Getting Started with Homeschooling
Practical Considerations for Parents of School-Aged Children
© Beverley Paine
Index
Homeschool
Australia
Timetables and Flexibility
Using a timetable to organise your time is not essential. Do not use a daily one unless you are already familiar with them and they work well for you, or you are prepared to make a commitment to following it. Timetables are most effective if your children are used to routine. Because your educational program will be tailored to your children’s learning styles and your own needs, it will rarely look like a school time table. Typically these place academic subjects before lunch, with physical and artistic after. Not all children work well with this arrangement. Discover your children’s best times for learning and try to schedule quality activities to coincide.
A more flexible timetable, perhaps in the form of a calendar or diary, may list agreed on objectives for each week, to keep both you and the children on track. A fixed timetable usually represents a commitment to achieve what is recorded on it. In the home school learning environment things often work out very differently, with many learning opportunities arising from what once may have been considered distractions. It is important to view the timetable as a flexible guide only.
The type of activities you wish to schedule on your timetable can include play episodes in addition to more structured periods of academic learning. There is never any need to sit down at desks and study for a set period each day, unless you and your children really want to!
Experience has shown a varied and flexible approach to home schooling is the most successful. Sometimes your children will be sitting at a table with an imposed schedule of lessons from a book, other times they will be following a series of documentaries on the television, sometimes just having fun gardening, cooking, making something together, or cuddling with you on a cushion reading a good book together.
Whatever method you choose to organise your time, having some way of recording specific events and commitments is absolutely essential. Home schooling families tend towards full and busy lives!
The important thing to remember as you endeavour to educate your children, is that you are doing it for yourselves, for the excitement and fun of learning new skills, of expanding your knowledge to meet your needs and interests. You are not doing it to meet or satisfy other people’s standards and expectations.
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Excerpt from Getting Started with Homeschooling, Practical Considerations
© Beverley Paine, 1997
