Learning to make books at the Carlisle School, 1910
What things make your life as a homeschooler easier, better, or just more fun? Here are my top ten inventions that I could not homeschool without!
10. Delivery Services. The Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx all make it possible for a homeschooler to use any curriculum or do just about any science project. If something isn’t available locally, all you need is a catalog and it will come directly to your door. A vast improvement over frontier days when the family would drive to town once a month and hope the mercantile had a slate in stock!
9. The Crockpot. You need to feed the family. You need to teach school. What to do? Load the slow cooker, turn it on, and dinner’s ready when you are without Teacher Mom having to mind the stove all afternoon.
8. Television. Learning is ever so much more fun when you can watch a renactment of the Vikings landing in Nova Scotia, observe animals on the African plain, or watch a favorite cartoon character work out a problem.
7. Dry erase boards and markers. Or, chalk and blackboards. The use of a writing medium that could be seen by all children in the room revolutionized teaching. Although home school teachers don’t have to lecture to a large class or worry whether the kid in the back row can see her writing, having a large area to write, map things out, make collaborative lists, or even just keep track of assignments makes homeschooling so much easier.
6. Computer and printer. Absolutely fundamental if you are teaching on a budget. You can create worksheets, learn typing, buy and play educational games, print out lesson plans, and more. Knowing how to use a computer is a fundamental skill that every American child needs to learn. What, you think a computer is a budget buster? Use the library’s for free.
5. Mass production. We no longer have to dip quill to ink or whittle down our own pencil stubs. Why? Factories do it all for us, producing homogenous, inexpensive, and reliable tools for learning. And yellow No. 2s write better than a homemade pencil ever could, too!
4. Indoor utilities. School is much more pleasant when Teacher Mom doesn’t have to keep tending the woodburning stove or worry about her child freezing to death in the outhouse. Not to mention that without electricity, you couldn’t have…
3. The internet. I simply couldn’t educate my children without it. I find support, ideas, projects, curriculum, and browse teacher catalogs all online – and often while I’m in the middle of teaching (or rather, waiting for the children to finish a lesson or worksheet). We constantly use free online games like Spelling City or reference sites to look up information. Several of my children are using free online textbooks, such as those found at Baldwin project, and I print up free worksheets daily, too.
2. The printing press. Could you teach without books? Would you want to? I thought not.
1. The number one invention homeschoolers love is democracy. Many countries forbid homeschooling, but in free countries it’s often just another choice among many. Governments that recognize parent’s fundamental right to direct the education of their children are the best thing that ever happened to home educating families.
Tell me what inventions you can’t live without!
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I think you hit the nail on the head! Especially with Democracy. Reading about what is happening to homeschool families in Europe is devastating. Parents should have the right to school their children how they want. It is disturbing to see kids taken from parents who care enough to teach them at home.
AprilS´s last [type] ..Chemistry in Action – The Potato Cannon
I can’t live without my library card.