Get outside!
Fresh air is vitally important for happiness and for homeschooling families, getting outside together is an opportunity to step away from the dynamics of teacher-pupil/classmates into parent-child/siblings.
Whatever the weather, we always get outside in the fresh air and adjust our school routine accordingly: If it’s wet in the morning, the school day shifts to bring teacher-led lessons to the morning so we can go outside when the rain stops; likewise in the summer when it’s too hot later in the afternoons, we’ll get outside early, delaying the start of lessons, or wait until evening.
Living abroad while homeschooling made us embrace a routine of year-round, seasonal schooling, whereby winter is a more intense academic timetable and summer is more relaxed to make school in the heat manageable.
If the lessons allow, it can be fun to take lessons outside.
Give homeschoolers control over their time
Some home learners (& families) thrive with strict routines & hourly schedules. Ours don’t. Using a homeschool timetable that allocates time for independent learning allows our homeschoolers flexibility with their own timetable. This adds a level of responsibilty for their own learning programme that seems to motivate them.
Weekly folders of allocated school work makes it easy for me (home-educator/parent) to regularly check-in with them through the week to help them manage this time efficiently.
Read aloud together
Reading aloud is the cornerstone of home education in our house. The internet et al are great tools, but still, everything we need or want to learn can be found inside a book. From an education perspective, reading fluency is imperative and from a parenting perspective, encouraging device-free, take-with-you-anywhere hobbies, like reading, is something we’re passionate about. For struggling readers/dyslexic learners, developing that fluency via audiobooks totally counts!
In our home-ed day, that looks like a certain amount of time assigned to independent reading, and 30mins-1 hour of timetabled reading aloud.
The more a child reads aloud, the better their pronunciation & vocabulary. Reading aloud as a group (parent/teacher + learner(s)) is an effective way of encouraging children to enjoy reading with confidence at their reading ability, tackle books they might feel nervous about reading independently (eg. classics with unfamiliar language usage) and helps home educators check their child’s comprehension of ‘school work’ assigned texts.
If it will work for your homeschoolers (not all children can hold multiple stories in their head at one time and so might find this approach confusing), but if it would work for your children, try having two read-alouds on the go at a time: A book they want to read, and a book you want/need them to read; one for fun and one for ‘school’.
Aside from academic progress and happy kids, daily harmony is what all home educators strive for, but truthfully, sometimes home-ed days are less than harmonious. That’s ok, it doesn’t have to run smoothly every day. The key is to finding rhythms/routines/systems that make most days run harmoniously: 3/5 is a win. If a day/lesson is not going to plan, this is what we do to reset a home-ed day.