These quotes are from Rosie at her blog Face Value
Many parents considering home schooling wonder how exactly to get started. Many parents, wondering if they are up to the task ask, “What exactly is the task anyway?” “Can I do this?” If you ever question your capacity to home school just ask yourself who or what taught your child prior to school. Make up a mental list. If you taught them to eat, to wash, to go to the toilet, to brush their teeth, to walk, to talk then you are indeed a great teacher already!!
There is no reason for the parent to mystify ‘academic’ subjects and treat them as a distinctly different phenomenon to other teaching tasks – they are not. As a teacher you become your child’s primary example of learning. Whatever you do with a positive outlook your child will do also. Therefore, whatever you teach your child is only within the limits and boundaries that you have placed upon yourself. Teaching should never be a one-way process. It should be a two-way exchange where each party brings something to the interaction and each party takes something away.
This is the crucial issue which I’ve wrestled with for many years. Could I teach my children? Me with my quirks, abilities and difficulties? I often hated school, struggled to learn to read and still just don’t “get” Maths. But I can teach my children because their learning isn’t limited to my knowledge! We learn together all the time and they often go on further and learn more than me. (Doug is teaching himself computer programming at the moment and is learning more about the very latest computers than I can keep up with.)
The other part of teaching my children which I wondered about when the children were younger was could I cope as a single parent, being single and spending nearly every moment of my day with my children without a break. I didn’t homeschool the children when they were younger partly because of this.