I know a lot of you are out there thinking, “should I homeschool my child?” And you’re just not sure if it’s the right thing to do. Hopefully I can help you decide. I know there are a lot of what ifs and worries, and I want to help you understand everything about homeschooling so that you can make the right choice and decide if you should homeschool your child in 2024.
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Why Do You Want to Homeschool?
People homeschool for all different reasons, and it’s important that you know your reasons because the reason that you decide to homeschool will shape the approach you take to homeschooling. For instance, if you are pulling your child out of school because they’re being bullied or you’re afraid of school violence, you might decide to take a more school at home approach where you have your child follow along with a curriculum that closely resembles the type of schoolwork that they were doing in public school.
If your reasons for homeschooling are because you want your child to have more freedom to pursue their interests, then you might take more of an unschooling approach. We all homeschool for different reasons, and there are a lot of different homeschooling styles. That’s something that you really need to understand – not all homeschooling is school at home.
Related – https://eschooled.com/how-to-start-homeschooling-2022-guide/
And what I mean by that is that the way school does school, the way that the curriculum flows, the schedule, all of that is something that is really ingrained in us as a society to think of as school. So we end up with this mistaken assumption that the school approach is the only way that a child can get a proper education.
We might worry that if our kids don’t get the right type of education as a child, that they’re not going to be able to get into college or get a job when they grow up. That’s just not true. There are many different styles of education, and as a homeschooling parent, you get to decide which style best suits your child.
It absolutely does not have to be just school at home. Although for many, especially new homeschoolers, this is the option that they are most comfortable with and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially if you’re not choosing homeschooling because you disagree with the whole public education system. If you want to homeschool simply to do school at home, there are many options for you.
School at Home Options
If you happen to live in an area that offers online public school, you can choose that. You can find out about that by visiting K12.com. Where I live, we don’t have that option. And if you don’t live in an area with that option either, don’t worry, because there are a ton of either free or affordable online homeschooling programs that you can choose from.
I highly recommend Study.com if you have a middle school or high school age kids. For younger kids, there’s a really awesome brand new homeschooling program called Homeschool Plus from the creators of ABC Mouse. Or if you want something completely free, you can check out Easy Peasy All In One Homeschool.
Or maybe you don’t want an online homeschooling program at all. That’s fine too. There are tons of great textbook curriculums out there. I really like Horizons. A lot of people really like The Good and the Beautiful. There’s Abeka. There are all sorts of options. Remember whether you choose online or paper, this all still falls under the umbrella of school at home.
Homeschooling Freedom
There is so much more freedom to homeschooling than just the school at home style. A lot of times you may start out thinking you’re going to follow this one set curriculum and then as you get more comfortable with it, you start to branch out. And you’ve got to remember not to have this preconceived idea of school in your head. You don’t need desks and a whiteboard and a special homeschool room and all of that.
You’re not teaching a class, right? You’re teaching your own children. You can teach them anywhere unless you really like that sort of thing. I promise it’s totally not necessary. In my family, we do a lot of school at the kitchen table over family meals. When we need to spread out, we use the dining room table. We don’t have any sort of special school room.
Related – https://eschooled.com/homeschool-pros-and-cons-top-10-list/
Homeschooling Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive
Don’t let money hold you back from homeschooling either. There are plenty of ways to do homeschooling on the cheap. You can use libraries for books, especially literature, but you can also usually get museum passes for either free or a discount that you can borrow from the library. Lots of places you may want to visit also usually offer some sort of homeschool discount during the week.
One of the best deals out there is from Schoolhouseteacher.com. You can get access to everything you need to homeschool your kids from PreK through 12th grade for just $15 a month. Use this link and code MONTHLY at checkout.
You can also find a lot of cool free printables online, or for the very small fee of $2.99 a year, you can get access to thousands and thousands of printables created by teachers at Creative Fabrica with their Teacher Club Card. Or another great one is Teachers Pay Teachers.
Homeschooling Styles
Once you start branching out, you will realize that there are many more styles of education than just the school at home approach. There’s the Charlotte Mason method, which is really great for kids that enjoy listening to and reading lots of stories but don’t really like worksheets and textbooks. Ambleside Online offers an amazing, completely free Charlotte Mason curriculum. There’s the Montessori method, there’s unit studies, there’s classical homeschooling, Waldorf, eclectic homeschooling, and of course, unschooling. Don’t feel like you have to know and commit to one of these methods right from the start and that you can’t change later because you can. And you can of course just come up with whatever works best for your family!
And honestly, if your kids are in school and you end up pulling them out, I really recommend taking a period to de-school first before you start any homeschooling. Take weeks, take months. It’s really okay. It’s only school that has given us this false notion that our kids need to be kept to these specific standards and that if we take time off, they may fall behind the other kids.
Related – https://eschooled.com/10-best-online-reading-programs-for-kids/
Once you start homeschooling, just don’t worry about what the kids in school are doing. You really have to let that go and just focus on your own child and what they need. But that’s the beauty of homeschooling. That individual attention that you can give to your child is something that they could never get in a school setting. And honestly, how silly to think that all children should learn exactly the same thing at exactly the same time!
How Long Does Homeschooling Take?
I think a lot of people, especially maybe those who had a taste of homeschooling during the pandemic, have this idea that homeschooling is going to take so much time and so much planning and so much teaching, and it’s just going to be overwhelming. And that may be true for some really intensive curriculums, like Abeka, for example. But for the most part, homeschooling takes a lot less time than the actual school day would in a school setting.
There’s none of the busy work. There’s none of that crowd control. You’re not trying to teach a bunch of kids all at the same time. If there’s something your kid grasps really easily or already knows, you can just skip right over it. If a particular subject is a little more challenging for them, then you can spend more time on it.
You have that freedom. You can take a day off whenever you want to. You can create your own schedule or you can just go with the flow. It doesn’t have to be Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. It can be whenever, and you really get to know your child and what their needs and their interests are. You can tell when they’re really engaged and you can keep going or when they’re getting bored and you need to stop or change to a different subject.
Homeschool Socialization
And of course, the elephant in the room, socialization, the big worry that many people have about homeschooling. First, you need to understand the difference between socialization and socializing. Socializing just means times spent with other kids hanging out, playing, having fun, that sort of thing. This is pretty easy for homeschool kids as long as you make a bit of an effort, especially at the beginning.
Just to get to know other homeschool kids or even kids in school, maybe your neighbors, kids or kids that your child meets at a dance class or sports or something like that. I promise you, most homeschool kids get plenty of time to socialize, and it’s often really good quality socializing because it’s with close friends or a small group of kids.
So it’s not something that you should be worried about. Socialization, on the other hand, is learning how to be a member of a certain group of society, what the norms are, what the expected behaviors are, things like that. So there’s two things I want to say about that. First, if your kids aren’t in school, then they don’t need to be socialized to school.
They don’t need to learn how to raise their hand to ask a question or a walk in a straight line or ask permission to use the bathroom. They don’t need to be socialized to how a school environment works, because honestly, none of that really resembles the real world. And homeschool kids are already living in the real world most of the time.
So for homeschool kids, they are being socialized. They’re just being socialized into society now. They’re being socialized into the real world. And so homeschool kids are often much better socialized to the world than kids in school. Homeschool kids have different interactions with people of all ages. They meet different kids in different settings. They have more opportunities to speak with adults, so their social skills are nothing that you should be concerned about. If anything, you’ll be pleased by all the compliments you receive on how well spoken and polite your kids are.
Should I Homeschool My Child?
So I guess the answer is if you can, yes, I think you should consider homeschooling your child. I don’t think you or they will have any regrets as long as you are transparent with them about what school is all about and what would happen if they were to go to school versus homeschool. I ask my older daughter who has never been to school often about whether or not she would like to try school.
Her dad works in a school. She’s been inside the school building many times, so she knows what a school is all about. And she is adamant that she has no interest whatsoever in trying school. Maybe that’ll change in the future. But for now, she’s very happy with the lifestyle that she has. She has close friends, homeschooled and not homeschooled.
She does a lot of different activities during the week. We have a lot of fun!1111 She enjoys learning as long as it’s presented to her in a fun way and it’s interesting to her. All kids are different, though. You’ll figure out what gets your kids excited about learning with practice and time.
If you have any questions, I’d love to answer them in the comments.
