Handling one or two children in a homeschool classroom is a piece of cake. You get one child busy with some activity, then move over to the second one and supervise them both as they work through the paces. Now add another sibling or two to the mix and suddenly the simple system doesn’t seem to hold up all that well. How do you handle several children in different grades in the same homeschool classroom at the same time?
Training Aids are the key
The idea is to train your children to keep busy on their own, in a productive manner, without needing your supervision constantly. If you can set a task for the child and have him tackle it for the next half hour, you get time off to handle all his siblings. When you set in systems where your homeschool students can each be learning something with an aid like the smartphone, a tablet or the laptop, each child is occupied gainfully.
Schedule a child to see a video on a certain topic, another child can be asked to read up from the text book before attempting a worksheet, and yet another child can be given an interactive learning application to work with on the tablet. All you need to do is supervise each child to see that they are progressing as per schedule.
Combining Subjects
If you read a story out loud about the American Civil War to your full class it can be used as a history lesson for a higher grade, a social studies lesson for a lower grade and a literature lesson for a junior grade. Using Unit Studies also works well when dealing with different ages and grades. Older children may write reports on what has been taught, younger ones can do worksheets based on the same information.
You can even use daily life experiences as good tools for teaching. Everything from shopping for groceries, making lunch and loading the dishwasher can become an opportunity to learn. Growing your own vegetables and fruit, putting up fences to protect the produce from pets and even plucking your own fresh products is all part of an education that all ages can participate in.
