Texas is a wonderful state for families that want to teach their children at home instead of sending them to school. These homeschooling families can make learning as fun or as serious as they wish. Consider these tips to make your time spent teaching lessons as stress-free as possible and learn how document shredding can play in role in minimizing that stress.
Make Learning Fun
Fun lessons are ones that children will remember, and it doesn’t take much. For younger children, colorful worksheets, color pages, and hands-on lessons are fun. For older children, computer-based learning and hands-on activities are fun.
What you want to avoid when you are homeschooling your child is having them stress out over work. They shouldn’t be overwhelmed by the work they are doing since you control the curriculum.
Remember to Include Visual Forms
Books, workbooks and printed materials are some of the visual educational forms that meet requirements in Texas. Their goal is to show the child the concepts that are introduced. The visual forms can involve reading a book about a favorite subject and taking a test or completing a worksheet after the lesson is completed.
Just because you need to have visual forms of materials as part of a lesson doesn’t mean that you can only use these forms for the lessons. Taking a trip to an art museum is an acceptable enrichment activity for a lesson in the arts. A trip to the symphony is ideal for music lessons. You could even take a trip to an amusement park as part of a physics lesson.
Include the Five Core Subjects
Good citizenship, writing, reading, mathematics, and grammar are the five core subjects that you are required to teach your children. On top of these, you and your child can choose other lessons in social studies, fine arts, science, physical education, and other subjects that interest your child.
It is possible to incorporate the core subjects in lessons about other subjects. Reading a story about your child’s favorite animal, writing out a story about a mythical creature, and factoring angles for building something all bring core subjects into the picture.
Use Good Record Keeping
You need to keep good records of what your child does for their schooling. One way to do this is to keep paper records of the lessons, activities, and grades. At the end of each semester, year, or unit, you can scan the records, worksheets, tests, and other important documents so you can store them on a jump drive. This is an easy way to keep the information organized without having to hang on to all of the original documents.
As you decide what records you are going to scan and which ones can just be thrown away without scanning, it is better to err on the side of caution. If you think that you might need proof of something later, scan and keep the document. You should also scan and keep things that your child is especially proud of. If you decide to throw something away, its best to choose document shredding as the way to dispose of sensitive documents.
Coincidentally, scanning and organizing things is a good strategy for parents who don’t homeschool because you can keep art projects and other items that your child makes in school. Refrigerator art is a nice touch to your kitchen, but when it is time to rotate out to new art, you have to do something with the old art.
Keep Information Protected
With homeschooling comes printables, records, and other paperwork that has to be organized. While it might be tempting to just throw things away, you should keep anything with sensitive information out of the trash. Those items include transcripts, vaccination records, and anything else that has your child’s full name, birthday, Social Security number, and other information.
Since you don’t want to throw documents with sensitive information away, you now have to figure out what to do with it. Document shredding is one option. This lets you dispose of those documents without having to worry about the information getting into the wrong hands. Additionally, you can also add in other documents, such as financial records and health records, that are ready to be disposed of.
Sources:
https://www.thsc.org/homeschooling-in-texas/
http://www.thsc.org/homeschooling-in-texas/state-requirements/