This series is sponsored by my absolute favorite homeschool organizing tool…Scholaric Planner. Scholaric makes my planning life a breeze!
My daughter has really taken an interest in website design this summer. She’s been asking my lots of technical questions about building sites, checking out html books from the library and playing around with graphics. We ended up enrolling her in an “intro to website design” course at our local community college designed for junior and senior high students.
The experience was great for her and now she is ready to dive in deeper. As a homeschool mom, I am thinking up ways to capitalize on this new found obsession. There is so much for her to learn from this.
Web Design- The obvious lesson she is learning is how to design websites. Knowing html and how to manipulate graphics is a great asset in today’s world. Most public entities have a website or want one. Those who have them are always looking for ways and people to tweak them and make them better. What a great skill to have! Many doors can be opened by having web design skills – professional and otherwise.
Graphic Design – As a blogger, I pay good money for a graphic designer to come with logos and graphics for me. Businesses need that service, too. Being able to design logos and graphics would be a great at home job for a young entrepreneur.
Art- Speaking of graphic design, my husband has a bachelor of fine art degree in graphic art. Learning art on the computer is a fun, modern art study that most home educators look over.
Writing Skills- If you have a website, you have to have content. Instead of assigning boring essay after essay this year, I’m assigning blog posts or web content. That way, my daughter can write about what interests her and goes along with her new website.
Have you ever thought about using web design in your homeschool? Got any great ideas to share?
I would love to do some web design with my girls (9 and 11 respectively). Have you found any good resources beyond HTML books in the library? We have already used (and will continue to use) googlesites (https://sites.google.com/site/vtstandyo/home) and other free googleware, but I’m wondering what other (free or inexpensive) resources might be out there…
Thanks!
Hi Rachel (& Marci),
Just wanted to put an online web development community for women and girls on your radar: Codagogy. Full disclosure, I’m one of the women behind it. =) I was browsing Pinterest for fun stuff for our newsletter and a pin of this post caught my attention, mostly because I was homeschooled myself! I didn’t start learning web development until I was finishing my PhD, but I wish I had done so much earlier. It’s great that you are getting your daughters going so young! These skills will serve them well, no matter what they end up doing when they grow up.
I hadn’t really thought about it until I saw your post, but our classes might be really useful for homeschooling moms and their daughters. We also have a community forum where you can post questions and share resources. Hope you’ll check out our little corner of the web sometime!
Nicole
@nenoll
Thanks for the info. Going to check it out!
For web design a curriculum called Kid Coder by HomeschoolProgramming.com will teach her all she needs to know. I use it for my kid.
Thanks for the information!