An old friend of mine from college reached out to me a few days ago because she is thinking about homeschooling and wanted to ask me some questions. Among her list of questions were “What are your favorite parts about homeschooling?” and “What are your least favorite parts about homeschooling?”
I took some time to think about the answers and after responding to her message, I decided to post my answers here as well (with some expansions that I felt to add)… one, just as a record of my thoughts and feelings at this point in my homeschooling journey, and two, in case they are helpful to anyone who reads this.
Of course, there are pros and cons to everything and the same is true of any type of schooling that we choose for our families. When my boys were attending public school, we experienced many pros. They went to a great school and had many good experiences.
But now that we are homeschooling, I value the pros that we get on this side even more than the pros that we got on the public school side. The trade off is worth it to me… and to my kids as well. I occasionally ask them if they are glad that they are homeschooled and they always say yes.
Are my kids missing out on some good things by not being in public school? Yes. I know that they are. But my own personal thoughts and feelings are that they are gaining way more than they are losing.
So with that, what are my favorite parts about homeschooling?
There are so many. Where do I even start?
Learning with my kids
I love getting to learn along side my kids. I get to be a student with them and we get to learn so many cool and uplifting things together. We have developed many common interests because of this.
My kids are excited to share the things they are learning with me and I am excited to share what I’m learning with them…all because we’re in this together.
I have also loved developing an even greater and more genuine thirst for learning. In a lot of ways, I feel like I am getting an education for the first time. There are so many things that I didn’t learn when I was in school (or I forgot them because they weren’t all that impactful). It’s amazing.
The hard part is feeling like I’m never going to have enough time to learn all that I want to learn before I die. Luckily I can keep learning and progressing even after this life.
Christ-centered education
I love that we don’t have “secular learning” and “gospel learning.” It’s not separate. The gospel of Jesus Christ is woven into everything that we learn about. Including God in everything enhances, expounds, enlivens, and enriches our learning.
I wrote a bit more about this here and here.
Best friends
Another thing that I love is that my kids are best friends. They are with each other all the time and really do love being around each other. Don’t get me wrong, they still fight. Haha. They are siblings (and humans) after all. But more often than not, they are playing together nicely and love being one another’s classmates and playmates.
Protected childhood
I love that I get to guard my kids’ childhoods. This doesn’t mean that I am overly protective or extreme in sheltering them (although to some it might seem that way), but that I get to let them be kids instead of the world forcing them to grow up too fast.
Because we have a lot of control over the environment that they are marinating in every day, they get to maintain their innocence, love of playing, etc for far longer than they would if they were consistently spending their days outside of our home.
They also get to lengthen their lack of exposure to harmful information/examples etc. longer than if they were constantly exposed to outside influences. This allows them to build and develop a stronger foundation and identity before being thrown out into the world.
These outside influences include peers. Friends are so influential (for good and bad) and although my kids do have friends outside of our home, they aren’t with them all day, every day like they would be in public school so the peer influence isn’t quite as potent.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that having friends is a bad thing. There are definitely good things that come from having friends and I think that we were meant to develop relationships with others outside of our families as well.
But I do believe that too much peer influence, especially during the young and impressionable stages of childhood, isn’t always a good thing. I think that our modern society places it too high up on the list of importance (hence the classic concern about unsocialized homeschooled children), when in reality I believe that more damage is being done than many realize.
I know this isn’t a popular opinion. haha. If you want to read a good book about this, I recommend Hold Onto Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gordon Neufeld.
Freedom and time
Something else that I love is the freedom and time that we have. We aren’t rushed and pushed for time. We have freedom to seize the moment and stop to observe, discover, and enjoy whatever comes our way.
Of course, we still try to maintain a schedule because I like order and I think it’s valuable and important to use our time wisely, but if something unexpected or special comes up, we have the freedom to throw the schedule out the window (for a moment, for a day, or even for a week.)
Just a few mornings ago I was thinking about how, at that very moment, if my kids were in public school I would be rushing them out the door to go to school (a daily struggle that we had when my boys were in public school) but instead, as they were waiting for a hot breakfast to be ready, 2 of my kids were watching their brand new baby brother smile in his sleep and the other 2 were looking out the window, through binoculars, at the birds.
I love that homeschooling offers us the freedom to use our time as we feel is best in any given moment.
We have the freedom to carpe diem.
Nature
This goes along with freedom and time. I love that my kids get to spend so much time out in nature. I truly believe that nature plays a vital part in our wellbeing and that it is through nature that Mother Nature nurtures Her children – and my personal thoughts and feelings are that this is part of Heavenly Mother’s realm.
Nature offers education, healing, peace, joy, growth, wisdom, and more.
Because we have full control over our schedule, my kids get to spend a lot of time outside. When the weather is good, they spend nearly their entire recess time (about an hour in the middle of the day) outside just playing and enjoying nature. They also go outside again in the later part of the day and sometimes they are outside even before breakfast.
And if there is anything interesting that comes up in other parts of the day, we rush outside (or at least look out the window) to observe, explore, discover, and enjoy.
This is one of my favorite parts about where we live now – that we have easy access to nature, right outside our door. And homeschooling offers us the freedom and time to be able to take full advantage of it.
Here are a few moments (among many…most of which I don’t have a photo of) that my kids would have missed out on if they weren’t home during the day…
We have time to explore, discover, and be excited about the things around us. I can’t tell you how many times the kids have run up to Jershon and/or me, so excited to tell us about something that they found or saw…usually outside.
“I just saw a cardinal!”
“There are two toads in our window well!”
“There’s a crawdad under the pergola!”
“Aida caught a beetle and ate it and I could hear it crunching.”
“We found a giant worm and fed it to the chickens!”
I love that we have the time to notice the world around us and to get excited about what we see and share it with one another.
Being surrounded by nature and having the freedom of time to experience it fills us with curiosity and wonder.
Organic learning
Going along with the time thing, we are able to participate in so many natural and organic learning opportunities… especially now that we live on the farm.
We can follow our interests and learn about anything that we want, whenever we want. For instance, the day after we got our baby chicks, I asked the kids if there was anything in particular that they wanted to learn about and they said “how to pick up the chicks and hold them” so we looked up some videos and learned some interesting and valuable information.
There have been other times when we have been heavily motivated to learn about something so that we can take the best care of our animals. For example, one afternoon, a hawk flew down into our chicken run and attacked one of our chickens.
Luckily, the kids happened to be outside right then (it was their recess time) and they ran in to tell me. I just happened to be walking outside at that moment (I’m sure it was a prompting) to go get something from the shed so I was able to get to the chicken run in time and scare away the hawk before it did too much damage. Our chicken was bleeding a little bit, but she healed and survived.
This incident prompted us to do some quick research on how to protect our chickens from hawks and we were able to jimmy rig a barrier on the top of our chicken run (some bright colored yarn) to make it more difficult for the hawks to swoop down in.
These are just a couple examples, out of many things that we have already experienced so far on our farm where our “school” learning was motivated by wanting to know something. We wanted to know how to do something, what kind of bird was on our fence, or what flowers to plant in our garden next to what vegetables, etc.
This information was much better received because it was applicable to our actual lives in that moment. This type of hands on learning will stick with us way longer than just learning something random from a worksheet or in a textbook.
Play is also a way that my kids demonstrate their learning. It’s amazing how often they will learn about something during “school” and then I will see them incorporating that person, place, thing, event from history, etc into their play. I get a sense for what has really made an impact on them when I see them pulling those things into their play time.
Love of learning
Going along with freedom, I love that we have the freedom to learn what we want to learn (as a family, and as individuals). I also love that we get to foster and protect a love of learning. There is a certain amount of structure in our learning, but there is also a lot of flexibility.
For instance, the kids know that I expect them to read for a certain amount of time everyday, but they are free to choose whatever books they want (from our home library). This is one thing that they consistently tell me that they love about homeschooling – their freedom to choose what to read. They read a lot… even beyond the time requirement.
There are also times when we have “free learning time” and they get to choose how to spend that hour of time. The only requirement is that it falls within one of the arts categories (music, art, poetry, story, nature). They love free learning time. It’s not unusual for Landon to choose to play the piano, Porter to choose to read some stories, Roxanne to choose to paint, and Evelyn to choose to do a violin lesson.
Self government
In our homeschool, we do some things family style (mainly scripture study, history, science, and family reading, but a little of everything as well) and then other things (math, language arts, piano, handwriting, typing, personal reading) as individual work.
At the beginning of this school year, I felt impressed to make a weekly chart for each of the kids (well, not for Roxanne since she’s only 4) of what I wanted them to get done each week for their individual work. I just put the different subjects on their charts with a certain number of boxes for them to check off for that particular subject. For instance, if I wanted Evelyn to get 4 math lessons done each week, her chart would say Math and then have 4 boxes underneath for her to check off.
I told them that they could do as much (or as little) as they wanted to everyday towards their weekly requirements, as long as they completed everything by the end of the week. For example, If they wanted to do all of their math assignments in one day and no language arts that day (or vice versa), then that was fine with me.
The only thing I wanted them to complete once everyday (and not save up to do all at once) was their piano lesson/practice.
They know that they work on their individual work after lunch each day so they did have that amount of structure with their time.
Not long after making these charts, I found out that I was pregnant. Through morning sickness, a cross country move, starting up a new life in a new place, and then having a baby, these charts have been a life saver.
They have helped us to stay on top of the individual work and know what has been done and what still needs to be done each week.
I help Evelyn with her math and language arts but the boys are really independent with everything on their charts.
The kids (the boys especially since they are older) have developed really great self government/discipline and time management skills. They choose what work they want to get done each day and they discipline themselves and organize their time in order to get everything done by the end of the week.
I love that they are developing these skills that will help them greatly throughout their lives.
