School-at-Home

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School-at-Home

Parents in the role of schoolteacher, instructor or tutor
If you'd like to homeschool your child by replicating the school's grade system and instructional style at home, you can follow the Ontario Ministry of Education curriculum guidelines and implement them with the help of textbooks and educational materials available from the Suppliers listed in our Resources section.

You will also find there (on the Suppliers page) some curriculum packages that provide an alternative to the curriculum content of the public educational system. For instance, there are several publishers of Christian materials that emphasize Christian values and perspectives.

School-at-home is often the approach chosen by parents who wish to direct their children's education in a conventional, structured, but often accelerated way, emphasizing high academic performance and strict behavioural discipline.

Other homeschooling parents start out with this type of structured approach at the beginning of their homeschooling journey out of a sense of not knowing how else to approach education, and gradually relax into a more flexible approach as they discover a need for adaptability to the realities of family life at home, become more comfortable with the idea of self-directed learning, and/or begin to have more trust in the non-textbook learning that children do naturally in the course of their daily lives.

On the other hand, sometimes families move from an unstructured style in the elementary years to a more structured approach in the teen years if and when the student wishes to enter the school system and wants to prepare for that passage. Often, this move to a more conventional and structured approach in the teens is through enrolling in a distance school for the purpose of obtaining an accredited high school diploma.

(Please note that it is not necessary to switch to a conventional structured approach at the high school level in order to pursue post-secondary education. Many universities and colleges have special admissions policies for homeschoolers who have no conventional high school diploma, and recognize that self-directed learners are especially well suited to the kind of studying that is necessary at the university level.)

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Part of the article Teaching Methods and Learning Philosophies by the Ontario Federation of Teaching Parents is a provincial homeschool group providing support to homeschooling families and information on home-based education to our members and the public at large.
• General enquiries: enquiries@ontariohomeschool.org
• Phone: leave a message at 416-410-5218 or 1-800-704-0448