Sports and Homeschooling
Ed, who is a self-proclaimed avid football fan since the 80’s (the New York Giants to be exact), and a hockey fan since the early 90’s (although that one’s cooled off slightly the last few years) will be writing Gridiron Gab here at Blogalogues. For those of you who have kids who are sports fans, you might want to go over and take a look at his blog together. I know he’s been writing a fair bit since our launch. There’s sure to be a story there to interest you, and reading fun things about something a child likes is an excellent way to encourage literacy. So, bookmark Ed’s blog and go back often!
Physical activities are an important part of every homeschool curriculum. Even if the homeschooling parent is not an athlete, there are lots of ways to include sport or even unstructured physical activity in your weekly plans. Our girls attend twice weekly JuJutsu classes and we also try to get out to the occasional park day with the Montreal Homelearners. There are a large number of sports groups in the after school hours, and in many communities gym days organized for homeshooled kids. In New Orleans, homeschoolers can even take part in tackle football – a fact I’m sure would tickle Ed!
The video below is Dakota Nelson giving a brief demonstration of some techniques he has learned in JuJutsu class. You can see the discipline that goes into learning these things, but I hope you can also appreciate the sense of accomplishment that comes with it. At the time of filming, I believe Dakota was in his final year of primary school.
Besides being important for the health and physical development of our kids, physical activity can be a good time to take care of the “s” word: socialization. Playing sports or taking a class in which they learn some form of physical activity offers kids the chance to practice turn-taking, cooperation and competition, sportsmanship, and all those other things that people seem to think are so difficult to master if a child is homeschooled (standing in line or in an assigned spot, raising one’s hand to speak, asking permission to go to the toilet, etc.)
I’d love to hear from you on this one: what do you do for homeschool PE?
Cheers!
October 20th, 2009 at 04:15
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by ruby3881: Sports and homeschooling http://ow.ly/qaQv…