This is NOT Homeschooling

Homeschooling looks more like this.

Schools are closed. Kids have been sent home with work to complete. You are asked to stay in, stay home, avoid people, distance socially. Moms are a little freaked out. Understandably so. The news is more intense every day. There is a lot to process. Restaurants, churches- so many closures. Economic uncertainty. Many are working from home, some are out of a job. Even food feels scarce or is scarce in some places. It stands to reason that adding the education of all of your children to the mix would weigh heavily on your spirit and be overwhelming. You are being asked to School At Home. Moms, I know it's a lot. Deep breath. Okay, better take a few and buckle up. You can do this! You are MORE than equipped to do this. You can teach your child. This thing you are being asked to do, it's harder than homeschooling. This, is doing all their school work at home, under the direction of their teachers, under unbelievably stressful conditions with no end in sight. This, is you being forced into a situation you never chose and that's not homeschooling. Homeschooling is a calling, it's a decision made as an act of faith. It's a choice that is sometimes agonized over. Planned for years. It's sometimes made in great joy and other times made in utter exasperation because the system has failed their child. It isn't put in place by government mandate, or in reaction to a pandemic or natural disaster. This isn't homeschooling and what it is, well it's going to present challenges. But you are the parents. You are equipped. I want to be a resource for you and I feel certain many others in our ginormous homeschool community will be too. Reach out if you have any questions, concerns, if you want help. The first thing we have to wrap our brains around as homeschool moms and you will want to get straight too - is that we don't have to know everything. We have to know how to find out everything, figure it out, access resources and ask for help when we need it. You don't have to fake it in front of your kids. Actually the barriers to learning begin to fall away when we learn together.

None of what you will have to do looks like homeschooling.

We don't stay at home, some weeks we are never home. The world is our classroom! We don't bury ourselves in rote memorization, tedious or busy work. We don't drudge through things again and again once we have mastered them. We keep moving. We follow passions and creativity. We develop our gifts, play to our strengths and use them to work on our weaknesses. We don't start and stop school by bells. We get up and we learn all day. The book work, it's pretty short really. Most of the learning doesn't come from books. We take on learning as a journey, an adventure and we do it as a family, together.

Your kiddos may have some struggles being home all day, everyday together. This is something they've been thrown into as well. They are accustomed to age segregation and having patience with younger children is hard when you haven't had the one room schoolhouse approach your whole life. Take breaks, retreat to outdoors and find creative ways to engage them in things they can do together. Siblings who have been raised together in a homeschool environment and spend all day, everyday together normally still have days where they are over it and want to move to Australia, so cut your kids some slack. Homeschooling has been the most wonderful adventure of my life. I've homeschooled for more than 25 years. All our children graduated from our homeschool program. I would start over again tomorrow! Best decision of my life (and it wasn't that hard). As all of you moms undertake this new, unexpected journey know that all of us who chose homeschooling had a long time to adjust. We call it deschooling. It takes a couple years to shift your mindset from a traditional classroom, Greek method approach. The only approach most of us know. But there are fascinating, remarkable ways to learn together - the Hebrew model, Montessori, Classical, Charlotte Mason, Unschooling, SO many educational models. Homeschooling and School At Home are different things but we all have the desire to provide our children with what they need. We all want to give them our very best and we are 100% able to do this job out of necessity or choice, for a while, or forever.