Online Homeschooling

Traditional education works beautifully for a very specific type of student. The students who flourish in a traditional school setting are usually verbal learners – they prefer learning through text, and so the passive learning style of sitting through lectures and memorizing textbooks is easy for them.

To do well in a traditional school, you need to be able to sit quietly for several hours each day. While this is challenging for almost all children, some children have an easier time being quiet and passive than others. Those kids do best at school. Their teachers adore them because they listen quietly, absorb the facts being taught and rarely interrupt. They also don’t move and bounce and fidget the way that more active students do.

Other types of students may manage the traditional system and may even learn to do fairly well, but they most likely will not flourish, and they will definitely not enjoy their learning.

The type of student who has the most difficulty in a traditional school is the creative student. You know these kids – they are bright, full of spirit and imagination, and very active. They love to create and build and invent, and they really dislike sitting quietly and listening to lectures, or memorizing facts. These students are often visual learners – they learn best when they can view visuals of the subject material. They are also often very active, so when forced to sit quietly for many hours, they develop habits, which the teachers find annoying such as bouncing around in their chair or fidgeting.

Active, creative, and visual learners can learn to tolerate the traditional school system, but if you want them to thrive and to flourish and to avoid the inevitable label of a “problem” or a “difficult” student, you should look into an alternative schooling system such as 3D homeschooling.

3D online homeschooling is a unique, interactive homeschooling program that fosters creativity, keeps students engaged and utilizes active learning rather than discouraging it. It makes learning fun for any type of student, and is especially suited for creative, active students who find it difficult to accept the rigid limitations of a traditional school setting.

Photo by Rob Shenk

During the learning process we use our senses to process the information and understand it. During this process, most of us tend to use one sense more than the others. The sense that we use most determines our learning style. According to researchers, there are three basic types of learning styles, which we’ll discuss below.

One of the problems with traditional schooling is that it shows preference towards reflective, sensing and verbal learners. Homeschooling is much more flexible and so can be better adjusted to all kind of learning styles, and is especially helpful to students who tend to have a hard time with the constraints that traditional schooling places on their behavior and on how they process new information.

Active and Reflective Learners

Active learners retain and understand information best by doing something active with it. Reflective learners prefer to think about it quietly first.

Sitting through lectures without getting to do anything physical but take notes is very difficult for anyone, but is particularly challenging for active learners. Active learners are often labeled as hyperactive by traditional schools, simply because they have a hard tome sitting quietly for hours.

Active learners love 3D online homeschooling because it enables them to do and to create as part of the leanring process, and so they rarely feel bored.

Sensing and Intuitive Learners

Sensing learners like learning facts. They like details and prefer a slower pace of learning. Intuitive learners prefer discovering possibilities and relationships. They like innovation and really dislike repetition. Courses that involve a lot of memorization and routine calculations are very hard on intuitive learners. Just like active learners, intuitive learners are often labeled by traditional educators as “difficult” students.

Honmeschooling in general, and 3D online homeschooling in particular, is perfect for intuitive learners because it focuses on discovery and avoids repetition.

Visual and Verbal Learners

Visual learners remember best what they can see, such as pictures, videos, and diagrams. Verbal learners like words, including written and spoken explanations. In traditional schooling there is a strong emphasis on words and very little visual information, which makes learning tough for visual learners. 3D education is perfect for visual learners because it provides them with the visual stimuli that they need in order to truly understand what they are learning.

The beauty of 3D online homeschooling is that it’s very flexible and can adapt to any learning style. When homeschooling, the pace can be slower or faster, visuals or text can be emphasized, and emphasis can be placed on active creation of material or on learning and memorizing facts – whatever works for the student.

Because it’s a fun, game-like way to learn, 3D education also keeps all students engaged, regardless of their learning style.

However, if your child is an active, visual or intuitive learner (or all three – they often go together), chances are he suffers in a traditional school setting. 3D online homeschooling can be a lifesaver for such a student and transform him from “mediocre” to “bright.”

Photo by nikon_d90man

Despite the common accusation directed at homeschooling parents that they are ruining their child socially by not letting him interact with kids his own age, it’s been well established by researchers that homeschooled kids actually grow up to be mature, well adjusted young people and that the “socialization issue” is no more than a myth.

We didn’t really need research to know this, although it is certainly good to have scientific backup to what we knew all along: there are many different ways to socialize children. Certainly children in past generations were socialized via going to church or to other social gatherings and simply spending time with family members. The best socializing happens when the child is naturally exposed to many different people from many different age groups – spending the majority of their day in a classroom with 40 other kids their age is not necessarily the best way to socialize and can be very hard on some kids!

Here are 3 great ways to socialize your homeschooler:

1. Spend time with family! Whether it’s the nuclear family or the extended family, the very fact that kids spend the majority of their time with family members means that they are getting plenty of opportunities to socialize. Of course, meeting the extended family is helpful because it expands the number of people your child is exposed to and also enables her to play with children of different ages.

2. Schedule play-dates and outings with other homeschooling families. You can start your search for other homeschooling families online, or you can ask friends and relatives, and befriend other families when you go to the library or to the park during a normal school day.

3. Go to church, or join a local community. Church is a wonderful place to build a community of like-minded people. Or you could join any other type of local community in your area. You could also sign up your child for enrichment activities or for a local sports group. If you do, make sure socialization there will be gentle.

The myth of the isolated homeschooler who spends her days next to the kitchen table with books is just that – a myth. Homeschoolers enjoy a very active social life. In fact, by not spending 6-8 hours each day locked up at school, they get to experience much more than a typical student who attends a traditional school.

Photo by D Sharon Pruitt