Due to its many benefits, many parents are choosing homeschooling for their children. Homeschooling allows for a more flexible educational experience, and curriculum can be easily tailored to your child’s individual needs. As the costs of private schools continue to rise, homeschooling becomes a viable economic decision as well.

When you decide to homeschool your children, you need to become knowledgeable on a broad range of subjects so you can prepare an adequate educational plan. Once you have established a plan, which should include targets for different subject areas, you should consider the idea of unit projects.

You’re probably familiar with projects, as you likely did one or two if you came through the public school system. Projects are a great way to implement and test knowledge acquired through an educational unit. A good plan is to have a multi-week unit set up for a given subject, and at the end of the unit assign a week-long project that will make use of what your child has learned.

Schools separated by over 5000 miles have been brought together by two Projects Abroad volunteers in a pen-pal story that has captured the imaginations and even the hearts of the students involved.

Students from Secundaria 45 in Mexico and Selkirk High School in Scotland began emailing each other back in January as part of their respective English and Spanish lessons. Since then, two other Scottish schools – Kelso and Earlston High – have also got involved in the project.

This idea was the brainchild of Hector and Violet Christie, a retired couple from Selkirk in Scotland. They went out to Mexico with Projects Abroad for a three month teaching placement at the start of the year, living and working in a district of Guadalajara called Zapopan. Seeing the benefit that the students were gaining from having native English-speakers taking their lessons, the Christies discussed the idea of putting the students in touch with people of their own age from their local school back in Selkirk. Although school from the UK generally concentrate more on teaching French and German, Selkirk High did have 5 students who were studying GCSE Spanish, and within days emails began to wing their way across the Atlantic.