Advantatges & disadvantatges of homeschooling

Homeschooling 

 Advantatges of homeschooling

Home education is a wonderful way to stay close to your children while helping them become well-rounded teenagers and adults. It offers you the opportunity to tailor your children’s education to suit your children, your lifestyle, and your beliefs. Education at home also gives you a safe ‘home base’ for your children while they explore the people and places around them. With the ability to individualize your child’s education, you can truly foster a lifelong love of learning.

A home school is a school in which parents teach their children an academic curriculum at home instead of sending them out to a public or private school. Home schooling is legal throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand, North America, Hong Kong, and South Africa. Home schooling is most popular in Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Home schooling is legally accepted in all 50 states of the U.S., but each state has its own laws that a family must adhere to.

Currently, it is estimated that over one million families school their children at home. Most of these families include a breadwinner and a stay-at-home parent who does most of the teaching, although there are single parent families and dual career families who home school. Home schooling education models range from unschooling to traditional classroom schooling. Unschooling is based on interest-based learning in which the child expresses interest in a particular subject, and the parents take steps to provide the materials for that subject. Most parents who home school, however, have a traditional setting in which the children are taught subjects such as math, reading, history, science, grammar, and spelling within a structured schedule created by the parents. 

Home school support groups

In most communities, the home school family can take advantage of a local support group. A home school support group organizes monthly meetings in which new and existing home school families discuss different home schooling issues. The group may also arrange for cooperative teaching in which parents with different skills teach a group of home schooled children once a week in a rented or donated building. In some places, the home school group shares in hiring a professional teacher to teach a particular subject. The group may also arrange field trips and sports activities. A number of home school groups field sports teams that compete against each other or with local private schools. These activities are intended to provide socialization skills for the students.

 External support schools

The home school movement is getting the attention of private and public schools. In response, some schools are providing support and materials such as books, videos, educational software, science kits, computers, field trips, workshops, and special classes.

Home schooling occurs when parents take charge of their children’s education organizing subjects, teaching lessons or arranging for tutors, evaluating progress, and supervising social contacts. Home school parents believe that one-on-one attention and individualized study produce the best education possible; most also think that peer groups are NOT the best “socializing agent” for their children.

Disadvantages of homeschooling

There are disadvantages as well. For instance, home schooling is often lonely because children aren't socializing with other children their own age. They don't get to commiserate with their peers about things like parents and homework, and they do not get to participate in school sponsored extracurricular activities. Parents are also isolated socially as days are spent teaching children, rather than communicating with other adults in a work environment or neighbourhood groups. In addition, students may not get the benefits of many of the services and programs available to those within the school system.

http://www.wikihow.com/Homeschool-Your-Children

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/what-is-home-schooling/

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-home-schooling.htm

Meaningful Learning in Education and Development

All development activity involves the learning of some process or product. This may include anything from learning about basic family planning practices, to learning how to manufacture and market local produce. In order to achieve their full impact, development programs and activities require careful attention to what needs to be taught and how to optimize its learning.

Learning that is most effective is a process that is situated within the context and the culture of the learning community. This is called meaningful learning.

The Role of Context, Culture and Community in Meaningful Learning

Learning design that focuses on the transmission of information has been found to be ineffective in the long run. Contemporary views on learning see it as an active and recursive process. This perspective is driven by greater recognition of the pivotal role of the ‘learning context’ in knowledge construction and understanding. 

This is the constructivist perspective on learning. It is grounded in the belief that learning and cognition are most potent when situated within a meaningful context, and within the culture and the community within which learners live.

The constructivist view of learning is one in which there is a process of developing understanding through problem-solving and critical reflection. As an active process, learning is most effective and efficient when learners are engaged in learning by doing.

This approach also highlights the importance of the learning group in the learning process. It argues that learning, and the development of understanding, is a social process which comes about as a result of learners acting upon authentic problem situations in groups, through dialogue, discussion, and debate.

Instructional designs that embody the constructivist perspective of learning make use of scenarios, problems, incidents, stories and cases that are realistic or authentic (i.e., that reflect real life situations). These activities ‘situate’ and ‘anchor’ all learning experiences, and in this constructivist approach, assessment of learning outcomes is closely tied to the learning context.

Evidence of this view of learning is reflected in the widespread use of scenario and problem-based learning in the study of medicine and the health sciences, case-based reasoning in the study of law, business and economics, and the use of role-play in the study of social sciences. Within these contexts, learners are put into situations where they are required to think for themselves by reflecting on their actions, drawing conclusions, and defending their decisions and actions.

Fundamental Principles and Practices of Meaningful Learning

Following this perspective on meaningful learning, there is growing consensus among educational practitioners that learning is most effective when:

§ Learners are active partners in the process, rather than passive recipients of information and dates;

§ Learners are engaged in learning by doing;

§ Learners are engaged in problem-solving tasks and activities;

§ Learners are engaged in critical reflection during and after their activities;

§ Learning is situated within the context of real-world or authentic problems;

§ Learning is engaged in support and promote cognitive learning;

§ Assessment of learning outcomes is closely aligned with the learning context and the learning activities.

http://pcf4.dec.uwi.edu/learning.php

Five principles of effective second language acquisition

Vocabulary instruction in Byki (Before you know it)

Now, we are going to tell you what it is. For years, to learn a foreign language we focused on grammar and sentences and then on vocabulary. Nowadays instead, there has been a change that demonstrates that learning vocabulary first leads to more success. Byki is an acronym for “Before you know it” and following we are going to show the five principles of effective vocabulary learning.

1. Present new word frequently and repeatedly in input. That’s means that to learn and know correctly a word you have to use it in different contexts and use it in several situations.

2. Use meaning-bearing comprehensible input when presenting new words. So, not only you have to input new vocabulary in different contexts but you have to show the sound and pronunciation of this word too.

3. Limit forced output during the initial stages of learning new words. It isn’t correct to force the children to do sentences or use a word in a sentence until you know this word appropriately. Then, the child has to embrace the meaning in order to make a sentence with logical.

4. Limit forced semantic elaboration during the initial stages of learning new words.
The article emphasizes the idea of associate the word with his meaning. You can do it with flash cards that have the foreign language terms and their native language meanings.

5. Progress from less demanding to more demanding vocabulary-related activities. This principle says that is more effective to learners take up with easy words and once you know it, learn others. The Byki exercises progress from easier to more challenging, and that’s way, learners build their confidence and motivate their selves to carry on with the foreign language.

CONCLUSION:

To sum up we have learned that we have to prevent in the first period the construction of sentences and take up a solid vocabulary in order to achieve to control successfully a new language.

http://www.transparent.com/about/second-language.html

Cooperative learning

Students’ learning goals may be structured to promote cooperative, competitive, or  individualistic efforts.  In every classroom, instructional activities are aimed at accomplishing goals and are conducted under a goal structure.  A learning goal is a desired future state of demonstrating competence or mastery in the subject area being studied.  

The teacher decides which goal structure to implement within each lesson.  The most important goal structure, and the one that should be used the majority of the time in learning situations, is cooperation.

Cooperation is working together to accomplish shared goals.  Within cooperative situations, individuals seek outcomes that are beneficial to themselves and beneficial to all other group members.

TYPES OF COOPERATIVE LEARNING

In formal cooperative learning groups the teachers’ role includes:

1.  Making preinstructional decisions.  Teachers (a) formulate both academic and social skills objectives, (b) decide on the size of groups, (c) choose a method for assigning students to groups, (d) decide which roles to assign group members, (e) arrange the room, and (f) arrange the materials students need to complete the assignment.

2.  Explaining the instructional task and cooperative structure.Teachers (a) explain the academic assignment to students, (b) explain the criteria for success, (c) structure positive interdependence, (d) structure individual accountability, (e) explain the behaviors (i.e., social skills) students are expected to use, and (f) emphasize intergroup cooperation

3.  Monitoring students’ learning and intervening to provide assistance in (a) completing the task successfully or (b) using the targeted interpersonal and group skills effectively.While conducting the lesson, teachers monitor each learning group and intervene when needed to improve taskwork and teamwork.  Monitoring the learning groups creates individual accountability; whenever a teacher observes a group, members tend to feel accountable to be constructive members.

4.  Assessing students’ learning and helping students process how well their groups functioned.  Teachers (a) bring closure to the lesson, (b) assess and evaluate the quality and quantity of student achievement, (c) ensure students carefully discuss how effectively they worked together (i.e., process the effectiveness of their learning groups), (d) have students make a plan for improvement, and (e) have students celebrate the hard work of group members.

 

http://www.co-operation.org/home/introduction-to-cooperative-learning/