A tutorial for temporary homeschoolers
Featured Articles
Is Emergency Homeschooling a Good Idea?
Books and Products to Consider
Homeschool Your Child for Free: More Than 1,400 Smart, Effective, and Practical Resources for Educating Your Family at Home
by LauraMaery Gold , Joan M. Zielinski
I haven't read this, but it has a great reputation--and who doesn't like free?
About the Emergency Homeschooling Website
When I started homeschooling, it was just going to be a temporary situation, intended to get us through a bad patch in my daughter's schooling. I homeschooled my oldest for a year and a few months and she went happily back to school. A year later, all three children asked to homeschool. I had two weeks to prepare. All I really knew was that I didn’t want to do what I’d done before. I knew no other homeschoolers and there were few books to turn to. I’d never heard of temporary homeschooling and there were no resources for doing it. I didn't have any special plans to do it forever at that time--although it turned out we did.
Today, there are many temporary homeschoolers, but there are still very few resources to guide them.
Some temporary homeschoolers began homeschooling after unemployment made the cost of their child’s private school out of reach. They only want to teach until they find a new job. Others are battling with the schools, often over a learning disability, and they pull their child out in anger or frustration. They plan to return in the future when things calm down. Some children have a poor or unkind teacher and the parents remove their children until the next school year. One young mother, realizing she would move a few months after school began, chose to homeschool for a year rather than to subject her daughter to a school change just months after starting kindergarten. A growing trend is the traditional school sabbatical—allowing your child a one-year break from school to study at home to alleviate stress, allow for family travel, or simply for family bonding.
Over the years, I learned that ordinary homeschooling books (including the one I wrote) and websites were not helpful to these temporary homeschoolers. There is so much information the parent gets ovewhelmed. After all, traditional homeschooling books are meant for people who intend to do this the rest of their children’s lives. All a temporary homeschooler wants to do is to get through the rest of the school year, and then successfully return her children to school.
Emergency Homeschooling resolves the problem of wading through a huge website that was never meant for temporary homeschoolers. For this reason, I'm limiting the amount of information offered. There is one section on the site called Extras which will go into more detail, but if you want to learn more, you might want to visit my traditional homeschooling website: Treasured Time for Homeschoolers.
Emergency Homeschooling covers just the essentials a parent needs to have to start homeschooling quickly with as little stress as possible and to ensure the child is able to return to school successfully. It will not expect parents to live up to homeschool culture or prejudices about certain types of schooling. The site will also focus on topics seldom covered in regular homeschooling books, such as how to find support when many support groups ban homeschoolers who are temporary and those who use government homeschool programs.
Please visit the blog and start posting there. I hope we can build a warm and supportive little community around the concept of temporary homeschooling there. Look for the Introduce Yourself post so we can find out who is who. It's always hard to get a community started, but we'll do our best.
Standard Plastic Pattern Blocks Set of 250 Grades K-6: 6 different shapes in 6 colors 0.5 cm thick Activities included by School Specialty Children's Publishing
Pattern blocks are popular in math these days and I'm a big fan of hands-on learning by playing.