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A Message on Homeschooling From an Original Homeschooler
To cope with the stress of ::waves arm around:: this, I have been lesson planning for our homeschool year next year. Reading and preparing for homeschooling, not to mention actually homeschooling, is how I unwind. I’m weird like that. I’ve been home with my kids and educating them in some form or another since my oldest was born over six years ago, and have been more formally homeschooling for the last year. I knew I wanted to homeschool for years before we started and I’m just about the biggest proponent of homeschooling you’ll meet.
And so, it might surprise you to hear what I did when everything hit the fan the past few weeks: we took a break. An extended break. I’m not sure when we’ll get back to it, or what form school will take when we do.
As all of my friends came to me, urgently requesting help with homeschooling, I kept telling them one thing: Don’t. Take a break. Give yourself some grace to readjust to this new reality and get your footing.
The kind of schooling my friends are doing isn’t homeschooling; it isn’t what we do. There’s no art or pottery classes, there’s no Irish dance or gymnastics. There aren’t any meetups playing in the park or hiking in the woods with friends. For my friends, it’s being cooped up indoors, doing something called “distance learning” – which, for most friends, has involved being chained to Zoom for ungodly amounts of time every day. Even for us homeschoolers, life feels very different; disconnected and unmoored.
So what are we doing instead? Lots of free play. My kids are currently splashing in puddles made by a big storm that rolled through our area this morning, playing with chalk on the sidewalk.
We’ll get back to it in a few weeks and finish the year, albeit in a triage kind of a way. We’ll do the few things that need to be done (math) and a lot that we want to do (watercoloring, sewing, etc). For parents who had no interest or intention in homeschooling before March, you might want to consider doing the same.
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This is one of the reasons that homeschooling is such a good idea if at all possible. You can be flexible and everything is not in lock step to some common denominator.
Call it “Spring Break for homeschoolers”. And you didn’t even have to drive to Daytona Beach . . .
If that’s the only way that you’re weird, count your blessings. :)
Thanks for the post, Bethany.
My homeschooled girls are adapting well to the change. My oldest — also named Bethany, coincidentally — is both taking and teaching her dance classes online, through Zoom or something similar. My wife teaches in their homeschool co-op group, and they’re managing to do classes remotely.
As a homeschooler, you’ll probably like this one. One of my wife’s classes is engineering, and she wants to do a project involving a Rube Goldberg machine. Her thought is to have everyone make part of the machine, involving a rolling tennis ball, video it, and then splice them together so the class has a combined Rube Goldberg video.
Of course, it’s gonna fall to me to figure out how to make the Rube Goldberg thingamabob out of the scrap wood, wire, and other stuff in the garage.
We live across the highway from the local roller-skating rink, and they have daytime home-schoolers skates once a month or so.
I’ve been homeschooling a long time.
I agree that it is a great idea for you to take a break. But, your oldest is only six years old. Up until kids are around 9 or 10, I don’t think regular school is terribly important, although hours of reading and playing outside in an unstructured way each day are essential in those years.
My oldest in homeschool is a high school junior, and then I have an 8th grader and a 6th grader. We’re still keeping on keeping on. We’ll be done with our school year in about five weeks. Yay!
As a homeschool graduate myself, I hope that this doesn’t turn into another case of giving homeschooling a bad name – I hope everyone realizes that, as you said, this really isn’t homeschooling. Amazingly, in just the last year or two, I have been asked how I socialized when I was homeschooled – we do not need another reason for people to be asking those kinds of questions.