What You’ll Lose if You Stop Homeschooling After Covid

a sad child stands in front of a school bus

You homeschooled this past year. Thrown into an experience that wasn’t even on your radar, you did the best you could in a difficult situation when you chose to use BookShark’s literature-based curriculum instead of remote pandemic schooling. 

Once again you have a choice to make, and this one isn’t about making the best out of a bad situation. It’s about being proactive instead of reactive in how you will educate your children. It’s about choosing the best instead of the good for your children and your family.

Consider what you’ll lose if you stop educating your children at home. Envision the experience that homeschooling can be for your 2021-2022 school year.

A Chance to Evaluate

Instead of focusing on the problems you had while your children did school at home, ask yourself what you learned through the experience. 

  • Did the pace of life slow down? Did you have more opportunities to connect with one another as a family?

  • What did you learn about yourself and your kids this past year—both the positive and the negative?

  • What were the problems you experienced with homeschooling during a pandemic? Were they truly homeschooling problems or pandemic problems because you were forced to do school at home when everything was restricted in some way?

  • What might your homeschool day look like if you could choose to homeschool instead of being forced to school at home?

Ask your kids what they liked and disliked about doing school at home this past year, and then use the knowledge you gained to make choices for the future. 

Kerry McDonald, Forbes contributor, says,

"This year, millions of new homeschoolers have discovered that learning without schooling is not only possible but preferable. For many of them, pandemic homeschooling may well become a permanent and positive educational change."

Will you be one of these families who make homeschooling a permanent and positive change? 

5 Things You’ll Lose if You Send Your Kids to School

It’s been a year of losses. Some of you are grieving the loss of loved ones, jobs, income, health or feelings of security. It's easy to get stuck thinking about those things that have hurt us this past year. 

In our quest to return to normal though, let’s make sure we don’t continue to lose. 

Take time to consider the good things you and your children will forfeit if you choose to send them back to public or private school. 

1. You’ll Surrender the Chance to Customize Your Children’s Education

You already knew that every child has a unique blend of personality, talents, skills, and interests that combine to make a one-of-a-kind individual. But now that you’ve homeschooled, you may be wondering why schools educate all children in the same way. They teach the same subjects at the same time and then grade them based on their performance of each task. 

In a school environment, grades measure children’s learning, and often the growth seen in students is ignored if they don’t measure up to a standard. 

Our kids deserve better than that. You’ve had a taste of it this year as a new homeschooler!

With homeschooling, you have enjoyed the opportunity to educate your children in ways as unique as they are. They aren’t bound by grade levels, so if your fourth grader is doing math at a third or fifth grade level, it’s not a problem. If your student finds a particular topic interesting in science or history, they can slow down and spend more time studying it. 

You can more easily meet their educational needs because you know them better than anyone else.

2. You’ll Miss Time to Explore & Discover

In pre-covid days, sports teams, clubs, and other extracurricular activities claimed so much of your children’s time in addition to the hours they spent at school—not to mention the never ending homework your children were expected to finish as well.

When did kids have the chance to explore interests and discover new skills and ideas? 

Consider how much time is saved each day homeschooling. You don’t have to rush out of the house each day to drop kids off—often at different school campuses—and then wait to pick them up. Your students don’t waste time going between classrooms and waiting for the classes to settle down and get to work. And because they can focus on their work and move on when they are done, they don’t have to fill their evenings with even more school work.

Homeschooling gives them time—time to develop into the person they are supposed to be. Time to explore new interests and discover talents and passions. Time to dig deeply into subjects and read books and do experiments and take walks. 

When time is lost, it’s impossible to get back. Do we really want to fill our children's lives with so many things to do they never have time to just be?

3. You’ll Sacrifice Freedom & Flexibility for Your Family

Does your spouse work odd hours or travel on a regular basis during a normal year? As you’ve discovered this year, you can fit your homeschool schedule with theirs. If you want to do less school each day year round, you can make that choice. If you decide you want to follow a block schedule or looping schedule or traditional schedule, you can. 

Homeschooling allows your family to take off days to enjoy the outdoors when the weather is perfect and have school in front of a roaring fire while taking s’mores breaks when it's cold outside. Homeschooling gives you freedom and flexibility that simply isn't possible with other educational choices. 

As more and more things open up, choosing to homeschool means you’ll be able to plan off season vacations, travel places you’ve studied, and go on field trips. It may sound cliché, but the world can literally be your children’s classroom. With this freedom and flexibility, your kids can take advantage of real-life learning opportunities. 

4. You’ll Give up the Lower-stress Environment

Because of their developmental level and lack of experience, the here-and-now felt like it would be forever to them. And although you started homeschooling as a result of the pandemic, remember it was the pandemic that was the true source of the stress

Homeschooling actually reduces stress and pressure on your children and teens. For special needs kids, those with learning challenges or anxiety, for example, learning at home in 2020 was a welcome reprieve from the demands of a classroom. These kids blossomed without the bullying, the competition, and the physical demands of sitting quietly at a desk.

You can ensure that your children’s education is less performance-based because you know the process is more important than the product… that learning happens in mistakes and failures as much as success.

What You’ll Lose if You Stop Homeschooling After CovidHomeschooling provides a more balanced approach to life. Instead of spending the majority of their time with other kids the same age, homeschoolers socialize with people of all ages in addition to their peers. Because of this, many of these students are less dependent on their peers.

Homeschooling takes the pressure off of kids to perform and to rely on fickle peers for approval. That’s a loss that heals instead of hurts. 

5. You’ll Forfeit the Chance to Build Strong Relationships

Of course public and private school students have meaningful relationships with family and friends. 

But homeschoolers have the opportunity to spend more time with one another. And no matter how often people say that it’s about quality, not quantity—we all know that quality time isn’t possible without an adequate amount of it.

Homeschooling Gives You Time ...

  • Time to read books together. But it’s not just about hearing a good story—although that alone is so much fun! It’s about discussing the ideas you encounter, seeing what each other thinks about the things happening in the story, and gaining a sense of camaraderie around a shared experience. 
  • Time to discover. You experience the joy of discovery as you gather around the table to do fun science experiments. You talk about what might happen and then see if you were right or not. You put your heads together to figure out why you were wrong or give each other a high five when you were right. Learning becomes as much about the experience—an experience that is wrapped up in good feelings your kids will cherish long after the facts have faded.

Children Are Not Isolated

People opposed to homeschooling have asserted that it’s detrimental for kids to be homeschooled because they are isolated. It’s simply not true. 

Homeschooling isn't about isolation—it's about choosing to educate your children in a different way, developing meaningful relationships as you do life alongside one another.

Homeschool students spend time with siblings, friends, family, and people of all ages. They get real world experience when it comes to building relationships, because when else in life (besides school) are you surrounded by people your own age the majority of the time?

It’s true that during the pandemic, students were isolated from one another. That is a pandemic problem, not a homeschooling one

After a Year of Losses...

We’ve all experienced a year of losses, This is a chance to stop losing and start gaining. The pandemic has rocked our world as well as our children’s. Most people have expressed a desire to just get back to normal. 

But what if you and your kids could create a better normal by continuing to homeschool?

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