The following article was written and sent in by Anna Hicks.
Homeschooling is becoming an increasingly attractive option for eco-friendly families. While not the course of academic action in my household, homeschooling can greatly reduce automobile dependence and consumption of paper-based and plastic supplies. But it’s not without its challenges. Being the custodian of your child’s education is no simple responsibility, especially for working parents. Not only do you need to teach, you need to supplement the lack of social learning experience at school with planned group based activities such as clubs and sports as well as have a confident grasp on education standards.
From what I hear from homeschooling families, having that firm understanding of academic standards has become an even tougher challenge in the age of Common Core. It can be a brain-number to help kids with CC-geared homework even for parents with children enrolled in traditional school, let alone those doing the teaching themselves. With so much buzz about it, I decided to do some research into the common confusion of applying Common Core in a homeschool environment. Here is what I found:
Testing: Homeschooling parents want to know the lowdown about how Common Core affects their curriculum. It pretty much comes down to testing. While several of the 45 states adopting Common Core standards allow homeschool exemptions for CC-imprinted assessment tests, it’s not outside the realm of possibility today’s home-schooled kid is tomorrow’s enrolled seventh grader, so it’s important the expectations of these standardized tests are incorporated into the lesson plan. Available Common Core tools found online are usually designed with next-generation schooling in mind, making for a more convenient method for parent educators to help their children achieve this goal.
Understanding: One of the chief components of Common Core is the push to help students appreciate the hows and whys of what they do, especially in math. This is why traditional problems such as “12 – 4”” are also likely to include requests for students to represent it in a visual way and break it down in more than one method. For math in particular this is seen as helping kids to appreciate numbers and values for more than just being part of a robotic formula process. Parents who grew up being asked to do little more than add and subtract numbers are typically confused by the perceived complexity, but the added dimensions are there not to trick kids but instead help them get a real world grasp of math and language from an early age.
Leveling: The fundamental reason for the push for Common Core is a desire for all American students to be striving for the same goals relative to their own ages and abilities. So that in theory if a child were to move across the country from one state to another, the change in education isn’t so drastic as to greatly alter that child’s chances for continued success. This applies to homeschooling in that by abiding by Common Core standards your living room class is less likely to stray from where it ought to be. Additionally, if a homeschooled child is for whatever reason made to enroll in a traditional school in the future, their unique and in many ways improvised at-home education won’t act as a hindrance.
Due to the ability to get your kid to class without starting up a car and having them do their homework on a tablet instead of lined paper, homeschooling can seem like the right decision for families seeking a greener lifestyle. But it’s no easy task, especially in the age of Common Core. With that said, changes in American academic standards are not only long overdue, but no reason to deny your child an eco-friendly education.
