How to Use Online Museums in Home-Ed (And Where to Start)
Museum websites are some of the best free home-ed resources available. Here’s how to use them well — and which ones to start with.
You don’t need a teaching qualification to home educate — but you do need to think differently about what teaching actually is. This section covers the practical side: how to plan and run lessons, how to handle reluctant learners, how to teach core subjects without a textbook, and how to build independence gradually so it’s not all on you. From someone who’s been in the classroom at the kitchen table for a decade.
Museum websites are some of the best free home-ed resources available. Here’s how to use them well — and which ones to start with.
Home-ed projects combine the student’s desire for interest-led learning with a parent’s need to structure their learning.
for home-educated students, the internet allows them to access knowledge independently of a teacher; to become self-led learners. And yet, giving children unsupervised access to the internet isn’t a good idea.
So how do you teach homeschoolers about safe surfing while still facilitating access to the educational resources available online?
There’s a version of this principle that sounds like giving up, let the homeschooler choose everything, follow their every interest, never ask them to do anything they don’t want to do. That’s not what we do, and it’s not what I’m describing here. (And I’m not talking about unschooling either.) What I’m describing is more…
In practice, you don’t always need a detailed curriculum to begin. What matters more, especially at the start, is whether the learning feels purposeful.
…the best homeschool curriculum is the one that fits best now.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, take a step back, a day ‘off’ from school. Relax and enjoy your children. What do you do?
Home-ed lesson planning gets easier once you know what kind of lesson you’re planning. Here’s the framework we use.
Screen time is one of those phrases that arrives pre-loaded with guilt, as if watching television is something a well-run homeschool family would be trying to minimise rather than use. We don’t approach it that way. TV in our house is a teaching resource — imperfect, variable in quality, and requiring some curation — but…
Reading and listening aren’t the same thing. That’s worth saying upfront, because audiobooks sometimes get dismissed as a shortcut — or quietly treated as cheating — when they’re actually doing something different and genuinely useful. The purpose of reading is comprehension: absorbing what someone else wrote and making sense of it. Audiobooks do that. What…
Why use documentaries in home-ed lessons? Encouraging homeschoolers to sit down and watch TV sounds counterproductive but if what they’re watching is entertaining enough to pass as TV, if the content of what they’re watching is informative about something you’d like them to explore (a subject/topic), watching TV becomes a lesson homeschoolers will enjoy. Learners…