Re: Home schooling…pros and cons?
Peace Peppermint
We teach the basics of I’man and Islam, continually correct and fine tune their understanding of right and wrong - good and bad and try to reward them for being good and give penalties for knowingly showing their bad side …
The eldest is memorising the Content of Character Amazon.co.uk and the Aqeedah At-Tahawiya The Creed of Imam al-Tahawi : English Translation of Aqidah al-Tahawiyyah (Shaykh Hamza Yusuf) (both in Arabic and English for both books) and I am memorising it with him … soon the second will be starting, inshaAllah. We have dzikr gatherings and the kids join in and they have learnt many qasidas and nasheeds and the second son has started to pick up some beats from the Daff that I use in the gatherings.
Jum’a is a collective exercise and when praying at home they stand behind while we recite so they can learn the prayer … We teach them to read Arabic and we reinforce the Surahs by listening to them and help the kids memorise. We ask them if they would like to pray and do not require them to pray, not yet anyway …
The Islamic studies starts from the Seerah - so we explain the life of RasoolAllah (SAW) to the children with greater emphasis, because the dogma stems from the story … We want them to develop an intense love for the dear prophet Muhammad (SAW), through learning about his (SAW) life and by sending many duroods. Their global outlook is all about Islam - so we are trying not to make it appear like another subject to learn … but we try to bring Islam in to all of their works … which includes all of their studies as well … they do Bismillah before doing all their work - not just before reading the Qur’an, but also before eating and before studying Maths, etc … It’s going okay Alhumdulillah, but it’s slow to my liking, but it’s constant and my wife is okay with it so far …
They seem to have a good grasp of Tawheed …
The other homeschoolers/teachers I have been acquainted with had older children who were capable of self-study by the early teens … First they were homeschooling and delaying their school going time. When they came abroad at first it was private schooling and then they had a nanny to take care of their basic nutritional needs, came back out of school and the routine seems to work fine because schools here end quite early so the time the teacher/mother had was enough to catch up with her kids every day … but the key success factor here was that the hard work had been done when the kids were between the ages of 5 to 13 to have the ability to self-study.