How to be a homeschooler

Our daughter Maya has never been to school. Ten years into our learning adventure, here’s how we make it work. 

One of the most positive things to come out the Covid pandemic was that homeschooling stepped out of the shadows.

Loads of families had a taste of home-based learning, and now know first-hand what happens when you take a child out of the classroom and set their curiosity loose in the world.

Homeschooling might not have hit the mainstream yet, but it sure has shaken off its fringe-dweller status. 

So what is homeschooling?

Homeschooling, if it must be called that, has almost nothing to do with school at all. It is an education all of its own, customised to your child, that aims to be flexible, fun, adventurous, engaging and very hands-on. 

Homeschooling doesn’t even have to take place in a home (I live on a sailboat, for starters), and goes by many names — unschooling, world-schooling, road schooling, free-range schooling, and more.

It’s really just an umbrella term for what happens when a child doesn’t go to a regular, Monday-to-Friday school, and when you – the parent or guardian – take responsibility for a child’s learning, and decide to make it happen in places far more interesting than a big, overcrowded classroom. 

This kind of education is a very fluid, individual thing that changes as your child grows, and as you learn too.

It can all be a bit baffling at the beginning when you’re confronted with the freedom to write your own curriculum and decide – of all the things a child might learn – where you’re going to start. 

The good news is that homeschoolers are all too ready to share their experiences, resources and ideas, and hook up with you for playtime and parental support (in-person and online).

I’ve been a part of many homeschooling groups over the years – some organised and some organic – and they have all been full of incredibly diverse and supportive people. 

In Darwin one year, the local homeschooling group met a couple of times each week to tackle ranger-led walks and circus workshops, beach fossil hunts, and water slide fun. My daughter took ice skating lessons and joined a kids’ gem club, tried her hand at small boat sailing and lawn bowls too.

What about deschooling and unschooling?

Deschooling might be viewed as the process of undoing and unlearning the unhelpful pathways and practises taught at ‘regular school’. About rediscovering a child’s natural curiosity and love of learning.

Unschooling continues the process, changing how we look at learning, and adopting a big-picture view that acknowledges the many effective ways in which human beings acquire knowledge and skills, and deepen their passions and interests. 

It can seem (at least in the beginning) as an abandonment of proper learning, and it takes time to realise that kids will still learn (and learn very effectively) when they are not sitting at a desk with pencil in hand. 

Over the years I’ve learnt to trust my child’s own instinct to learn, and I’ve seen first-hand that when kids are left to their own resources, they find books to read, things to play with, and stuff to do outside. Not everyday is a complete success (at least to your mind), but hang in there: I promise you, good things happen when you embrace organic, curiosity-led learning.

Here’s what’s hard at first:

1. Convincing your partner or your parents, friends and sometimes, complete strangers, that homeschooling is a good idea. 

2. Getting your head around the paperwork and all the possible learning programs available to you.

3. Dealing with the comments you get from strangers when you nail your lessons by 11.30am and hit the park….“Shouldn’t she be in school today?”.

After a while, even your child will roll their eyes!

But lets just say you are ready to take it all on: ready to shake off the naysayers who tell you your child will never get into university, tackle your first learning program, and give up a fair chunk of your own personal time to invest in your incredible kids. Here’s how you do it. 

Getting started

Becoming a home educator is easier than you might think, you just need the motivation to do it. The paperwork and procedures are different in every location on earth, so expect to have to research what’s expected of you in the place where you choose to live. You might need to register as a home educator, provide a curriculum and reports throughout the year, perhaps even have a home visit.

You can choose to pay for a ready-made program (there are plenty for sale online) or draft your own curriculum, outlining what you are going to teach and how (through what kinds of activities or projects), and what resources you intend to tap into.

These can be text or workbooks, online lessons or games, private tuition for music or art classes, plus trips, sports clubs and excursions.

Your program doesn’t have to involve tutors or paid classes; teaching your child yoga or working your way through a science experiment book from the library all counts as great learning. 

Don’t feel overwhelmed about interpreting your child’s curriculum –there’s plenty of help online and you can download samples from your home education unit website.

In Australia, for instance, ACARA (the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority) produces two helpful documents that drill things down: “Achievements on a page” is helpful when trying to understand what learning the curriculum is shooting for, and I like the “Content for Year 4” documents (there’s one for each year level). 

I loosely follow the Australian Curriculum, but I use it to inspire our learning, not dictate it. I don’t stick rigidly to the smack of skills and knowledge that each child is expected to have grasped in any predetermined year.  

To me, education is not a list of things to be taught and ticked off. Instead, I try to create learning situations and projects that are accessible to my child, that I know she will enjoy and benefit from, and will hopefully stimulate her independent thinking. 

What does a homeschool week look like?

The simple answer is, you decide. You can choose to teach and learn about whatever interests your child, in whatever order they decide to learn it, in whatever place seems to teach it best, be it outside, with a mentor, within the pages of a book, as an audience at a play, listening to a podcast or while playing with a group of friends. 

When you home educate, you abandon the ‘rules’, so try letting your child decide what to learn and when.

There are an awful lot of things to know about the world and ourselves, and assigning a timeline to this acquisition of knowledge simply makes no sense.

I truly believe that children learn things at exactly the time they are ready to grasp them. 

My daughter used to hate writing — frustrated, rolling-her-eyes, head-on-the-desk plain hated it!

One day she discovered my old travel diaries and without a word from me, started writing the most amazing adventure tales, just like that!

It was the same thing with music. When I introduced the recorder, our lessons were miserable and short-lived, and we both felt like failures.

I buried that recorder at the bottom of the school box, and a year later, a gifted keyboard became the thing my daughter loved to play, singing away merrily to her own, made-up songs. Now she’s taught herself to play the ukulele and the guitar and our on-board collection of musical instruments continues to grow.

10 years on, here’s what I know…. 

When you homeschool, you naturally look for opportunities to learn in everything you do. Hone in on your child’s passions and stimulate their creativity.

Teach them what they want to know, not what you think they should.

Treat cooking and beachwalks and fixing things as seriously as you would maths and science, and discuss with your child what’s happening in the world.

Get outdoors and learn to do real things, like lighting a campfire, knowing the stars, recognising birds and using a first aid kit.

Most of all, find the fun in everything because a really engaged child learns 10 times more easily, and the lessons stick. 

I used to ask my then five-year-old what she wanted learn for the day, and she’d tell me to teach her something ‘off-the-page’.

That meant, of course, to go out into the world where things felt real and multi-dimensional, and where learning was lots more fun. 

This grand adventure of nurturing our kids is so, so worthwhile. It’s daunting and time-consuming and sometimes it feels like you get nothing else done in a day, but it’s worth every bit of effort you can throw at it.

Personally, I’m a big fan, and just secretly, I’m convinced that just by teaching, I’m getting smarter every year, which is a nice little perk for me too.