Homeschooling & T.V.

I decided half way through this current school year to take my daughter out of public school and finish up her 2nd grade year homeschooling her. Being a military family we move around a lot and bless my daughters heart, she has been in 4 different schools since pre K. All of the schools have been great with awesome teachers and not many issues out of the other kids, overall good experiences, until this year that is :(
I made a HUGE mistake assuming that since the new neighborhood we were moving into was a good one with nice homes, very little crime, good neighbors ect that the school MUST be good as well. I was wrong.
There were several factors that came into play when making the choice to pull her out and take charge of her education myself. We had an issue with violence towards my daughter, something we had never had to deal with before and it was scary. We also had an issue with her teacher and the way she chose to deal with her students. Bunny (that's her nickname) was starting to hate school and asked me on several occasions to send her to a private school (an option we cant afford at the moment) or to homeschool her. We chose to homeschool and its gone very well for us! We have networked with other homeschooling families in our area, joined a book club, international fair, field trips, girl scouts ect. We stay busy :)

One thing my daughter loves to do is watch Animal Planet on T.V. She loves animals and L O V E S science and thus is intrigued by a lot of the programming on Animal Planet. We have a very lax school schedule, as in, I don't have a set time each day where we do certain subjects, one day we may do lots of math in the morning time and on another day we might not do most of our school work until the afternoon because of other activities we have going on, it all depends! So, she asks me a lot if she can watch Animal Planet as part of her science work and at first the thought of letting my child watch T.V. as part of her school work sounded utterly ridiculous and I said no. But it didn't take me long to realize that I should have said yes from the beginning. Bunny came up to me one morning and said "Mom, did you know that termites in Africa build mounds taller than Giraffes" I told her I remember seeing pictures of giant termite mounds in one of my text books when I was in school and I asked her where she had learned this as we hadn't gone over it in any of our work together yet...she replied, "Animal Planet!"

Now, we use T.V. a lot as an educational resource nearly on a daily basis! We watch a lot of shows on space and the Universe on the Science Channel, we watch the Smithsonian and National Geographic Channels a lot as well. I think the appeal for my daughter is that it doesn't feel like work, she thinks she is getting to relax and get out of some of her school work for the day when in reality, she is still learning, learning easier and better and enjoying it more than if she were reading these same facts out of a book.

Some may say its a bad idea, that even though its educational its still T.V. and not good for her, but I firmly disagree! It grabs her attention, entertains her and educates her all at the same time! Sounds good to me :)


Until next time...peace.