Homeschooling is a unique and rewarding journey for every individual family. While homeschooling WILL have its challenges, there are so many numerous benefits your child will receive. The bond and the connection you develop with your child through homeschooling is truly special. The flexibility in your routine, the joy in learning, the ability to pick your own books & resources, among so many other reasons!

I shared Quick Tips to Encourage you to Homeschool on a recent Podcast episode. Make sure to check out my Grace in Homeschool Podcast and listen to my quick messages of encouragement. Stay positive, be flexible, and trust in your ability to provide a nurturing and enriching educational experience for your child. You’ve got this!

Quick Tips to Encourage You to Homeschool

Ask for help & find a community of women who can encourage you!

1. This is vital – those who have gone before you have so much rich knowledge to share and offer.
2. Ensure you are making choices that are best for you!
3. This is when your group transfers from “play groups” to homeschool peer groups for both you and your children!
4. Ensure you’re able to say NO! (When you say YES to something, you are saying NO to something else!) Make the choices that YOU want to make!

Take care of yourself, write down your wins, take some reading breaks for yourself, even (and especially!) in the middle of the living room while the children play in the afternoons.

1. Billy Graham said: “Mothers should cultivate their souls, that in turn they may cultivate the souls of their children.”
2. Karen Andreola talks about this in depth in her amazing book, Charlotte Mason Companion, “Besides my Bible, I alway keep three books going that are just for me – a stiff book, a moderately easy book, and a novel, and I always take up the one I feel fit for.” She also has an entire book devoted to the concept of Mother Culture!
3. What I try to read each morning before anything else: my Bible, Prayers of an Excellent Wife, Overcoming Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Own your Life by Sally Clarkson, and I listen to many things on Audible and Hoopla or Libby — free apps from the library! (I love knowing that it’s GOOD to read in the middle of the day, with the kids all around is freeing too! They benefit when we rest in the Lord or educate ourselves!)

Have fun with learning, go places you want to go! Take nature walks, travel to museums and the zoo, enjoy your children's company, and find families that would like to do the same! 

But don’t ever feel like you have to do too much, being home and walking around your neighborhood is just as valuable!

Take days off! 

1. That grocery trip is learning!
2. Spend one day a week outside or doing a special activity that requires no extra planning, but just being together!
3. You could plan a picnic outside, or do chores together. These trips can be spontaneous or planned, but not all homeschool is actual seatwork!
4. Boredom is also fine!!! Masterly inactivity (as Charlotte Mason calls it) it so valuable for children!

Compliment your children, tell them you love to see them!

1. This is one I have been wanting to do more and more! To tell them I love watching them and I love spending my time with them! They need to hear that!
2. My high needs child needs constant compliments!

You will “mess up” but you will learn and you will keep going!!!!

1. You will make big mistakes! Just know that and be okay with it! When they happen, forgive yourself and move forward.
2. Jump in and don’t give in to perfectionism!

All education has so-called “gaps”, the question is not did you cover everything, but instead should be, does the child know or care!!

1. Don’t let the naysayers point out that your child won’t know everything they would know in public school – this is why you homeschool!
2. They will have great wisdom about the topics that matter to them, and hopefully about the classical model of beauty and literature and history!

What your child needs to know is up to you. Absolutely they should be taught how to read and proper penmanship, alongside a solid math curriculum, but apart from this, you get to decide their history, social studies, science lessons!

1. There was a time that I thought I would get thru so so much, instead we’ve gone slow and we’ve enjoyed the journey
2. You decide! Of course take counsel, but ultimately it’s up to you!

Homeschool does not look like public or private school, so don’t feel that you have to make it look that way!

Your child is homeschooled because you don’t want the influence of:

• secular humanism, 
• you want them to learn core subjects, 
• you want to be the primary spiritual and moral influence in their life, 
• you want to give them more time to move, 
• more time for their interests.

Foremost, let the Holy Spirit guide you and ultimately be your child’s Teacher!

Charlotte Mason said, “God, the Holy Spirit, is Himself the supreme Educator of mankind.”  This, according to Charlotte Mason, is the great recognition.  

We as parents and teachers find ourselves in divine co-operation with the Holy Spirit “in the direction, teaching, and training of the child.”  

When practiced, “our feet are set in a large room; there is space for free development in all directions, and this free and joyous development, whether of intellect or heart, is recognized as a Godward movement” (Mason, Parents and Children, 275).  

Charlotte Mason stated that, “we do not merely give a religious education because that would seem to imply the possibility of some other education, a secular education, for example.  But we hold that all education is divine, that every good gift of knowledge and insight comes from above… that the culmination of all education is that personal knowledge of and intimacy with God in which our being finds its fullest perfection” (Mason, School Education, 95).

She expressed that a liberal arts and classical education, all true knowledge is from the Holy Spirit regardless of whether or not the person recognizes it. 

She quotes Isaiah 28:26 which says, “his God doth instruct him and doth teach him.”

“Oh, that one day we may hear our Lord Christ say, “Well done, thy good and faithful servant.” Matthew 25:21

I hope these quick tips encourage you on your homeschool journey today!