How to Reimagine Your Homeschool Support: 7 Essential Lessons

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Here are seven lessons in my homeschool family life that can be your homeschool support and enable your homeschool success.

Here are seven essential lessons I’ve learned that will be your homeschool support and help spur you on to your own homeschool success.

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Homeschooling really is an amazing educational and family life option. It’s a whole lot of parenting, but I continue to scream from the mountaintops, If you want to do this, you can do this!

Teresa Wiedrick, author of Homeschool Mama Self-Care: Nurturing the Nurturer

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Here are my seven essential lessons that might come as homeschool support for you:

1. Know yourself. 

When we understand ourselves, what’s important to us, how we interact with different personalities, and our emotional atmosphere, we go a long way in addressing a lot of our homeschool challenges.

2. There is no one right way to homeschool, but how would we know unless we tried a few approaches? 

After enough years of homeschooling, most homeschool families will declare: we are eclectic homeschoolers.

Why?

Because they take a little of this and a little of that.

So do it all. Then observe. Plan. Change. Accept your mistakes or the things that didn’t work.

Keep doing, keep learning. Shift, change.

Reframe, grow.

3. Homeschooling is a great way to add to your education too. 

Why is it that I went through a conventional educational path, attended six years of post-secondary school, and worked in a pediatric nursing unit, but only learned subtraction when I engaged it with my oldest daughter?

Um, because I was available for the learning.

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4. Work toward fun. 

Every day won’t be fun, but many of them can be if your goal is fun.

If your goal is: to get through the work, you’ll probably accomplish that, till…well, till your kids decide they don’t think that is a fun idea. Then you’ll have trouble with your hands.

Resistance.

Complaining.

Slow work.

You’ll be dishing out consequences left and right. Up and down. Until you turn blue.

So work until you have fun.

5. You are not trying to create gods or Google out your children. 

The kids will learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it, if I haven’t already taught them, or found them resources.

Gaps are in everyone’s education.

Everyone’s.

The end product of my child is not to become God or Google. Life is learning. And continues to belong after they live in my home.

6. Work toward realistic expectations. 

When you arrive on the homeschool shores, you will have all sorts of expectations of what this homeschooling thing will be like. Every one of them might be challenged.

7. There’s always a way to reframe every challenge. 

Yes, every challenge.

I’m not saying you can think your way out of trouble.

No.

Sometimes the reframe is simply: I really really REALLY don’t like what’s happening but I’m not in control so I’m going to have to release, let go, and accept the reality of my scenario.

But there are more opportunities when you reframe things that you will discover the ease you create for yourself when you recognize how you saw things did help shift a circumstance in a different direction.

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“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”

Van Gogh

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