Homeschooling Your Child

Many people these days look on home schooling as an odd thing done by those that are extremely religious or have strange ideas. While home schooling is gaining in popularity, there is still a lot of misinformation out there.

The history of home schooling is far longer than public schooling. Until the late 19th century, when states began passing laws that made parents send their children to school, all parents home schooled. However, if you are talking about modern home schools, well that began to take shape in about the 1960s due to three people.

John Holt was an Ivy League graduate and a teacher who began trying to reform schools. As he realized that reform was impossible, he began suggesting home education. Holt believed that children have a natural curiosity and love of learning. He believed that public schools stifled creativity and curiosity with their rigid structure and authoritative system. He suggested a method referred to as "unschooling", which is largely unstructured and takes advantage of the child's natural sense of curiosity and love of learning.

Raymond Moore is another important figure that has had a large effect on home schooling today. He was a Christian and former missionary who saw public schools taught counter to his beliefs. He found many negative things about public schools, including violence and told parents that they should take the responsibility of educating their children not only factually, but morally and spiritually. He believed education to be more than just a place to learn facts, but also the place to lay a basis for a strong set of values and morals.

Ayn Rand never actually wrote anything about home schooling specifically. She was an author and philosopher who gave us the libertarian movement. Libertarians are opposed to any state sponsored education system and especially to it being compulsory. However they are not simply negative in their approach. They advocate a system that focuses on children as individuals, catering the education to the child.

While all of these are different approaches, they basically exist for all the same belief: public education as it currently stands is a failure and will always be a failure until it delivers a quality education in a safe environment and encourages a child to learn. All three also put both the intellectual and moral education of the child as the center of education.

Many parents look on reading as a very difficult thing to do and so wait for school to teach it to them. However, there are some simple things you can do to put your child on the road to reading.

The simplest thing is to read to your child every day. Using your fingers to follow the word, sit with them looking over your shoulder so they connect the words under your finger with the story. This opens your child to the wide wonders of the world of reading and begins associating the letters with the words that make up the story.

Another very important thing is to let your child see you reading. Children want to be like mommy and daddy and tend to want to try things that their parents do. This is a reason why you see little shaving kits for boys and make up kits for girls. This enables them to act like their parent. If they see you reading they are also encouraged to read. If even one parent in the house has a love of reading you can easily pass that on to your children.

Teach them to respect books. This assigns an importance to reading and makes them feel like your entrusting them with an important thing. Reading books should be differentiated from coloring books and not allowed to be tossed on the floor or written in. You can also label things in the home. By using clear letters, no cursive, your children will be faced with these words every time they use that object.

You can turn even driving into a reading lesson by using the clear letters of billboards to practice identifying letters. Teaching a child to read is a lesson that can be reinforced all through the day in many ways. At a restaurant, you can have your child identify letters and sound out words on the menu, rewarding them with dessert.

Teaching a child to read can be fun for both of you and do not even have to include actual lessons. In this way you share the joy of discovery and an important step in their development while instilling a great love of reading.