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Posted by tiarali79

Hi. I majored in primary education for three years before changing my major, and am now halfway through my first year of homeschooling.
The first year and a half of my degree was in redoing all the subjects I had done up to grade ten level, and I only had to get a pass mark of 50% in each of them - including maths and English - to continue in my studies. So if you passed grade 10, you have the equivalent content knowledge of most Queensland primary teachers.

The rest of the course covered subjects like behaviour management (you know how to discipline your kids, you've done it for years!), including minority groups in the classroom (your kids should all have the same values and cultural background as you), and planning - which is really quite easy, and many homeschool mums have written on that subject anyway.

There was a small component of the course on how children learn. Firstly, however, there are a number of ways to tackle that issue (I'm in the meanie 'my kids will be expected to learn from books in adulthood so they can jolly well learn now whether they like it or not' camp) but again, other homeschool mums have written on how various children learn, so if that's important to you, then there's no reason why you can't learn.

And of course there were a few pracs, where you had to stand up and act a lesson in front of 30 kids who really couldn't care less. I hope your experience of homeschooling isn't like that!

In a nutshell: I firmly believe that the idea that you need a teachers degree to teach your kids is false. Most of what is taught in college just doesn't apply to the homeschool.

As a homeschool mum, you will make mistakes. We all do. So do teachers. But while teachers go home and forget about the problem, or blame the kid involved ('must have a learning disability') or the child's parents, you will care enough for your children to work on the problem, talk to other mothers about the problem, and make sure that eventually you come to a satisfactory conclusion. Because at the end of the year, the teacher says goodbye to her students and never sees them again. But your child is precious to you - forever.

I hope this has encouraged you.

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Posted by ScottsHelper

There is no one more motivated to see your children succeed that YOU (that's very obvious in your blog!) Determine to keep it fun for both you AND the children! (It's SO important for the little ones especially--foster a love of learning!) And, don't become a slave to curriculum: take what want from it and leave the rest! Children are like sponges...they absorb SO much on their own if they are in an environment with lots to explore, materials with which to build and create, and LOTS and LOTS of good books to read / be read to!

ScottsHelper
http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/domesticlegacies

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