Learning Styles: Auditory

Another learning style that your child might have is auditory learner. Auditory learners process information by hearing it. They do well by listening to lectures, and will retain more information from a book if they hear an audio book, than if they read it themselves.
Auditory learners might read out loud to themselves. Auditory learners may learn by saying the information out loud. You might even notice that they close their eyes to block out visual input, or organize the material in a chant or song. An example of this is the ABC song, but the same methods can be used for anything from the ABC song, to multiplication tables, to the Krebs cycle.
Some auditory learners benefit from listening to music while studying.
I know parents of my generation (I’m probably older than a lot of parents with 6th grade children!) were always told to turn the music off, make it quiet so that we could study. But for some auditory learners, seeing a cluttered room is much more of a deterrent than hearing loud music while studying.
As more research is done into learning styles, we are discovering that there are many different learning styles, and that a one size fits all way of teaching and learning just won’t work for some children.

Learning Styles: Kinetic

Did you know that there were different learning styles? One of the ways to make your homeschool more successful is to teach to you child in a learning style that will be most effective for their learning styles.
If your child is a kinetic learner, he or she is very active physically. She enjoys learning through touch, and is very aware of textures. He probably learns better when he is allowed to do something physical while learning.
For children who are kinetic learners, math manipulatives are probably a good idea. Writing and drawing are also physical activities so letting your kinetic learner write spelling words on the white board with a marker is probably better than asking the child to spell the words out loud.
Consider letting your child bounce a ball while practicing multiplication tables. A friend of mine made small bean bags for her kinetic learner. Some were filled with rice, some with beans, some with small beads, some with sand, and the fabrics were silky, furry, rough, smooth. She let her child hold them, toss them, and play with them while they were doing school work. She reported that her son’s scores on almost everything improved. This is just anecdotal but might be worth a try if you have a kinetic learner.

More on Homeschool groups

I promised to speak more about homeschool groups. There are many types of homeschool groups. Some groups base membership solely on the fact that you homeschool, or are even considering homeschooling. Other groups add additional criteria, such as statements of faith, or religious affiliations. There are even groups that are specific for a certain thing, like a history co-op, or homeschool boy scout group.
If you are having trouble finding members of a homeschool group to link up with, check with your local library, or your local school supply store. Often they will have names and contact information for groups in the area.
I do have one warning about homeschool groups. People who homeschool generally feel very strongly about homeschooling. Strong emotions and convictions often lead to inflexibility.
If you hear gossip within the group, nip it in the bud. Know that if they are gossiping about other women in your presence, they are gossiping about you when you are not there. I was a member of a group that totally disintegrated a couple of years ago because of gossip. Members of that group reformed into another group, and the gossip was not halted because the same personalities were still in play. That group just had another melt down due to gossip. In the process, it was not only the parents who had hurt feelings, but also children lost friends because the parents could no longer stand each other.
A good homeschool group can be a wonderful thing. A bad homeschool can produce an unreasonable amount of stress in a situation that should be fun, helpful, and supportive.

Homeschool Groups

Do you have a local homeschool group? I can honestly say that if I had not found a homeschool group for support when I first started homeschooling, I probably would not have continued to homeschool. I believe that having veteran homeschoolers tell me that it could be done, in fact showing me that they had been successful, I would have gone nuts.
Beyond the support a good homeschool group can lend, and beyond the advice they can give you on getting legal in your state, they provide a great place for your child to find peers who share the homeschooling experience.
It is important to know that you are not alone, and that other people have had success in homeschooling. There are times, particularly when it gets difficult in your homeschool to be discouraged to the point of returning your child to the previous schooling situation. Those mom’s who have succeeded through the tough times are proof positive that you can continue, and succeed in homeschooling.
Another advantage of a good homeschool group is field trips. It is often more fun for your child to be in a small group. Sometimes places that you would go on a field trip to require a minimum number of students, or offer discounts for groups.
Next time I will tell you a little bit more about groups.

Keyboarding

Keyboarding. Do you know what it is, and are your children practicing it?
Well, you probably do know what keyboarding is, because you are reading this online. That indicates that you probably used keyboarding to get here. Not so long ago homeschooling was done around the kitchen table, with notebooks, workbooks, and textbooks.
Now days, more and more families are utilizing the internet to home educate their children. When I was in high school, we took typing lessons, now children are practicing keyboarding. This is more than just typing letters, but includes learning to utilize the functionality of today’s modern keyboards.
In our house, keyboarding is also an adaptive technology. My daughter hates to write. She says that writing for any length of time causes pain in her hand and arm. If you saw how tightly she grips the pen you would probably agree that writing is painful for her. However, I cannot allow her to not write just because it is painful.
Our way around this is that she practices keyboarding as a course. She practices her typing skills in her core curriculum, as well as using keyboarding games. The games make it fun, and challenging. She enjoys trying to beat her best time, or her accuracy in the keyboarding games. Learning should be fun, right??

Homeschool Science

Homeschool science is what I wanted to write about today. My daughter loves science. She would never do any other course if I didn’t make her move on and study such things as language arts or math. We went to a library book sale not long ago, and do you know what she purchased? Yes, science text books. She wanted a chemistry and a physics text book.
That is what she bough the year before also. So my sixth grader has a growing collection of science text books on the high school level or higher.
What does she do with these books? She reads them…for fun. Don’t get me wrong, I love science, I find it fascinating, I have even studied it at the college level. But my daughter is eleven. I hope that this interest and fascination at a young age will lead to a career in a scientific field in her future.
Our core curriculum has science included in it. However, my daughter would like more, more, more science. Fortunately, the internet is a great source of science videos, and science information. There are even games that she has found online that allow her to apply physics concepts. She even found a game where she balances size of planets with gravitational pulls to build her own solar systems.
If your child is interested in science, foster this and like the unschooling parent, be a facilitator. Make sure that your child knows how to search for and enjoy various science web sites.

Online Eclectic Homeschooling

We are eclectic homeschoolers. And while that means we pick and choose what works best for my daughter, we try very hard not to be scattered, or disorganized.
We do use a core curriculum, called Time4Learning, which is an online, interactive, student paced curriculum. It contains the core courses of Language Arts, Math, Science and social studies. There is an also an art appreciation course which can be included as part of the curriculum.
In addition to Time4Learning, we have several other subjects that we add to my daughter’s homeschool education. She is learning Spanish as her foreign language, she is taking piano lessons, and she is taking an additional art course, online.
We use Vocabulary and Spelling City when she needs more practice with spelling. We do actually use workbooks for word ladders, a spelling and vocabulary exercise, and logic, which we just started this year.
We also do something we call special studies. This is studies in things that interest my daughter, and I will mention how it works in our homeschool in a later post.