QUICK GUIDE to teaching your children at home!

Interested in homeschooling, but still not sure? Read All You Need Is...'

The information in this guide can also be found in Beverley's comprehensive The Educating Parent Resource Directory, a free download.

• About Home Education
• Is it Legal? Registering
• Getting Ready: learning plans, environment and resources
• Assessment
• Keeping Records

How Will You Know They Are Learning?

QUICK GUIDE to teaching your children at home!

A major component of education is evaluation. This is more frequently known as assessment and monitoring progress. There are two main elements to evaluation: observation and reflection.

Observation of your children's actions and reactions, their temperaments and developing personalities, allows you to build relationships with them to ensure successful learning in all areas of their lives.

Evaluation requires the conscious reflection on the usefulness, the appropriateness, and the outcomes (products and results) of their activities. Goals and objectives need to be measurable: by being able to compare 'then' with 'now' and having a clear plan of where you want your child to be in the future, you will build a confident overview of her educational progress.

The process of evaluation can include assessment, but involves much more than simply tests and exams. You need to think about what you are hoping to achieve, whether your methods are appropriate, and how things may have been done differently.

Being organised with keeping records, jotting down your observations and evaluative comments throughout the day will help you to plan their education to suit their emerging learning needs. It also plays an important part in building your confidence in your role as a home educating parent.

Tests and exams can be tailored to suit the individual child's learning needs, or adapted from commercial tests. Some text books and online learning programs include tests and answers. There are also 'test' books for each year level in each subject available.

How to evaluate - some questions to guide you:

• Was the learning activity, or method, effective?
• Have the objectives of the learning activity been met?
• What does your child know now he didn't before?
• What can your child do know she couldn't before?
• Was the learning activity easy or hard, and why?
• What do you know now about how your child learns you didn't know before?
• Did your child find the learning activity challenging?
• Was she enthusiastic and motivated? If not, what contributed to this?
• Were the resources and activities appropriate?

Record your responses in your diary, or on dated samples or your children's work. Use your evaluation to tailor the learning program to your child's immediate learning needs.

As a home educator I developed a couple of different diary formats: the weekly homeschooling diary is very similar to the familiar school diary and the learning naturally diary has been designed to help parents understand that when children are engaged in play, chores or following their interests they are also learning. Another recording approach I developed when my children were high school age, is the Home Education Report / Portfolio. Similar to an end-of-year school report, this document records major assignments or learning tasks undertaken throughout the year. It also contains broad objectives for students in each subject area. It was my aim in creating these resources to help ease parents into home education and to take the worry out of recording their child's progress.

Recently I combined all of these into the Always Learning Planner, Diary and Report, where you can print the pages you need as you require them.

There are dozens of articles on this site about record keeping and evaluation and assessment. Use the search function or look under 'Record Keeping' or 'Evaluation' on the site map. In our complete 'how to homeschool' course, book 3 of our parent workbooks deals exclusively with recording and evaluating home education learning plans.

Read the last page in our quick guide to getting started: a typical homeschooling day.