So, you have decided to homeschool your littles, first off, welcome! This is going to be an amazing experience for both you and your children. You are already working on your first step to creating a year full of joy and love of learning by researching how to be successful. I know the first year can be stressful and feel overwhelming to both you and your child, I’m here to help alleviate that. I will be giving you advice on how to set yourself and your children up for success. If you have already been homeschooling, I’m so glad you are here as well! I continuously research and dive into new sites to help myself and my children grow, hopefully, I can do the same for you!
Calming and Preventing Anxieties
Going into homeschool can be overwhelming for both you and your child. It could be that you had your children in public or private schools and felt they weren’t learning how and what they needed, so you decided to give homeschooling a try. You could be just starting pre-school or kindergarten with your child. Or you could be looking for new ideas on how to give your school a fresh new look and feel. I have been in all positions and know that each situation can cause anxieties in you and your child. This is something we do not want for ourselves or our children. We want our children to enjoy and love learning, and we want to enjoy teaching them as they learn. We start to calm ourselves and our children by gaining control over what our children are learning and by giving them a say in what they want to learn by aligning it with what they need. We do this by creating diverse and engaging educational experiences for our children individually. This is our time to help our children learn how to express themselves and how to deal with emotions and feeling they may encounter. Homeschooling isn’t just about an educational value, it’s about developmental value as well.
Setting The Goals
Your first step is to set goals for both you and your child. While doing this, have your child help with their own thoughts on what they wish to achieve throughout the year. If, like me, and you are schooling multiple children, sit down with them separately to get their own goal as each child may be in different grades levels and have different goals. Set your own goals as well and help your child, or children, understand that these are important too.
While setting up the goal for the year with you child, make sure you cover multiple areas of growth. Personally, when I set up the yearly goals with my child, we focus on academic growth and excellence, social skills development, and personal growth. You see, homeschooling isn’t just about growing in knowledge academically, it’s about growing as an individual as well. While yes, our main focus is educational, our secondary focus is on the children themselves. Helping them to understand emotions and feelings that are new to them, how to meet new people and communicate with them in a way that makes both of them feel welcomed. It is our goal to help our children be a better version of ourselves. When they helped to set goals with us, they get the chance to see that homeschooling will be different or engaging for them.
SMART Goals
This is how I work my homeschool. When I sit down with my child, we cover all ground necessary for state requirements and personal requirements. SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. It’s a simple way to lay thing out and ensure everything is meet but enjoyable for everyone. Let me break this down for you to help you be able to work SMART goals into your homeschool.
- Specific: This almost self-explanatory, it’s your state requirements such as reading, writing, math, science, history, and physical education. However, we add in our own subjects as well such as art and music. When setting goals with my children, these are the first things we cover. Knowing we are required to learn these subjects is sometimes not the easiest on my littles, but by giving them the choice of order on the subjects, it helps them feel in control and not so overwhelmed by them.
- Measurable: This means that we can measure how they are learning and track their progress. Parents, this is on us. This part is solely our responsibility and our goal. This is where we focus the majority of our efforts to ensure that our children are actively learning and engaged in each subject. This is where we see where our children need extra time and encouraging. We may need to re-evaluate their learning style for a subject or multiple subjects. Don’t worry, I will dive deep into learning styles and the importance of learning styles separately.
- Achievable: When we set our goals, we need to ensure they are achievable. When our children set their goals, we need to ensure they are achievable. When we do this, it helps to encourage our children to keep going, that they can do it! When I do music with my son, I don’t expect him to play Beethoven by end of week one or even 6 months into it. We need goals that are able to be meet and then grow from there.
- Relevant: Each goal needs to be set for each subject. When you have a child who is easily distracted or struggles with a subject, don’t set a goal or time frame that is too short or too long for them to work with. I have 2 children with ADHD and one child with dyslexia as well. With each of them, I have to adjust times and ways to teach them. I have to make sure the material they are learning from is relevant to their needs.
- Time-Bound: A typical school day is 7 hours. But what we, as homeschool parents, need to remember, we don’t have to focus and help 20+ students. While each state may require a set amount of time for children to be taught, we need to remember that we have multiple way to teach our children. Studies have shown that younger children learn best though play. I encourage my children to learn through play from pre-kindergarten to 5th grade. For required subjects I set a time limit for the work to be done. If they finish early, I mark the time and we move on to the next subject. At the end of the day, when there are subjects they completed early, I have fun actives or games to play with them. For example, I have Sight Word Swat for reading and Target Math for math. These are only 2 of the game that are educational and fun for children!
As parents of homeschooled students, this is our time to help plan for their future. We do this by taking it one year at a time, one subject at a time. We get to be engaged and supportive of our children without being overbearing to them. With homeschooling we can be flexible and adapt to individual needs that arises. Best of all, there are many resources we can rely on for support, encouragement, and help when needed. With the rise of children being homeschooled, there are several support groups on social media platforms that can help guide us or encourage us. When we set goals for ourselves and our children, we help to ensure that we succeed from the very start.