Delegating Subjects

We are having one of those seasons here in our house.  We have a brand new baby, home renovations, doctor visits and tests to determine specific food allergies in one son, and strep throat and the flu going on all at one time.  We are a busy family!  What’s worse is my oldest daughter is learning chemistry this year and I am certainly no chemist!  Besides a foreign language, higher level sciences are the most challenging subjects for me to learn let alone teach.  Oh how I miss the days when turtles and a kitchen full of tadpoles and toads constituted science.  Where did the time go… and how can my daughter be old enough to learn chemistry this year?  More importantly, how am I going to teach this puzzling subject to my daughter with success when I hardly understand it?

Delegating subjects to others who understand the subject better than I do, to my children to work on autonomously, to technological advancements, and with other homeschoolers to work in a group with mine is going to make our homeschooling year most successful rather than just survived.

Our 4H leader is teaching my sixteen year old some chemistry while she sleeps over for the week, keeping away from the rest of the families germs.  I’m scheduled to teach art for the church children while friends get to hold our new little guy (beginning once we are all well again).

The most unusual delegation is going to my children.  Usually we think of getting other family members, experts, or friends to delegate the teaching of subjects but having my older children help their younger siblings is also a great way to delegate subjects.  Especially during this trial of constant sickness in our home this year, my fourth grader is an easy choice to play counting games with my preschooler.  My sixteen year old is great at calling spelling words for my fourth grader and the little preschooler loves to make our new baby’s music play to soothe the little fellow while I’m working individually with one of my kids.

One other way to delegate subjects is to take advantage of technology.  Online learning resources such as Global Students networking is an amazing option for teaching subjects to our children for us. This is how I was able to offer a foreign language option to my kids!!  One last way I delegate my children’s subjects are apps.  My nine year old was not going to memorize his multiplication facts for anything.  No matter what I did to try to get him to learn them – he could figure the answers out and failed to see the need to memorize them.  So I found an app that uses a game – a timed game – to make memorizing multiplication facts possible without my son even realizing what was happening.

I feel more like a manager these days working out days and weeks for other people and me to take turns teaching all of our children.  This is the season of life we are in right now and with so many options for delegation of the subjects it makes homeschooling during the most challenging times possible.

Lisa Blauvelt (with her family and three dogs, two cats, a horse, pony, donkey, two red eared turtles, a fluctuating number of tadpoles and baby fish, and various other creatures collected by her adventurous boys) puts her education degrees to work at her home in the Deep South.  There she teaches not only her own children, but others who come to her home to learn. Her decade long experience in teaching children to read will soon be published as a 476 page guide for parents.

Need to delegate some subjects? United Digital Learning has THOUSANDS of excellent, effective online courses for all levels!