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Getting Started with
Home Schooling:
Practical Considerations

© Beverley Paine

In addition to all the recording you do as a home educating parent your children will engage in an enormous amount of different types of recording as they do various educational activities. Understanding the importance of your children's recordings, and the role these play in evaluating the learning experience, can assist to enhance the actual activities.

Recording, when done by both children and parents, and linked to the evaluation process, is useful for the following reasons:

1. provide a springboard for further explorations.
2. link outcomes of knowledge and skills to the process of learning, encouraging recognition of your children's individual styles of learning.
3. form the basis of reference sources of an on-going nature, both informative and evaluative; for example, children's project books, dictionaries.
4. develop your children's language and mathematical skills, particularly reading, writing and oral skills.
5. celebrate learning as valued and exciting by displaying learning outcomes using a variety of media.
6. co-operative collecting of samples of the children's work in scrapbooks or portfolios encourages a sense of responsibility, commitment, co-operation, and focuses on progress and achievement.
7. as an aid to memory retention.
8. reflection after the activity is finished can reveal insights into the children's learning processes which may be missed during the activity.

It is impossible to separate evaluation from planning. Effective evaluation needs to be linked to your learning plans, as well as reflecting your overall educational approach. Evaluation should be manageable, simple, practical, meaningful and provide useful information. All participants in the learning program are responsible for evaluation, not just you, the parent. Most of all, evaluation needs to reflect the developmental nature of your children's learning, as well as monitoring their achievements.

Keep in mind that evaluation is a celebration of achievement, rather than an assessment of what the child doesn't know or understand yet, or is unable to do. This will help make the process an enjoyable one, and will build successful home schooling experiences.

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