Primrose Kitten
In our latest article series, we will be exploring the world of homeschooling and offers advice to parents who decide to pursue this education path. It’s a challenging prospect and one that still meets some opposition in the minds of local authorities and other parents. It’s particularly difficult when it comes to preparing your kids at home for their GCSEs and A-Levels. Luckily for those who choose to homeschool, it’s entirely your decision and your right to pursue it when you believe it’s what’s best.
Isn’t homeschooling much cheaper, in fact?
As with most things you do and pay for yourself, you can do it on a shoestring or on a bumper budget if you have the money. That much is up to you. The question is, if you want to guarantee a level of quality and that your child gets everything they need, then you may need to spend more. This is especially true for homeschool kids preparing for GCSEs and A-Levels.
Students in homeschool have some tough choices to make as they leave year nine and prepare for their GCSE journey, and again as they prepare for year 12 and the marathon of A-Levels. One of the things that can put off potential homeschool families is choosing subjects and exam boards.
There is not much point in investing your time and money in a top-notch homeschool set-up and taking the time to read about and select courses if you forget about securing your GCSE and A-Level exam centres in time. All that studying, revision and more hard work would have been for nothing.
Years ago, before the Internet was mainstream, homeschooling was much harder and potentially more expensive. This was because you had to rely entirely on textbooks and other printed resources purchased at inflated prices.
Times like this have thankfully, passed us by, and you can now take advantage of the incredible online world to give your kids some amazing and often free online learning resources. Read more...By incorporating different styles into your homeschool classes, you too can discover what way your kids learn best and then start applying it.
This ability is a golden opportunity. When attending a typical public school, class sizes are frequently too large for the teacher to apply this kind of differentiation to the students. When you only have a small number in your home, it’s easy to try different things. Here are some ideas:If your child has attended a regular state school before, or any other kind of school for that matter, did you ever notice that maths class was most often in the early morning? Many schools seem to avoid putting subjects like maths and physics after lunch or in the afternoon if they can avoid it.
Why is that? The main reason for this is that they are the subjects many students find challenging, and so teaching them when students are freshest, and most alert is better. This principle still holds well in the homeschool environment.
When you are homeschooling younger children and the learning material is basic, there’s less to fear. You can spend more time focused on method and making each day fun and productive. When it comes to teaching GCSE and A-Level material, on the other hand, it’s a different story. The level of learning material moves up several gears, and the amount of detail can get intimidating, especially if you have been out of school yourself for some time.
By the time you finally get to set your homeschool schedule, you’ll have already spent a great deal of time budgeting, choosing courses and exam boards, finding local exam centres, sourcing online materials and outside help --- the list goes on. To make all your hard work worthwhile, however, you now need to build a timetable that works. Read more...