When I hear the question how can I be sure I cover EVERYTHING this year, my mind flashes back to my many years of homeschooling when I too felt the same way.
Teaching EVERYTHING In Your Homeschool
One point I stress is to be balanced in your teaching. This is important because it gives you a changed direction to your efforts.
Switch your direction from checking off a list of subjects for the day to intentionally teaching educational independence.
Instead of focusing on EVERYTHING, focus on the skills your children need to have so they can learn ANYTHING.
This is a completely different concept from the way most kids have been taught up to the time you begin homeschooling.
Teach your children to be independent instead of daily spoon feeding.
We already do it if you think about it.
For example, the other day Tiny tried to ask me a question, which he should have known.
Instead of looking up what a word meant, he wanted me to simply tell him the answer.
Each situation is different and at times, I do explain what a word means.
But as the teacher, I also knew what kind of effort he had been putting forth in writing his composition for the day.
He was in a get it over with mood because his mind was more interested in the games he could play later after school.
Instant Education – Do Our Children Pay the Price?
Teaching him to value his independent learning time and also because I knew the meaning of the word would stick, I required him to look up the word.
Yes, it would have been easier for me to give him the answer so that he could finish with his composition and move on to the next subject, but in the process I would not be teaching him everything.
It is not even realistic nor a trait of modesty to think we will teach our children everything.
When our eagerness turns to anxiety, it can have a devastating affect on our children.
Personally, I never thought that pushing EVERYTHING onto my children as being a lack of modesty on my part because I certainly did not know everything.
What was I teaching my children? That we could read a few books and be an expert in that subject? Certainly not.
Also, my pushing an everything education at them might be depriving my children of a childhood because I expected instant performance.
The public educational system is in a hurry to label our children as behind, ahead, gifted or whatever new politically correct term that will arrive in the future.
Skills our children will need are ones that will last a life time like reading, math, research skills. and technical know-how in this modern age.
Too, whenever did life skills and plain practical sense like opening a bank account, trying to live a debt free life, running a household, making good decisions as the head of a household ever be counted as less important?
Are we raising dependent or educated independent children?
Harmonious Homeschool
Do you know that some children do not know how to use a library let alone research resource materials?
Equipping our children to weigh valuable resources found on the internet versus valueless ones is vital today.
With the amount of information overload we have access to, kids need to know the difference.
Children’s dictionaries, student dictionaries, rhyming dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias and atlases are resources that are priceless as we teach our children a lifelong love of learning.
Too we want resources that give us an idea of basic subjects because we don’t want to compromise our rigorous standards.
The most basic subjects are arithmetic, language arts, history and science.
Public schools nowadays cut back on subjects that also enrich our lives.
Enrichment, the very thing that causes children to accelerate in their education is the first thing stripped from it.
In homeschooling, we can add art, foreign language, drama, PE, dance, 4H and sports.
All of these subjects help to round out our children but more important they instill an appetite for learning everything that is not easily quenched.
Curriculum, course of studies, and checklists are just guides, but they don’t take importance over the goals we have set for our family.
Therein lies the secret to equipping our children with everything they need to know.
When looking back now, it’s liberating to know that teaching children how to learn everything they want to know is easier than I even imagined.
Self-Education. Expert or Novice Status
The key was to give them the freedom to explore what interests them and then give them keys to self-education.
There are those that will always scoff at the ideas of self-education thinking and that we only cover broad strokes.
It has been my experience that a scholar can be born from a slacker and infused to knowing everything about the details of any subject he deems worth to cover.
So next time someone asks you how are you going to teach EVERYTHING, let them know you don’t have to.
We don’t know everything. You are leading them to teach themselves ANYTHING they want to know.
Beside, we were made to learn lifelong and not in just the short few years our children reach high school and graduate.
How do you answer those who ask you about homeschooling gaps?
Look at these other helps and tips:
- Controlling the Time Spent on Homeschool Subjects or Running a Homeschooling Boot Camp
- Am I Doing Enough When Homeschooling
- How to Know What A Homeschooled Child Should Learn Yearly?
- How to Teach Homeschool Preschool From the Inside Out (And Preschool Skills)
- Homeschool High School The Must Cover Subjects Part 1
- Homeschool High School The Must Cover Subjects Part 2
- 35 Simple But Powerful American History Homeschool Resources K to 12
- How to Choose the BEST Homeschool Middle and High School Language Arts Curriculum & Options
- How to Build Elementary Homeschool Curriculum Directly From Amazon
- 15 Old-Fashioned Useful Skills Homeschoolers Love To Teach
Hugs and love ya,
