School of thought
Considering homeschooling? Experienced parents share their top tips
As back-to-school season collides with the new coronavirus pandemic, many parents are considering options for educating their children while schools grapple with how to safely return students and staff to classrooms.
According to the Maricopa County Superintendent’s Office, the number of families reporting that they will homeschool their children this fall has more than tripled since July 2019.
Taking on the responsibilities of both parent and teacher has its share of frustrations and learning curves, but a plethora of resources are available to help parents find the right homeschooling system for their children.
These websites have information about costs, curricula and other requirements:
Area-specific homeschooling support groups from Arizona Families for Home Education: http://afhe.org/resources/support-groups.
Arizona homeschooling laws from the Home School Legal Defense Association: https://hslda.org/legal/arizona.
How to register for homeschooling in Maricopa https://schoolsup.org/homeschool?rq=homeschool.
While you’re researching whether homeschooling is for you, here’s
County:
some advice from moms who have lots of experience at it.
How to discover your homeschooling style
Pauline Abello, a Paradise Valley mother, has been homeschooling 10 years. With seven children to instruct, she understands the complexity of taking on a child’s education.
The most overwhelming part of the process can be knowing where to start.
“Like a lot of moms, I started with trying to completely replicate what the public schools were doing,” Abello said. “But, in time, I realized there’s a lot of strengths in being able to adjust your home to what suits you. So we started to gravitate away from doing things exactly like the schools, and doing it more like exactly what our family needed.”
Abello set up a schedule by which all of her kids start school at 8 a.m. and engage in lessons specific to their academic level. Her older children work more independently for longer periods of time while she has shorter, hands-on lessons with her younger kids.
“In a lot of ways, it kind of reflects a one-room schoolhouse situation. I’ll be working with the two littles, I’ll set them to one task, then the second-grader starts on her cursive, and that gives me some time to work on phonics with the kindergartner,” Abello said. “The bigger kids are doing independent study under my direction.”
Tailoring education to the child
Kathryn Graunke, a Gilbert mother who has homeschooled for 25 years, also takes an individualized approach.
“I once had a freshman in high school and a kindergartner at the same time — it was a big span,” Graunke said. “But when you have multiple children, you work out your day to have dedicated time to each kid, and then each kid has independent work.”
Three of Graunke’s kids have graduated from college, and her youngest son is beginning his last year of homeschooling. Although she had to juggle the individual education of four different students, Graunke also used group activities.
“Everybody’s going sequentially through their math lessons, but if you’re studying ancient Rome, it doesn’t matter if you’re in seventh grade or first,” Graunke said. “There are curriculums that are specifically written to that type of style, so parents who are looking for multiple ages, they have curriculums that they can choose that would help them to juggle that situation.”
How to choose the right curriculum
When it comes to setting up a homeschooling routine, parents have many types of curricula to choose from.
Erin Brown, a Tucson mother homeschooling three children, warns against becoming overwhelmed by the abundance of options and suggests researching learning styles that best fit the students’ needs.
“I always recommend people don’t focus too much on the curriculum at the beginning, because you’ve got to learn your style of learning, your kids’ style of learning and your style of teaching. There’s so much variety out there that it’s going to depend on all of those things,” Brown said.
“So, you kind of need to take time at the beginning to learn about yourself before investing the money into all the different curricula available.”
Brown said her curriculum is “pieced together” from various programs and curriculum guides based on her kids’ needs. She also allows time for them to learn subjects that interest them, including pottery, archery and learning to play instruments like the hurdy-gurdy.
This specialized learning approach is one of the reasons Brown decided to homeschool in the first place.
“I knew I could let them focus on their interests and guide them in a way that you can’t do when you’re teaching 30 kids instead of three,” Brown said.
Co-ops enable social, collaborative learning
Although homeschooling can stereotypically be perceived as socially isolating kids from their peers in a traditional school setting, many homeschoolers collaborate and learn in group settings.
Parents who homeschool often form co-ops, which are support groups organized for regularly scheduled activities, classes or clubs.
“Co-op is a term we use to mean that the parents are going to rotate responsibilities. So most of them are pretty loosely aligned. And let me just say that in Maricopa County, we have a ton of resources in the homeschooling community, and the majority of them are parent-led,” Graunke said.
Parents in Graunke’s homeschooling co-op have led classes ranging from robotics to competitive math while creating clubs and sports leagues for stu