The Rookie Workshop for New Homeschoolers
Howdy! If you're wondering who I am, take a gander at the About Me page.
Other than that, welcome to the online version of my popular 3-hour-long workshop for new homeschooling parents! If 3 hours sounds daunting, don't worry. Yes, there's a lot to find out, but this isn't a midterm exam with a make-or-break deadline. You're not going to learn everything you need to know about home education in one sitting, one week or one month, no matter how much you surf. It's impossible. And the process doesn't work that way. You'll learn as you go along, and surprising as it may sound to you now, your kids will teach you more than I ever could.
Now having said all that, please know that I've designed the Rookie Workshop to be fun, friendly, thoughtful, insightful -- and humorous. Because you will bumble and stumble, and stick your foot in it, and take wrong turns and make mistakes . . . . and that's okay. It comes with the territory. We've all been there, done that and bought the tee shirt. If you knew how many mistakes yours truly made along the way, you'd run, not walk away from this website. But somehow, I lived to tell the tale. Even better, I learned to relax and laugh at my oh-so-human foibles. Perfect is something I will never be, let alone aspire to. Heavens. How exhausting.
The First Year of Homeschooling: It's All
Greek to Me!
What am I getting myself into? Hindsight and humor from
a homeschool veteran. An RMEC article. By Cindy Englan.
Questions About Homeschooling From a
Teacher
As a former teacher sympathetic to homeschooling, I
often wonder, who guarantees that the parents actually
have the appropriate knowledge to teach? By Tammy
Takahashi.
But . . . . if finding out about homeschooling feels more like going to the dentist or doing taxes, methinks you're doing something wrong. Perhaps you're looking at homeschooling as just another 'form of education', like attending public or private school. Maybe you see it as A Destination. A Goal. A Means to an End. It is hard for us, we parents who were reared in the public school system, to switch gears in our brains and see that homeschooling is so much more than what we were offered. It's an adventure. A lifestyle. A journey. Let's compare homeschooling to something you truly enjoy. Like eating. You don't sit down to a meal just to swallow and fill your tummy, do you? If that's the only goal, just gulp down a couple of supplement pills and call it good. Dinner would take 30 seconds and there'd hardly be any dishes to wash. Hooray! Mission accomplished.
But in all honesty, we sit down to eat, not only because we enjoy the companionship of sharing our day with the family, but also the smell of cooking, the taste, the texture, the sheer delicious sensations of ingesting food. We relish this common experience. Every one of us has fond memories of Thanksgiving feasts, magnificent Easter dinners, warm, gooey cookies just out of the oven, special trips to get ice cream or slurpees on hot summer days. Learning is just as enjoyable as eating. Or shall I say, it used to be -- and it can be again. That's what I'm here to show you.
Oh yeah, one more little thing before we jump in. Bookmark this page, peruse it at your
leisure in your fuzzy pink bunny slippers, share it with friends, link it to your website, whatever.
But please don't distribute/copy (all that jazz) my
copyrighted work without my permission. Thanks.
NEXT: THE ROOKIE WORKSHOP PART 1 -- Deschooling: The Mental Vacation You
Didn't Expect
Are your kids resisting all your attempts to start
homeschooling? They're not trying to drive you nuts.
Really. They're just unconsciously letting you know
that they need time to decompress, to take a deep
breath and flush all that unhappiness out of their
system.
"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think." - Anne Sullivan, Helen
Keller's teacher
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