Home School Course

One of most favorable attributes of home school is the variety of ways you can fashion a homeschooling course.  You can choose from one of the ten most popular teaching methods or design you own to fit your child and your family's lifestyle.  There are literally dozens of ways you can put course together.

Some of the more traditional methods would require textbooks, lesson plans and maybe workbooks to complete the work.  Others are a little less stringent and eclectic and may be centered more around everyday sources of learning, like learning to sew or cook.  Others center their learning on courses either downloaded from the internet or real-time learning on websites.  Yet another way would entail the use of correspondence courses to home school.  These are usually associated with programs that also grade the work the student does and tracks it like a public school to assemble a transcript of the learning that was done.  Both the Universities of Nebraska and Oklahoma offer distance learning as well as several private correspondence schools.

Besides correspondence schools, which like for you to lock in a whole year at a time, there are subscription schools.  Some only offer daily lessons on the computer for kids aged kindergarten to eighth grade, while others take it all the way through high school and offer diplomas as a result.

But because homeschooling is so flexible, you can also design a curriculum with a little of each method of teaching.  You can have textbooks for certain subjects, use video either from a DVD or the Internet or even use tutors to teach certain advanced science or math classes.  When teaching high school subjects, these resources will come in very handy and they are numerous.

As far as costs go, correspondence schools seem to be the most expensive way to put together a homeschooling course.  The two university schools mentioned charge $ 300-$ 400 per subject per semester, which could run about $ 3,000-$ 4,000 per school year per student.  The other private correspondence school charges in the range of $ 1,000-$ 1,900 for a school year depending on whether the course is online or in writing.

Subscription schools charge month-to-month and the rates are as low as $ 20 per month per child; a huge difference from correspondence schools.  They claim their courses can be tailored for the individual child and let them take all the time they need to finish any lesson.  They also track grade scores and store them.  It would seem you would just set a standard time of day to sit your student down at the computer, turn it on and log into the school's website and walk away until their lessons for the day are done.

This would be too techie for some parents, but it might serve as a supplemental method of teaching to break up what otherwise might become a dull day.  With the relatively low fees involved, this might be a tempting resource to use.  They even have multi-unit courses on things like the life of Thomas Jefferson or how locomotives work or the story of the California Gold Rush.  The service might serve as a source of entertainment that also teaches in a fun way.

As you can see, if you're putting together a homeschooling course, there are numerous resources readily at hand to do it.