Different Methods and Approaches to Home Education. - Melinda Harrington

Different Methods and Approaches to Home Education.

- Melinda Harrington

(There's a video made by Marnie about this topic down below after you've read this post, or you could skip to it straight away!)

Many people worry intensely about finding the ‘correct’ approach when they commence their home school journey. Over the years I’ve met people who are strictly devoted to one particular method, while others pick and choose from across a range of educational approaches. 

One of the more popular Christian home education programmes is
the ACE programme. The Accelerated Christian Education approach is useful because it arrives at your house in bundles. Each subject and year level is catered for with a work book that your child fills out. Ideally your child will work through the material each year and progress right through until the end of Year 12. I know of home educated people who have been accepted into TAFE course and University courses based on successful completion of the ACE programme. Another similar Christian method is Sonlight. Both of these programmes can be purchased online.
 
My daughter attended a Steiner school until we decided to home school. I must admit that I was influenced by the ideas and methods of Waldorf education and continued to use some of the material. I recall that we had regular nature tables, morning circle poetry and singing, and form drawing for several years. Eventually though we moved into more mainstream methods.

Friends of ours have used the Montessori approach with great success; while others are very influenced by Charlotte Mason’s ideas. I would advise any new homeschool families to spend some time researching all of these different methods and approaches. Some of the ideas will resonate with your own ideas and values.
 
Some families enrol for distance education and work through the materials that are sent to you each term. The subject matter and material is dictated by your state’s curriculum. We tried this but did not particularly like it. I recall that in English there was a unit of work on the topic of Sport (we don’t really have anything at all to do with sport in our family), which was a bit of a bore. Then the next topic was an essay on “Should there be advertising during children’s television programmes?” Well we don’t have a television, so the topic was somewhat irrelevant to us. In the end we gave the whole lot away to someone else.

Over time we have picked and chosen different topics and projects based on what my daughter is interested in (or sometimes what I’m interested in). For maths we’ve tended to use mainstream school textbooks. I’ve read through the state curriculum each year and I’ve made sure that we cover the main topics in each subject. I design our own units of study; sometimes merge topics across subjects; sometimes skim over topics. Our focus is increasingly on what interests my daughter (in our case music), and as she grows older some subjects have been dropped. It seems to work really well for us.
 
How about you, what methods and approaches have you used, and why?


Thank you for reading! Please consider supporting this blog by liking the Facebook page, commenting on posts and donating by clicking the donate button! Really appreciated!