If you’re looking to adopt a home teaching approach and start homeschooling your child, there are a number of ways you can start. One thing to remember is that you do have to follow the national curriculum set and you can actually receive support for home education from your local council.
At Achieving Success, we have years of experience in tuition, both in person and online, administered by our certified, highly qualified teachers. To help support you, our team have pulled together our favourite top tips on how to teach your child at home, making the transition to home teaching that little bit easier. We hope you find this helpful!
Set Up A Workspace
First things first, when you’ve decided to take your child’s learning into your own hands, you need to make sure that they have the right environment in which to learn. This will help to ensure that they are in the right frame of mind when it comes to learning and putting pen to paper. A dedicated place for lessons helps to instill a routine and set the expectation that they are there to learn.
Consider where this workspace may be set up – the kitchen table, a desk in your child’s bedroom or a dedicated room? Do you need to invest in equipment that will help you conduct your lessons, such as a whiteboard, textbooks or a desk? Wherever this may be, make sure that there is good lighting. If you’re looking to ensure that your child gets the most out of their learning, we actually have a complete guide on how to set up the perfect workspace for home learning, which you may find interesting.
Set A Routine
Follow Usual Habits
A routine is always key when it comes to learning. To make this transition to a home teaching model a little easier, it may be beneficial to follow your child’s usual habits. These can include:
- Setting a time to wake up and get out of bed.
- Taking a shower to be fresh and ready to take on the day.
- Getting dressed into a ‘uniform’.
- Ensuring they eat a substantial and healthy breakfast to fuel their mind and body.
Make A Schedule
Children often benefit from knowing what to expect from the day, so creating a schedule will help to organise their learning, encourage great habits, increase productivity and provide them with a sense of routine. Creating a schedule keeps learning organised and will help to achieve your end-goals. This also helps your child to focus on one task at a time, preventing them from becoming overwhelmed and settling into their learning schedule. This will make home teaching that much easier to adapt to.
Consider how you want to break down your schedule by timings and subjects. You may also want to consider how you want to schedule out your home teaching, week by week. Regular reinforcement is key to improving knowledge and information retention.
If you’re looking to create a detailed timetable, you could use the following information below to organise your child’s lessons into a weekly schedule.
- The typical ‘School’ day starts from 8:50 through to 3:00pm.
- There is usually a 20-minute break time in the morning.
- Lunch is typically from 12:30 to 1:30pm.
- A 15-minute break is then held in the afternoon.
Subjects usually include the following:
- English language.
- English literature.
- Maths.
- Science – Biology, Chemistry, Physics.
- A Modern Language – French, Spanish, German, Italian.
- Geography.
- History.
- Physical Education.
- Design and Technology – Woodwork, Metalwork, Textiles, Food, Graphics.
- Art.
- Music.
- Drama.
- Religious Studies.
- IT (computing).
- PSHE ( personal, social and health education).
If your child is particularly interested in an extracurricular activity, you may find it beneficial to weave it into your weekly schedule to capitalise on their passions.
Alternatively, you may decide not to follow a conventional school day, and instead prefer to ensure that learning is achieved little and often, opting to spread home teaching across 7 days finishing earlier. You may like to try different approaches and see which one works best with your child. Either way, there are different options available should you ever need to try something new.
Be Flexible
You don’t have to be rigid in your schedule, you can mix it up a bit, be flexible and fit your timetable to suit the needs of your child. You may also have commitments that you need to consider when planning. You may even decide to take a child-led approach, giving them the power to decide what they want to focus on the most, the approach taken to that learning and when they would like to learn. Adapting to your child’s needs will most likely result in you establishing a routine that works for you both.
Take Regular Breaks
In a similar way to a working day, your child will need short breaks to digest what they’ve learned and improve their memory. Breaks are important because it gives their brain the time it needs to process information and will also enable them to return to learning with a fresh and rested mind.
Rather than just turning to their phone, iPad or tv, encourage your child to get some fresh air and a change of scenery. Screen time will only make them feel more tired.
Keep Moving
During school, playground games and P.E. lessons are factored into your child’s weekly schedule. This means activities such as this should also be added into your curriculum, to ensure they’re exercising their body as well as their mind. Keeping fit and active can actually help to improve memory and gives your child the chance to blow off some steam and enjoy that all-important fresh air.
Make It Fun 🙂
Making your home teaching fun will only encourage your child to be more inquisitive and take their learning into their own hands. Anything that they find particularly interesting can be researched in greater detail online. If you fall into the same routine, chances are that this may impact their overall learning and attention span. Boredom will lead to frustration and eventually an unwillingness to learn. This also presents you, as a parent, with the opportunity to spend more quality time together.
Activities that we encourage to make homeschooling more fun include:
- Studying the flora and fauna outside in the garden, parks and farms. Get up and close with flowers, and pull out their roots.
- Creating your own experiments with gravity, pouring water downhill or rolling objects.
- Practicing cooking, weighing ingredients and calculating percentages.
- Exploring creative writing and critical thinking with exciting comprehension.
- Reading with storytelling and articles from the local newspaper.
- Exercising the application of modern languages by translating household items and replacing them in sentences.
- Exploring creativity through creating, rehearsing and performing drama acts.
- Listening to music at local performances and practicing musical instruments at home.
- Treasure hunts to hone their orientation skills.
There are so many ways to make learning fun, and it should definitely not be confined to the indoors.
Enrol In Online Tuition
Taking a home teaching approach can at times be overwhelming, and it’s not a sign of accepting defeat or failure by asking for extra support. If you feel like you need help to educate your child, then it may be time to consider hiring an online tutor to give your child some extra support.
Hiring a tutor can really help to reduce the pressure on you. This means that even if you’re homeschooling your child full-time, collaborating with an online tutor will ensure that your child receives an experience that is tailored to their style of learning and is all encompassing, covering every base.
How Can Achieving Success Help You?
Home teaching can be an adjustment, for both parents and children. To make things smoother, consider investing in an online tutor, helping support you and your child. In the same breath, it’s also important that you understand everything you need to know about online learning. You can find our complete guide “Everything You Need To Know About Online Tuition” for your own education.
At Achieving Success, we provide online tuition across the UK and teaching from our Birmingham tuition centres. Our programmes follow a bespoke curriculum that was created to maximise success, and all teaching is completed by highly qualified and highly experienced teachers with a passion for what they do. For more information on our services please contact a member of our friendly team on 0121 769 2795 or alternatively, email us at info@achieving-success.co.uk. We look forward to hearing from you!