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My Top 3 Ideas to Help Your Kids Love Homeschooling

Let's get brutally honest for a moment.

Homeschooling isn't always our kiddos favorite thing in the whole wide world. (And I know this is true for all homeschool families, not just my homeschool family...I mean, none of us LOVES every aspect of home education every second of every day, right?)

Over the course of a couple of decades and some change of homeschooling my five children, these three things helped "turn that frown upside down" & ended up being the things that helped my kids to love homeschooling.
(Hold the eye roll please, because my children are all adults now and they have actually told me that these things made homeschooling pretty great for them.)






As always, I'll keep this post short & sweet.

THING #1 that helped my kids love homeschooling: 
          They could work ahead in any & every subject & once they finished that year's assigned work, they were DONE homeschooling for the year...as in FINISHED, no take backs, pinky swear, ALL DONE. 

Did this make them work hard at finishing every subject early? Nope. 
Did it motivate them to do their work daily without griping or complaining? Most of the time, yes.
Did they finish the school year early? Uh, yeah. Pretty much every single year they got to start their summer break early. 


THING #2 that helped my kids love homeschooling:
          Each year when I was planning what we'd be learning in our family's homeschool, I let my kids choose something they wanted to study for the upcoming year. And then I actually made it happen.

I didn't give myself and out, & I didn't dilly-dally around when it came to putting all the pieces in place for them to learn something of their own choosing.

This one's a winner, my friend. I highly recommend trying this out in your homeschool.



THING #3 that helped my kids love homeschooling:
          No homeschool work or assignments on their birthday.  No matter what, I always made sure this was a given. 

It was fairly easy to implement in our family because we homeschooled from late August to early May (um, well, actually we wrapped up our homeschool work in April, or sometimes even in March...see THING #1 above). Since none of my children had birthdays during our summer break, I just gave them their actual birthday off. And if their birthday landed on a weekend, I let them choose what day they wanted to "ditch" school either the week prior to or immediately following the weekend of their birthday.


Three simple things that made a big impact on my children's outlook on homeschooling. 
Also - and this goes without saying - their happy homeschool attitude made my life way better than it would have been with a not-so-happy attitude.

Was every day perfect? Did these three things eliminate all complaining and fighting and cause them to wake with a smile and a song each morning? 
Of course not.
But it came pretty darn close!

Let me leave you with two quick things:


Each year I spent a handful of hours planning out the entire homeschool year with a system I created & now I have turned that system into a product called Homeschool Planning Made Simple. You can check it out right here.

Happy Homeschooling!



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