Discipline for Homeschooling

To discipline thus means to instruct a person to follow a particular code of conduct "order." Consequently, "in the field of child development, discipline refers to methods of modeling character and of teaching self-control and acceptable behavior." To disciple also gives rise to the word disciplinarian, which denotes a person who enforces order.


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Maintaining Discipline in Homeschooling

There are certain issues of discipline at stake. When the child stays at home all day, and mommy is the teacher. It is easy for he child to misconstrue the freedom he has at home and feel that homeschooling is just a long summer holiday.

This is a potential landmine and children need to be disciplined right at the start. Homeschooling gives you and your child a truly immense amount of flexibility. You and your child decide where to learn, how much to learn and when to learn. But,these should be decisions made at the beginning stages. If your child is too little to take an active part in the decision, chart out a few hours of the day for the various activities, and stick to it. When there is no outside agency to supervise and no exams to answer, it is easy to get sidetracked.

If your child is old enough, consult him and find out when he wants to learn. Apply your parental discretion and come up with a timetable. Homework is also a part of homeschooling. What this means is that once lessons have been taught, the child should be asked to do some part of the course work by himself without your guidance.

You will need to make sure that your child sits willingly and finishes his work. Courtesy, manners and punctuality are some of the various facets of discipline that a child has to imbibe in the early years of his life. The school where he interacts with his peers, his seniors and juniors and his teachers mould these values quite automatically.


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At homeschool, the child should be taught the importance of speaking and behaving in a proper manner and appropriate corrections need to be meted out if behavior is unsatisfactory. It is advisable to keep aside a particular room or a part of the room for your homeschool. The child should be expected to reach his desk at the appointed time, in proper attire with all the necessary material.

It is easy to allow the school to become an extension of play if these ground rules are not laid out and followed. As the teacher, supervisor, principal and janitor rolled into one, you should also approach the study area with a cool professionalism. Homeschooling is doomed to fail without patience. In spite of all the precautions and steps one takes, it is easy for a child to get familiar' at home school. At such times, it may be difficult to discipline the child and get him to listen to you attentively.

When this happens, switch to something new. Allow the child to take a breather and enjoy a break yourself. Homeschooling requires a lot of hard work and patience, because it's not easy. The very informality of the whole procedure sometimes works against it by making it too easy. Your homeschooling experience will be a huge success, if you take steps to establish rules at the very beginning and adhere to these rules.

What Are Word Families And Why Are They An Important Reading Strategy

By Deanna Mascle

When we consider all the elements that go into becoming a skilled reader it seems a monumental task and yet some how young children learn the many different decoding skills necessary to them and most become proficient readers within the first few years of school.




However not all young children learn to read with ease and even those who will eventually succeed face struggles on the road to success. One easy way that parents can help smooth the path to reading success for their children is through the use of word families.

Word families, sometimes called phonograms or chunks, can really help emergent readers begin to understand our complicated, and often inconsistent, language by providing some predictable patterns within words. As you and I learned to read, we picked up these patterns effortlessly, and they still help us when we try to decode new words. When we direct our students' attention to these same patterns, they too will be able to untangle the seemingly unrelated sounds of English.

When learning to read, patterns are important. Children recognize word patterns and this makes it easier when sounding out words.

For example, let us consider the "all" word family. First, show "all" to the child and have them repeat the sound. Then show the word "ball" and demonstrate how you can "read" the word by first making the "b" sound and then the "all". Repeat it slowly and then more quickly. Now continue with some other members of the "all" family such as call, fall, hall, mall, stall, tall, wall.

Can you see how much easier this method of using "chunks" of letters is compared to sounding out one letter at a time? We break words into chunks naturally as skilled readers and teaching children this skill can help them learn to read.

What is even better is that once children learn the 37 most common word families in English they will be able to decode 500 words. That puts emergent readers well on their way to mastering the entire decoding process. The most common word families include: ack, ain, ake, ale, all, ame, an, ank, ap, ash, at, ate, aw ay, eat, ell, est, ice, ick, ide, ight, ill, in, ine, ing, ink, ip, it, ock, oke, op, ore, ot, uck ,ug, ump, unk.

Word families are indeed an efficient way to get children reading. Once children learn these one-syllable phonograms then they will more easily be able to decode longer words, too.

Exposing your child to word families, teaching the use of these language patterns, and reinforcing the knowledge with rhyming games and activities will help your child learn to read.

Visit Deanna Mascle's blog Reading Strategies at YouCanTeachYourChildToRead.com to learn more about Word Families