By Marisa Pullan A lot of new homeschoolers ask, "What does homeschooling look like?" Then they get told, "Anything you want!" Realistically, that is a really tough concept to wrap your head around as a brand-new homeschooler, especially when you may still be coming to terms with the idea that you have taken your child's education into your hands. With that in mind, let's try to see if we can help you understand the elusive "Anything you want" mentality! So you have decided to homeschool - now what? If you are new to the homeschool arena and your kids have been in public school, most times, you will receive the advice to "de-school" which is homeschool-inese for "give the kids a break." As your children are no longer in public school, one of the hardest things for a parent to do is to understand and accept that homeschool does not equate to public school at home. The break is as much for the kids as it is for the parents! What the heck is public school at home? I'm glad you asked! So seriously, public school at home is the idea of recreating and implementing a strict schedule similar to that of a public school student. You'll find that you often don't need to do that as a homeschool parent because your elementary school student will often finish their work in 3 hours or less each day. Because you need less time to cover material, you don't need to have the rigid schedule. Flexibility becomes your friend, plus there is a major bonus - that few hours per day is hitting ALL of the core subjects AND possibly some fun stuff, too! Is 3 hours enough time for my child? In short, yes, it is enough time for your child, unless there are significant learning disabilities. Even with that, the time spent doing school work is still much less than the average public schooler. A large portion of your child's time is spent being told to get in line or wait quietly between learning periods. As such, there is a lot of time that is unfortunately wasted. The time wasted is not the teacher's fault, but more the by-product of having to wrangle 15-20 kids at a time. If my child is not in school, how will he or she make friends? This is a question a lot of new homeschoolers face because they simply don't know the ins and outs of where other homeschool kids hang out together. A better question might be, "How do I find other homeschoolers in my area so I can make sure my kids make friends?" Your best bet is to use social media to find homeschoolers local to you. There are often groups found on Facebook, Meetup, Google+, BigTent, Yahoo Groups, and others. Plug into these groups to find your very own homeschool community! De-schooling, Scheduling, Friends - Check. What about curriculum? That's the next biggest question homeschoolers have - what curriculum to choose and how to decide what is going to work best? The short answer is that everything is trial and error. We will explore this more in our next blog article because this deserves an article all by itself. Stay tuned for the next article! Until then, friends, happy homeschooling!
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January 2021
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