Adapting Home Based Education to Your Child’s Interests has to be one of the biggest motivators to homeschool for us as a family. In public education your child goes to school and learns a curriculum set and purchased through your school or district based on choices and contracts by the teachers and school board.
Depending on the grade your child is in at public school, he or she will be learning the same as most kids across the state. Depending on the city, town or state your child will also have varied levels of indoctrination. We all already know this. Even in the small rural area I live in we cannot escape Critical Race Theory being tapped into our Elementary Literature due to the authors being chosen for the stories in our school book readers. Though CRT may not be overtly there, the authors who support it are there in the curriculum being taught. Right? Ok, so big or small school this is becoming almost non escapable.
However, what I would like to talk with you today about Adapting Home Based Education to Your Child’s Interests is beyond that. We did not choose to keep our kids at home for home based on fear of large indoctrination for our kids really didn’t have a huge indoctrination issue at our school, thank goodness. Though I am sure the Oklahoma State Board of Education will vehemently try by 2030 to do so, before our children’s high school graduations if they were to have continued traditional public school. It is the way the world is headed and the answer to anything in public education begins and ends with money and funding all centralized from local to federal grants and state funding.
Adapting Home Based Education to Your Child’s Interests
What this article is about, really, is the freedom to choose your curriculum, the freedom to tailor your curriculum, for your current children’s interests. To water your child’s garden of knowledge and desire to learn for themselves. This is a life long value, a skill, that if they are interested in something, to teach themselves more about that something. Pretty simple, but a big deal.
When Fiona, our 9 year old, was born it seemed she loved dinosaurs and paleontology. She lived, breathed, slept, dreamed dinosaurs. In Kindergarten she went on to explain to strangers what a paleontologist was only to tell them that was what she would be when she grew up. Julz, our 5 year old likes dinosaurs, but not to the extent of extreme passion Fiona had. We watered this seed for her and bought her all the books about dinosaurs, took her to natural science museums with dinosaur skeletons, allowed her the freedom to look over the pages before bed time before she could even read. This really motivated her to learn how to read quicker, she could not wait to read to herself the informational text on the page. Fiona’s main motivation when she started to read was being able to read the small informational text on her own of these dinosaur books. I am so proud of that and proud of her for that.
As she has gotten older, and I do believe because of social implications of public school, she has lost her passion for dinosaurs. But, as my husbands continues to remind me, she has not lost her passion for learning and research, it has just shifted toward marine animals and marine biology. See, with her interest in paleontology, we really encouraged a base education of biology as a broader spectrum, with specializing in other fields. So, naturally, she has found another avenue of biology, that I guess at nine years old is more socially acceptable and mature amongst her friends and peers.
With our decision to homeschool and our ability to as I say “Adapting Home Based Education to Your Child’s Interests” we have the freedom and right to choose what she learns as her science for 4th grade. I asked her what she would like to learn about. She chose Marine Biology. She has developed an absolute obsession for Orca Whales. (A girl after her mother’s own heart) and so naturally I said I would crochet her an Orca Whale. She is currently reading Whale of the Wild and researching all that she can in her free time about the physiology of these whales.
She cannot wait to start her marine biology unit, which is one from The Good and the Beautiful. Neither can I, really. And really the best part of this entire thing is, my 5 year old gets to also learn about marine biology in Kindergarten. How cool is that?
We also like to go a little overboard when our children show interests in things educational, so for us as a family, we also currently have two different aquarium annual passes. This allows our kids to really see and feel what they are learning. These are part of our entertainment budget and is really worth every penny. Anything that encourages your child to LEARN is worth it.
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