What You Need to Know As A First Time Homeschooler

Hi there, it's Sheri from Our Life Homeschooling where I share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I want to talk specifically today to first-time homeschoolers and I want to give you some things to be aware of and to expect in your first year. If you're new here, my name is Sheri. I am a homeschooling mom to 10 kids. I'm married to my high school sweetheart, Nelson. We've been married for 23 years. This is our 14th year homeschooling. I'm a former public school teacher turned homeschool mom. I love encouraging other moms on my YouTube channel and on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com. If you like the content that you see here, would you do me a favor and like and subscribe? If this is your first year homeschooling, you have taken that courageous step to decide to start teaching your children at home. This can be both very exciting and scary at the same time, but I want to encourage you in this video with some things that you can expect that first year and to be aware of and how to handle them when they do happen. I want to start first of all by saying how excited I am for you in what you're about to embark on this year and this exciting adventure. We started homeschooling over 14 years ago with our oldest who has now graduated. He's gone all the way through. He's been homeschooled the whole time as well as our other children and I had no idea what I was getting into when we started back then. It was just something we weren't even sure we were going to keep doing it. We just decided to try it for a year and then we kept doing it and I can tell you it's been an incredible gift and blessing to our family and this is what you have started doing. You are giving your kids an environment where they have a lot of free time to learn at their own leisure. You're giving them a one-on-one teacher where they can learn at their own pace. They can slow down if they're struggling with something. They can move ahead if they get it. They don't have to wait for everyone else to catch up. You're giving them time to pursue their interests and to do things outside of school because they just have a lot more free time on their hands. You're giving them a safe environment where they're home with their parent and they don't have a lot of the pressure that kids have in schools today. You're giving them free access to the outside world. You're going to give them an excellent socialization opposed to what a lot of people think. Your kids are going to have a lot of friends. They're going to have friends in different circles. They're going to be involved. They're going to be busy, but they're not going to be at that frantic pace of always being hurried to the next thing and running around all the time. Homeschooling has been an incredible blessing to our family and looking back now I have this perspective. I can see things with a bigger picture. I know there were some really challenging times and I think of some of the times that I wanted to just throw in the towel and now I'm so glad I didn't because I've been able to see a lot of the rewards and just love the opportunities that I've been able to give our kids, that we've been able to give our kids because we're homeschooling and this is the same journey that you're starting on, so I'm really excited for you. Having said that, I will also say that you're probably aware that this is the road less traveled. Not everybody's doing it and the reason is because it's hard. It's not easy to homeschool your kids. It's not easy being with kids all day. You're doing something that is not mainstream and so because of that it's going to be a little bit more difficult than if you would just do what everyone else is doing. So there's a few things that I would like to share with you to be aware of in your first year of homeschooling so that when they happen you're not caught off guard, you're not discouraged, you just know that this is probably normal for most first-time homeschoolers and you can just have that right point of view and right thinking on it when it does happen to you. These are things that I wish I had known when I had started out homeschooling. The first one is what works in school does not usually work at home and if you have listened to anyone else that is a homeschooler you've probably heard this before. Don't copy what they're doing in school and this is so true. In fact it took me several years of homeschooling and I knew this and I try not to copy things because I know it just does not work the same way at home as it works in school. Things work differently and even so I still found myself copying a lot of those patterns and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that in a home things work differently and the school model really was meant to serve a large group of people and you're serving just your child or your children however many you have homeschooling. There are many ways that we do this as homeschoolers just because it's all we know. All we know is the school model. That's what most of us grew up with and so you don't know where else to start so it's okay to kind of just start with whatever you know. You have to start somewhere but the more and more you are homeschooling your kids when you run into problems that aren't working stop and consider is it because I'm trying to copy how they do it in school because a lot of times it is and I'll give you one example from my own experience. I wanted my kids to be on grade level if we were going to be homeschooling I wanted to make sure they were right where they were supposed to be and you know hopefully ahead of that and so we worked really hard. I wanted them to finish all their math books by the end of each year so that they were right on track and so I picked a math curriculum I liked. We do Singapore. We still do it. What I didn't know at the time is that Singapore is actually ahead of where most other kids are in that grade level but we started with our first grade curriculum second grade. As we kept going it got a little bit harder. It started really getting hard but I thought oh we got to finish this you know here we are getting towards the end of the year so we would just work extra hard. My oldest son I would just really make sure that he was finishing his book. He was my first homeschooler by the end of the year. Well as we moved on here he was in seventh grade and he was still doing the level six Singapore math book and I was so hard on myself because I felt like you know he's behind here we are seventh grade he's still doing the level six math book. He finally finished it up in the middle of seventh grade and I realized oh I need to figure out something else and with Singapore level six is the highest that they go so we had to switch curriculums and what I realized was when they finish level six they're ready for algebra one. So here we had finished level six in the middle of seventh grade. I had just worked our tails off to get that done and now what am I going to do? He could start algebra one but it's just so early he didn't need to and so really a lot of times I feel like we do this as homeschoolers we feel like we've got to finish this curriculum by the end of the year and this is just one way that we copy school and it's not necessary. The goal is progress so after this our approach has been different. They have to do some math every day. They do at least one lesson but I am not just trying to cram it all in. We're just trying to keep moving forward and keep learning a little bit more every day. So if you're running into struggles look at how you're doing things and ask yourself am I doing it this way because that's what they do in school and a lot of the methods we use really do come down to it and it just takes a while to realize that that might be why it's not working. Another very good possibility for you is that you are going to hit some point in your school year where you think I just feel like I'm not doing enough and the reason for this is that homeschooling takes a lot less time than traditional school. What you spend eight hours doing in school you can probably get done in two to three hours at home. So you may find that the kids are finishing up and it's lunchtime and you think you know what what am I not doing? What didn't we cover? I feel like we should be doing more. A lot of homeschoolers feel this way their first year and it can be a source of frustration because they just worry that they're doing enough and the fact is it just takes a lot less time. The important thing if you want to measure whether or not you're doing enough is to make sure you're doing reading writing and math every day. That's the minimum that should always happen and then on top of that read to them a lot. If you are reading it's going to cover any of the gaps that your child might be missing or something that maybe you feel like you should have covered but you didn't. Reading to them just covers so much ground and read to them good quality literature books that engage their imagination and where they can learn about different places and different times. Another thing that is normal as a first time homeschooler is to be overwhelmed by the curriculum. There's so much out there so it's really hard to make a decision. In fact I honestly think this was kind of the hardest part of homeschooling was making that initial curriculum decision. I just I didn't know anything about these curriculums. I hadn't tried any of them. I didn't know anything about myself or our style or how our day was going to flow. It all seemed so foreign to me and just making that decision on what to go with was I just remember it being a real challenge. What I would suggest for you is to find some moms who have been homeschooling for a couple years and ask them what they've been doing what they like. Ask them about different curriculums because chances are a homeschool mom has probably tried a couple and she can tell you what did not work and what she didn't like and why and that doesn't mean you won't like it but it will give you a little bit more insight into what kind of curriculum it is and you know if it might be something that you would like for one reason or another. It's also normal to be overwhelmed in general. I would say the first year is just a lot of people quite honestly quit after the first year and they haven't given it enough time. You're forging a brand new path not only for your child but for you for your whole family. It's just a whole different way of thinking. In a lot of ways you do have to find your own way. You have to find your group of friends. You have to find your support and that takes time. It doesn't happen quickly and so if you try for one year and that's all you really haven't given it enough of a shot to really see what it's like. You've just done like the hardest part and then decided you know to throw in the towel. The first year is just filled with so many new things and new ways of doing things and learning so I think if you know that ahead of time and you know to expect that you're going to be overwhelmed, you're going to run into challenges, then it can help you to just realize it's just a time factor. You just need more time to get used to it and to adjust. Now there's something else that is most definitely going to happen in your homeschool. Something you're probably not prepared for and I'm going to tell you ahead of time. There are going to be a lot of distractions. It's not like a brick and mortar school where you're all sitting at a desk. You can close the door and you just you're all in that room and you're getting something done. You're working in a home where you make three meals a day where people there's laundry to do where kids have a lot more freedom of coming and going where you probably have an infant or a toddler. So a home is just a very natural environment and there are a lot of distractions. So you're going to have interruptions and if you know this ahead of time and you can relax about it and know that it's normal then I think that will really help you not to be so discouraged by it or think that you're doing something wrong. The way to handle distractions is to be relaxed and let learning happen naturally. Some of these interruptions can be frustrating. You know for example a child being sick or a child being emotional. You know sometimes you wake up and you're ready to work you're ready to get going and your child is like crying for no reason or just had a bad dream or just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. There are just so many things that can throw your day off because you're you're working in a home and you're working with children so don't be put off by these. Unless you have someone else in your immediate family that is already homeschooling you may be blazing this trail yourself. So maybe you're the first one of your friends or the first one of your family and I want to let you know ahead of time to expect people to criticize what you're doing and this is hard it's hard to accept it's hard to hear sometimes it's hard to have the right response but a lot of times people just don't know very much about it and it's not what everyone else is doing and you know they're going to tell you about some wild extreme example of some family and how they did it all wrong and their kids were just ruined because people just don't know a lot about it. Since you're doing something that is so countercultural you should just be ready and accept that you're probably going to have people that criticize what you're doing and make comments. If it's family a lot of times I've discovered they they're not trying to be critical they just are genuinely concerned they want their grandkids or their nieces and nephews you know to to be well cared for and to have a good education and so a lot of times with family they are genuinely concerned they just don't know a lot about it. When we were homeschooling we had this elderly neighbor she was like 90 95 years old she was really old very sweet lady we would go over and visit her often and we had great conversations with her and whenever homeschooling would come up she clearly she made it known that she just thought it was so strange that we were homeschooling and you know she would always make a comment about it and so I would just kind of pawn it off and you know just say something positive and over the years she just this was kind of our relationship one time I was visiting her and she made some comment and I said well you know we homeschool so that's not a problem and she looked right at me and said when are you gonna finally put those kids in school and I didn't know what to say to her it really put me on the spot and um you know I don't even know what I said really but it was intimidating because I really loved this lady she's very sweet but she just didn't understand she had no idea of the community we're involved in how busy our kids are with co-op they were involved in sports and scouts they had a lot of friends it was a very normal life just like any other kid has they're just not in school every single day and um she didn't know that so I had to just take this with a grain of salt and just be okay with her not liking our decision because I knew it was best for our kids I knew this was a great growing environment for our children so you're probably going to experience things like that and I want to encourage you if you're aware of it if you expect it then hopefully you can have the right approach and the right answer and that is to not get discouraged by it not take it to heart but continue doing what you know is best for your family if you've never done something before people always question you they stop questioning you once they start seeing the products and the fruit when they see your kids have a lot of friends when they see that they're doing really well and that they are can interact with adults and children and they're they just enjoy all that they're learning when they start seeing the fruit then I think they become less critical I hope some of these things have helped you to know what to expect your first year of homeschooling you are doing something that is really exciting some of my best years were those first couple years of homeschooling and they were really hard there were times when I just I didn't know how it was going to turn out but now looking back I'm able now that my kids are older I'm able to really see a lot of the fruit of it and see them each developing their own interests and going down different avenues and it's really exciting I'm so glad that we stuck with it so I want to encourage you to keep your head held high and keep homeschooling your children you're doing a great job thanks for watching I'll see you next week