Homeschool Textbooks

What Good are They Anyway?

What good are homeschool textbooks anyway?

For younger children - they're not!

For older children - 7th grade and up - they're great.

Textbooks usually get a bad rap...they're considered boring and aren't usually recommended by homeschoolers.

I agree - to a certain extent.

While your children are young, take the time to explore and do a lot of hands-on activities.

But...if you have an 7th grader or older, a great textbook like Apologia Science Books can be a good thing.

As your children get older, they don't need to continue to be "spoon fed" knowledge.

Here are some reasons why textbooks are good for older children:

• They need to learn to read and comprehend on their own. One of my favorite memories of homeschooling my children is the "snuggle" time when reading to my children. Of course, my children loved it too and I don't regret it.

  But one thing you have to watch out for is that they would continue to sit there and let you read to them until they graduated - letting you do the work.

  Reading aloud to children is great. It enables them to be exposed to much more complicated literature and vocabulary than they are able to read on their own. But, you have to remember that you can't do all the work for them. They have to read and comprehend what they are reading; they get good at this by doing it

• They need learn reading strategy. When using homeschool textbooks with your older child, you need to teach them to read strategically - to read the questions at the end of the chapter, skim the material, and read to find the correct answer.
• They learn to turn in neat work written in complete sentences. One of the traps that many homeschool families fall into with homeschooling is that you can get so much work done if you read over the material with them and then let your chidren answer the questions verbally.

  Answering questions verbally definitely has its place. By answering verbally, you can interact with your children and help them dig for deeper understanding and this is good. However, if you only make your children answer verbally, penmanship, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and writing in complete sentences falls through the cracks.

  Children learn to do these things by practicing over and over again. A few lessons a week in how to write a complete sentence or how to spell won't accomplish this. They need practice. By having to answer the questions at the end of the chapter, you know if they read correctly, if they comprehended what they read, and if they can answer in a complete and correct sentence.

  Trust me on this. I have talked to many homeschool moms who have had this happen.

• They save you time. When you use homeschool textbooks, it is easy to divide the book up into how many pages or chapters your chid needs to do each week to finish the book in the school year. This takes a lot of work out of lesson planning and preparing lessons.

  Keep these things in mind when you're choosing homeschool textbooks and remember, homeschool textbooks aren't all that bad! And just because your kids are older, don't forget about using free science worksheets, and fun science activities. Using these two resources can help liven up those textbooks.