Homeschool Spanish Lessons
July 6th, 2010 | 
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US $.01
Question: Homeschool, what do you think?
Our daughter wants us to home-school her. About 5 of our friends home-school and their kids seem to excel. She is 4 now and is constantly wanting to learn things that are probably too advanced for her. We are in church a few times a week and she is always wanting to move past the class in her workbooks.
Do you think homeschool is a good option so she can move at her own pace, or is it better to be in a class structured so the information has time to resonate. i know she would want to constantly working and move quickly to get through her grades, but is that a bad thing?
For instance, we were on a kids learning website and she was working on site words, she refused to quit until she had done all of the 12 weeks of lessons. Also when she is learning new Spanish words, she can't quit with 5 or 10 words, she wants to learn 50 words and then forgets them because she flooded her brain.
Any suggestions would be great.
Answer: I don’t know you or your daughter, so this is a wild shot. Please don’t be offended. I’d advocate Homeschooling for (almost) anyone who has the motivation and the time.
But in your question, I’m not reading a sense of discipline, which is crucial to any education. I don’t think any child should be held back, but if she’s forgetting words, then she hasn’t really learned them. Even in public schools the kids aren’t given the whole dictionary at one sitting.
Maybe you could go in ahead of her and copy 5 to 10 words and present her with only these words. Then she needs to “spend the day” with those words. Both of you use them as many times as you can during your other activities. Then before bedtime, review with her to check how many she remembers. Any words she remembers on three different days get bumped off the list, and enough new words are added to bring the total back to 10. This way, she is moving as fast as she is actually learning, and should still wind up far ahead of her peers. (I use this system with my children’s spelling, also.)
Again, I absolutely would not throttle her desire to learn, but you can redirect that energy into a more focused method. For instance, when she does her church lesson, put the book away (out of sight if possible, definitely out of reach), and engage her in a conversation about what she’s just learned. Have her describe what it means to her, and how she can use that knowledge as she grows up. Make sure she understands that this “talking” is part of the lesson. Later on, this can become a writing assignment as well.
As you start doing this, you ARE home-schooling. What most American parents don’t “get” is that they are their child’s first teacher. Homeschoolers simply believe that it’s too important a matter to turn over to someone else.
You should understand going in that this is time consuming, especially with younger children. In most cases it becomes a full time job for one of the parents, taking the place of outside employment.
One more caveat: your daughter sounds like a very bright child. It is important to give her challenges, not to the point of frustration, but enough so that she doesn’t become lazy, or think that classes are too easy. At some point, she will run into material that she’ll actually have to “work at”, and if she’s not used to it she could “stall out” at that point.
If you think you’re up to it, and it certainly sounds like your daughter is, homeschooled children are generally ahead of the curve in both academia and social ability, AND there’s a good chance that she’ll still be speaking to you when she’s a teenager.
Best of luck to you both!
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