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I wrote the following several years ago about how understanding educational jargon, and how I found it helpful for building my confidence as a home educator.

"Yesterday I read part of the Level 1 Victorian Essential Learning Standards, a .pdf document that I had downloaded some time ago. I've always made a point of reading school curricula: it helps to know what schools are thinking about how learning happens. I'm not overly impressed by this document, but I was heartened to see the glossary.
As a fun exercise I went through the glossary and translated the jargon into language that made more sense in my life, as a mum helping her children learn.

• Product: output of human activity in form of an artefact technological product: artefact created to meet an identified need or want;
  
• Sensory perception: seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, smelling... that is, experiencing life via the senses;
  
• Technological process/technique: human activity (eg cutting, digging, shaping, usually carried out using tools);
  
• Skills, techniques and processes: ways and methods of using and handling just about anything;
  
• Manipulate: handle;
  
• Realise (ideas/goals/effects/outcomes): achieve them;
  
• Outcome: result, usually expressed as a desired result (goal);
  
• Objective: what we hope to achieve;
  
• Range of processes: use various methods;
  
• Document: write, tape, film, take photos, etc what happened;
  
• Multimedia resources: anything that includes words, images and sound; eg DVDs, internet, computer programs;
  
• Media: can be anything one uses to create something as well as the way information is conveyed to others. Arts media - paper, canvas, paints, body (eg dance), clay, etc. Information media - books, television, internet, newspapers, etc;
  
• Investigations: opportunity to create and ask questions and then work out ways to answer them;
  
• Materials: anything that can be used to make into something else;
  
• Information product: something that tells/shows others what you know using analog or digital technology;
  
• Graphic/visual organiser: a way of showing on paper how different parts relate to each other or link together - map, flowchart, graph, time-line, etc;
  
• Design brief: a statement that tells why, how, where, when and just about anything else that is necessary to help solve a problem;
  
• Design: a map that shows how we transform ideas into action and results/products. "

If you come across a word in a teacher's manual, article or curriculum framework that you don't understand and can't work it out from the context look it up in a dictionary. A thesaurus might help too. Once we become familiar with the meaning of jargon we remove its power to dent our confidence as educating parents.

See Beverley's other articles on jargon:

• Why Homeschoolers Need to Learn to Translate Everyday Activities into Educational Jargon
• A Role for Educational Jargon in the Homeschool

She also has a Practical Homeschooling Series booklet on the subject, called Translating Everyday Language into Educational Jargon.

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Beverley Paine with her children, and their home educated children, relaxing at home.

Together with the support of my family, my aim is to help parents educate their children in stress-free, nurturing environments. In addition to building and maintaing this website, I continue to create and manage local and national home educating networks, help to organise conferences and camps, as well as write for, edit and produce newsletters, resource directories and magazines. I am an active supporter of national, state, regional and local home education groups.

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We began educating our children in 1985, when our eldest was five. In truth, we had helped them learn what they need to learn since they were born. I am a passionate advocate of allowing children to learn unhindered by unnecessary stress and competition, meeting developmental needs in ways that suit their individual learning styles and preferences. Ours was a homeschooling, unschooling and natural learning family! There are hundreds of articles on this site to help you build confidence as a home educating family. We hope that your home educating adventure is as satisfying as ours was! Beverley Paine

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