Читать книгу Homeschooling For Dummies - Jennifer Kaufeld - Страница 41

Homeschooling isn’t really “school at home.” Instead, think of it as independent tutoring sessions day after day. Most homeschooling can be done in two to four hours per day with no homework, and that includes high school. Because you teach 1 and not 20 or more, you can explain concepts in much less time than a conventional teacher. Sometimes independent reading or assigned projects fall outside that range, but the vast majority of homeschoolers find that they don’t need to assign homework for their children to maintain their skills.

If a child misses a concept today, you can always reteach it tomorrow. Teacher’s manuals include reteaching time nearly every day as they attempt to catch the learner who didn’t quite understand the first time. If you wait until the following school day to tackle a particular skill again, you give the concept some time to settle. Within the next 24 hours you may discover a new and fresh way to present the skill, or your student may gain the extra processing time he needs to understand it.

For several years, one of my children refused to do math. Well, okay, he didn’t actually refuse; he simply completed the pages as slowly as possible. After awhile, I got tired of waiting for him to finish daydreaming over his math page, and I assigned the unfinished problems as homework. That meant he put the math page with any incomplete problems next to him on the table, and it became after-school work.

It didn’t take too many months before he realized that finishing a math page within 10 to 20 minutes proved to be much more fun than staring at the math problems and thinking about all the other things he could be doing. Now he does his math quickly and well, within a decent time frame, and we move on to other things.