Avoid Burnout in Home Schooling

By Gail Jones

It does not matter whether you are studying in a traditional school or in a home schooling environment, there will come a time when you will come across burnout. This is something that you have to avoid so that your teaching progress is not affected.

Here are a couple of useful tips that you can use to prevent possible home schooling burnout:

Know your limitations. From the very start, you should already know your limitations and those of your child. You must be capable of taking things slowly sometimes, especially if your child is still very young since you have to consider your child's capacity to absorb. Most students are average learners (obviously), so you will have to take the lessons according to your child's learning speed. Never expect your small child to read complicated selections nor your teen to get top marks in SAT exams.

Don't adopt rigid schedules, as this could put undue pressure on your child. You should just set an interesting routine for your child to follow. Children spend most of their time doing routine activities like getting up, eating hearty breakfasts, reading books, practising writing, doing light jobs about the place, etc. You must ensure that they finish their routine activities before they can play outside or with the computer. Even these routine activities change from day to day, but you must make sure that your child follows these routine activities. You can throw in occasional incentives or fun activities if they finish their routine tasks early.

You should try to get into the spirit of home schooling with your child, since it is one way of developing a strong relationship with your child and if you and your child can relate to each other, you will find it very much easier to handle curriculum struggles and motivation issues later on. Aside from motivating and guiding your child, you can also follow some of your own hobbies like gardening or cooking. If your child sees you enjoying your own interests, then he or she will also be inclined to do the same.

Since your child is into a home schooling program, you should not try to mimic a traditional schools environment. Try to use unusual methods when teaching your child. Home schooling is also about flexibility and creativity, and if you can create a light-hearted atmosphere, you can probably avoid burnout.

Always try to remember that with home schooling, you don't have to structure your teaching methods in the traditional way. You can just do things in a fun way especially with very young children so that they learn naturally. Just ensure you keep the day in the right perspective to prevent burnout. Although your children might forget some of the day's lessons, that's all right too because somehow they grow in intelligence as well as in physique.

For sure, your children will always look back on your moments together and remember fondly how well you treated them. The old song goes: "... there's no place like home" and for little pupils, home is the best place to learn the first lessons of life. If your teenagers are already in high school or in college, they can still do home schooling if they so desire. That would also a good decision because you'd get to monitor your offsprings' performance.

Parents always look after their children's best interests, so, if after careful consideration, you still think that home schooling is the best option for your family, then go on with it. Just follow the tips mentioned above to avoid burnout. Have fun activities from time to time to prevent monotony.

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