8 Critical Questions for Successful Homeschooling While Working
Are you finding that your stress level increases as the days count down to the first day of the school? With the new school year quickly approaching, many are feeling overwhelmed at the aspect of trying to balance their work responsibilities along with continuing to have their children at home throughout the workday. Questions swirl in your mind as you try to determine how you will effectively meet your job requirements while feeling the added responsibility of overseeing your children’s educational needs.
Last Spring, many parents told themselves that they could hold on and get through the last quarter of homeschooling while also trying to adjust to working remotely. With the pandemic worse than before, distance learning is continuing, and parents are frantically trying to prepare for a longer-term solution to their daily schedules.
Effectively assessing your current responsibilities and time obligations is necessary to build the foundation for a successful work and a remote learning environment. Here are eight critical questions to explore.
How many hours/weeks are you working and how flexible is your work schedule?
Are there two parents working from home or only one?
How many hours per day are you required to be on Zoom calls vs. doing deliverable type items? Determining your time commitments are an important step to properly structuring activities for your child during peak work times.
How many children are in your household, and what age ranges are they?
Are there any other responsibilities that you are trying to juggle? (i.e. Are you a caretaker to an elderly person? Are there any family health issues that need to be taken into consideration?)
Is the school continuing 100% with remote learning, or are they offering a hybrid of onsite and remote? This needs to be a factor when creating an effective schedule.
What is the school’s requirement for picking up materials and turning in homework (is it once a week, twice a week, etc.)?
How do you feel about screen time? What do you think is the appropriate amount of daily time for each child? (i.e. Are you open to more screen time if it is in the context of the child learning a hobby vs. just playing a video game?)
The next step is to take the responses to these questions and begin structuring your day accordingly. It’s thinking outside of the box and letting go of the traditional schedules and ideas of a brick and mortar school, at least for now. This means your child may be doing their math at 10 am and science at 5 pm if that works into your work schedule. It’s okay not to have such a stringent daily routine and feel that your child has to do all of their schoolwork at the same time every day. This is difficult for many parents because we are socially conditioned that school hours are specific times of the morning and early afternoon. The most successful parents who homeschool and work full time realize schedules don’t have to repeat the exact way every day to be successful. By no means am I suggesting that kids don’t need structure, it’s just that every family member’s routine is now being blend into one overlapping work/school/household schedule.
It’s a challenging time, and some parents are glad their children are doing remote learning during the pandemic, but others want to get the kids back in the classroom for traditional onsite learning. Regardless of what you believe, we all need to figure out a new normal for juggling more things than ever before while simultaneously providing a successful daily educational environment for our children.