Home learning can be a leap of faith. To homeschool, you need to trust.
You need to trust that you can teach your children. You may not have a teaching certificate, but you have been teaching your children since they were born. You may have a teaching certificate but feel that your relationship with your children makes it challenging to teach them. This could be true. You need to trust that you can work through this.
This means that you put aside feelings of failure or challenges from your own schooling and believe that you can learn what you want to teach. It means that you can trust yourself to be a resourceful person in your home, finding the people who can help mentor your children in areas where you are not knowledgeable.
You need to trust that your relationship with your children will last through home learning and that it will strengthen your relationship instead of making it more challenging. Challenges can make our relationships deeper and stronger.
For unschoolers, trust is even more important. Trust means that you believe that your children will learn what they need to learn to function in life. It means that you know that your children will pursue their interests and live passionately and deeply, even though their interests may not be those that you would choose for yourself. It means that you trust your children to find balance in their life over time, even if sometimes it feels like their lives and interests are not balanced in the moment.
We are used to schools, and schools tell you what works for many people much of the time to a certain degree. As a home learner, you can choose to follow those guidelines or go far outside them. Homelearning does not come with the tried and true feeling that schools have in our culture.
You’ve taught and learned with your children for years before thinking about homeschooling them, and in many ways homeschooling is simply an extension of this learning. However, in other ways homeschooling your children is not something that is tried and true. You are always on a journey with your children and you make it up every day you learn together. This is part of the challenge and the thrill of learning at home.
