A Beka Home Schooling

The A Beka curriculum is a very popular choice for many homeschooling families. It is also used in quite a few Christian schools across the country.

The A Beka Books were developed at Pensacola Christian College. They are based on experience and information gathered over a period of fifty years in the classrooms of Pensacola Christian Academy by many writers. They are unique in that they do not use any currently published works for their curriculum, but instead research and develop their own. Dr. and Mrs. Arlin Horton are the founders of A Beka Book, and the series is named after Mrs. Horton, whose first name is Rebeka.

The A Beka home school curriculum is fundamentally Christian based. The main goal of this program is to ground children in the Christian faith. Every aspect and subject points toward the Christian worldview. It is a workbook based curriculum and is very detailed. It goes step by step through each concept and is very comprehensive. This is a good curriculum for those home school families who are very organized or need a highly structured program.

There are three choices when working with the A Beka Book home school program. There is the A Beka Academy DVD option, which provides two options. The first is the Fully Accredited College Preparatory Program in which A Beka keeps all of the records. The second is the Non-Accredited program in which the parent keeps all the records. Each covers the exact same material. The only difference is the price. Basically, in addition to the workbooks, the DVDs feature teachers who help to explain the subjects in greater detail.

The second option is the A Beka Academy Traditional Parent-Directed option. This is a fully accredited college prep program. A Beka provides you with teacher manuals that explain exactly how to follow and teach the curriculum. You teach the material and A Beka keeps your records for you. It is very much like a traditional school without the school building. You send in all of the work and tests and they grade them and issue a report card. There is an academic calendar along with progress reports. This is much the same as the DVD option minus the DVDs.

The third option is the Textbooks/Materials for Home Schooling. This is simply the curriculum. There is no other involvement from A Beka besides the materials. You will keep all the records and set your own pace. You can order the entire program or just the items that you feel are appropriate for your child. Many parents who choose this option will use parts of another curriculum along with the A Beka materials.

A Beka Book is a good choice for home school families. It is very Biblically based and structured. It sets a strong foundation during the early years in core subjects such as reading and math, and continues to challenge students all the way through high school. The A Beka Book home school curriculum is a great tool with which to teach your child and offers many options.

By: Diane Crawford -

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The Power of Homeschooling

There are 3 powerful reasons why homeschooling works. These include:

(1.) Homeschooling enables exposure to a broad range of people, ideas, and places. Homeschooling is so flexible that it allows family field trips whenever you want. This provides a great way to learn through taking tours, meeting knowledgeable people, and volunteering. What is even better is that you can take advantage of these opportunities during the week when there aren't crowds and when the tour guides, or educators, have time to answer your individual questions. Add in some library books and videos, the writing of thank you notes, the writing of a portfolio entry describing your "adventure," and the possibility of giving an oral presentation to other homeschoolers and you'll see just how powerful this can truly be. This also teaches your child(ren) that there are great teachers to be found in every walk of life.

(2.) If you own your own home business, homeschooling provides opportunities to teach your child(ren) business skills. Starting a home business today is relatively easy and painless. Involving your child(ren) in your home business is an excellent opportunity to teach them skills which will serve them well in any livelihood they might choose as adults. Just think of the various business opportunities that avail themselves. For instance, you can teach your child(ren) how to do basic bookkeeping on the computer.

(3.) Homeschooling allows great flexibility for vacations. You can easily take vacations in the off-season when prices are significantly lower and crowds are rare. For instance, if your family enjoys camping, you can go during the week, or in the weeks before Memorial Day and after Labor Day.

As you can easily see, homeschooling allows a family to do so much of what they truly love to do. That is the greatest power of homeschooling.

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Tips For Successful Homeschooling

There are many reasons why parents choose to homeschool their kids. For many it is because they want to add religious content to their children’s learning experience.

Making the decision to home school is usually a very difficult not and it is not one to be taken lightly. It is a personal decision that no one can make for you, but maybe I can help in the thought process by providing you with a comprehensive guide to making the choice to homeschool your kids a successful one.

When making the homeschool decision, you must first consider these things:

1. Time commitment that is involved. Homeschooling has a tendency to take up a lot of time in your day. It involves more than just sitting down with books for a couple of hours. There are experiments and projects that have to be done, lessons to prepare, papers to grade, field trips, park days, music lessons, and the list just keeps on going. You can go online and search for some sample schedules that will help to give you an idea of a typical day.

2. Personal sacrifice. The homeschooling parent has very little personal time or time alone and away from their children. If a lot of care is not taken to set aside time for yourself, it is easy for the parent to feel overwhelmed. Basically, the parent and child are together 24 hours a day and this can get frustrating on both sides.

3. Financial problems can arise. Homeschooling can be accomplished with very little cost to you; however, it usually requires that the teaching parent will not be working out of the home. Some sacrifices will need to be made if the family is used to two incomes. Of course, if you are a single parent, this could pose an even bigger problem.

4. Time for socialization. More attention will need to be given to getting your children together with his/her peers. The best part of homeschooling is being able to have more control of the social contacts your child makes. However, the downside is that you must prepare your child yourself on how to socialize with other kids. Homeschooling has a tendency to make your child feel isolated.

5. Household organization is harder. Housework and laundry and other house work will still have to be done, but it probably won't get done first thing in the morning. If you are a neat freak, you might be in for a big surprise. Not only does housework need to be let go at times, but homeschooling creates messes and clutter on its own. You will have to get organized so that you can keep your home together.

6. Both parents must agree to it. It is important that both parents agree to homeschooling. It is very difficult for this to work if one of the parents is against it. If your spouse is against it at this time, try doing more research and talking to more people so that you can be absolutely certain it is something that both of you can agree upon. Otherwise, the chances for success are much smaller.

7. Your child has to be willing. A willing student is crucial to the success of homeschooling. Ultimately, the decision is the parents to make, but if your child is dead against it, you might have a very difficult time in teaching them. The fact of the matter is that an unwilling child can sabotage his/her own school efforts.

8. Know that it works one year at a time. It isn't a lifetime commitment and doesn’t have to become one. If you find that homeschooling just isn’t worth it, you can choose to go the regular route.

There is a lot more to homeschooling than to just do it. As a parent, you must know that your child’s education is the most important factor in his/her future. You need to be thoroughly prepared for all of the time and commitment that is involved. If you are thinking of choosing homeschooling for your child (ren), this guide will help to make it a successful transition.

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Does Homeschooling Create Narrow Minds

Some critics of homeschooling parents may suggest that they will be passing on narrow and bigoted ideas to their children. I would suggest that you do not have a right to try to prevent this from happening, nor can you prevent it even if you send your children to public schools. I would even go so far as to suggest that this is an issue of a free country vs a police state. What do I mean? Well, in a free country, as long as you obeyed the law, you can believe whatever you like. Your beliefs are none of the government's business. They have no right to tell you which of your ideas and which of your ideas are bad. Therefore, I do not believe that it is the schools' "job" to promote the good and stamp out the bad. It is a person's individual right to believe what they want, and then to try to pass their beliefs along to their children.

What about people who are prejudiced, bigoted, superstitious, etc? Many people would say that people can tell their children anything they want, as long as it is true. This brings up the question of who decides what is true? Most people would agree that there is no one in government or anywhere else whom we would trust to decide that. Therefore, I believe that we can't give schools the right to tell all children that some ideas are true and others are not. While those who approve of the ideas being taught or promoted in government schools may be glad to send their children there, people who don't approve of those ideas should have some other choice.

One of the many reasons why growing numbers of people are so passionately opposed to the public schools is that these schools are in fact acting as if someone had explicitly and legally given them the power to promote a specific set of ideas while stamping out another set of beliefs. These people believe that educational bureaucrats, at the state and federal level, largely control what schools say and do. These bureaucrats are increasingly using the schools to promote whatever ideas they happen to think will be good for the children, or the country. Yet, we've never formally decided, through any political process, to give the schools such power, nor have we ever agreed on what ideas we would like the schools to promote. In fact, there's reason to believe that large majorities of people strongly dislike many or most of the ideas that most schools promote today.

Even if everyone agreed that the schools should try to stamp out narrow and bigoted ideas, we'd still have to ask ourselves if this actually works. Clearly it doesn't. Think about it... Almost everyone in this country, except for a few rich kids, has been going to public schools for several generations now. If schools were as good as they claim to be at stamping out prejudice, then there shouldn't be any prejudice left. By simply glancing at the news, you can clearly see that there is plenty of prejudice left in this country today. In fact, I would even go so far as to argue that there is less support today than ever before for the tolerance and open-mindedness that the schools supposedly promote. Therefore, I would argue that homeschooling does not create narrow minds. In fact, in most cases it promotes more open mindedness.

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Using the Library for Homeschooling

Where can homeschoolers get unlimited educational materials and not spend a dime? The library, of course! What a blessing to be able to bring home stacks and stacks of books, all for free. The library makes homeschooling an option for parents who could not afford it otherwise.

According to various experts, and proven by our own experiences, reading aloud is the very best educational activity. The library is the place to get the books for doing this. When reading aloud you will be able to skip over really objectionable parts of books; or discuss world views. An example of this was the book that we used when studying slavery and the Civil War. We checked out a book of the slaves own words. Rather than pass over such interesting and accurate history, I passed over the few passages about nudity.

Scope and Sequence

A good place to start is with a plan, your scope and sequence. The scope and sequence gives details on what you will be teaching (scope) and in what order (sequence). The scope and sequence is usually written for one year at a time.

There are guides available that are quite helpful for writing the scope and sequence. One is World Book's Typical Course of Study. I thought it overwhelming and simplified it for the Course of Study in my book, Easy Homeschooling Techniques. Even a text's table of contents can be used as a a guide for a subject.

As well as helping with choosing resources from the library, a scope and sequence will make it easier to plan your daily schedule. You will also be able to see at any point during the year, what you have covered and what needs to be learned next.

Begin

Begin a rough draft. As main points (I, II, III, IV, etc.), list the major subject areas you will cover, such as Bible, Math, Language Arts, Health, Science and History. Leave plenty of room between your points, so that you can list subordinate topics beneath the main points. You may add Music and Art as well. (You could study the art and music of the time period you are covering in history.)

Now, pick and list the topics (from the guide) that you would like to cover. Get your children's input . You may end up with more than necessary. Remember, this is a rough draft! Look at grades around your child's grade, so you can have a continuity from year to year in subjects such as history. (See sidebar for an example of a history plan.)

Put some order into the jumble of science topics in Typical Course of Study when writing the scope and sequence. Choose one field of science (chemistry, physics, biology, etc.) to focus on each year, or spend the year studying scientists and discoveries from the same historical period you are studying. Tobins Lab's catalog has science topics arranged in an orderly fashion.

If you have children in several different grades, perhaps you can combine the topics or pick one that all can learn at the same time. I did this frequently with History, Science, and Health. Teach your children who are close in age the same Math and Language Arts. Look through several of the grades and plan ahead to achieve a continuity from year to year.

Choosing Books From The Library

Once your scope and sequence is completed, you have the easy job of picking out armfuls of books on a regular basis to fulfill the learning goals of your plan. With so many libraries having computerized card catalogs, this is quick work. Type in the era or topic, such as "civil war."

With this method one thing leads to another and soon you will read in one book about a person whose biography you can then borrow. Many homeschoolers favor the old Landmark, Signature or the We Were There biographies, which your library may still have. More eloquent writing was done by authors like G.A. Henty, Oliver Optic or Horatio Alger who wrote about various historical periods. We used the children's section of the library almost exclusively for many appropriate non-fiction books on a wide variety of topics when our children were younger. We also found some wonderful classic novels in the adult section, such as a fragile copy of the Christian colossus about slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Other Ideas

For foreign language, check out videos or cassette tapes. Do an intensive study during the time you have the tapes. Then in a week or so check them out again and do another study. Keep doing this until done with the course.

Most libraries have computers for public use, sometimes with good quality learning software. Have your child work on one of these while you are looking for books. Keep track of progress made each visit.

Use the library's newspapers for current events classes

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Homeschooling — Is It Worth It

Suppose that you rearrange your life to homeschool your child and the experiment fails? You may feel that you’ve disrupted your life and wasted a year of your child’s time. Your child may even be kept back a grade by the local public school.

The answer to this concern is, can you risk not trying? Isn’t your child’s future worth the risk? If you see that your child is getting a bad education in public school, the worst thing to do is nothing. Then there is no chance of improvement. If you leave your children in public school, chances are great that their ability to read, self-esteem, and love of learning may be damaged, and they can waste twelve years of their lives. Look at the potential consequences to your child if you don’t try other education alternatives.

The real question is this: Is good enough, good enough for your child? Your child is unique and precious. He or she is born with a love of learning and a unique potential. Your child’s love of learning, self-confidence, and potential can be squashed in the rigid atmosphere of public schools. Is a third-rate public-school education good enough for your child. If you could give your child a rich, fun, rewarding education that will make your child’s mind and future blossom, isn’t that worth the risk of trying?

Money Doesn’t Have To Stop You Anymore

If the only problem is money because you can’t afford $8000 a year private schools, then happily there is a great new option for you—Internet private schools. These schools are low-cost and can give your child a fun, quality, and rewarding education. Many of these schools cost less than $850 a year tuition, which is less than $85 a month for a ten-month school year.

While no one can guarantee you success, like anything else in life, if you keep trying, you will probably succeed in giving your child a great education at home. If you say to yourself, “I will make this work, for my child’s sake,” you’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish.

Tell yourself what Gene Kranz, actor Ed Harris’s character in the movie Apollo 13, said to his Houston crew about rescuing the astronauts in trouble: “Failure is not an option.” If you say this and mean it, you’re halfway to success for yourself and your child.

http://www.articlecity.com/articles/parenting/article_371.shtml

Homeschooling — Can I Do It

Many parents would like to homeschool their children but are afraid they don’t have the training or ability to be their children’s teacher. This is certainly understandable, because many parents never had any formal training to be a teacher. However, most parents don’t have to worry about this issue.

There is literally a supermarket of education resources available for parents to choose from to help them homeschool their children. These include low-cost Internet private schools that take most of the homeschooling burden off parents’ backs. There are also hundreds of low-cost instruction books on how to teach your child reading, math, and many other subjects. These are available in most libraries and great book stores like Barnes

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