My first year Homeschooling: The biggest lesson I’ve learned.
Homeschooling. If you would have asked me 10 years ago about the possibility of me homeschooling my future children, I would have said absolutely not. I would then proceed to list off all the reasons as to why I thought it was a terrible idea. Little did I know that that 4 short years later I would start considering the possibility, the reasons, and the options. Here we are now with four kids with the oldest being six and the youngest almost one year old. We are one year into our homeschooling journey, and I want to share the ups and downs and the lessons that I’ve learned so far on this rollercoaster of an adventure.
Let me start out by saying that I felt pretty dang confident in my ability to homeschool my children. After all, I have a master’s degree and have worked eight years as a SLP in the schools. I’ve worked with hundreds of children, knew lots of strategies and tricks, have had incredible amounts of practice in organizing and implementing structure, routines, and even behavior management. To say I probably felt over-confident would be an accurate statement. That was my first mistake.
Now there is nothing wrong with being confident and I fully encourage any parent embarking on the homeschooling journey to have confidence because, you can do it! My mistake was allowing my confidence to foster certain expectations. I thought that because I had all this knowledge and experience working within the realm of child development that it would be easy for me to implement a certain type of structure and routine at home. Wrong!
As much as I knew that homeschooling was different than public/private schools I still let the idea that we had to try and follow a structured routine cloud my judgement. It was a crash and burn type situation for my children but also for me. I was trying to make something work that just was not. And that leads me to my first lesson and piece of advice… Learn your own rhythms and routines.
I realized we were not doing well with trying to stick to a schedule or routine that I made up because I thought it was what it “should” look like. So, I took a step back and just observed. I took notice of how our days naturally flowed and made observations about what worked well and what did not. I realized that our daily rhythm was actually much different than I thought it was.
When I took the time to really observe my children and myself throughout the day, I started to notice little key pieces of information that were very important to understanding how our day needed to be structured for success. I noticed that my children played together best in the morning (which allowed me to get chores done), and I noticed they actually are more apt to learn in the afternoon than in the morning. Mind-blown! Here I was thinking that the morning was the best time to set up our learning activities when in reality it was not.
The next mistake I made was trying to jump too much into structured activities that I was used to do when working in the schools. Now don’t get me wrong, I know how to set up and create some pretty fun play-based activities…..for structured therapy. There were two things that I quickly realized, 1) my children did not care for those types of activities and 2) they really were not learning from them. That was a bit of a blow to my pride. But I buried my pride, remembering God calls it the deadliest of sins and went to work brainstorming and thinking of what to try next. This is where the concept of trial and error came into play. I started trying different types of activities to see which ones they were more apt to be interested in. In this process I also learned more about their different learning styles. What works well for my oldest does not work as well for his younger brother. We came back full circle to the concept of observation.
The BIGGEST lesson I have learned in that first year and one that I cannot stress enough is to OBSERVE. Observe your children when they are playing, when they are happy and when they are upset. Observe their interests, their strengths, and their weaknesses. Take note of these things as they will help set up you up for better success. Also, observe yourself. Do some deep work here and figure out your preferred teaching style, your interests, how you best operate throughout the day. Figure out what you need to fill your cup up and get you refreshed and excited.
Homeschooling is so much more than just schooling at home. It is literally a lifestyle. In that lifestyle you and your family will be working together to get everyone’s needs met physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It is a team effort and in order to get into a good rhythm and routine you first have to look at what comes naturally to you. Changes will be made as needed and different seasons of life (or even of the year) will call for a change in routine and rhythm. Just remember to do what works best for your family.
Alycia
“Therefore, encourage one another and build one another up, as indeed you do.”
1 Thessalonians 5:11