Avoid Home Schooling Burnout

By Gail Jones

No matter if you are teaching in a traditional school or in a home schooling program, there will come a time when you will come across burnout. This is something that you have to avoid so that your learning progress is not affected.

Here are a few useful tips that you can make use of in order to avoid an occurrence of home schooling burnout:

Know your limitations. From the very start, you should already know your limitations and your child's limitations. You must be capable of taking things slowly sometimes, especially if your child is still young since you have to bear in mind your child's learning capacity. Most students are average learners, obviously, so you have to take the lessons based on your child's learning pace. Never expect your small child to read complicated reading selections nor your teen to ace SAT exams.

Try not to follow strict schedules, as this could put undue pressure on your child. You should simply 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 add in occasional incentives or fun activities if they finish their routine tasks earlier.

You should try to enjoy home schooling with your child. This is one method 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 problems later on. Besides 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 likewise.

Since your child is in a home schooling program, you should not try to imitate a traditional schools environment. Try to use non-conventional ways when teaching your child. Home schooling is also about flexibility and creativity, so if you can create a light-hearted but firm atmosphere, you can more than likely prevent 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.

Your children will always think back on your home schooling days together and remember with fondness 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 college, they can still pursue home schooling if they so desire. That would also a good idea since you would get a chance to watch your offsprings' development.

Parents always try to look after their children's best interests, so, if after careful thought, you still think that home schooling is the best option for your family, then run with it. Just follow the tips mentioned above to prevent burnout. Make time for enjoyable activities from time to time in order to prevent monotony. - 30301

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