Home Schooling Tip 2: Interest-Based HomeSchool

by Juli Herman

If you’re into interest-based homeschool, and I’m not talking about riba, it may do some good to list different areas of interests such as Ocean, Sewing, Caves, Solar System (you get the idea) on a piece of paper. Generate as extensive a list as you can. If you have multiple children, make a table and put each child in a column. Have them rate the areas on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being ‘most interested in’ and 1 being ‘least interested in’. Based on this, you can generate unit studies, or research-based projects that they will do as part of their Science or History.

When I decided to change our homeschooling method and make it more interest-based, I divided the year into quarters, and each child would pick a topic of the highest rating for each quarter and do a research-based project around that topic around the subject of history and science. At the end of the quarter, each child presented their history and science projects in our homeschool ‘Science’ and ‘History’ fair. I graded their presentations and projects and each child received a certificate for that quarter. So if you’re looking for a teaching idea that would give you some time off, this might be a worthwhile idea especially if you have older more independent kids. You can also incorporate literature into it by looking up fiction that are related to the chosen topics.

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