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RE: Gratitude and a Chance to Win a Share of 10 Steem With the HomeEdders Challenge.
I can only imagine that your contributions would be more of help than hinderance. It's always good to hear the successes, and even mishaps, of those who have been there and done that, because its easy to worry that you might not be making the right choices when you're in the midst of it all.
The idea of this account and community is to encourage more content of the homeschooling kind on Steem. I'd love to see homeschooling become more normalised and commonplace.
Just don't be offended when I don't participate in contests. I'm happy to encourage folks facing the scary unknown. As to that, I will say this: kids are laser focused on learning. Just try and stop them from learning stuff they want to know!
Government indoctrination seems carefully designed to grind that out of them, and showing kids that learning stuff is a lot of fun may be the most rebellious aspect of homeschooling. It also ends up making homeschooling a lot easier than it looks, as you don't need to develop curricula, or force rote memorization of dry subjects they are uninterested in on them. When they are the ones seeking information you get left feeling they wrung it out of you instead of feeling like you're ramming it down their throats.
Take math. Healthy active boys rightly detest being sat in rows and paying attention to scribbles on chalk boards. However, if they want to build a fort, handing them a tape measure and explaining how fractions work, or paying them minimum wage to hang sheetrock in which they need to know how to use fractions in order to get that sweet, sweet paper, reveals how avid they are to learn, and how well their personal interest enables them to do it quickly and effectively.
That may be the best encouragement to folks considering homeschooling, but trapped in thinking of schooling as drilling a curriculum into kids.
As home schoolers parents are dramatically more capable of providing educational opportunities suited to their kids' interests than academics and institutions. Because of this, most of the anxiety over being competent to teach things like math parents feel is shown to be unnecessary, and kids doing things they want to do is their real education. Our role is basically reduced to knowing where to find the information they want to know because we have already had to find it, or at least know who does know, and pointing kids there.
Haha! I didn't expect you would join in the contests! I feel you are more of the discussion kind and gravitate towards the comments.
I would love to quote a few of the things you're sharing here when I wrap up for this topic. Would you mind me doing so?
If it helps folks, I don't mind at all.