Homeschooling is a growing trend, with around 86,000 homeschooled students recorded by the UK government alone in January 2023. In the US, figures from 2019 show that around 2.9 million children were being homeschooled prior to the pandemic, and numbers are expected to have arisen significantly since then.
If you’re thinking of joining the homeschooling movement, but want to utilise your time to learn something new yourself, here are four top tips for balancing homeschooling responsibilities alongside learning new skills.
Study Together
Children learn best from effective role models, so studying or working on your own project alongside your child while they are independently working can be a great way to stoke their enthusiasm for confidently pursuing their own projects relating to their interests.
If you’re interested in a particular industry, or area of study, why not sign up to a distance learning course? Universities like Anglia Ruskin offer a wide range of courses in both undergraduate and postgraduate disciplines for a huge variety of interests.
Whether your passion lies in Medical and Healthcare Education MSc, or the Early Years and Education FdA, the course structure means that you can study completely flexibly around your existing commitments.
The resulting qualification you gain from this could be used to help you further your own career in the future, or set you on a completely new path!
Teach Life Skills
Homeschooling gives an excellent opportunity to learn useful life skills on top of academic content.
For many children, they have limited exposure to a kitchen until adulthood, so why not use your lunch break to teach them new skills for meal prepping, baking, and general food hygiene and safety?
Start out by teaching basic safe chopping skills, food hygiene, cleaning skills, and safe handling of hot dishes, as this will help to build their confidence in a kitchen environment and reduce the risk of cooking related accidents.
You can buy baking and cooking utensils for younger children from retailers like Lakeland. Their 48 piece baking set includes all the beginner tools they need to make a variety of sweet treats with your assistance.
With time, you can move on to more specialist skills, and this will help to teach your child practical life skills they can use during an independent life outside the house.
Run a Creative Business from Home
If you enjoy making arts and crafts, you could set up a business from home that can be worked flexibly around your homeschooling time.
For example, if you sell greetings cards through an online shop, you can time your posting schedule for lunch breaks, or after your homeschooling schedule finishes.
Additionally, you could schedule in some independent learning for your crafting time so you can keep afloat of your business demands whilst letting your child learn independent studying skills that will help to build skills relevant to problem solving.
Learn a Language
Although this is often a part of the regular school curriculum, why not learn a brand new language together with your child? This could create a bonding exercise, and will ensure that you learn at the same pace in preparation for your summer holiday or educational trip.
Invest in books, apps and watch foreign language films to stretch your linguistic muscles, and you can even organise a trip to a nearby country of interest to practise your skills on native speakers!
Evidence has shown that practicing a language around other native speakers can influence a more natural dialect, and introduce more colloquial and conversational expressions into everyday dialect.
Do you have any tips for learning new skills while homeschooling your children? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!
