“Forced to do work at home with my kids.” That’s the phrase I hear most as this worldwide epidemic spreads through our nation.
Schools closed and the public systems have recreated a new world where Zoom calls replace class time, and internet or picked up packets replace at-school, desk learning.
My prayer when this epidemic started was that homeschooling would be a hit.
Parent’s would see how much they have missed their kids. But more so, how much their kids have missed them.
We have created a social norm, prior to this epidemic, where kids were away from their parents six to twelve hours a day. But is that really o.k.? Was that healthy?
Sadly, as pressures mounted, news feeds pluck information bringing terror and panic into households, school-at-home has became for most, just another “thing to do”…
One that involves deadlines and forced needs demanded to be met…in the middle of an already stressful society.
Friends, can I just tell you, as a mom who has homeschooled over a dozen years, REAL homeschooling is NOTHING like the school at home you’ve been doing with your children.
Let me just highlight 5 differences:
1. Homeschooling is a way of life. School-at-home is just taking a rigid model of checks and balances, busy work and tests and forcing them into your everyday life.
Let me explain.
When I first started homeschooling, I placed a pile of books in front of my students (my children). From there, I checked off each box, insisting homeschooling looking like traditional learning.
What happened was, the first year I almost quit. There were tears, missed expectations, and my own guilt and shame for not making our home a substitute institution.
Tweet ThisHome is where kids live, sleep, laugh, play and enjoy the easy going company of their families.
To be a teacher is not the same as being a homeschool parents. (And I say that as an ex-teacher)
Traditional learning is more structured. Homeschooling is a more relational, personal, one-on-one and lighthearted love for learning that takes into a count a child’s learning styles and differences, strengths and weaknesses…
Putting people’s individualism at the very center, instead of a one-size-fits-all belief system.
When homeschooling gets strict and dictating, you have already failed. Homeschooling makes learning out of everyday life and thinking, speaking and doing.
Learning for us, apart from books and math and academic resources, is done in the car through conversations about science, religion, politics, and benevolence. It’s done while we are play crocket in the front yard, sit in the evening eating dinner or reading together.
Whatever we might be enjoying in that particular season becomes a learning opportunity.
Homeschooling is a way of living, thinking, and interacting as a family. It takes the classroom from the four walls of a school or computer system and places it in every interaction and relationship, every environment and situation.
Real homeschooling doesn’t mean we do LESS as parent educators….It actually means we do more.
Teaching is our world, educating our children becomes taking advantage of every opportunities to engage our child vs. just patting our kids on the head when they arrive from the bus at dinner time each evening.
We become, as parents, a model of healthy, whole, engaged learning. Everyday life is the doorway to not just one lesson or subject. The world becomes a child’s oyster, in every sense of the world.
2. Homeschooling isn’t less social, it’s more social.
If you are hiding your kids away, funneling pages and pages of work through your children, just to check off some box, hindering your child from the love of learning…
Let me remind you, REAL homeschool isn’t about just meeting some quota, tear-filled eyes of both you and your children….
That is not homeschooling….That’s quarantine schooling.
TRUTH: Homeschooling isn’t less social that quarantine schooling or public school. It’s MORE social.
Quarantine school can limit not just interactions, but the quality of interactions peers and adults may
have.
Homeschooling doesn’t just face another pupil on some screen…
It cuddles close to siblings, laughs and interacts with parents.
Homeschool cooks, looking others face-to-face. The world is the limit of what a child might learn and who might be their friend or teacher.
Homeschooling can allow a child to learn ASL from an educator in Europe, do woodworking with an retired neighor, laugh at Zoom calls with a friend or relative half way across the world.
In REAL homeschooling, a child feels A PART of the world around them….not distant, segregated or isolated from it.
In fact, that’s the thing I love most about homeschooling. Children become a part of their family and the world at large…
Every aspect of a child, family and community is not chopped up into separate parts, leaving a parent to only scoop out the time they are allowed access to their children.
While not quarantined, kids play with others of every age and ethnicity; at parks, museums, playgroups, coops, sports activities, music lessons, online adventures.
And the best part? If there is a rowdy, rude, or inappropriate bully, you can remove your kids from that environment, and go do something different.
3. Others educational systems are about performance, REAL homeschooling is about relationships.
I pretty much talked about this benefit in #2, but I just wanted to reiterate it. The actual goal of other learning methods is an almost robotic, “Get the work done”.
Genuine homeschooling stems first from connection, then fans out to establishing learning methods most affective from whatever system benefits both the child and the parent.
It’s not just about checking off a subject, but really getting to the heart of its methods, understanding, being able to impliment and challenge concepts, all together.
Science shows kids learn most when they feel safe, protected, and loved. They learn best when their minds aren’t at a constant state of anxiety and stress.
If we are rigid, or children feel pressure in a traditional setting, kid’s minds literally shut-down and the ability to gain information becomes limited.
But with homeschooling, relationships are the launching point to growth.
Felt safety is the pre-requisite and becomes the foundation for all future learning. Kids grow exponentially in the places they feel most loved, safe, and protected.
That isn’t always the case in other settings.
4. Other methods are one dimentional. REAL Homeschooling is broad and adaptable to what most benefits you and your child most.
There have been times our family has utilized every resource offered to homeschool parents. We’ve done co-ops, math online, science through hands-on learning, child-interests and focused history, while using a conglomerate of other curriculum for our other subjects.
Quarantine school, public school and even private school mass produces one curriculum. And everyone follows.
But what about if you have a child who is advanced or behind in a certain subject?
Homeschooling allows you to adapt to your children’s academic needs. Afterall…Who knows a child better than their parent?
I love homeschooling because if a child is three years ahead in reading (which often they are because homeschooler are known to be avid readers), you can offer books at their grade level, adapt math to focus on where they struggle, or center your subjects around a child’s interest…
For example, group studies are popular among homeschoolers. That’s where children learn history, reading, geography and language around dinasaurs, American Girls, or whatever focus your child is drawn to.
5. Often traditional school brings division (And my guess is Quarantine schooling does as well). Homeschooling creates unity and onesness.
What I have seen with traditional learning is, there becomes a great divide in society;
- “Good” kids vs the “bad” kids
- “Smart” kids vs the “dumb” kids (for lack of a better word).
- The “troublemakers” vs. the “teacher’s pets.”
We can even have these divisions between learning. For example…
- “School is for learning” vs “home is for playing”
- “Teachers are for pleasing” vs “students are for obeying”.
In Homeschooling, there is more of a collective thinking in a child’s world. The parent and the child become both the teachers and learners.
There are no walls between “education” and “learning”. Students don’t have a mentality of, “us vs them”…
Children have an ocean of academic and learning possibilities with limitless hinderings, when their entire world becomes their classroom.
Conclusion
I know, so many of you have felt exhausted trying to do school at home.
But friends, please know, forcing paperwork or computer work and then going away in tears or exhausted is NOT homeschooling.
REAL Homeschooling is centered around family, community, a child’s interest and their love for learning.
If you feel frustrated with your child or are struggling trying to teach them…
Maybe it’s not that your child that needs to change. Maybe your way of teaching and thinking about your family and learning needs to be tweeked to benefit everybody.
Friends, don’t give up. Try REALLY homeschooling. As a mom to kids in her twenties, it is so, so worth it.
Today, my older kids are avid learners, both have received degrees from college. And more importantly, our family is extremely close to one other.
We have spent years investing in relationship….And in the end, isn’t it the inward character of our children that benefits them most?
Homeschooling is an entire world different from traditional school or Quarantine education.
If your child isn’t loving learning, the last thing you are doing is homeschooling.
So what do you have to lose? How about just tyring REAL homeschooling?
