You’ve probably heard the saying that goes, “There’s no place like home.” While many find this to be true, it doesn’t mean that your school environment has to be limited to your house!
As you roam, you can take your children’s learning with you. Some parents, who embrace the freedom they have in homeschooling have even coined terms like “roadschooling,” “boatschooling,” and “worldschooling” to describe their family’s homeschooling adventure!
But no matter if you’re roadschooling or boatschooling, a significant component of your child’s education will be taking place where you live.
At your house
Children thrive in structure and routine, so it is beneficial to carve out one main place for school activities where you have all the needed supplies on hand.
If you have the space and creativity to design an inspiring homeschool room, that’s great! You can search for “homeschool room organization” on Pinterest or Instagram to find lots of ideas. Just be sure to adapt what you see to what makes sense for your home and budget.
Or you might find that your dining table or coffee table doubles nicely as a desk and will sufficiently serve your school needs. Plenty of homeschool families don’t have a dedicated homeschool room, and that is perfectly fine!
It’s important to take into consideration what space your child requires to be able to listen and attend to tasks. You could distinguish schoolwork into categories such as “couch work” for subjects that involve sitting together to listen to a story or discussing historical events and “table work” for subjects that require a stable surface for handwriting, doing math calculations, or spreading out books for research and study. (And don’t forget the space you will need for a laptop or computer!).
The needs of your kids also play a factor in how you set up your homeschool space. For example, your 2nd grader may just need a spot at your kitchen table where you can easily help them, while your 10th grader might need their own desk in a spacious and quiet room. Your child with special needs may use adaptive tools and need a designated area for their work. And maybe your child doesn’t mind where they are, but just thrive with the structure of knowing, “This is where I do my schoolwork.”
Long story short: you are not bound to any specific arrangement; you can adjust how you do school in your home depending on your family’s needs!
Away from your house
In addition to homeschooling, every family has other responsibilities to accommodate for, like taking care of an elderly relative, weekly visits to a doctor or therapist’s office, getting kids to soccer or music lessons, and other extracurricular events.
These types of unique scheduling demands might affect where you homeschool.
For example, if you’re caring for grandma at her house one day a week, what subjects could your kids do at her house? She might enjoy discussing history lessons, hearing creative writing assignments read aloud, or supervising your kids as they learn to cook a family recipe.
And when you drive an hour each way to one of your child’s music lessons, are there things your kids could keep learning in the car, such as math drills, spelling words, history timeline songs, poetry memorization, or anything you can “gamify”? Audiobooks are also tailor-made for such times!
Other environments could also mean learning in . . .
- the library
- a coffee shop
- the backyard
- Auntie Em’s house
- the church building while mom attends Bible study
- homeschool co-op
- cottage school
- field trip
- a friends’ house, where you trade off teaching a half-day once a week with another working homeschooling parent
- in the car, on the go
But even if your homeschool schedule doesn’t include these types of commitments, sometimes switching up the learning environment can help your child learn.
Are attention spans and tempers shorter than usual? You might be experiencing an outbreak of cabin fever. Planning a learning day out (or even on the back porch or deck!) might be just the right remedy.
The point is you don’t have to replicate the “sit at a desk all day” model of most traditional school settings. You and your children’s level of motivation and enthusiasm may benefit from you being flexible about where “school” happens!
Sometimes my kids and I need a break, so I will plan days where we all take our work to the coffee shop. —Kristy Horner, HSLDA Director of Educational Resources and Outreach