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Homeschooling your children is a brave undertaking and requires that you give a lot of yourself over to the project for a number of years. Being a homeschooling parent means becoming your child’s teacher–not the teacher of just one subject, but of all of them. That means you need to understand all of the subjects that your child studies relatively well so that you can instruct, answer questions that your child may have, and of course know which things are important to learn so that you can create a course of study.
Being expected to know so much can be daunting, but reference books and your own knowledge can be more powerful than you might expect. The real stumbling block is when you have a school subject that you yourself are not good enough at to pass a class, never mind teaching it to someone else. One of the most common subjects that homeschooling parents struggle to teach is mathematics, for example.
If you’re dedicated to homeschooling your child, you won’t let something like difficulty with a subject stop you. That’s not to say that you should force yourself to try teaching it and to end up doing it badly, though. A decade ago, a homeschooling parent who couldn’t teach a particular subject might have to pay a tutor to teach their child that subject. Now there’s a much easier solution: supplement your homeschooling with a few online learning courses.
Online classes allow your child to study a subject in a written course that typically lasts 3-6 weeks and can be attended from the comfort of your home. All you need is a computer, an Internet connection and a child eager to enroll and learn something, even if it’s a subject you may not be so enthusiastic about yourself.
