Season of Re-Education Approaches to Education Library/Resources  Organizing Home Lesson Plans

Teaching Methods

If you have just pulled your child from public or private school, you are probably familiar with only one style of teaching: the lecture-textbook-workbook style, with multiple choice tests. 

Once you have found your philosophy or educational approach, you can use any method to teach that approach. 

Let's take Math for example.  In school the teacher talks about math, then the kids do their workbooks.  In homeschool, you can use something like Math U See where all of it is illustrated with real items, then they do the workbook. 

There is M&M math, using M&M to illustrate sets, subset, division, subtraction and most of the major properties of Math.  Pizza math is another great tool.

Now many homeschool Mom think they cannot teach math.  But you probably have already been teaching math.  You have 2 or more 4 year olds at your house.  You give each child 2 cookies, but one child received 3 cookies.  You then had a teaching opportunity to explain more and less, or in math terms, greater than and less than, while you contended with the wails of *it's not fair*.  The other myth dissolved in such a scenario is the myth that children don't understand math concepts until they are in kindergarten or older.  Children understand real life math concepts very well.

So how does this transfer in you homeschool?  When children are young they particularly need the concrete version of math before they transfer it to symbols.  6 is a symbol, six is a word that represents the symbol, neither is a concrete representation of six  So when you are at the grocery store, and they are little, you help them count everything that goes into the basket.  When they are older, they help find price per unit and which is the best deal.  They can help you stay in budget.  All this would be considered math lessons.

I had a very active child so she did her times table drills on the trampoline.  We did math games, dominos, card games, 'Shoots and Ladders when she was in kindergarten.  There are thousands of games out there that help children learn, and if you have a child who loves fun, they can still learn while doing games for much of their homeschool.  And then we did computer drill when she learned to sit for longer than 15 minutes. 

I had an auditory child, he could remember anything he listened to.  For that child we used tapes of math songs, grammar songs and they even have geography songs.  Wonder why you can still remember Conjunction Junction after 20 years?  Perhaps you were also an auditory learner.  Or perhaps because instead of the teacher standing in front of the room explaining this grammar rule and then you doing a workbook, Conjunction Junction illustrated the concept, sang it to you and made it fun.