- Almost everyone you know, to begin with, thinks you are possibly too stupid to teach your child. I know this because almost everyone said ‘But you aren’t a teacher’ or ‘How will you teach her anything?’
- You are actually an amazing teacher, simply because you don’t think you are. You try so very hard to impart knowledge and wisdom, when actually the real meat and potatoes happen in the garden over biscuits and tea. This one may take a while to figure out, but it happens in the end.
- Absolutely everything is a learning opportunity – even if you didn’t think it was.
- Your child wants to learn, everything. They want to know how the world moves so fast, how the birds stay in the air, how to write poetry and how to make a really good cupcake.
- There is no limit to what you might get asked, from sex to how they get wooden sticks into the ice-cream (might even be a similar explanation there).
- They will instil within you a deep sense of worth, confidence and respect. When you watch how they learn, and you see what makes the fires light behind their eyes you have basically unlocked the secret to their learning process. That is a powerful tool.
- They will eventually make better cakes than you. They might be a natural baker or, more likely, they want to impress you so much that they out-do you. Sometimes it’s nice to be out-done.
- That book work is not king. Sitting with a book, writing the same thing over and over teaches them nothing but repetition (This may not be the case for all). Take the book away, ask the same questions and see what happens.
- Frustration is a heavy handed beast. Children, like flowers, will be easily crushed with heavy words or the belief they cannot do something. While you sit and watch them struggling with something, or perhaps desperately trying to work something out – you have a choice. You can solve the problem for them, tell them they are doing it wrong or, and this is my preferred method, get up and get them to approach it from a different angle. If you do the third one, you begin to hand them to tools to really think about what is in front of them.
- You may not always see the wood for the trees. There are bad weeks, when you feel like you haven’t done enough, not enough has been learned, not enough has been imparted. There are days when your child really doesn’t want to hear what you have to say. There are days when you wonder why you are even doing this, and then they do something. Something simple. It could be slipping a new word, in the correct context into their sentences, it could be them writing a new poem, or teaching their siblings something. It could be anything. In that moment, you will see that little spark of something you placed there weeks ago just shot fireworks out into your world once more.
The truth is I have learned more from my eldest child than I ever would have had she been in school. Whatever the reason she was homeschooled we are here now, 3 years on. There have been many tears, some arguments, a lot of judgement from people who just refuse to believe that they can learn at home or get much socialisation but in the end, when she makes cupcakes while reading her ever-lengthening poems I know it was the right thing for us.
And I wouldn’t change a thing.
