Getting Started with Homeschooling
Practical Considerations for Parents of School-Aged Children
© Beverley Paine
Index
Homeschool
Australia
Collecting Together Your Resources
After you have made your list of activities and explorations in your chosen focus areas you are ready to brainstorm all of the possible resources you can utilise.
Resources are all of the books, materials, information, places, and people you can access in your educational program. Forget about the need to purchase narrowly focussed educational texts and let your imagination roam. Learning is about doing, as well as reading and writing in books!
After making your list of possible resources, it is time to visit bookstores, libraries, other home learning families, craft and hobby stores, community and educational centres, to gather the information, materials and other resources you will need. Remember, resources which can be used include people, places and things, not just books and texts.
There is no need to rush out and buy or collect a lot of resources and materials to start with. Every year millions of dollars are spent on advertising trying to convince parents and teachers to buy the latest, best way to learn this or that. Many of these educational books, toys or ‘aids’ are completely unnecessary. A few are exceptional and are of excellent quality, and often the only way to find out what is worth buying is by talking to other home schooling families or other parents who have used them already.
Planning helps to alert you to what you are likely to need in the immediate weeks ahead. It is frustrating to find you don't have the right materials for an activity, and to have to wait until you get them, maybe on another day, just when your child is most interested. Some consumable items need to be on hand all the time. Let experience be your guide here, as all children are different and go through materials at different rates.
However, purchasing consumable items in bulk to save money or trying to anticipate all the possible activities your children may become interested in, can prove an expensive exercise if your children lose interest, and the same goes for texts or reference materials. Pooling resources with other home schooling families often overcomes such problems.
Home schoolers are in a unique position to use absolutely anything and everything as learning resources. With the freedom to access the community and environment whenever they want to, resources are limited only by the imagination and finances.
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Excerpt from Getting Started with Homeschooling, Practical Considerations
© Beverley Paine, 1997
