How To Homeschool. Hint: It’s Not School At Home

Disclaimer: The links to books in this essay, like this one, for the Elephant and Piggie book by Mo Willems, redirect you to Amazon.com. If you buy the book, or anything else, through that link, I get a small commission from Amazon for referring you, which means you will be supporting my writing and helping me keep this site alive. That particular link is to the book I Really Like Slop, which is not only one of my favorites, but the favorite of many small bookstore owners I have discussed these books with. But they are all fabulous.

What’s In a Name?

We really do need a new name for the act of educating children at home. When people think of how to homeschool, they conjure images of sitting their kids down at desks and formally instructing them for X amount of hours each day, then assigning homework. Many homeschoolers I know do not do anything close to that. Most parents I’ve met who educate their own children do so in a variety of ways that mostly involve some loose curriculum. The idea is that the parents and kids have a sense of where the student’s peers are in traditional school. 

Homeschooling also involves a lot of hands on active learning, 4H, physical activity classes like gymnastics or ballet, and/or sports like baseball or soccer.  Most of us are part of a community group, I found mine on Meetup.com. A small portion of us are highly educated, meaning beyond high school or an undergraduate degree, and many, many of us are average everyday working class or middle class people.

The reasons for homeschooling are myriad, and my next homeschool post will address many of them, and mine specifically, but that is for another day.

What I want to make clear is that homeschooling is simple and, at least in the early years, virtually effortless. I’ve met so many people who say they’d love to homeschool but they just can’t because of X, Y, or Z. Many of the reasons I’ve heard come from a misunderstanding of what is required (very little) to educate your children at home. So let me address that aspect of “how” first because the bottom line is this: if you want to homeschool, you absolutely can.

The Three Big Reasons People Give For Not Homeschooling, Even Though They’d Like to:

1. I’m not a teacher

Yes you are. You are a parent. That makes you a natural teacher. You taught your child to walk, to talk, to dress herself, to feed herself, to do chores around the house, to brush her teeth, and the list goes on and on. You, in fact, are the most effective teacher your child will ever have. Way more effective than a person with a four year degree in any given subject and the six month training program required to earn a credential.

You are connected to your child, you are invested in his education, you are motivated to help your child learn. Every time you have a discussion about bullies, about helping, about responsibility, you are teaching. ABCs and 123s are way easier than all that. And elementary science and history are just a more formal version of the conversations we have with our kids every day. At the very least up until sixth grade there is absolutely no reason you, no matter who you are, cannot teach your child.

    2. I don’t have a degree. What do I know?

You know everything you need to know to start. You know your ABCs, you know your 123s, and you have an even greater superpower than a teacher in a classroom with a degree: you can adapt any lesson you want to teach to your child’s individual learning style. You know when your child has reached her limit. You know when your child needs to get outside for some play time. You know when your child can be pushed just a little bit more. You know a lot. As far as academics, come on, we’re talking about elementary school here. It is called elementary for a reason. It is easy stuff for a grown adult to relearn if you have to.

And, anything you don’t remember and do need to relearn, you can learn with your child, which makes it more fun and more engaging. As curriculum, or your child’s interest, grows more complex, there are a gazillion (yes, a gazillion) resources out there to tap into. Happily, homeschoolers encourage and support other homeschoolers. It is easily the most welcoming extended tribe I’ve found.

There are charter schools, online courses, micro schools, you name it. And every single subject you can think of at every level is available to you.

It is not rocket science. But if you are a rocket scientist, great!

    3. What if my child falls behind? Doesn’t get into college? Feels left out? Never gets socialized?

I put this one last, but I should have put it first because it is always the first response I get from anyone once I say I’m homeschooling. And all of the questions above fit into the same basic concern: my kid won’t be like all the other kids. Once you realize this is the issue, you can relax and remember that that’s not what you want anyway! You want your child to stand out, you want your kid to be individual, you want your kid to not follow the crowd and be like everyone else.

Falls behind? Falls behind what? There is ample evidence that by the time children hit middle school they all catch up to each other in their capabilities if they put in time and effort. So your kid is not reading at grade level when he’s 8, but he’s way above grade level in math. This concern is the same as the concern we have over why our children aren’t walking/talking/climbing/eating, etc. like all the other kids their age. You name it, we worry about our kids falling behind. The reality is, they all walk, talk, climb, eat, and do all the other early milestones, in their own time. The same goes for learning.

Think of it this way, your child can either be “behind” in reading in traditional school, where she will be pressured to catch up, possibly moved to another class, sent home with extra work and specific instructions for home study, and catch up eventually, or she can follow her natural learning style at home and learn the subject in her own time without pressure and stress and anxiety placed on her and the entire household.

Doesn’t get into college? Increasingly, Ivy League schools are searching for the kid who is not the carbon cutout perfect extra curricular, volunteer, AP student with the impeccably polished college essay. They, and many other large and small schools around the country, are looking for an authentic voice, a kid with a good head on his shoulders who knows his own mind. If there is anything you can say about homeschooled kids it is that they are individual, independent, freethinkers. And universities know this.

Feels left out or never gets socialized? This could happen anyway. Your kid could be the goth with black fingernail paint and black lipstick alone at the lunch table. Your kid could be the nerd with the pocket protector and one skinny friend name Simon (or your kid could be Simon). Your kid could be the pothead with three friends who ditches school and hangs out in the field behind the bleachers.

Regardless of what you do, your kid is her own person. At least when your child is educated at home, you have that many more years to ensure a personal connection with family and close friends, a great influence on raising them to be good people with strong values. Which brings me to my own personal story.

How I Homeschool

“Mama, are you in the zone?” Celaya, my five year old, asked me this the other day at lunch. We were in our kitchen and I was staring off out the window. I call this “the zone,” and she has adopted this language.

“Huh? No honey, I was thinking about how best to help people of color gain equality in society.” No joke. This was our conversation. The Nazi march in Charlottesville, VA had just occurred a few days earlier, and I had been debating with a Facebook group about “well meaning white people.” (Confession: I’m white. Like, so white I’m clear.)

“Oh,” she responds. “I was thinking about how we can save our planet. Like, we should go out on the street and pick up garbage and put it in the trash can. That could save our planet.”

“Haha, yes, honey, it can. Do you think we can help our brothers and sisters with different skin colors gain equality and save the planet at the same time?”

“Yes. I think we can.” She said this so confidently that I knew I was doing my job. I was educating my child.

This, to me, is homeschooling. Celaya learns about the world, the practical and the ideological, at any given moment of the day from the time she wakes up until the time she goes to bed. Some issues are way over her head, like social justice, so we touch on them briefly but regularly, with a light touch appropriate for a five year old. Some issues just need to be resized to fit her comprehension level.

“Mama, is that tree going to fall over in the wind?” She asked me once when she was about three years old, as we were taking a walk in our neighborhood.

“Probably not. It looks like it has really strong roots.” I responded, and then we had an in depth conversation about the root system of a tree, how deep the roots go, how far spread out they can be, depending on the tree. Science. This conversation then led to an analogy of roots in a family, and how important family and community is. Humanities.

Experiential Learning

She learns math because she gets an allowance and has to figure how much money she has, how much she wants to spend, how much change she gets back from a cashier.

Children are sponges; they learn every day, all day, they learn from what they do. And they learn from what you say and do, even when you think they are not watching or listening.

In terms of practical instruction, we do the single most important thing anyone can do with their child ever anywhere: we read. We read and we read and we read. All educators across the board of early child development and education are agreed on this point. Surround your children with books and make reading a fun filled family activity for as long as you can. They will have a higher chance at education success across all subject matter, regardless of their schooling. I have had many of my own students confess they have come to hate reading by the time they get to me.

“Did your parents read to you when you were little?” I’ll ask.

“Oh yea, we read all the time.” Is a typical response.

“And then, once you learned to read on your own, did you continue to read with your parents?”

“No, after that it was pretty much on me to read to myself.”

The conversation continues in what has become a very predictable fashion. Once kids learn to read, parents read out loud less and less, reading becomes work, just another assignment for school. It becomes laborious and, ultimately resented.

When you homeschool, you have the opportunity to avoid all that. You make time to continue reading as a family. Your reading time is not crowded out by all the other homework (busy work), and the foundation is firmly laid for a lifelong love of not just reading but learning, gaining new information, listening to other people’s voices, and gaining empathy. This is the power of reading.

Of course you can totally continue to read at home as a family if your children are in traditional school; I have many friends who do this. The problem is that as school gets inevitably busier, reading becomes an afterthought and then, as I said, a resentment. As an educator myself, I have heard this refrain from parents, teachers, and students alike.

Reading, and books, should be exciting, not stressful.

In our home, reading is a natural part of our day. It is the one legitimate educational activity we do religiously. We read after lunch for about 20 minutes, and we read before bed for about 20 minutes. That’s it.

Obviously, she’s five. Our reading times will expand, with longer and more complex literature coming into our lives. For now, we stick with fun picture books, early readers, and simple chapter books.

Celaya also asks me throughout the day to read to her; her current favorites are the Elephant and Piggie Books by Mo Willems. They are the best early reader books I have ever read with my kid or any of the kids I have taught to read, and there are some great early readers out there.

Celaya is excited to read and reread (and reread) Elephant and Piggie, she knows each one by heart, and she insists on reading the part of Piggie. Not only reading, but acting the part, she often stands up as she reads to mimic Piggie’s stance on the page. She “reads” with enthusiasm.

To be clear, Celaya does not know how to read. She knows the same basic things all kids her age know: her ABCs and her 123s. She knows the sounds letters make and she can pick up on rhyming schemes in words, so we can play word games. All of this has come from games we play, bathtub foam letters that stick to the bathtub wall, refrigerator magnets, and… Reading! Fun.

She Wants to Read

She memorizes the stories we read and “reads” them to or with me. Any reading specialist will assure you that this memorization process is a natural, and great, part of early reading.

But she cannot sit down and read a new book from start to finish, any book

And she doesn’t need to. She’s five. One of my favorite scenes in literature is in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee when Scout is explaining how she learned to read. She says that she doesn’t remember learning to read, that her family says she was born reading, and all she knows is that sitting on her father’s lap night after night as he read from the newspaper to his kids, she soon found herself reading along with him.

By all accounts, that is exactly how all kids learn to read. One day it clicks and they can read. For some it happens at 5, for some it doesn’t happen until 10 or 12, but we lay the foundation and eventually they learn to read. We can make this painful or fun. It is up to us.

So, this is how I homeschool. We live our lives, we try to make them fun as much as possible, and learning happens naturally.

A typical day for us involves waking up slowly, lazing around bed for a bit, having a leisurely breakfast, then I clean with Matilda (the baby) while Celaya plays or chats with me. Often, before she can do anything else she is charged with cleaning up her play area from the day before. Celaya then gets screen time in the early morning while her sister naps and I do computer work.

Then, most days we head out for outside time, usually a playdate with friends in the park, sometimes an adventure at a museum or lake. We’ve done this since she learned to walk.

We typically eat lunch in the park or out and about.

After lunch we head home, we read, and Monday through Thursday I head off to tutor at work. The rest of Celaya’s day, whether I’m home or not, involves afternoon screen time while her sister naps, then she plays, she eats dinner, she plays, she gets a bath, she puts on her pajamas and feeds the cats (one of her chores).

And finally, she gets read to in bed. Once her lights are out and we’ve said goodnight, Celaya is allowed to stay up “reading” with her nightlight until she falls asleep, this is usually no more than 10 or 15 minutes. And, more often than not, when I go in to check on her before I turn in, I find her crashed out in various positions, surrounded by books.

That’s how I homeschool. 

 

Other early reader books that I have had tremendous success with not only with my own child, but with the dozens of children I have taught to read over the years are listed, and hyperlinked, below.  Know that when I say success, I mean that children love these books because they are fun and funny, the books have short simple, but engaging sentences, with repetitive words for easy recognition, and pictures that help kids decode what is happening in the story. And adults love these books because most of them have heartwarming messages without being too didactic.

1. Frog and Toad Are Friends, by Arnold Lobel (Really any of the Frog and Toad stories are fabulous.)
2. Morris The Moose by B Wiseman (Again, any of the Morris books are awesome.)
3. Mouse Soup by Arnold Lobel
4. Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodnika
5. Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik

All of these are great early readers and they have great messages, and you can’t go wrong with any or all of them. They are fun stories to read to your children before they can read themselves, they help kids learn to read, and they remain classics long after they become fluent. I hope you enjoy them. And remember to please provide feedback, questions, or comments on your homeschooling experiences or your own experiences with reading.