FORCED Home Schooling: Short Cuts for Better Results

FORCED Home Schooling: Short Cuts to Better Results I spent about 15 years of my life home schooling three children, about 12 or so of those years being forced to home school against my wishes. So, I completely understand the position so many of you are in now being forced or feeling forced to home school during the coronavirus. My three children are all in college now with two of the three in the honors programs at their respective universities and the third one having had very close to a perfect score on the SAT without any major studying or preparation. While I was home schooling against my will I did the best job I could because my children deserved that much. Clearly, I didn’t do too badly. My degree was in marketing so I did not have an education background. I learned the hard way what worked and how to do things. Today I want to offer you some short cuts for better results. By the way, the easy way for one parent to force another parent to home school their children is to refuse to sign the matriculation paperwork to register a child into the school district. Most states require both parents’ signatures to register a child into a school district unless there is a protection from abuse order or a custody agreement allowing one parent that authority. So that is a little-known fact that is true in New York State and Pennsylvania or at least the 2 districts I was in at the time. Let me address your emotional state right up front. You might be a little upset to very upset, worried, panicked, anxious, depressed, angry and so much more. The more you can deal with your emotions the better you will be able to deal with home schooling – an added burden for you or very likely so. I have put up several blog posts on how to deal with your emotions. So, if you go through my previous 4 posts you should find ample support. The reason that I mention this is because your children are most likely going through some emotional struggles right now too. Now is the time to train yourself on how to manage, process and deal with your emotions because then you can role model that for your child or children. The other reason I mention this is because high stress impacts a child’s ability to learn. So there is an extremely high amount of value for YOU to learn to deal with, process and be able to “Flip the Switch” on your emotions so you can help your children learn that too.

Know the Different Types of Learning

Before I get into the short cuts it is worth mentioning that there are different ways of learning – something that I was late to the party on. If you look online you will find that some educational sites say that there are 4 ways of learning while others say that there are 7 or more ways of learning. What is important here is that some children learn better in one format and the more you can gear your educational efforts in the format that your child learns best in – the better results you will get. One common list of methods of learning is the VARK list, which stands for V-visual (seeing or watching); A-auditory (hearing); R-Reading/writing; and K-kinesthetic (doing, touching and interacting). Out of doing the home schooling for 15 years I learned that I am a visual learner – I learn better when I can see something. I also learn well with reading and writing. My children varied in how they learned best. Once I caught onto that I could better tailor the structure of the curriculum to their individual learning styles. It’s wonderful if you can have a course or a class that incorporates more than one method of learning. Here is one other GOLD NUGGET: When your child has some autonomy in selecting the specific area of focus for his or her school project, paper or school work – you will get SIGNIFICANTLY better results. Why? Because they are working on a subject or topic that THEY are interested in. For example, one of my kids had to write a paper on a current event, which might have been in the 7^th grade. In any case, I gave my child the newspaper and said, pick a current event that interests you. He did. Then he proceeded to dive into the topic, that HE picked, and he wrote a 12-page paper on it! Twelve pages! That far exceeded the minimum. He did that because he was engrossed in a subject that he selected.

Write Reports

I figured this out relatively early on, thankfully. If you have your child write reports, hopefully on a subject they have selected, they will learn how to research a topic. They will practice their language arts skills of writing. I firmly believe that writing a report is a much better way to get the subject matter to “stick” and be remembered because (1) they are learning while doing the research, and they are (2) covering the same material when they are writing the paper. To really boost this to the next level – have your child give oral presentations on their report. Yes, we did that. Often. Having your child give an oral report to me is the double whammy of report writing. If you want the triple win then ask your child to give the oral report with “pizzazz”, which means something special like a visual display to accompany the report. When the Korean news station (MBC) came to our house in 2007 to do a news story on us because they viewed me as an allergy expert in the U.S., one of the pieces they were interested in covering was the home schooling aspect of our life. So, one of the kids gave an oral report with their visual display – and the producer’s mouth fell open. She could not believe it. She had lots of questions. You could tell she was amazed. My children wrote reports in science and history. They wrote lots of reports, which means that I corrected and coached them on how to write a better introduction and conclusion as well as how to organize their papers. And they learned how to write pretty well. And I have no doubt that they were better able to recall materials from reports than from other learning structures like on-line courses or simple reading and take a test. Just my two cents.

Make Maps & Timelines & Notebooks

One of the best things I discovered although late in the game was the high value of making both maps and timelines. The kids and I made world maps for high school and it was extremely valuable. In a do-over situation I would start having the kids make maps in early grade school. Number one it is far more interesting than most geography course work and number two there is a lot you can do with the map. You can even do historical maps for battles and specific time periods. Along with maps I would highly recommend timelines. You can tape 8 ½” x 11” paper together end to end to get a long piece of paper. It is a visual way to put history in perspective and there is a lot you can do with a timeline. This is the world map that I made when I was home schooling. I happened to have a roll of brown craft paper for our world maps, but any paper will do. The other thing that worked well was having the kids make notebooks on specific subjects like the Presidents of the United States, and they also had a book of the states. These made learning much more interesting because they were working on a project while learning.

Hands on learning (kinesthetic learning)

Whatever you can do to incorporate hands on learning will really help you get better results in my humble opinion. One year I did a horticulture and agriculture class for the three kids and as part of that we planted a cover crop over a 5-acre piece of land BY HAND. Basically, we had buckets of seeds that we hand cast over the 5 acres. Do you want to know what they all said? This will never work. These seeds will never grow. Of course, it was an opportunity to teach how many people in other countries cast seeds by hand over their land. Of course, you know that the cover crop grew. It was a very memorable experience. Hobbies can offer a huge potential for learning and can be incorporated into your learning program. Building things, cooking foods, doing experiments are all great ways to provide valuable learning experiences for your children.

Arts & Crafts

For very young children, doing arts and crafts is an excellent way to build fine motor skills, which is something that I did not know early on. Art for any age child or adult provides for an emotional release or at least it can – if not it at least provides a distraction for daily life. It counts for school. Because art is so important and can really be valuable to students, I am going to give you a few ideas of things you can do – while you are sheltering in place with the items you already have laying around. You don’t have to have an arsenal of arts and crafts supplies if you know about the term ephemera. Ephemera is various items, often printed or written ones, that were originally expected to have only a short-term use. You can use ephemera to make beautiful artwork. Examples of ephemera include:

• New or used gift wrapping paper
• Old tea boxes, cereal boxes, or boxes from whatever
• Clippings of pictures or whatnot from magazines
• Words cut out of old magazines
• Stamps from the mail that you get
• Labels from canned goods
• Pages from a old book that is no longer useful
• Junk mail often has some good useful parts to it
• Old ticket stubs or movie stubs
• Play money from an old Monopoly game
• Old candy wrappers

This is actual ephemera that I will use to make get well cards. This is a greeting card made with ephemera – a piece of a tea box plus some items to collage on top. I stick a tea bag inside… I think you get the idea. You have items where you live that could be used for art that falls into the ephemera category. Kids usually pick this up very quickly and can see and find ephemera fast. So what would you do with the ephemera you are asking yourself! Perfect question. I will introduce you to what is called Artist Trading Cards or ATC’s. Artist Trading Cards are 2.5” x 3.5” sized pieces of art. You can cut out 2.5” x 3.5” sized pieces of paper or cardstock if you have it. Then you can draw on the ATC. You could paint on it if you had paints, but a very fun thing you can do is to use ephemera to collage onto the ATC. I will include some pictures to give you a visual. This is a very easy project and kids of all ages love it. Trust me I have done it with very, very young children through teen agers to adults. You can find books and lots of materials about artist trading cards online. You are never supposed to sell them though. You can trade them with people, but you are not to sell them. You might be able to purchase pre-cut Artist Trading Cards from a store called Buffalo Stamps and Stuff – at least that is where I have purchased them in the past. Examples of Artist Trading Cards More examples of Artist Trading Cards… More Artist Trading Cards The other thing that you can do with ephemera is make journals with them using the ephemera to cover note books. I love making blank journals covering inexpensive composition books. I will include a picture or two. The other thing you can do that is fun is use the ephemera to cover an old shoe box. The possibilities are many! Hand made blank journal using ephemera and scrapbooking paper A blank composition book covered with scrapbooking paper and then some ephemera… Another thing that my Mom, who happens to be an artist, introduced us to is what is called a 30 Days of Drawing Challenge. Get some paper and each day, every day, you draw. Just start drawing. You can look at pictures from a magazine or a book. You can find something online that you want to draw. Just keep drawing. If you do this with your children you will be amazed at how much better you become at drawing in 30 days. We loved this challenge and did it several times. You have paper and pencils or pens. This can be very fun. When we did the 30 Days of Drawing Challenge we did not show each other our drawings and instead did a reveal at the end of the 30 days over a special dinner. I can’t tell you what a fan I am of this. It’s fantastic. I can absolutely say that I learned to draw by doing that challenge – a few times.

Adventure Novel

One of the products that I happened upon later in the game was a product called “Adventure Novel”  by Daniel Schwabauer, M.A., which is a DVD series with workbooks. It is absolutely amazing! While we started this late in the game, I still remember components of the “Adventure Novel” DVD all these years later! That should tell you something. If you are in home schooling for the long haul or you just want to help your child write really compelling novels, then I would recommend this product. I don’t remember the cost of it but it was well worth it – whatever I paid for it. Concluding Thoughts Home schooling has been around since the beginning of time. It was the way of the day before the one room school house. We have had U.S. Presidents who were home schooled – two I believe but don’t quote me on that. You can do this. It is not as hard as it seems although you may be feeling overwhelmed. There is a tremendous amount of online support materials available for free. Let people know what you need. Ask for help. Don’t be embarrassed or afraid to say – what is the best way to do this or that? I hope that you found this somewhat helpful! That was at least my goal. If so, please share this on social media We are all in this together. The more we can help each other the better things will be. How can I support you in this? What questions do you have? I hope you can find some joy in the process. Even though I was forced to home school, I found happiness and joy in much of it because that is what I do. I wish you the best! Please let me know what I can do for you!
Love,
Lisa