As we all start our homeschooling year, I think it is important to remind everyone that you should keep joy front and center in your homeschool. Some of us experienced education as a drudgery that we had to slog through. That isn’t what we want for our kids! As homeschoolers, we can make education fun, even joyful!
Letting Them Lead
One way to keep joy front and center in your homeschool is to let your children choose things they want to do each day. This could be that they choose something to learn about or study. However, it can also be that they choose to make art, play outside, enjoy their toys, or play with their siblings. Your homeschool day should be long enough to do it all.
Keeping Lessons Short
For most elementary school-age children, there is no reason for any lesson to take more than 30 minutes. If your curriculum is taking longer than that, you need to consider using something else. In a well-crafted lesson, kids can learn a huge amount in 5-10 minutes. Keeping your lessons short allows you to cover many topics in a school year. Short lessons let your children experience history, science, language arts, and math while having time left for art and music, without getting burned out.
There are times when a lesson is bringing joy, so you decide to extend it. That can also be great. We have had times when a lesson was going so well that we skipped our other subjects for the day so we could focus on trying to build a railroad track across the house to simulate the transcontinental railroad. Another day, my kids pretended to be pioneers going West across our backyard. We leaned into what that would have felt like. They drew the plants and animals they saw and considered where they would set up camp for the night. We would get back to those skipped lessons another day. But the combination of letting them lead and keeping the base lesson short gives us plenty of flexibility to meet our overall goals while keeping the joy in our day-to-day learning.
Joy Filled Lessons
I have always found that making art, dancing, and singing were joy filled with my kids. I consider those an important part of our homeschool. You can honestly make art with all ages at once, even if you don’t know much about art. Give everyone their own set of watercolors and paper and see what they make. Or pull out coloring books, blank paper, and colored pencils. Just be sure you sit and do it with them. Remember, the product you make matters far less than the experience of making art together.
We also found a lot of joy in hands-on history experiences and science experiments. When we studied ancient humans, I covered our bathroom walls in brown paper and we pretended we were in a cave. My kids drew on those cave walls with markers and finger paints. I turned off the lights and they worked by the light of a candle, to make it more authentic.
We created volcanoes in the yard and made them erupt! This lesson was FAR more fun than it would have been inside. I took a plastic bottle, filled it halfway with vinegar, dish soap, and red food coloring, and replaced the lid. My kids buried it in the sandbox and placed around the volcano various tiny toy people and other items to get washed away in the lava. When we were ready, my kid got to remove the lid and pour baking soda into the bottle. The eruption was epic!
Find Your Joy
Those are just a few of our joy-filled days! Find your own joy. Make homeschooling this year fun! You and your kids will have a better year if you do!
About the Author
Laura Sowdon, OTR/L is an occupational therapist, writer, speaker, educator, and creator of the Five Senses Literature Lessons homeschool curriculum. She has worked as an occupational therapist with children in public and private schools, as well as private practice. Laura has taught and managed homeschool co-ops as well as homeschooling her own three children. Laura is dedicated to the idea of educating children at a pace that aligns with brain and physical development milestones and respects neurodiversity in all its forms.
