The Secrets of How to Homeschool During Coronavirus – Hint: UNSCHOOL!

Has it felt incredibly stressful to figure out how to homeschool during the Coronavirus quarantine?  What if I told you there’s a way to keep up to school standards in less than an hour a day? I’d like to introduce Homeschool’s radical little sister, Unschool.

Watch: How to Homeschool During Coronavirus

Learn how to homeschool during the Coronavirus quarantine, and hear how we unschool in less than 1 hour a day!

A Simple Roadmap to Homeschool In Less Than 1 Hour a Day

How To Homeschool during Coronavirus with Competing Demands

If you’re having a hard time figuring out how to homeschool, be home 24/7 with your child, with rising anxieties, forced lockdown, perhaps job loss, and health concerns, you’re not alone. 

It’s incredibly stressful.

But to add onto all of that, the academic pressures of keeping up is just too much.

It’s too much for us, and it’s too much for our kids.

Key Points if You are New to Homeschooling

If you are new to homeschooling, I want to share the best homeschool advice I’ve ever heard:

Children educate themselves.

Here are some key points to consider about how children learn best:

• Children are naturally curious.
• When given half a chance, children will come up with:
• • projects to research,
  • new skills to try out, and
  • excellent questions to discover answers to.

Education is not something you can do to someone.
It’s something that each of us seek for ourselves.

Instead of bringing school home, what if we try not bringing school home?

Perhaps this could be a time to take a leaf out of the lifestyle of unschooling parents.

Unschool Defined

What does it mean to Unschool? Unschooling is a subset of homeschooling.

It’s an educational method and philosophy that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning without any compulsory curriculum or arbitrary goals.

Unschooling Explained

Basically, unschooling means, “learn however you like and I’ll help you.” This looks different for each family, but the general idea is that you learn from life. 

With unschooling, children get a rich, robust, and diverse education, but without all the stress and pressure of the adult-led curriculums in school.

Unschooling is about learning, day-to-day,
moment by moment, naturally.

Here’s How To Unschool

The key to learning how to unschool our children is to open our minds to an easier, but no less effective, approach to education.

Instead of burdening ourselves and our children with long hours of textbooks, homework, and virtual classrooms, which lead to a lot of stress for many of us and for our children,  we can:

• Help children to find the tools to learn what they really want to learn. The tools of learning include reading, writing, and math. The rest of their education can flow naturally.

• Follow children’s passions. In the age of information, what could be easier?
• Trust children to be curious, to educate themselves, to seek answers to their questions, and to build skills based on the projects that they want to complete in their life.

Homeschool Tips for Reading, Writing, and Math

Here are some homeschool tips to help children develop the core tools of learning:

1. Keep it short, tight, and easy. Keep your structured academics and textbook work to less than an hour a day.

2. Use a visual timer for focused bursts. You will be shocked at how much you can accomplish in short, focused, 5- or 10-minute bursts of time!

3. Keep it really simple and straightforward.

4. Customize to your child’s optimized learning environment and time of day. 

5. Always end on a high five!
   

And then spend the rest of your time enjoying and pursuing your child’s interests, working on fun projects together, or simply allowing your child to explore boredom, and see what comes up for them as they play freely and independently.

Do I Need a Homeschool Schedule for This?

We’ve all seen a color-coded, detailed homeschool schedule floating around social media that’s made us feel like less-than-stellar parents.

Here are 5 real-life homeschooling schedule ideas:

• Avoid a strict homeschool schedule. Take a look at how homeschooling parents avoid following a rigid, even punishing homeschool schedule. These are parents who always live their lives without school, and who guide their children in their lifelong learning process.

• Instead of set lessons, allow children to learn from regular life experiences in your day.  Let them learn by baking together, planting your garden, or finding the answers to your child’s questions together. 

• Let children learn as they go through their day, which is natural and highly-relevant learning that serves and preserves their curiosity.
• Learn through conversations. Children take in knowledge through genuine conversation.

• Allow for lots of play! Trust that children learn through play, as the research confirms they do.

I promise they are learning, more than you might ever have known, and probably more than they would have at a school desk.

Free Homeschool Resources for You

Here are links to some of my free homeschool resources: 

• Why I’d Like to Unschool
• How Unschooling Really Works (for us)
• Unschooling Daily Routine for Work at Home Moms
• A Day in My Life Homeschooling with 3 Little Ones
• Homeschool House Tour
• Child-Led Learning – How to Make Harry Potter a Homeschool Curriculum
• Radical Tips For Homeschooling During Coronavirus (with Renee Jain)

Learn How To Homeschool from a Work at Home, Unschool Mom of 4 Littles

If you’d like to know exactly how to homeschool like we do in our home, you can get my course: Focus Time. It will show you how we hit Common Core standards in less than an hour a day, and how we follow an unschool approach mixed in with some Reggio Emilia and Montessori throughout the rest of the day.

What’s one homeschooling piece you’re good at and one that you want to improve?  Comment below!