by Karen Pennebaker
Happy New Year! Use the internet to have a better year.
Even though the official “school year” begins in September, each new year is an opportunity to look at how things are progressing and to make changes, if necessary. Homeschoolers always have an opportunity to re-work their curriculum if things aren’t working out as planned. This is a good time to see what works and what doesn’t.
Everyone needs a change of pace now and then. If your child is having problems in arithmetic and you use a particular curriculum, spend some time on the internet looking for work sheets that you think might appeal to your child. There are math puzzles, games and other learning tools at many online websites, free. Use Google or your favorite search engine. If your child is working on third grade level multiplication, for example, type in “free worksheets +third grade +multiplication”. Then start looking at what is out there. (Type it in exactly as I did, but without the quotation marks.)
This is the 21st century, yet mankind still has 10 fingers and toes, most languages have a word for mother that starts with the “m” sound, and the basic needs of a human being have not changed since cave man days. The wonder of modern life is our access to information. Never, until a few decades ago, could you sit at home and access a library on the other side of the earth. Can’t remember how to convert Fahrenheit to Centigrade? Get online and look for a conversion table. Need to teach someone French or Spanish? Find not only an amazing assortment of curricula available for purchase but also free practice websites, babelfish.com (which translates from one language to another), and countless websites with worksheets and information.
Whether you are home-schooling children, have children or grandchildren in public school, or even college students, talk about what they are learning. If they are having problems with a particular subject, help them find a new way of looking at it. There are good reasons to learn proper grammar and spelling. One of those reasons is the internet. Try searching for something you can’t spell! Yes, your computer will give you suggestions, but depending on how you misspell a word, you may get a suggestion that isn’t even related to what you are trying to find. There are also good reasons to learn basic mathematics, general science, history, etc.
The idea of a classic, liberal arts education is to prepare you for life. It is not to merely teach facts but to teach you how to learn and how to find the information you need. Being educated has nothing to do with diplomas and degrees. The saddest sort of person is one who says “I should be able to do that job because I have a degree in ‘whatever’.” Anyone who thinks their education is finished when they graduate from high school, college, etc., is delusional. When I graduated from college, a computer that could do very little would fill your living room. My Tracfone has more capabilities! How boring life would have been if I had stopped learning.
Talk to your children and grandchildren about the value of learning new things and warn them that you can’t believe everything you read and see. Many people write books that are supposed to be non-fiction that have glaring errors in them. There are internet sites out there that toss out information with no source of where it came from. As they said in Ancient Rome, “caveat emptor” – let the buyer beware!
This year, let’s all resolve to learn something new!
Karen Pennebaker has homeschooled her granddaughters for over 10 years. She was encouraged to do this by all of the public school teachers she worked with in the past. Over the past 45 years, Karen has been a self employed artist and typesetter. She has done volunteer work in elementary schools both as a teacher’s aide and teaching art. She can be reached at homeschool@twolanelivin.com.
I agree with your advice of warning your student that all authors are not truthful and also may not share the same beliefs as your family. Little ones can be so literal minded, believing everything that they see in print is true.