strengths and learning style. Public schools often focus on linguistic and math intelligences only, and learn by rote memory. You can create a classroom that fosters visual or environmental skills.

By Mimi Rothschild

Home school allows your child and your entire family to escape the many bad things about traditional school. For example, in a home school, you can decide what the important content areas are, emphasizing the areas you think are important and deemphasizing other areas you think are less important in your home school curriculum. In addition, you can decide what sorts of experiential learning and field trips are appropriate, and you can set your own hours according to the needs of your child, you, and the rest of your family. Perhaps one of the best things about home school, however, is that you can teach your child with the way that she learns specifically in mind. At a traditional school, the teachers have to teach a standard curriculum in a specific way. All the learners in the classroom with a different learning style are just sort of pulled along. In your home school, however, you can tailor any curriculum to meet your child’s learning style and needs.

Before you can do this in your home school, however, you will need to figure out just what your child’s learning style is. The easiest way to go about doing this is to watch your child do what she likes to do. Is your child a hands on-sort of learner, does she learn by doing? Or is she more apt to read the directions carefully before trying something out? Does she draw things out or use a lot of diagrams? Or does she spend time pondering a problem before she starts working on it? Observing your child in a more natural state and doing the things that she wants to do, can give you significant insight on her learning style. As a home school parent, you have many tools at your disposal to figure out how your child learns best. Many child development books by respected authors, online tools, tests, and manuals can help you get the most out of your home school curriculum for your child.

By taking the time and effort to make your home school and home school curriculum meet your child’s specific needs, you can make the entire experience better for both your child and yourself. Creating an environment that is perfect for your child’s growth and development is a key aspect of creating a successful home school. When you get to know how your child learns and customizing your home school curriculum to that end, you lay the foundation to help your child succeed in both learning and life.

By Mimi Rothschild

Summer is supposed to be a relaxing time. However, the constant family vacations, social events, sports and lessons can make it seem stressful. Making literature and writing a part of your homeschooled child’s summer can alleviate the boredom and stress of summer.

When the sun is at it’s peak and it’s too hot to go outside, this is a perfect time to plan a family afternoon together. Select a theme, such as Native American folk tales or ancient Egypt to bring out your child’s natural curiosity. Teaching history and culture through narratives is a good way to draw them into a different time and place.

Learning about a specific location, such as a planned vacation destination is a great way to liven your homeschooler’s interest in reading. Have them study up on the places you plan to visit. This will give them some insight into the location and its culture as well as familiarize them with the various activities they might participate in, such as nature hikes or rafting trips.

Have your homeschool child bring along a sketch book to document their trip. By stopping to sketch a particular scene, the trip will be much more personal and memorable and the small details will be retained for years to come. They can also write short descriptions to go along with the drawings to really bring the memory to life.

Hikes are a great way to begin a journal. Have your homeschooler write down detailed descriptions of the hike, not only what they see, but how they feel as they take the trip. The journal will not only bring them closer to their subject, but will also be a prized possession later. A journal is a great way to cement the memory of their vacation in their minds. A trip to Washington D.C., for example, could inspire many great experiences and feelings, which, once written down, could be relived later as your child grows older. NOt only will the memory of that trip be preserved, but the thoughts and feelings of the child as well.

After visiting a site, have your homeschooler write empathically about the experience. Empathic writing is about writing from the viewpoint of the person who had lived at the site. For example, if you visited a Civil War site, your homeschooler could write from the viewpoint of a Confederate soldier or a citizen of the town or city the battle was fought near.

Summer is a great opportunity to include reading and literature to your homeschool student’s lessons to break up the monotony and pressure of the summer vacation. Your homeschooler will not only enhance their education and learning, but will also have some great memories preserved.

By Mimi Rothschild

Families in the military living overseas decide to homeschool for the same reasons families in the states make that decision. Much of the time, it is so they have the freedom to teach their children in a Christian atmosphere without the restraints of public school policy. In a 2002 policy memorandum, the Department of Defense Education Activity released a memo that essentially stated that it neither encouraged nor discouraged military families from exercising their right to homeschool their children.

Military families tend to move rather frequently and with all the other adjustments there are to be made it makes sense to preserve the continuity of the homeschool environment. There are positive sides to this situation as well. Imagine the field trips the homeschool family can take assuming the family is stationed in a safe area. Landmarks that most children only read about can be visited by the family who decides to homeschool overseas.

Even if the children of a future homeschool family are yet to be born or are not old enough at the time the family is stationed abroad, the experience can still be rich for the children. Mom and Dad can pick up souvenirs, take photographs and keep journals of places visited. Future history and geography lessons can come alive with the personal experiences the family encounters.

This would be an excellent time to teach culture differences to your homeschool students. Different foods, different customs, different kinds of stores can all be lessons brought to life for the home schooled children of military personnel. When the family is back in the states, think of the lessons your kids can teach others. Your child could have a lesson in public speaking without even realizing it by sharing his overseas experiences with other home schooled children.

You can most likely meet other families who homeschool while you are overseas and learn from each other as well. Think of the scrapbooks you and the children could make together. Even though this could be an extremely stressful time for the entire family, there are things you can turn into positives simply by turning them into learning experiences. For example, are you able to publicly worship as you choose or do you have to hold church services in your home? Are you able to get the same food and supplies you would normally purchase in the states or is your shopping trip radically different? Whatever the answers to these questions, turn them into learning experiences for your homeschool class. One day, the hardships will be but a distant memory, but the lessons learned will last for a lifetime.

By Mimi Rothschild

New research supports the effectiveness of homeschooling as an option for educating children. The studies prove that when children are homeschooled by one or both of their parents, it strengthens the bond between parent and child. Children who are homeschooled may have an added learning advantage since they are more likely to feel good about their parents taking an active role in their education.

Many parents today, who send their children to public or private schools, do not take an active role or interest in their child’s education. They simple rely on the school system to teach their children properly. The problem with this attitude is that often the children are learning what the school system says they are required to teach, not what the parents actually prefer their children learn. To make matters worse, many parents do not even know their children are doing poorly in school until they receive a notice from the teacher or a school board member. Often by the time this happens, the child has fallen behind in his or her studies. Children who are homeschooled have the support of their parents on a daily basis. This has been proven to increase both their learning ability and interest in their studies.

Throughout most of civilization, children have been taught at home by their parents. It is only recently since the start of the Industrial Revolution that children have been taught in a public setting among several other students. This is not a natural way for children to learn. Homeschool students have the advantage of spending several hours a day with their mother or father.

Critics of homeschooling often say that the children are not taught socialization skills, but this is far from the truth. Homeschool students can participate in many other activities outside of their daily learning routine. Often times these students are exposed to people of all different ages, since they are not constantly among their peers. This helps their socialization skills by teaching them how to act among people of all age groups.

Another common myth about homeschool students is that they will become too dependant upon their parents. This is ironic because studies have proven just the opposite. Children need to be reliant upon their parents at an early age. As they grow and mature on their own, they will naturally depend less on their parents for help or assistance. It is better to let children grow and mature at their own pace instead of suddenly removing them from their parents care to be put in preschool or the public school system. Children who are homeschooled are more likely to feel secure because they are learning in an environment that is both familiar and comfortable to them.

By Mimi Rothschild

New research supports the effectiveness of homeschooling as an option for educating children. The studies prove that when children are homeschooled by one or both of their parents, it strengthens the bond between parent and child. Children who are homeschooled may have an added learning advantage since they are more likely to feel good about their parents taking an active role in their education.

Many parents today, who send their children to public or private schools, do not take an active role or interest in their child’s education. They simple rely on the school system to teach their children properly. The problem with this attitude is that often the children are learning what the school system says they are required to teach, not what the parents actually prefer their children learn. To make matters worse, many parents do not even know their children are doing poorly in school until they receive a notice from the teacher or a school board member. Often by the time this happens, the child has fallen behind in his or her studies. Children who are homeschooled have the support of their parents on a daily basis. This has been proven to increase both their learning ability and interest in their studies.

Throughout most of civilization, children have been taught at home by their parents. It is only recently since the start of the Industrial Revolution that children have been taught in a public setting among several other students. This is not a natural way for children to learn. Homeschool students have the advantage of spending several hours a day with their mother or father.

Critics of homeschooling often say that the children are not taught socialization skills, but this is far from the truth. Homeschool students can participate in many other activities outside of their daily learning routine. Often times these students are exposed to people of all different ages, since they are not constantly among their peers. This helps their socialization skills by teaching them how to act among people of all age groups.

Another common myth about homeschool students is that they will become too dependant upon their parents. This is ironic because studies have proven just the opposite. Children need to be reliant upon their parents at an early age. As they grow and mature on their own, they will naturally depend less on their parents for help or assistance. It is better to let children grow and mature at their own pace instead of suddenly removing them from their parents care to be put in preschool or the public school system. Children who are homeschooled are more likely to feel secure because they are learning in an environment that is both familiar and comfortable to them.

By Mimi Rothschild

It used to be that we needed computer education only if we were planning to find work in a specific computer field such as computer programming or the like. That is no longer the case. You may consider teaching computer applications in your homeschool. Computer literacy has become almost as important as literacy itself and we should take that into account when planning our homeschool curriculum.

Once upon a time, it was enough for our daughters to learn how to type but we need to go beyond typing lessons in our homeschool of today. For instance, there is no better “job” in the world than being able to mother your children full-time, educating them not only academically but “training them in the way they should go.” Sadly though, circumstances often dictate that mothers who would much prefer to stay at home with their children work outside the home. In today’s mobile society however, being computer savvy can mean the difference between having to work outside the home and being able to work from home and homeschool your children. We can help our daughters achieve that goal by teaching computer lessons in our homeschool.

The number of people who work from home these days has multiplied again and again from just a decade ago. Not only do thousands of people run successful businesses from their homes, but savvy computer users are telecommuting from home for major corporations instead of having to be physically present. This computer revolution is helping to bring mothers back home. Not only can we help our daughters earn a living from home, we can help ensure that they are able to homeschool their children too.

You don’t have to be a computer genius yourself to teach computer technology to your daughters. There are many, many self-paced programs out there that will guide you and your kids through the technology learning process. One of the best ways to involve your kids and to get them excited about learning computer technology in the homeschool classroom is to make it personal for them. Start with simple applications, like keeping a calendar on the computer where they can enter in the data for important dates like birthdays or assignments due. They can also do research for literally any other class in their homeschool curriculum. If you pay your bills or bank online, involve your daughters in these applications as well.

When young Christian mothers-to-be realize that learning computer technology can not only help them to earn a living, but can help them do so while remaining at home with their children, chances are they will grab the opportunity to learn everything they can!

By Mimi Rothschild

Though some are intrigued by the idea of home schooling their children, many are weary at the same time. Unsure of their ability to handle the job of traditional home schooling (i.e. figure out requirements, create curriculum, teach each subject, test, grade, make it fun, et cetera), many parents opt out of the whole home school idea without even trying.

For these families, there has arrived a middle ground: online home schooling. No longer are online schools just for adults earning a degree after work and on weekends. Now there are classes available online for kindergarten through 12th grade, allowing home schoolers to take some or all of their courses via the Internet. Curriculum materials including textbooks and CD-ROMs are either rented or bought, a teacher is available via email or live chat for questions, and the home schooler can learn at her own pace. There is no grading, but a minimum score must be earned before the next level can be taken on.

For those who haven’t taken online courses before or are uncertain what level to begin with, there are placement tests available through many online home schools. Home school students receive transcripts and other documents that make applying for college a simpler process than if applying from a traditional home school setting. All of this at a cost that is considerably less than a private school education and a little more than a traditional home school curriculum, with a limited time money back guarantee for most courses.

Why would a parent want their home schooler to take classes online? A variety of reasons; the parent may not feel comfortable teaching every course or may not have the time or patience to do so sufficiently. Also, with academics in which a parent doesn’t feel strong, there’s the reassurance of an online professor who can offer back up and answer questions while validating the child’s progress and understanding.

The time saved on research, planning, and developing a curriculum is considerable, but online home schooling is not a license for a parent to kick back and read the paper while their home schooler clicks away on the computer. For every five hours spent doing online home school work, it is advised that parents be intimately involved in at least three of them.

If there is an online home school that is reputable, offers courses that fit state regulations, and suits the motivational standard behind the desire to home school, then perhaps online home school is for you. However, no need to jump in with both feet. Try one class, to see how it fits, and if it’s for you and your home schooler, go for it!

By Mimi Rothschild

For many homeschool parents, homeschooling is moving into the modern world with online courses. Taking online homeschooling classes is a great way to supplement a homeschool curriculum, and there are benefits for any age group. The popularity of online classes for home schoolers is quickly replacing the prevalence of correspondence schools in a homeschool setting. With correspondence courses, students must wait days or weeks for test results before they can move on to the next lesson. Online courses allow for instant delivery and a much faster turnaround on assignments.

Many homeschool parents are turning to online courses to supplement their existing curriculum. The benefits of adding online instruction to a homeschool curriculum are many. Homeschoolers can learn about specialized subjects their parents may be otherwise unable to teach them. Working at a computer also makes it easier to structure and regulate lessons, as the assignments arrive pre-formatted and ready to dive into. Adding online courses to a homeschool curriculum also frees up some of a homeschooling parents’ time to concentrate on other aspects of the curriculum as a whole.

Online classes are an excellent option for high school students who are homeschooled. With a high school home page, both parents and homeschoolers can keep track of assignments, easily transmit lessons, and take tests in an organized and structured fashion. Online courses also allow high school aged homeschoolers to sharpen their independent learning skills and study habits, which is an important step in later education.

Homeschooling parents may be wary of allowing younger children to take online courses as part of their homeschool curriculum, but there are many benefits to introducing elementary and middle-aged children to online learning. Computer skills are a necessary component of success in the modern world, and allowing homeschoolers to get an early start will help them tremendously as their education progresses. Additionally, online courses provide more structure to a basic homeschool curriculum and help to foster good study skills. With younger children, homeschooling parents should monitor their computer time carefully to ensure they do not stray from their intended work.

Whether your homeschoolers are high school aged or just starting out, enrolling them in an online course to supplement the homeschool curriculum is a beneficial option. It is much easier and more convenient than a correspondence course, and online classes serve to broaden your homeschooler’s horizons. Every homeschool parent should consider online courses as part of a successful homeschooling curriculum.