Homeschooling Your Older Children
Teaching young children can be a bit challenging, but it’s nothing when compared to teaching your older children. It is the age when they’re going to challenge you at every turn. They don’t WANT to study math, science, English, reading, or spelling. They want to watch television or play video games. It is a tough audience to please and an even tougher one to get interested in learning things.
If your children have had any experience with public schools, this can affect how they respond to being home-schooled. Since they’re now at home, you may find that they’ll want to sleep in every day and won’t take your teaching efforts seriously. That’s why you must come up with a routine and stick to it. Make sure that your children know that from this time to this time these days, they will be “in school,” and they need to understand that you mean it.
How to choose the best curriculum for children?
Choose a curriculum that will hold your children’s interest and make the learning fun. For example, a science class can be conducted by going outside on a hike with a list of various things to find. These can be different leaves, berries, flowers, and rocks. A scavenger hunt is always fun. Make it challenging, but not so hard that it gets frustrating.
Target the strength of your children and let them spend plenty of time doing activities related to that. If they’re strong in more than one area, that’s even better. Combine their strengths with their weaknesses.
For example, English or language can be combined with drama. Have them do a reading of the Spoon River Anthology. They can choose which of the epitaphs they want to give a dramatic reading of. Then they can write their epitaph. It provides them exercises in English, language, drama, and writing. It’s also fun for dramatically inclined children, love to write, or both.
Let your children have a “free” period each day where they can choose their activity. It can be their video game time or their time to get outside and ride their bicycles. They need something to look forward to every day, and this is usually going to be that time. This free period is in addition to lunch and physical education time. You can help get them rejuvenated so that they’ll be ready to take on the next class on the list.
Something else that you may want to avoid is giving them homework. They’re already at home doing school work. When the end of the day comes around for them, don’t assign even more schoolwork that will keep them chained to their desks for the rest of the night. The exceptions to this will be tests that need to be studied for or papers and reports that need to be written. Otherwise, let them complete their daily work during school hours.
When you can go that extra mile to make learning at least interesting even when it’s not fun, you’ll have much more co-operative children to homeschool.