Getting Started with Homeschooling
Practical Considerations for Parents of School-Aged Children
© Beverley Paine
Index
Homeschool
Australia
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is perhaps the most popular method of coming up with ideas and activities. Most of us do it naturally, often without realising we are actually ‘brainstorming’. Learning to formalise the process and to record it can be a useful tool in planning educational activities or programs.
Having a brainstorming session with your children encourages creative and lateral thinking skills. Sometimes you will want to organise a unit of learning by yourself, but it is always best to involve the children. The more people involved, the more ideas gathered.
With your children choose a topic or theme of interest to them. It may be something that has come up in life recently, perhaps a focus on a hobby or collection. ‘Brainstorm’, by thinking of all of the possible ideas that may be relevant to the chosen theme or topic, and list them on a piece of paper. A large sheet is often useful here. Listen carefully to your children’s ideas, even if they seem unrelated to the topic. In stretching your minds you might also come up with some less obvious concepts and connections. Brainstorming is most effective when you just relax into it - allowing your thoughts to flow freely without judging or correcting them.
Next, scan the list to determine the ideas and terms that seem to be related to each other, and place these into categories with specific headings. New ideas or words may come up at this stage, so record these in the appropriate category.
After this you can brainstorm, together, as many activities as you can appropriate to the children’s developmental or interest levels. You will also need to list all the resources needed in carrying out the study. This includes consumable materials, tools, books, possible excursions, and different people you could access for help and information.
The more people involved in the brainstorming stage the better. This is an excellent beginning for most activities, especially for the children. Brainstorming, even without recording, helps to develop lateral thinking skills.
The following two charts illustrate the first two steps in brainstorming, listing and categorising.
| trees | air | planting seeds | babies | springtime |
| flowers | plants | people | getting bigger | changes |
| getting old | kindergarten | gardens | going to school | home |
| mother | school | farms | dentist | autumn |
| doctor | sisters | water | grandparent | sun |
| children | illness | grown-ups | horses | fish |
| food | pediatrician | father | pets | birthdays |
| ceremonies | grandmother | play | families | forests |
| lambs | animals | learning | more | ponds |
Brainstormed list of ideas and possibilities on the topic of growth
| Things that grow | animals pets | trees plants |
flowers fish | lambs bushes |
people brothers |
children sisters |
| Growing | air | water | sun | food | ||
| Places | farms | gardens | forests | families | home | ponds |
| People who help | father | mother | doctor | grandparent | families | dentist |
| Markers of growth | getting older changes | doctor visit play ceremonies | learning more kindergarten | grown up getting bigger | going to school | springtime birthdays |
Categorisation of ideas and possibilities on the topic of growth.
From this chart you may like to construct a map, web or bubble diagram which shows the connections and relationships between the ideas and possibilities to the categories and topic. New ideas can be added on to this map or some may be deleted after consideration. If the topic has grown too large to seriously consider, you can focus on one of the categories only.
 previous page |
Excerpt from Getting Started with Homeschooling, Practical Considerations
© Beverley Paine, 1997
