Will I manage to juggle my job and homeschooling?
Yes. If you can devote about 2 hours a day, on average, to giving your focused attention to your children, you will easily be able to homeschool them. (That’s what some parents spend doing homework with their school-going children!) It could be one hour in the morning and one hour reading together at bedtime. You can be flexible!
If your children are preschoolers, they need maximum time for unstructured free play as this develops the frontal cortex of the brain best for formal learning later on. They don’t need to be drilled in reading and writing at this young age. They need to play out of doors. More about that here: Play is the Work of Childhood.
Read aloud to them every day and let them count and work in the home alongside you.
Read Preschool Language Skills
If they are in Years 1-3 and they are ready to learn to read and write, they need short lessons, no longer than 15-20 minutes at a time, then read aloud to them and let them play.
If they are older and can read instructions for themselves, let them do a few lessons of 20-30 minutes each in maths and languages independently, if possible and then read aloud to them for about an hour a day.
By high school level, your children should have taken ownership of their learning and should be able to work alone most of the time. Read aloud to them every day too – even if they are old enough to read alone.
Are you catching the repetition? Read aloud to your children every day.
Literature-based learning has the added advantage that children of different ages can learn together, simplifying lessons for the parent. Only their maths and language activities need to be on different grade levels.
Reading aloud together in our home!
If you have time for nothing else, they will still learn. Their natural curiosity and their desire to learn the skills that grown-ups have will motivate them (sooner or later) to learn the skills they need.
Read More than 20 Benefits of Reading with Children
Sharing books means you are sharing learning experiences with your children. Books are all about how people in different place and times solved their problems, overcame an adversary or their own fears and grew in wisdom and character.
Those are lessons you don’t find in textbooks either.
Wow, I say that often. There are so many lessons that we homeschoolers are able to help our children learn because they are out of the confines of the 4 walls of a classroom, living life alongside us and not limited to textbooks only for their learning.
Your task is to give your children a love of learning, to develop their self-confidence and the motivation to do what they need to do to achieve their goals.
Stick that somewhere you can see it often.
You can’t measure that by pages filled in a book, but that is what homeschooling parents constantly do. They stress that they aren’t doing enough. That is the ‘dis-ease’ of the homeschooling mom. Read Am I Doing Enough? Homeschooling Worries
Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.
William Butler Yeats
This quote is my mantra. It has got me through many a bad day, when I felt like we hadn’t done enough!
Lighting that fire takes much less time than filling a bucket, and that means you can juggle working and homeschooling. I do every day!