Homeschooling doesn’t need to look like school. That’s easy to say but harder to put into practice. For most people grasping the idea of education that doesn’t look like school requires a pretty significant paradigm shift. So we thought starting simple, with 6 (mostly) small ways homeschooling doesn’t have to look like school might give you a place to start. None of these ideas are complicated, and most of them aren’t too drastic by themselves but implement them all and you have a form of education that looks a lot less like traditional schooling than you might have imagined when you first started on this homeschooling journey!
1. You don’t need “time periods”
I am probably not the only person who has sat there at class frantically scribbling out the last of my thoughts for an English paper or trying to solve a math problem before the bell rang. I’m certain I’m not the only person who has willed the bell to ring in a class period that just would not end. Time periods are arbitrary- they’re defined solely for the logistics of a school day with a large number of students. If a math lesson is going really well at home, or your child is really into their book, or they are completely lost in the paper they are writing, don’t stop because your “Schedule” says it’s time!
2. You don’t need subjects
The idea of breaking learning into distinctive subjects is so engrained that can be hard to realize that these divisions are not “naturally occurring” but something we have created so that we can define which teachers are responsible for which content and which content goes in which text books. The world is not that simple. There is an astonishing amount of overlap between trigonometry and physics, one is simply the applied version of the other and if we don’t need them to be taught by separate instructors we can save a lot of time by combining them. Is the history of inventions and science history or science? If I read a biography of George Washington is that Language Arts or History? What about historical fiction? Why is learning to write a research paper English Class, if the thing I’m researching is science or history?
I do want to note here that while I don’t believe you need to worry about what subject a particular topic falls under, and it’s a good idea to move away from the traditional subject divisions within your own homeschool, they are useful as a taxonomy, especially because it’s become a fairly universal system, which is why I’m using it as a means of organizing information on this website!
3. You don’t need grades (most of the time)
Imagine you got a home inspection report. And you took that report and thought, oh well it looks like my house is starting to show signs of trouble in the plumbing, and the roof is looking a little rough. And then you set aside the report and went about your day. Maybe you clean out your gutters, because they’re near the roof, so you hope that maybe that will help and the next time the roof guy comes to look at your house your roof will get a better report. Its crazy right! I mean it doesn’t even make sense! But that’s how we use grades in school. Hear me out. A child gets a 75% on their spelling test. That means that 25% of the words they should have learned this week they don’t know how to spell. So we give them a C and a new list of words for the next week. And maybe the next week they get a 90%. Well now they have a B overall in spelling, but they still don’t know how to spell the words that they missed on the test. We never addressed the actual issue.
Schools need grades so that they can communicate something about a child’s learning and progress with parents and the other teachers. When our child is leaning with us we can see what they need help with, what they understand and what they don’t understand. But grades are past tense, they aren’t real time. We can’t see where they’re struggling until after they get the grade on their test and the class is ready to move on to the next thing. We can tell a lot more about our child’s understanding of History or Literature by talking with them about what they read and what they learn than a grade on a test can tell us. The caveat to this is that you might need to track grades for your high schooler. But for younger kids, skip them. And go back and learn the spelling words they missed.
4. You don’t need the other kind of grades either
If you ask a homeschooler what grade they’re in 9 times out of 10 you end up with a deer in the headlights look, or they’ll reply with hesitation, or possibly never answer the question at all and reply with their age or “oh, I’m homeschooled.” My favorite response is the homeschoolers who answer something like “Well, I’m in third grade for math, and second grade for history, and I’m not really sure for reading but I read a lot of books.” Here’s the thing about grades- they’re really restrictive, and in most cases they’re holding a child back in one area or another. Most students are asynchronous learners. They don’t learn every subject at the same pace. As home learners we can ignore grade level designations and let our kids learn every subject at their own pace.
5. Learning isn’t only something that happens on weekdays
The more interest led your homeschool is, the more you focus on letting your kid explore and discover their own passions, and the more they enjoy learning the less important weekend/weekday designations become. When learning is more “fun” than “chore” it becomes something they’re more likely to pickup and do in their free time on a Saturday. It’s also possible that the reason weekend/weekday designations become less important is because we realize how much of what our kids do is actually educational and we stop thinking of learning as “the thing that happens with a textbook behind a desk.”
6. You don’t need Textbooks
This is a big one and I would have put it first but it tends to scare people and I didn’t want to scare everyone away at point 1! Hear me out a minute here though. While there is nothing wrong with a textbook per say, the question is- if you had the freedom to choose how to learn something, and your goal is to learn it in the most interesting way possible (because we learn better when we are interested in what we are learning) would a textbook be your first choice? Because here’s the thing- we’re homeschoolers and we do get to choose, and no one is forcing a text book on us. We have lots of options for more interesting resources: books (there are so many books that are more interesting than a text book!), games, documentaries, field trips, the internet.
If you decided to learn a new skill, whether it was a hobby or a job skill that you knew would make your work more valuable, how would you go about learning it? I suspect that you would start with the internet. Maybe order some books or watch a video on YouTube, or talk to a friend who knew about the subject you wanted to learn. Most of the time, we wouldn’t research curriculum and order textbooks and workbooks and give ourselves a letter grade based on our test scores. If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to homeschooling, pretend you’re wanting to learn about this topic or subject yourself, and start there.