Have over 50 cumulative years of homeschooling my kids under my belt. My kids are way more socialized than their peers. Can publicly speak without fear or hesitation. Look adults in the eye when speaking. My buddy visited for a week once and called my youngest, “extremely socially adept.” Public school is like nothing else people ever go through again in life (closest thing might be prison, if they had age segregated prisons). Not sure why anyone thinks that’s good preparation for social interaction.
Great article! Thank you. My wife and I have our boys in Catholic school but have been looking at alternative options. We have noticed that as our oldest son (9) is getting older the 7 hours of being told what to do is impacting him. My wife volunteered yesterday and just really did not recognize our son at the school lunchroom and realized it is time to make a change. I remember lunchrooms being a bit rowdy when I was a kid, but this one was fairly quiet and each child sat at the lunch table. If their voices started to raise a little, the lunch lady would come out and announce over a loud speaker that the kids need to quiet down.
I came up though the traditional education system and I have really been red pilled by the things I have read about the poor design of schools and how they impact our kids. I have joined Educating Young Heros run by Matt Beaudreau and am trying to lear more about home education.
We are looking at some home schooling options but are interested in learning more about pods and co-ops. We have been trying to research in our area but the list of options is endless. What would be a good resource to filter the list and find pods and co-ops we can trust?
Catholic Schoolhouse is a classical education weekly co-op. They have chapters all across the country. Our group has been such a blessing to us as I really wanted to have a Catholic community of friends for our son. I can’t say enough good things about it, and highly encourage all Catholic families to check it out.
If you are interested in a Charlotte Mason education with a Catholic worldview, there is a free online curriculum guide called Mater Amabilis that you could check out. Best of luck to you!
The wife and I decided to try unschooling because of some health stuff. Anyways, 1 year later and basically not formally teaching our son a 2nd grade curriculum he just took a placement test that put him passing 3rd grade.
Sure it’s a superficial test but it’s also encouraging that even with health stuff our son is still being educated.
Note, my wife and I are both readers and we read everyday to our kids and use every opportunity in regular life to educate.
I don’t recommend this method but if being a life long learner is your lifestyle then your kids might just come along for the ride.
We’ve been homeschooling our son for 2 years after the Covid insanity. I jumped in head first and started a co-op with 30 like-minded parents that meets once a week at a church for very low rent and overhead. The parents are the teachers in a wide range of topics — this trimester includes 20+ classes in art, music, cooking, gardening, CrossFit, science, team building, and even masonry! Kids are in mixed ages classes and have 4 classes every Thursday. We bring in different professionals for demonstrations/lectures and take field trips. It’s on the parents to come up with interesting course offerings and I’m always impressed with what they come up with.
There’s many online and traditional book curriculums options now that fills in the rest. I found this website helpful when researching options: https://cathyduffyreviews.com/
My son is also in a “forest school” called Timbernook which is a world-wide program of unstructured outside play. When asked what his favorite part of school is, he says he likes the variety of each day. Now that I’ve seen this style of education, I don’t know if I could ever go back to regular school.
Question: How much "friend time" do you think kids need?
Background: Our 8-yr old daughter is a student at a hybrid classical school where she's in class 2 days, homeschooled 3 days using their curriculum. It's a great school but getting too expensive for us (especially in light of our 3-yr old son getting closer to school age), so we're thinking about fully homeschooling next year. But, my wife, who is an introvert, is worried about giving up hours of her time for playdates (as she thinks she must) so our daughter can build friendships.
My kids do their work every weekday between breakfast & lunch. Not a set time for either, but rather a routine. As sometimes they like to wake up & get straight to work. Other times they like to play for a bit first.
We have lunch and then head out to parks, beaches or friends houses for playtime 3-4X per week between 1pm and 4-5pm.
We then wrap up our day with family dinner and we’re either home or at Jiu Jitsu or sports.
I'm a social phobic and an introvert. I only have sons, but 2 are very social.
Different kids have different needs.
If you find the right homeschool org, you can drop the kids off or hide in your car reading. Or you can find that one close friend who gets who you are and picks up and your daughter and takes her to the roller rink or cooking class or playground.
But you have to give back, too. I gave up hours of my time, but not to playdates. I decided I'd channel it to being the teacher, so it wasn't awkward or insipid or stuff I was bad at socially. I taught chemistry lab at my house and then the younger kids and moms played and the older ones worked with me. If they wanted more social time after, I could easily spend it just sitting while others did the chatting. Later I taught math club, game theory, computer science, radio building from kits, linguistics, etc. The other moms did great things like hold summer camp or organize board game events or parties. You need to see that you're building a community. What can you offer?
Yes I'm exhausted, and I do more peopling than I want. But I look at it as my job, and sometimes your job requires you to do things you'd prefer not to, and you need to get better at. They're worth it. Every sacrifice I made was worth it.
All helpful comments. I'm really just asking about the importance of friendship. Cerno always has good insights, thought I'd ask. But, I'll leave it there and think about it more. Thanks
If you have several children "socialization" is built-in to the process anyway. Ours get along great overall, and get to develop a wide-ranging kinship with their siblings who they see and share life with all day most days. We are homebodies more than most, but live very rural so going to a regular coop would be too time-disruptive for my wife. Most of the public school kids I know aren't as conversational with adults as my children.
I have been meaning to become a subscriber for some time, but this post motivated me to pull the trigger!
We just decided to homeschool our 8 year old starting this fall (she's currently in 2nd grade at a fantastic Classical Christian school 6 minutes from our home, which we have loved). I was homeschooled for 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade in rural NC, and hated it. We went to our small church twice a week, 4H once a month, and spent the rest of the time at home. I was a social kid, and felt very isolated. I was biased against homeschooling for most of my life.
I was a model student and employee my entire life. Eventually went to law school and got married to a wonderful man from a higher station in life. We always assumed we'd send our kids to the best, most elite school we could afford.
Until we did just that for our 3 year old (at the time), and saw all of the radical woke nonsense being pushed (this was even before Rufo & DeAnglio were household names). At the time, we were political and religious normies, but what we witnessed was disturbing enough to send us to a private, conservative Classical Christian school.
About this time, I started to become more interested in the homeschool movement, and I realized how different it was from when I was young. Several close friends & family members joined the movement, and it became an actual possibility.
The thing holding me back the most was how much we loved our classical christian school. While I didn't like my kids being gone all day, and I could quibble with details on the curriculum, the community, and overall direction of the curriculum was hard to beat. I judged senior thesis projects for the past 3 years, and the graduates of this school are impressive. They are reading C.S. Lewis and learning latin as part of the curriculum. Very much a Hillsdale College type of place. Community wise, it attracts most conservative leaning professionals within a 25 mile radius. Half of the parents in my kindergartners class are medical doctors, all of which support medical freedom and horrified by the trans kids movement.
However, my oldest struggled in the classroom setting. Her grades are excellent, but her ability to focus and stay on task turned into a big problem. Her teachers & school administrators have been excellent & very transparent - she requires a lot more direction than her peers. And we see it at home. Her younger sister can already follow multi-step instructions (go upstairs, clean you room, get dressed). She cannot. She requires more micro-management even at home than her younger sister.
She cannot reliably follow multi-step instructions without me standing over her.
The school said they were concerned about her meeting the expectations in 3rd grade. But her academic grades were excellent.
We had her evaluated and she was diagnosed with ADHD. The entire process was very eye-opening. The psychological evaluation was an IQ test which identified that she was of superior intellect (top 93%) but had a "pretty significant" focus disorder. The old-school psychologist was confident that her IQ would be several points higher if we medicated her. He recommended strongly against repeating a grade.
The decision to homeschool was pretty much made for us.
I visited a few co-ops, but have so far decided to do our own thing for now. She's in many activities, and I want to take the year to figure out how best to educate her.
Her school has been fantastic and so supportive - they didn't even try to convince me otherwise, and even offered their entire curriculum as a support. They offered for her to come to recess, lunch, field trips and other activities, and even to come in for tutoring or evaluations if need be.
We are so blessed, and the situation could not have worked out better.
I have no idea what our homeschool journey will look like, but I'm so excited to begin.
Mike, i hear you brother! our first is 5 1/2 yo, went to an fully outdoor nature school 2 days a week this year. Going to an outdoors Emilio Reggio style / CM school in the Fall for kindergarten 27 kids mixed ages up to 3rd grade with 4 passionate teachers - thankfully the weather allows us to do this as we are in Florida Just for the contrast visited the local public school this week, it's brand new, very highly rated but yikes!!! Its an institution, teacher faces were devoid of that spark of life, we were talked down to, and the kindergarten was proud that each kids station had a laptop with headphones that they use a few times a day... Oh, breakfast and lunch are provided, lunch starts at 945! I was prepared to be underwhelmed just not completely 100% let down. ...
Thanks for this post. I appreciate your wife for making recommendations in the comments!
I think if a family is considering and on the fence about homeschool, they should read Hold Onto Your Kids (you often mention this book and it definitely swayed our family’s decision!). Eye-opening to say the least, and it helped my husband and I come to realize that peer-orientated socialization is not at all ideal. Social skills are learned through an adult modeling such behavior.
We have a preschool-aged daughter and our methodology is simple. We take her everywhere, and that creates an infinite amount of learning opportunities. We walk and talk to different places. She orders her own food and pays for things. We sit down and read constantly. We create theories about the world that make sense to only us and she uses her imagination to answer her own question. If there’s nothing to do, she finds something to do. When learning is child led, then little to no issues arise.
It’s funny—since we decided to homeschool, I often take note of who is at the local park and when. I would chat up the other parents and get the feelers out. This is how I met our previous homeschool playgroup. If the kids are a little older and with their parents in the middle of the day during “school hours”, they most likely homeschool. Though my family and I have since moved, our group would meet on a regular basis and play and we’d all have lunch and snacks at the park. The kids ranged in age, from 3 to 8. It was great because the other moms had a similar parenting philosophy to mine and we could share resources while the kids played with one another. I’m hoping to find something like this in our new town now!
Yes, it's possible. Make a tribe. If your child is under 8, the amount of formal schooling needed in a day is an hour max. For real. You can do that at home after work. The hard part is the childcare. Find every family member you can to take on some part of it. So they help with carpooling or child care now? Then grandpa has a skill to teach or grandmother does. Maybe it's sitting and reading and teaching phonics or playing cribbage or gardening or sewing or electrical engineering. You will find it takes some time to your child to use all those hours without devices, but develop those hobbies.
Find a group co op something with people whose values match yours and get plugged in. Ask at your church who homeschools. Ask another family there if they can homeschool your kid certain days/hours. Pay them as you would for daycare or barter for some skill you have.
Or switch to wfh or to contract work you can do in the afternoons or at night. Upwork, Fiverr etc.can help.
For those asking how you can work full time and still home school, it takes a sense of priorities. Realizing many years too late how badly my kids were messed up by public schools, what I should have done, even as a single mother (divorced by my adulterous spouse) with no independent source of income outside of work, was to sacrifice literally anything to stay home with them. Nothing is worth the cost of ruining your child's life. Beg, borrow or steal. Better to live in a tent than to let them suffer the "socialization" of public schools, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. One of my kids was cognitively impaired, and 18+ years of costly "special education" did not enable him to read above a first grade level, or do any kind of math at all. He was on Adderall due to ADHD and sertraline for anxiety & perseveration. And he actually turned out better than the so-called "normal" kid with an above average IQ.
Definitely would be a challenge, but could be done. Highly dependent on your work routine, but again— homeschool communities and the support you can get from them can be great.
Plug into a community or ask someone to go for coffee & pick their brain!
Same question I have. I would love to find a pod that I can trust. I am a single parent (adopted) and I work, otherwise I would love to teach my daughter. How can I find a good pod?
We are two working parents who homeschool. It depends on how you want to homeschool. I find those who have 2 working parents tend to be more into unschooling where children find their own way OR they tend to make more use of pods like Prenda and Kai-Pod (or those Cernovich describes above) to allow hours for parental work. I think it's very hard to do Classical homeschooling in a two working parent household. We are somewhere between unschooling and classic but I'm still likely to quit my job in the next 6 months and/or move to part-time. But this has to do with that I want to start and run my own homeschool-pod and give my kids more - integrated history/science lessons etc which are very had to create and manage. All that to say, if there is a will, there is a way. Any way you want to homeschool, there is someone out there doing it. Including 2 working parents.
We have three under four years. Our oldest has been spelling and sounding out letter/words starting at 2.5 while the middle is way less verbal in comparison. When/how do you formally ‘start’? How do you manage having multiple kids at different ages or levels (w/ or w/o a pod)? I really appreciate the specific follows you recommended - I expect to be aiming my autism that direction shortly
They say it takes a village to raise a child. I’ve seen the village, so I think we’ll go our own way.
I have 2 and one was reading by 2 and doing double & triple digit multiplication in his head by 3/4. The other had no interest in anything educational until 5ish and then went from not knowing letters to fully reading in 3mo.
When the kids are young, especially if you have naturally curious kids, be interest led and go down all the rabbit holes with them.
My kids learned INSANE amounts during the first 4-5yrs of life. We’d get 50-70 books every 2 weeks on whatever topics they were into or i through they might like. They played and built and explored their interests fully.
Then when we actually started following a curriculum around 6YO, I realized we’d already covered years of science, math and social studies just following their interests. And my non-academically inclined youngest soaked up an insane amount of info just by playing around next to us while my oldest was asking 1M questions about everything exploring all his interests.
We’re in our 7th year of homeschooling our kids and they’re both about 5yrs ahead of their peers academically & EQ wise despite only doing a couple of hours of ‘book work’ 3-4x a week and the rest free play with friends or at home.
Each kid will have different aptitudes - one of the most beautiful things about homeschooling is you can go at each child's pace. You can get separate curriculum with the different age groups but I've also found that it's surprising how many lessons I can scale for each kid. I have 8 and 6 yos. I can do age appropriate math and just scale up the math. For example, the little one might be doing clocks just look at 3:15, 3:00, 3:30 but the oldest is doing 4:23 etc. Same with multpilication. My youngest is doing skip counting songs which are super fun to memorize but the oldest is moving onto procedural multiplication - memorization of facts and application. Hope that helps.
Are the other parents in the pod taking on teaching responsibilities or do all the families collectively pay to hire a teacher/multiple teachers or tudors for the kids?
"she felt like she was robbed of a real education by going to public school. She felt it was utilitarian. You do what you need to do to get good grades. It’s formulaic. Study the material, take a test, get a good grade for Baba, then forget it all to repeat the process for the next subject."
story of my life.
thank you for this! all obviously true, but apparently still needs to be said these days. I couldn't believe that twitter thread about how you need to send your kids to modern school for socialization.
i don't want to be banned, so here's my question: what age do you start your kids? i'm way more laid back from what i've researched into homeschooling, don't plan to start anything formal til age 7 (though again, with homeschooling, the lines between formal and informal blur - so much reading and exploring going on already), but then you go to a homeschool convention and some people are doing stuff super early and it stresses me out... what's y'alls approach?
Also, for those reading this, never ever drug your kids to fit into their 'normie' classroom! There are a million different ways of schooling out there, don't feel trapped in the historical accident of the one your country happens to prefer at this brief moment in time...
With our oldest, I couldn't help myself and had her reading at 3 years old. I have definitely scaled back though. The early years I would just focus on time spent outdoors, observing nature, cultivating good habits, teaching them simple chores they can accomplish on their own, and lots and lots of reading books to them, quality "living" books.
What has been your biggest challenge in homeschooling? Or maybe what’s something that’s not obvious on the outside that you wished you knew beforehand? My youngest is two so I’m starting my research now. Thanks!
Have over 50 cumulative years of homeschooling my kids under my belt. My kids are way more socialized than their peers. Can publicly speak without fear or hesitation. Look adults in the eye when speaking. My buddy visited for a week once and called my youngest, “extremely socially adept.” Public school is like nothing else people ever go through again in life (closest thing might be prison, if they had age segregated prisons). Not sure why anyone thinks that’s good preparation for social interaction.
An amusing and somehow, I think, the most true comparison to prison. I completely agree with you.
It’s funny cause you’ll see memes online with correctional facilities and school cafeterias side by side… and then it hits you… it’s true
Homeschooled kids aren’t sick because most of them are not vaccinated. You forgot to point that out.
Cerno,
Great article! Thank you. My wife and I have our boys in Catholic school but have been looking at alternative options. We have noticed that as our oldest son (9) is getting older the 7 hours of being told what to do is impacting him. My wife volunteered yesterday and just really did not recognize our son at the school lunchroom and realized it is time to make a change. I remember lunchrooms being a bit rowdy when I was a kid, but this one was fairly quiet and each child sat at the lunch table. If their voices started to raise a little, the lunch lady would come out and announce over a loud speaker that the kids need to quiet down.
I came up though the traditional education system and I have really been red pilled by the things I have read about the poor design of schools and how they impact our kids. I have joined Educating Young Heros run by Matt Beaudreau and am trying to lear more about home education.
We are looking at some home schooling options but are interested in learning more about pods and co-ops. We have been trying to research in our area but the list of options is endless. What would be a good resource to filter the list and find pods and co-ops we can trust?
Chris
You can search here to find any Charlotte Mason inspired groups near you - https://charlottemasonincommunity.com/listings/
Wild + Free is another homeschool community and you can search here for groups in your area - https://www.bewildandfree.org/about-groups
We attend a wild+ free group. They also have a beautiful book "Wild+Free Family" which is truly a wonderful read.
Catholic Schoolhouse is a classical education weekly co-op. They have chapters all across the country. Our group has been such a blessing to us as I really wanted to have a Catholic community of friends for our son. I can’t say enough good things about it, and highly encourage all Catholic families to check it out.
If you are interested in a Charlotte Mason education with a Catholic worldview, there is a free online curriculum guide called Mater Amabilis that you could check out. Best of luck to you!
Thank you for this information
The wife and I decided to try unschooling because of some health stuff. Anyways, 1 year later and basically not formally teaching our son a 2nd grade curriculum he just took a placement test that put him passing 3rd grade.
Sure it’s a superficial test but it’s also encouraging that even with health stuff our son is still being educated.
Note, my wife and I are both readers and we read everyday to our kids and use every opportunity in regular life to educate.
I don’t recommend this method but if being a life long learner is your lifestyle then your kids might just come along for the ride.
We’ve been homeschooling our son for 2 years after the Covid insanity. I jumped in head first and started a co-op with 30 like-minded parents that meets once a week at a church for very low rent and overhead. The parents are the teachers in a wide range of topics — this trimester includes 20+ classes in art, music, cooking, gardening, CrossFit, science, team building, and even masonry! Kids are in mixed ages classes and have 4 classes every Thursday. We bring in different professionals for demonstrations/lectures and take field trips. It’s on the parents to come up with interesting course offerings and I’m always impressed with what they come up with.
There’s many online and traditional book curriculums options now that fills in the rest. I found this website helpful when researching options: https://cathyduffyreviews.com/
My son is also in a “forest school” called Timbernook which is a world-wide program of unstructured outside play. When asked what his favorite part of school is, he says he likes the variety of each day. Now that I’ve seen this style of education, I don’t know if I could ever go back to regular school.
Question: How much "friend time" do you think kids need?
Background: Our 8-yr old daughter is a student at a hybrid classical school where she's in class 2 days, homeschooled 3 days using their curriculum. It's a great school but getting too expensive for us (especially in light of our 3-yr old son getting closer to school age), so we're thinking about fully homeschooling next year. But, my wife, who is an introvert, is worried about giving up hours of her time for playdates (as she thinks she must) so our daughter can build friendships.
My kids do their work every weekday between breakfast & lunch. Not a set time for either, but rather a routine. As sometimes they like to wake up & get straight to work. Other times they like to play for a bit first.
We have lunch and then head out to parks, beaches or friends houses for playtime 3-4X per week between 1pm and 4-5pm.
We then wrap up our day with family dinner and we’re either home or at Jiu Jitsu or sports.
How about sports and clubs instead?
I'm a social phobic and an introvert. I only have sons, but 2 are very social.
Different kids have different needs.
If you find the right homeschool org, you can drop the kids off or hide in your car reading. Or you can find that one close friend who gets who you are and picks up and your daughter and takes her to the roller rink or cooking class or playground.
But you have to give back, too. I gave up hours of my time, but not to playdates. I decided I'd channel it to being the teacher, so it wasn't awkward or insipid or stuff I was bad at socially. I taught chemistry lab at my house and then the younger kids and moms played and the older ones worked with me. If they wanted more social time after, I could easily spend it just sitting while others did the chatting. Later I taught math club, game theory, computer science, radio building from kits, linguistics, etc. The other moms did great things like hold summer camp or organize board game events or parties. You need to see that you're building a community. What can you offer?
Yes I'm exhausted, and I do more peopling than I want. But I look at it as my job, and sometimes your job requires you to do things you'd prefer not to, and you need to get better at. They're worth it. Every sacrifice I made was worth it.
Very helpful, thank you Greifer.
All helpful comments. I'm really just asking about the importance of friendship. Cerno always has good insights, thought I'd ask. But, I'll leave it there and think about it more. Thanks
Are you part of a charter program? That can help offset some of the costs.
No, it's a private school. But, next year we might join a co-op instead or homeschool.
If you have several children "socialization" is built-in to the process anyway. Ours get along great overall, and get to develop a wide-ranging kinship with their siblings who they see and share life with all day most days. We are homebodies more than most, but live very rural so going to a regular coop would be too time-disruptive for my wife. Most of the public school kids I know aren't as conversational with adults as my children.
I have been meaning to become a subscriber for some time, but this post motivated me to pull the trigger!
We just decided to homeschool our 8 year old starting this fall (she's currently in 2nd grade at a fantastic Classical Christian school 6 minutes from our home, which we have loved). I was homeschooled for 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade in rural NC, and hated it. We went to our small church twice a week, 4H once a month, and spent the rest of the time at home. I was a social kid, and felt very isolated. I was biased against homeschooling for most of my life.
I was a model student and employee my entire life. Eventually went to law school and got married to a wonderful man from a higher station in life. We always assumed we'd send our kids to the best, most elite school we could afford.
Until we did just that for our 3 year old (at the time), and saw all of the radical woke nonsense being pushed (this was even before Rufo & DeAnglio were household names). At the time, we were political and religious normies, but what we witnessed was disturbing enough to send us to a private, conservative Classical Christian school.
About this time, I started to become more interested in the homeschool movement, and I realized how different it was from when I was young. Several close friends & family members joined the movement, and it became an actual possibility.
The thing holding me back the most was how much we loved our classical christian school. While I didn't like my kids being gone all day, and I could quibble with details on the curriculum, the community, and overall direction of the curriculum was hard to beat. I judged senior thesis projects for the past 3 years, and the graduates of this school are impressive. They are reading C.S. Lewis and learning latin as part of the curriculum. Very much a Hillsdale College type of place. Community wise, it attracts most conservative leaning professionals within a 25 mile radius. Half of the parents in my kindergartners class are medical doctors, all of which support medical freedom and horrified by the trans kids movement.
However, my oldest struggled in the classroom setting. Her grades are excellent, but her ability to focus and stay on task turned into a big problem. Her teachers & school administrators have been excellent & very transparent - she requires a lot more direction than her peers. And we see it at home. Her younger sister can already follow multi-step instructions (go upstairs, clean you room, get dressed). She cannot. She requires more micro-management even at home than her younger sister.
She cannot reliably follow multi-step instructions without me standing over her.
The school said they were concerned about her meeting the expectations in 3rd grade. But her academic grades were excellent.
We had her evaluated and she was diagnosed with ADHD. The entire process was very eye-opening. The psychological evaluation was an IQ test which identified that she was of superior intellect (top 93%) but had a "pretty significant" focus disorder. The old-school psychologist was confident that her IQ would be several points higher if we medicated her. He recommended strongly against repeating a grade.
The decision to homeschool was pretty much made for us.
I visited a few co-ops, but have so far decided to do our own thing for now. She's in many activities, and I want to take the year to figure out how best to educate her.
Her school has been fantastic and so supportive - they didn't even try to convince me otherwise, and even offered their entire curriculum as a support. They offered for her to come to recess, lunch, field trips and other activities, and even to come in for tutoring or evaluations if need be.
We are so blessed, and the situation could not have worked out better.
I have no idea what our homeschool journey will look like, but I'm so excited to begin.
Mike, i hear you brother! our first is 5 1/2 yo, went to an fully outdoor nature school 2 days a week this year. Going to an outdoors Emilio Reggio style / CM school in the Fall for kindergarten 27 kids mixed ages up to 3rd grade with 4 passionate teachers - thankfully the weather allows us to do this as we are in Florida Just for the contrast visited the local public school this week, it's brand new, very highly rated but yikes!!! Its an institution, teacher faces were devoid of that spark of life, we were talked down to, and the kindergarten was proud that each kids station had a laptop with headphones that they use a few times a day... Oh, breakfast and lunch are provided, lunch starts at 945! I was prepared to be underwhelmed just not completely 100% let down. ...
Thanks for this post. I appreciate your wife for making recommendations in the comments!
I think if a family is considering and on the fence about homeschool, they should read Hold Onto Your Kids (you often mention this book and it definitely swayed our family’s decision!). Eye-opening to say the least, and it helped my husband and I come to realize that peer-orientated socialization is not at all ideal. Social skills are learned through an adult modeling such behavior.
We have a preschool-aged daughter and our methodology is simple. We take her everywhere, and that creates an infinite amount of learning opportunities. We walk and talk to different places. She orders her own food and pays for things. We sit down and read constantly. We create theories about the world that make sense to only us and she uses her imagination to answer her own question. If there’s nothing to do, she finds something to do. When learning is child led, then little to no issues arise.
It’s funny—since we decided to homeschool, I often take note of who is at the local park and when. I would chat up the other parents and get the feelers out. This is how I met our previous homeschool playgroup. If the kids are a little older and with their parents in the middle of the day during “school hours”, they most likely homeschool. Though my family and I have since moved, our group would meet on a regular basis and play and we’d all have lunch and snacks at the park. The kids ranged in age, from 3 to 8. It was great because the other moms had a similar parenting philosophy to mine and we could share resources while the kids played with one another. I’m hoping to find something like this in our new town now!
Yes another good point! Kids out in the parks or on hiking trails in the middle of the school day are likely homeschoolers!
Is it possible to homeschool kids and still work full time? What would you suggest for single parents who are interested in homeschooling?
Yes, it's possible. Make a tribe. If your child is under 8, the amount of formal schooling needed in a day is an hour max. For real. You can do that at home after work. The hard part is the childcare. Find every family member you can to take on some part of it. So they help with carpooling or child care now? Then grandpa has a skill to teach or grandmother does. Maybe it's sitting and reading and teaching phonics or playing cribbage or gardening or sewing or electrical engineering. You will find it takes some time to your child to use all those hours without devices, but develop those hobbies.
Find a group co op something with people whose values match yours and get plugged in. Ask at your church who homeschools. Ask another family there if they can homeschool your kid certain days/hours. Pay them as you would for daycare or barter for some skill you have.
Or switch to wfh or to contract work you can do in the afternoons or at night. Upwork, Fiverr etc.can help.
For those asking how you can work full time and still home school, it takes a sense of priorities. Realizing many years too late how badly my kids were messed up by public schools, what I should have done, even as a single mother (divorced by my adulterous spouse) with no independent source of income outside of work, was to sacrifice literally anything to stay home with them. Nothing is worth the cost of ruining your child's life. Beg, borrow or steal. Better to live in a tent than to let them suffer the "socialization" of public schools, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. One of my kids was cognitively impaired, and 18+ years of costly "special education" did not enable him to read above a first grade level, or do any kind of math at all. He was on Adderall due to ADHD and sertraline for anxiety & perseveration. And he actually turned out better than the so-called "normal" kid with an above average IQ.
Definitely would be a challenge, but could be done. Highly dependent on your work routine, but again— homeschool communities and the support you can get from them can be great.
Plug into a community or ask someone to go for coffee & pick their brain!
Has anyone found any helpful resources for finding a pod in your area? Is homeschooling even possible with two working parents?
You can search here to find any Charlotte Mason inspired groups near you - https://charlottemasonincommunity.com/listings/
Wild + Free is another homeschool community and you can search here for groups in your area - https://www.bewildandfree.org/about-groups
Same question I have. I would love to find a pod that I can trust. I am a single parent (adopted) and I work, otherwise I would love to teach my daughter. How can I find a good pod?
I agree with @shauna and love Wild+Free another good place is https://www.thehomeschoolmom.com/local-support/ They have all the homsechool groups by state - it's a HUGE list!
We are two working parents who homeschool. It depends on how you want to homeschool. I find those who have 2 working parents tend to be more into unschooling where children find their own way OR they tend to make more use of pods like Prenda and Kai-Pod (or those Cernovich describes above) to allow hours for parental work. I think it's very hard to do Classical homeschooling in a two working parent household. We are somewhere between unschooling and classic but I'm still likely to quit my job in the next 6 months and/or move to part-time. But this has to do with that I want to start and run my own homeschool-pod and give my kids more - integrated history/science lessons etc which are very had to create and manage. All that to say, if there is a will, there is a way. Any way you want to homeschool, there is someone out there doing it. Including 2 working parents.
We have three under four years. Our oldest has been spelling and sounding out letter/words starting at 2.5 while the middle is way less verbal in comparison. When/how do you formally ‘start’? How do you manage having multiple kids at different ages or levels (w/ or w/o a pod)? I really appreciate the specific follows you recommended - I expect to be aiming my autism that direction shortly
They say it takes a village to raise a child. I’ve seen the village, so I think we’ll go our own way.
I have 2 and one was reading by 2 and doing double & triple digit multiplication in his head by 3/4. The other had no interest in anything educational until 5ish and then went from not knowing letters to fully reading in 3mo.
When the kids are young, especially if you have naturally curious kids, be interest led and go down all the rabbit holes with them.
My kids learned INSANE amounts during the first 4-5yrs of life. We’d get 50-70 books every 2 weeks on whatever topics they were into or i through they might like. They played and built and explored their interests fully.
Then when we actually started following a curriculum around 6YO, I realized we’d already covered years of science, math and social studies just following their interests. And my non-academically inclined youngest soaked up an insane amount of info just by playing around next to us while my oldest was asking 1M questions about everything exploring all his interests.
We’re in our 7th year of homeschooling our kids and they’re both about 5yrs ahead of their peers academically & EQ wise despite only doing a couple of hours of ‘book work’ 3-4x a week and the rest free play with friends or at home.
Each kid will have different aptitudes - one of the most beautiful things about homeschooling is you can go at each child's pace. You can get separate curriculum with the different age groups but I've also found that it's surprising how many lessons I can scale for each kid. I have 8 and 6 yos. I can do age appropriate math and just scale up the math. For example, the little one might be doing clocks just look at 3:15, 3:00, 3:30 but the oldest is doing 4:23 etc. Same with multpilication. My youngest is doing skip counting songs which are super fun to memorize but the oldest is moving onto procedural multiplication - memorization of facts and application. Hope that helps.
Are the other parents in the pod taking on teaching responsibilities or do all the families collectively pay to hire a teacher/multiple teachers or tudors for the kids?
"she felt like she was robbed of a real education by going to public school. She felt it was utilitarian. You do what you need to do to get good grades. It’s formulaic. Study the material, take a test, get a good grade for Baba, then forget it all to repeat the process for the next subject."
story of my life.
thank you for this! all obviously true, but apparently still needs to be said these days. I couldn't believe that twitter thread about how you need to send your kids to modern school for socialization.
i don't want to be banned, so here's my question: what age do you start your kids? i'm way more laid back from what i've researched into homeschooling, don't plan to start anything formal til age 7 (though again, with homeschooling, the lines between formal and informal blur - so much reading and exploring going on already), but then you go to a homeschool convention and some people are doing stuff super early and it stresses me out... what's y'alls approach?
Also, for those reading this, never ever drug your kids to fit into their 'normie' classroom! There are a million different ways of schooling out there, don't feel trapped in the historical accident of the one your country happens to prefer at this brief moment in time...
https://gaty.substack.com/p/fore-the-big-golf-controversy-and
With our oldest, I couldn't help myself and had her reading at 3 years old. I have definitely scaled back though. The early years I would just focus on time spent outdoors, observing nature, cultivating good habits, teaching them simple chores they can accomplish on their own, and lots and lots of reading books to them, quality "living" books.
Hi Shauna, can you recommend some books to get the started or by age level ?
What has been your biggest challenge in homeschooling? Or maybe what’s something that’s not obvious on the outside that you wished you knew beforehand? My youngest is two so I’m starting my research now. Thanks!