As this crisis with COVID-19 has escalated I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about educating your children at home. Now that students are home, what do we do? I’ve also seen parents wondering about this thing called “homeschooling.” Should I do it? What does it take to do it? Is it hard?
The number one best advice I’ve seen about homeschooling your children is this:
Don’t simply move traditional education into your homeschooling environment. Don’t bring traditional school home. As a parent, you have the opportunity to sculpt your children’s education to their specific needs and abilities. You don’t need worksheets and thick textbooks. They were bored at school with these things, don’t bore them at home with the same thing.
I can hear you, “Yeah, yeah, that’s all well and good…but what do I do?”
There are a lot of non-traditional approaches, but the one my wife and I used with our son was to read books to him. Real books. That is, not textbooks, but books written by real authors. This included many of the classics, but also many recent books that teach grammar, math, history and science in a way that is fun and engaging. My wife, Kristin (author of the Draw the World series), calls this “Homeschooling with Real Books.”
Homeschooling with Real Books
Recently, my son, who is now 22, was telling us he didn’t even realize he was being educated until he was 9 or 10. He has dyslexia and we decided early on we didn’t want his education to suffer because he couldn’t read. He learned math and science and grammar through books, through fun books, often while building something from LEGO®.
To understand the approach take a look at Kristin’s talk, “Serious Fun: Homeschooling with Real Books,” in the video below:
Read a partial transcript of this video »
More Books!
See this list of posts showing many of the books talked about in the video with links to the books on Amazon.com.
Take a more in depth look at Serious Fun: Homeschooling with Real Books (print and Kindle editions available).
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