What are the benefits of homeschooling?
10th March 2020
Amid coronavirus outbreak, many school children are now practising homeschooling due to school suspension. Are you aware of the pros and cons of homeschooling? How will this education model affect children? Let us talk a bit about the benefits of homeschooling and areas that we should pay attention to.
Benefits of homeschooling:
(1) Child(ren) could learn self-discipline
For the interests of children’s education, parents more or less will refer to some educational books and collect information that could be useful for children’s learning. Unlike schools, which have a set of teaching materials, such as teaching children to read and to learn phonics, parents at home can teach their children at a more flexible schedule such as during reading or playing. Home education allows children to enjoy a more adaptive learning style and freedom. Parents as teachers can also arrange their child’s learning curriculum that suits their child better, with higher flexibility on time arrangement for example. It also provides the opportunity to let children arrange their own time, set their learning tasks and goals to achieve, and in doing so they can feel more empowered and learn about self-discipline at the same time.
(2) Supplement the school learning materials
Textbooks provided by schools are often highly structured and rigid, which may not suit each individual fully. For home education, parents’ teaching could be more personalised and tailor-made to suit the child’s needs. In school, teachers always face a large group of students; while at home parents can give their children one-on-one guidance, from which they might be able to find the best way to adjust the teaching and learning methods. If we were to have a suitable learning plan, not only can we teach children based on their aptitude, but we can also have more time to nurture their extracurricular interests, such as music, painting, sports and so on.
(3) Promote parent-child relationships
Parents are often very busy with work, and as a result, children may not have as much time spending with their parents as now during the school suspension. Therefore, home education provides parents and children with a learning opportunity to grow with each other and spend some more precious moments together. For example, if we were to cultivate children’s personality and shape their good characters, parents can lead by example to teach children courtesy, kindness, and sincerity. This kind of family education is never replaceable by school education. In particular when children are struggling during puberty and adolescence changes, parents can especially spend time with them to help them get through the difficult periods.
Certainly, there are downsides of home education as well. However, if we were to pay more attention to the following areas, the learning quality would be highly enhanced. These include:
(1) Improving children’s social skills
Children’s interpersonal skills are often better cultivated in a collective environment, learning at home all the times might reduce the children’s opportunity to learn how to socialise and interact with others. When children are in school, they are not only acquiring knowledge, but also learning how to communicate, integrate, cooperate with and care for others, so that they can have the opportunity to learn more about the world outside their families, embrace a broader vision and better prepare them for the society in the future. Therefore, when we are at home, we can also arrange some time slots for the children to meet with their close friends online, and add some more story books that are related to friendships during the story time. In this case, children can learn to support, understand, share with and better accommodate the needs of their friends and others.
(2) Increasing the opportunity to learn about independence
In school, most daily experience and group activities allow students to learn from challenges and failures. However, when we are at home, parents tend to provide a very safe and protective environment for their children, and as a result, reduces the opportunities to let children explore and discover the opportunities to grow and fail. We should be reminded that failure leads to success, children (including our younger selves) all grow up by overcoming obstacles and failures, and as a result, we learn to be more resilient and independent. During our homeschooling period, parents can create some opportunities for children to be more autonomous such as by sharing housework chores with them, allowing them to participating in simple cuisine and table setting for meals, or by making their own choices in daily activities, in which children can be encouraged to have better sense of responsibility, higher autonomy and independence. This will be very useful for them to adapt to the society with good characters and personality.
(3) Encouraging children’s learning progress
Certainly, many parents understand that cultivating children’s characters are very important. However, during critical periods such as exams, parents will focus more on their school results and whether their children are catching up with school work or not. In fact, regardless of the school suspension, parents should learn that children are a unique individual and should be educated with differentiated materials. Based on the uniqueness of each child, we should arrange a personalised learning schedule and progress for them. With the rapid changes in the 21st century, we should also reconsider if the traditional school materials are suitable for our children or not, whether these will best prepare them for tomorrow’s society. Perhaps we can make use of the opportunity of school suspension, and spend more time to discover and understand our children’s interests and abilities, and arrange the learning materials and schedule accordingly, supplementing with the corresponding guidance. In doing so, our children’ natural talents may be better encouraged and cultivated. If you would want more advice on personalised educational advice, one-on-one online tutorial and courses, do not hesitate to learn more from us by speaking to our professional educational consultancy team.
KnewSTEP Education hopes to help children and parents to learn more about the benefits and areas to pay attention to regarding homeschooling. We sincerely wish all children can effectively spend their time at home, while also enjoying the quality and precious moments with their family. In order to ensure our students can still study with us in full confidence, we have extended our early bird discount for our summer programme until the end of March. We are looking forward to meeting you in Cambridge!
Check out here to learn more information about our Cambridge Summer Project 2020
Photo Credit:
1. https://www.facebook.com/BookuyApp/photos
2. https://www.theguardian.com/
3. https://kknews.cc/baby/z64rkga.html
4. https://www.istockphoto.com/
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