How to Home school Different Aged Children

"Hi, I’m Sharon Wilharm on behalf of ExpertVillage.com. And I’d like to talk about home schooling different ages. Now many find this very terrifying because they’ve never done this before, but it’s just like the olden days with the one room school house. And how did they do it? Well what they did, is they would put together all the students in the subjects that they could teach them together and then they would allow other time where everybody was working independently. Subjects such as history and science work great for all ages, you all are studying the same time in history, you may all be reading a book together and then you have different expectations for each student based on their level. For instance the high schooler may have to write a research report on the topic, your middle schooler may write a shorter report and your youngest one can be coloring a coloring book page on the subject. And so they are each studying the same thing, but they’re doing it at different levels and then you’ll need some time when they are all working on their math or their other subjects where you can go around from student to student and to check to see how they’re doing and making sure that they’re understanding. Another wonderful idea is to get the older students actually helping to teach the younger ones, by teaching they’re going to learn a lot and both ages are going to benefit. Now for instance with science, it would be great to have the older ones in charge of doing experiments for the younger ones and they will love feeling in charge and the younger ones will enjoy it and that way it takes some of the pressure off of you because you’re not having to do all of the teaching anymore. You’ve got teacher’s helpers so all of them benefit, but it’s important to make sure that you spend enough time with each student individually, but put them together doing the same thing whenever possible."