Being a homeschooling parent, I have experienced the difficulty of delivering a well-rounded education that promotes our children's growth and development. While I concur that conventional academic subjects hold significant value, I continue to discuss other modalities and areas that require attention to help our children realise their true potential.
In my last article, I discussed laughter, the Goulding Process - SleepTalk, and Mindfulness or Medication. However, today I am going to dive into physical exercise, time management, and critical thinking and problem solving.
Physical exercise is not only essential for our children's physical health, but it can also improve their mental health and academic performance. As homeschooling parents, we can encourage our children to engage in physical activities such as sports, yoga, or even dance classes. But what if your children are couch potatoes. Well visits to the park, bush walking even slower less active outdoor activities are a start. Again I believe it is us parents who need to be the active role-models.
Time management is a skill that children can benefit from learning early on in life. Hey, but let's face it, many of us still don't have Time Management down pat. (And yours truly was an hour late for my own wedding.) So let's think outside the box here. As humans, we are really driven by two factors - Pleasure and Pain.
We either do things that bring us pleasure or avoid things that bring us pain, and our children are not any different. So if we adjust our thinking and teach our children to focus on the benefits, we will get better results regarding prioritizing tasks and time. Allow the children to set their timetable to their liking occasionally. My son used to love doing all the hard stuff first. He used to breeze through the day once the major tasks were completed. When they weren't, it was a real chore, and the day dragged on for both of us.
To give some examples of how we can improve children's time management, parents can work with their children to create a daily or weekly schedule that includes time for academic work, physical exercise, and other activities. We can teach our children to prioritise tasks (using different colored highlighters) to identify which ones are most important and need to be completed first. And, we can help our children set goals and work towards achieving them by breaking down larger tasks into smaller, more manageable ones.
Critical thinking and problem-solving are both invaluable skills that children can use throughout their lives. Homeschooling parents have the ability to promote critical thinking far more than normal teachers. Puzzles, riddles, debates allow children to creatively come up with solutions to problems they encounter in their daily lives.
We can always use technology to our advantage in this area, as I remember well, my son spending hours mastering an animated math game which was quite difficult. How to build a structured bridge to hold so much weight (so that the villagers could escape the zombies.)
By utilising these modalities, we can help our children develop essential skills that will serve them well throughout their lives. In this second article, I hope I have given you some food for thought. I look forward to catching up in part three.