The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [93]
Since then, I’m happy to say, a lot more people have stepped in to plan things, not just field trips, but we have new volunteers doing a newsletter, running a teen group, and organizing regional groups.—Linda, Hawaii
Just as parental panic attacks mainly tend to afflict unschoolers, burnout tends to be an affliction that strikes highly structured homeschoolers. Keeping to a strict schedule can be stressful—particularly if the material being covered is relatively dull and difficult to adapt to individual interests or includes large amounts of busywork designed to occupy the larger number of students in a conventional classroom. It’s easy to get so caught up in keeping to your schedule that you forget the schedule was designed for your convenience instead of the other way around.
If you’re finding you or your children are less and less interested in keeping to your schoolwork or getting more and more crabby about it, consider making some changes:
Take a day or a week off to do something entirely different from your usual routine.
Share some of the load. If your spouse doesn’t help with the homeschooling, get him or her to take on some subjects. You will enjoy the break, your kids may enjoy the change in teachers, and your spouse may get a look at an otherwise unfamiliar side of the kids. Or consider working out an arrangement for a cooperative class or two with a few other homeschooling families.
Look seriously at your routine. Is everything in your normal routine actually something you want or need to be doing, or can you drop parts of it without losing much? Do you know why you’re doing most of what you normally do, or is much of it just for the sake of maintaining the routine? If the schoolwork your kids are doing is mostly material they already understand, you’re probably working far too hard and might do well to consider a less structured approach to homeschooling.
Sibling Wars
All those kids stuck at home with each other all day long? Everybody knows siblings would drive each other (and their parents!) crazy if they had to spend all their time together. You can’t do schoolwork with kids of vastly different ages all together, and if you try working with them separately, you’re always getting interrupted to answer questions or settle disputes with the others. How can you handle a whole family of children without everybody getting totally frazzled by the end of the day?
At first I found homeschooling a wide age range difficult. It helped once my oldest son became able to read well. I will soon have another learning to read. I think things will be different this time because I don’t feel so pressured to perform. I have enough experience to relax and let the learning come in its own time. I’ve learned not to push. We expect our kids to help each other and to support each other. This has been such a part of their life that the younger two know they can go and ask their older brother and sisters for help and receive it. The kids get along very well together most of the time.
There is more friction between my oldest two daughters than any of the others. There is some jealousy involved in their relationship. The younger daughter thinks it’s very unfair that her sister [who does not homeschool] gets things like HoHo’s for her lunch, while she gets none of those prepackaged junk food treats. The older daughter is required to make her own lunch, so I have a stock of things that she can throw in a sack and run. It’s purely fuss avoidance on my part.—Beverly, Nebraska
Well, we used to do everything as a family, with the little ones in arms sleeping or nursing while we did family projects, but that’s changed as the kids have grown