Are you wondering how to track your homeschooled child’s progress? It’s much easier than one might think.
Read More3 Questions to Answer Before You Begin to Homeschool→
/
Many parents are choosing to homeschool today because of the inappropriate content being taught in public schools. They are also frustrated with the substandard education children have been receiving for too long.
However, while it’s critical to keep your children out of an institution notorious for the poor character and education standards it maintains, there are a few questions to ask yourself before you begin to homeschool.
Know Your Why
If we don’t fully understand why we are doing something, our chances of following through in the most effective way are compromised.
For example, if you tell someone not to eat extra protein while he is trying to build muscle but you don't explain why, he'll be less likely to follow through. He also needs to know what foods contain the highest amounts of protein, so he can reach his goal.
Home education is no different.
You want to know why public school has failed as well as what kind of an education model does work. If you can answer the question to both of these accurately, then you will be 100% committed and able to give your child a stellar education at home.
John Taylor Gatto’s best selling book, Dumbing Us Down, is the best place to begin. It will expose the fundamental problems with school making an alternative option the obvious solution.
My Why
My biggest "why" for homeschooling was that I wanted my children to have integrity, and I recognized that this was something we lost in a system that teaches us conformity. After integrity, I wanted my kids to develop their minds to the fullest.
I knew enough of the history behind public school to be 100% determined to homeschool, rain or shine. Nothing would have induced me to put my kids into a system that I knew would fail them, as it had failed me.
If we don’t have a firm commitment to homeschooling, it’s very easy to fall back on public or even private schools during difficult times.
While fear is the best motivator, fear is not the best reason to homeschool. We want to resist falling prey to a fearful mindset and adopt a proactive mindset moving forward.
We want to become someone who is determined to give their child a better education at home no matter what difficulties we might encounter.
Which begs the question, what kind of an education is the best?
2. What Education Model Should You Choose?
You will come across a lot of different homeschooling models, and it will be difficult to know which is best. Unfortunately, we now face the problem of too many blind leading the blind in the homeschooling community, so deciding who to take advice from may be a challenge.
But since you're here, I’m going to encourage you to follow a traditional approach to education because we know it works. Our safest bet is to choose that which is know to train the mind most effectively and this leads us directly to the classics.
In America, the liberal arts education, which is often referred to as a classical education, is what our children were taught when our literacy rates peaked during the 19th century.
Today, we have reached such a low point in our academic history with 54% of Americans reading above a fifth grade level. An educated guess is that a fifth grade level today was probably the equivalent of a second grade level in 1900.
For example, a third grade test in the 19th Century included questions, such as:
Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.
Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.
Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
The Classics
The classics have produced some of the greatest minds in Western history including Cicero, who was considered one of Rome’s greatest rhetoricians; and Thomas Aquinas, who debated with the Catholic Church for ten years, finally convincing it that the study of Aristotelean logic was not a threat to the religion.
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
Let’s not forget the words of Martin Luther King, who said that we should judge a man by the content of his character, not the color of his skin.
If you are going to put your time and energy into homeschooling, why not give your children the best possible training of the mind?
If you are worried that your own mind is not well-trained, don't be. You will learn alongside your children and do the best job you can. If you dedicate yourself to the task, you are capable of giving your children anr education superior to that of any public school and most private schools.
Seneca the Younger said that “By teaching, we learn.” This is the attitude to adopt when you reach for the homeschooling stars!
3. How Do I Help My Child Develop Good Character?
Raising a child with good character has always been considered the most important component of raising a child. “Education" goes under the rubric of “raising a child,” it does not stand above it.
You will find a lot of workbooks with exercises regarding character, or you will be advised to teach your children about their “feelings,” or you will come across books that teach lessons about good character, but this is not the way to raise a child up in the ways of good character.
Developing good character requires action, the right sort of action. Reading moral stories will supplement what children are learning in real life, but they cannot replace the action required to develop good character.
The truth is that most of us aren't taught how character develops anymore, so we can be confused on this point, yet it is the most fundamental aspect of raising a child.
The Ancients taught that a life well-lived was a moral life, and modern research has proven this is true, which is one of the reasons I don’t wait for the research. We spend billions of dollars trying to understand how to live well, when all we need is to go back to the classics.
Do you think after so many thousands of years, we have not yet figured these things out!
Homeschooling Is a Job
Homeschooling is not a job we take lightly. It is the education of our children. While I know any committed and willing parent can do a better job teaching their child at home, the tide in the homeschooling community is shifting.
A friend of mine, who worked in a co-op school, told me that the "homeschooled" kids they have been accepting lately we're all behind.
I attribute this to parents not taking the time to understand the very things I just pointed out as well as not adopting a proactive mindset towards homeschooling.
Too many of us keep our kids out of school for fear of negative influences without understanding the deeper problems with modern education; too many of us are using government and virtual programs without realizing that we're turning to the beast for help, and too many of us have no idea how to intentionally raise a child with good character.
We don't have to be an expert in each subject we teach, but we have to understand why we are homeschooling; what constitutes a good education, how character develops, and how to provide these things for our children.
Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.
Teach your child to read before sending him to school! Learn more about Elizabeth's unique course, How to Teach Your Child to Read and Raise a Child Who Loves to Read.
For parents of children under age seven who would like to prepare their child for social and academic success, please begin with Elizabeth’s singular online course, Raise Your Child to Thrive in Life and Excel in Learning.
When you join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course for parents, Elizabeth will make homeschooling manageable for you. She’ll guide you in helping your kids reach their intellectual potential and developing good character.
As a homeschooler, you will feel confident, calm, and motivated knowing you have the tools and support you need to homeschool successfully.
Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a homeschooling thought-leader and the founder of Smart Homeschooler.
As an Educator, Homeschool Emerita, Writer, and Love and Leadership Certified Parenting Coach, Elizabeth has 21+ years of experience working in education.
Developing a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child, she devotes her time to helping parents get it right.
Elizabeth is available for one-on-one consultations as needed.
"I know Elizabeth Y. Hanson as a remarkably intelligent, highly sensitive woman with a moral nature and deep insight into differences between schooling and education. Elizabeth's mastery of current educational difficulties is a testimony to her comprehensive understanding of the competing worlds of schooling and education. She has a good heart and a good head. What more can I say?”
—John Taylor Gatto Distinguished educator, public speaker, and best-selling author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
3 Ways Homeschooled Kids Get Behind→
/
An idea that gets thrown around in the homeschooling community is that wherever your kids are is "exactly where they are meant to be".
However, unless we are speaking philosophically about the nature of being, it isn't exactly true.
It's a useful concept to remember in moments when, for example, we just missed a plane to China, lost a lot of money in the stock market, or our two-year old destroyed our living room, but not when it comes to our children's education.
When it comes to our children's education, we need to be on top of our game, so we can help them get the most out of their prime learning years.
Optimal Learning Windows
Children have windows of optimal learning, and when we miss these windows, we fail to optimize our child's learning potential.
For example, grammar is not a subject that we should teach a child who is 5 or 6, but if a child does not know his 8 parts of speech by the time he's 9 or 10, well, in my book, that's a little behind.
If your child is 10 years old and can't read, that's a little behind.
This idea that we are "never behind" is empty rhetoric, and we should reject it.
We can get our kids behind what they are capable of learning when we are not diligent homeschoolers.
Here are 3 ways we hinder our children from reaching their full learning potential:
1. Using substandard Programs
If we are doing public-school-at-home or using a virtual, state-approved homeschool program, our children are not going to get the same quality of education they might get if we followed a more serious education model.
Why go to all the trouble of homeschooling and then teach our kids exactly what the state is teaching in school?
2. Failing to Plan
I'm not a natural planner, but I have learned over the years that having a solid plan in place increases our chances of reaching our goals, including our homeschooling goals.
While planning is an essential part of reaching goals, the way we get there never precisely matches the way we planned to get there, but we still need to do our planning. If not, we could end up anywhere.
Aren't you more focused when you have a deadline to meet? What about when you have limited time to complete something? Think about how quickly you clean your house after hearing that an unexpected guest is coming!
A plan allows us to put the structure in place and create deadlines, so we have a greater chance of reaching our goals. If I only have from 9 - 1 to work with my kids, I’m going to stay a lot more focused than when I have no start or ending time.
“Action without planning is the cause of all failure. Action with planning is the cause of all success.”
When we don't add structure our homeschooling days any little thing that comes up can distract us. And each distraction is one more thing that gets in the way of our kids moving ahead.
3. A Misguided Attitude
I am guilty of calling homeschooling a lifestyle as much as the next person, but is it? A lifestyle is the style in which we live in the same way that we have a style in which we dress. Some people dress in expensive designer clothes, and others dress in second-hand clothes. Some people dress casually; others dress formally.
So yes, we have different homeschooling lifestyles, but regardless, we want to remember that first and foremost, homeschooling is a job.
While we aren’t heading off to the local school every morning as an employed teach might, we have chosen the path of being a self-employed teacher to our children.
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
Of course, things will happen and throw us off schedule, but they should be the exception, not the norm.
Also, the "behind" we refer to is in relation to the public school objectives. But we want our goals for our kids to be higher; we want to help them maximize their best learning and work hard to give them the education they deserve.
Conclusion
When all is said and done, as long as you are using a sound curriculum, you understand what kids need to learn and how to teach them, your kids are listening to you and doing their work, and you are doing your very best, your kids will probably be ahead—not behind—and exactly where they should be!
Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.
Teach your child to read before sending him to school! Learn more about Elizabeth's unique course, How to Teach Your Child to Read and Raise a Child Who Loves to Read.
For parents of children under age seven who would like to prepare their child for social and academic success, please begin with Elizabeth’s singular online course, Raise Your Child to Thrive in Life and Excel in Learning.
When you join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course for parents, Elizabeth will make homeschooling manageable for you. She’ll guide you in helping your kids reach their intellectual potential and developing good character.
As a homeschooler, you will feel confident, calm, and motivated knowing you have the tools and support you need to homeschool successfully.
Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a homeschooling thought-leader and the founder of Smart Homeschooler.
As an Educator, Homeschool Emerita, Writer, and Love and Leadership Certified Parenting Coach, Elizabeth has 21+ years of experience working in education.
Developing a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child, she devotes her time to helping parents get it right.
Elizabeth is available for one-on-one consultations as needed.
"I know Elizabeth Y. Hanson as a remarkably intelligent, highly sensitive woman with a moral nature and deep insight into differences between schooling and education. Elizabeth's mastery of current educational difficulties is a testimony to her comprehensive understanding of the competing worlds of schooling and education. She has a good heart and a good head. What more can I say?”
—John Taylor Gatto Distinguished educator, public speaker, and best-selling author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
4 Tips to Manage Unexpected Challenges When Homeschooling→
/
Unexpected challenges will happen, and how we handle them will make all the difference.
Read MoreThe Productive Mother's Homeschooling Routine→
/
We know the hours can easily disappear when we don't have a schedule in place for our day, especially when homeschooling.
“Every minute you spend in planning saves 10 minutes in execution; this gives you a 1,000 percent Return on Energy!”
To reach your new homeschool year’s goals, you want to set your days up for success.
Otherwise, you’ll feel overwhelmed and exhausted scrambling to get everything done after you’ve run out of time. In other words, you won’t get it done.
It happened to me, and it’ll happen to you too if you don’t watch out!
One way to be more productive during the day is to create a morning routine.
HOW TO PLAN YOUR MORNING
Planning your morning is a matter of working backwards, starting with the night before. You have to decide what time you will go to sleep, so you get enough sleep to wake up at the optimal time to perform your morning routine.
As a mother of two, the morning hours were important to me as they are probably important to you. Waking up an hour or so before your children will give you a less harried start on the day.
To create your morning routine, you have to first decide what are the important things you want to do as a part of your routine.
Whatever you decide, write your schedule down on paper so you can see it in front of you. Pin it to the wall or wherever you want to put it to remind yourself of each step. You want to follow a certain order too, so your routine becomes a habit you don’t have to think about.
After coffee, you read for 30 minutes; after reading, you go for a 30-minute walk and so forth.
The things you write down will be your morning ritual. It’s sounds so simple, but it will have a huge impact on how much you get done. Planning a routine is also a proactive strategy which will serve to keep your stress levels down as well.
But it doesn’t stop there, not when you have kids!
THE OFFSPRING RITUAL
You want to follow your morning ritual with what I call the Offspring ritual.
Teach your children to get into the habit of getting up at a certain hour each day and performing their morning ritual. Maybe they start their day by brushing their teeth and then chatting with you for 10 or 15 minutes to reconnect after a good night’s sleep.
After a good chat, they run off to get dressed, put their dirty clothes in the hamper, make their beds, and come in for breakfast at a designated time.
(Eating on a schedule is much better for your children’s health than eating at random meal times.)
Depending on how you set things up, you can prepare breakfast while they are getting ready or you can enjoy another cup of coffee and wait for them to help you prepare it.
After a relaxed breakfast, the children clean up while you get ready to teach And that’s why we also need a homeschool ritual.
After you finish eating breakfast with your children, you will head to your homeschool room and examine your plan for the day and prepare to teach your children.
Once your mind is in gear for teaching, you can ring your school bell!
THE HOMESCHOOLING RITUAL
A general rule is to teach your most essential subjects first, the ones that if there were an interruption to your day, you could still relax knowing you'd gotten those finished.
Language arts and math for the morning hours work well.
Give your children 2-minute breaks when they begin to get restless, so they can stretch, run around the block, or jump on a trampoline. Getting a good dose of oxygen into their brains will replenish their thinking energy.
You want to schedule a long lunchtime break when they can eat and then go outside and play for a while.
Let the morning hours be the more intense hours of study, and in the afternoon you can take it easy. Read some history, do a science experiment, or read a story out loud. Some days you may have outings planned with other homeschoolers.
Always make sure you children have enough some time to read or pursue their hobbies; practice an instrument, do some artwork, or play a sport.
On the days when you stay home, try to finish homeschooling around the same time each day, so everyone has leisure time before dinner including, and most importantly, yourself!
Final Reminders
If you create a schedule and adhere to it, you will prevent your day from slipping right past you. Otherwise you’ll find that too many times the afternoon has rolled around, and you have barely made it past grammar.
“Excellence / Perfection is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never ends.”
The key to your success with keeping a routine is to keep in mind that we are not perfect beings and some days we will falter in our plan. We don’t tell ourselves we are hopeless at sticking to a plan, as this will reinforce that behavior.
Instead we get up the next day with a new intention, and we start all over again. Eventually, we will get better and discover the freedom and ease that comes with keeping to a plan not to mention more productive homeschooling days!
Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.
Teach your child to read before sending him to school! Learn more about Elizabeth's unique course, How to Teach Your Child to Read and Raise a Child Who Loves to Read.
For parents of children under age seven who would like to prepare their child for social and academic success, please begin with Elizabeth’s singular online course, Raise Your Child to Thrive in Life and Excel in Learning.
When you join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course for parents, Elizabeth will make homeschooling manageable for you. She’ll guide you in helping your kids reach their intellectual potential and developing good character.
As a homeschooler, you will feel confident, calm, and motivated knowing you have the tools and support you need to homeschool successfully.
Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a homeschooling thought-leader and the founder of Smart Homeschooler.
As an Educator, Homeschool Emerita, Writer, and Love and Leadership Certified Parenting Coach, Elizabeth has 21+ years of experience working in education.
Developing a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child, she devotes her time to helping parents get it right.
Elizabeth is available for one-on-one consultations as needed.
"I know Elizabeth Y. Hanson as a remarkably intelligent, highly sensitive woman with a moral nature and deep insight into differences between schooling and education. Elizabeth's mastery of current educational difficulties is a testimony to her comprehensive understanding of the competing worlds of schooling and education. She has a good heart and a good head. What more can I say?”
—John Taylor Gatto Distinguished educator, public speaker, and best-selling author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
