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There are as many reasons for home schooling a child as there are families. Some of the most prominent reasons are…

Absolute control over the child’s education.

More and more public schools are letting our children down and they are not getting a quality education. Homeschooling your child puts you in control. If your child needs help in a particular area you can give him the one on one attention he needs to master that area. This will give him more confidence in life as he realizes that he can master the things that are hard for him. This usually cannot be accomplished in a public school. On the other hand, if they excel in a particular area and have an interest in it, they have the opportunity to reach their full potential in that particular area.

The ability to tailor your child’s education to him. Again, this falls into the absolute control category. People have different learning styles, and there are many. Some learn by seeing, some by hearing, some by actually doing, some by just reading about something, and most by a combination of all these things. Learning styles can even vary depending on which subject they are studying. In a public school it would be impossible for a teacher to tailor their lessons for every child. In the home school this is very possible. A parent can use different lessons and curriculum for each subject and can take the time to try different methods if a child is having a hard time grasping a particular concept. In a public school if a child cannot grasp something the teacher must move on as they are up against a time table of what they must cover for that particular year. If this problem is encountered in the home school, you can slow down and take all the time needed, it can even be postponed until another time if the child just isn’t ready to grasp a concept.

Religious convictions. Some choose to home school their child for religious reasons. Religion is left out of public schools. A religious private school can be expensive and out of the question for some families. Even if a family can manage to send their child to a private school it still may not be a good option. Homeschooling your child can give you the opportunity to make the religion you believe in a part of your homeschool days.

Moral convictions. When my son attended public school for kindergarten I was absolutely shocked at some of the things he came home and told me. We even lived in a small town and my son went to one of the best schools in the district. I then realized he was spending his days with others that I would prefer he did not and there was really nothing I could do about it as long as he remained in public school. The town has since grown by leaps and bounds and that particular school as well as most in the area are overcrowded and riddled with problems. Other parents as well are shocked at the moral environment that our children are thrown into at public schools. Sending a child to public school often results in our children being exposed to people and morals we would prefer them not to be around. We have very little control over who our child spends their time with at a public school. With homeschooling it is possible for our children to be very well socialized and the parent to have more control and influence over the quality of people with which they spend their time.

A closer family relationship. In today’s busy world most families live in the same house but barely have time to spend together or know each other. This can make the family dynamic suffer and ultimately the children. With homeschooling you have more time to just hang out with your children, get to know them and influence and direct who they become as adults. As the child grows older this closer relationship with his parents will give him the confidence he needs to succeed in life and they will be more likely to follow their parents direction and value their opinion.

In summary, whatever the reason for homeschooling a child. The failure of our public school system and the failure of the family unit in today’s world can make homeschooling your children a very attractive option and in some situations, a very necessary option. The rise in homeschool’s popularity and the success that families are having show that, for many families, it has become a very viable option. And, for many who have taken the road into home schooling, it has become one of the most rewarding journeys of their lives.

.About the Author:

About The Author:

Kimberly has been a homeschool mom for 7 years and is the owner/author of http://www.theschoolplace.com. A resource website for the homeschool community that provides information on where to get free and cheap lesson plans, articles, advice and more.

In your last two articles, I have shared with you the importance of schema in making text meaningful. Now we shall learn how to use schematic clues to increase reading speed.

Consider this very important statement: author’s publish text for a group of people, but you must read that text as an individual. A writer offers all the information they believe that anyone reading their text might require, because a writer can’t anticipate what every possible readers’ map of a subject might contain. On the other hand you tend to read text on subjects that are relevant to your work or hold special interest to you. This mean that you often have a map of many of the important points found in many of the texts you must read, and you can use this map or schema to reach incredibly high speeds in much of your reading.

Ironically, many individuals actually slow down when encountering familiar or easy material. It is human nature to seek out and feel comfortable with familiar surroundings. For example, what might happen if you were reading a really complicated, boring, and challenging Chemistry text, and then found a really interesting, familiar, and easy section in that text. Would you be in a hurry to finish this easy and interesting portion of the text so you could focus upon difficult and boring information, or might you spend more time that you should staying in this comfortable and familiar text? Most people make the mistake of wasting valuable reading time focused upon things they already know, rather than productively using their time to learn new and necessary information. You won’t make this mistake ever again. In the future, as soon as you spot familiar or easy information, you will increase your reading speed and use your time to learn new, unfamiliar, important information. There are many significant applications of this point in business that I would like to share with you.

Imagine you are reading your daily newspaper. In business, it is essential to stay on top of timely and important information. Yet, you often hear the news on the radio on the drive to work, or perhaps view it on television. By the time you read the newspaper, much of the information it contains has already been learned. Spend more time on the news that you didn’t know about, and you will find yourself becoming a more productive newspaper reader. This is a skill I’ve shared with companies like Prudential Realty. Information changes daily in real estate, and good brokers search for leads in the newspapers, while keeping abreast of economic changes and changes in the law that can affect their industry. They know that failure to keep abreast can hurt their bottom line just as using that information correctly can increase their profitability. This same principal holds true for newsletters, and magazines that often contain sections of very familiar information.

Your daily mail, and e-mail are another area where you can put this reading strategy into practice. Many executives have their mail screened by others, because they don’t have the time to pour through a pile of unopened mail. How often has someone made a poor judgment call and not shown you a piece of mail that you would have judged important? Scan you mail swiftly looking for things that require your personal attention, or letters that are responding to your personal requests. Look for mail that can be tossed, postponed, or delegated to someone else. Using schematic clues you will find yourself quickly getting through your mail more efficiently than any assistant could possible accomplish. During a recent program I gave in Montreal for Cisco systems, I was told how they were receiving as many as 300 E-mails a day that seriously compromised their time and efficiency. Learning to speed read their e-mail greatly cut down on this waste of their time. Ironically, many of the e-mails were sent simply to notify people that a letter was on the way. You can significantly cut down on this waste in your company by making people aware that they should either send their letter by e-mail, or use the. regular mail. Have them stop cluttering up your associates’ time by sending e-mails announcing that regular mail is on the way!

The schematic technique we have just learned works well for familiar or easy material, but not everything you read is easy or familiar material. We need a different strategy for speed reading unfamiliar information. It is important to remember that only about 40% of a text is information, and that the rest is explanation. Explanations take the form of stories, anecdotes, examples, and illustrations. Writers use these structures to clarify, simplify, and exemplify the information they are offering to you. However, you will often find that you understand points made in text and don’t require any

additional assistance. When this happens, you can quickly skim these embellishments and move onto the next new and significant point in your text. Only when you find yourself confused or unable to understand a technical point should you take advantage of the extra information the writer included to help make difficult text easier for you to learn.

.About the Author:

Howard Berg is known as the “World’s Fastest Reader” as documented in

the 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. He has taught

thousands of people all over the world not only speed reading but

advanced learning techniques to help them succeed. Get a free lesson

directly from his website here: www.HowardBerg.com

Technology and the knowledge of it are becoming more and more important every single day. As home-schooling parents, you may or may not be well versed in new technology and expanding uses of the internet.

However, as home-schooling parents, you are in the unique and enviable position to use your dual role as a parent and teacher to learn technology skills along with your child. Build upon those skills to make your home-schooling experience that much better. Technology is, in short, important to incorporate in your home-schooling curriculum and design.

The first step for home-schooling parents to incorporate appropriate technology into their lesson plans is to buy a computer and read the instructions carefully. You may even consider signing up for a class or seminar at you local university or community college. It is important to get the basics down if you don’t already know them before introducing the technology to your children. Although you may need to learn the basics from someone else, you and your home-schooled children can do a lot of exploring and learning together. Recent research shows that 97% of teachers learned something new about technology and computers while they were teaching their own students how to use them. You too can use the teaching experience to learn something about technology yourself.

Another great benefit of appropriate technology to home-school and home-schooling families is the time management benefits. It is faster to research topics utilizing internet libraries and databases than it is to drive to the library for research projects and papers. Word processing on a computer is also faster and neater than on a typewriter. This can be utilized by your children and by yourself as you keep records of your home-school activities and home-schooling lesson plans. Indeed, over 75% of traditional classroom teachers reported that technology helped them improve classroom management and nearly 90% said that technology helped them improve lesson planning and instruction. Home-schooling parents and home-schooled children can both benefit from this increase in productivity. You can focus more time and attention on learning the content and doing hands on activities and spend less time on paper work. Furthermore, learning to use technology will help your home-schooled children keep up with and surpass their peers in traditional schools.

.About the Author:

Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, children’s rights activist, author, and Founder and C.E.O. of online education company Learning by Grace, Inc. Rothschild and her husband of twenty-eight years reside in suburban Philadelphia with their eight children.

Feeling that “our current system of education has broken its promise,” Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. to provide families with Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children all over the world.

In addition to her twenty years of experience as a homeschool mother, Rothschild has written a number of books dealing with education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Daily Education News Articles consist of feature stories on online homeschooling and alternative education.