Critical thinking is a skill that students in traditional public or private schools may or may not develop, without thinking about it much. There is no class on critical thinking in middle school or high school. The children who have a preternatural ability to think critically tend to succeed in school, while those who do not tend to fail. Home school offers you the chance to make up for this deficiency. Home school will give you the flexibility to teach things like this to your child when they might not otherwise learn it. You may wonder if you have the capability to teach critical thinking as part of your home schooling curriculum. Despite the fact that it is not formally taught much in school, there are effective methods for teaching your home schooled child critical thinking skills.
The first step in a critical thinking exercise is choosing a topic. It can be Romeo and Juliet, the American Civil War, botany, or bats. Because you are home schooling, the topic is completely up to you. However, it is probably best to choose a topic that the child is already fairly knowledgeable about, unless you want to make extensive research part of the exercise.
The next step in teaching your home schooled child critical thinking is to take that topic and write down everything you know about that topic. You can use a concept map for this. A concept map is basically when you write down the topic and you diagram how the various pieces of knowledge are related to the topic. It is important for the home schooled child to include everything you can squeeze out of your brain about the topic at this point. You then organize the information, deciding on how all the pieces of information fit together. The home schooled child can then begin asking himself more complex questions about such topics: significance, importance, place of all the ideas, facts and theories. Writing down everything is very important for the home schooled child during this exercise. It will keep him focused and help him remember all the aspects of the topic.
Home school has many advantages over traditional public and private schools. One of these advantages to home school is that you, as the parent, get to decide what exactly your children learn. Most parents would agree that critical thinking is one of the areas that are neglected in traditional public and private schools. In home schooling, you can correct this deficiency and help mold your child into a successful critical thinker.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, author, children's rights advocate, and Founder and C.E.O. of Learning by Grace, Inc. She and her husband of almost 3 decades reside with their 8 children in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. because "our current system of education has broken its promise..." Learning By Grace, Inc. delivers Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children in the United States and throughout the world.
Rothschild has authored a number of books about education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Daily Education News Blog contains feature stories on alternatives in education.