10 Reasons My Kids Love Being Homeschooled
I call our homeschooling a serendipitous accident. I never intended to homeschool. But my oldest was born October 2nd, missing the kindergarten deadline by a few weeks.
She cried as she watched all of her little friends (there were 13 little girls right around her age in our neighborhood) head off to kindergarten! I called the school and begged them to let her in early, to no avail. So, feeling desperate to help her feel better, I told her we’d have school at home!
I made it sound just as exciting as I could, and somehow I talked both of us into a year of school at home, just for fun. I never planned to continue, either. But we both enjoyed that year so much that when kindergarten registration rolled around that next year, neither of us were interested.
Year by year we’ve continued, simply because we enjoy it so much. My kiddos know that they can attend public school any time they want to — the choice is theirs.
But they keep choosing homeschool because he kids enjoy it as much as I do!
I’ve already written about Why I Love Homeschooling and the Top 10 Reasons You Should Homeschool, but I thought you’d like to hear about all the benefits of homeschooling from the kids perspective.
So I asked my kiddos to tell me the reasons they love being homeschooled. Here’s what they said:
1. Homeschool field trips are the best.
We’re headed to China next week for a month-long field trip. We’re going to visit the Terracotta Warriors, bike the city wall of Xi’An, climb the great wall, walk through the French concession (and go to Disneyland!) in Shanghai, tour the Forbidden Palace and cruise up the Yulon River through Yangshuo.
We’ve read Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China and Red Scarf Girl and each of us get to act as tour guide for one of the places we visit. We’ve also visited lots more amazing places!
We’ve criss-crossed the United States, road-tripping to National Parks, historical sites and cultural events in major cities. One of our road trips covered most of the US History sites. We walked the Freedom Trail in Boston, participated in a re-enactment on Patriot’s Day in Lexington, then drove straight to Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell and tour Independence Hall.
It’s been cool to learn about the providential founding of America where it actually took place and it increases our understanding of the sacrifices made by our founding fathers.
We also visit our local museums, zoos, parks, and factories. Hands-on, in-person learning is a much richer educational experience than learning from a textbook or a video.
2. We can have impromptu dance parties whenever we want.
Homeschool seems like it might be more dramatic than public school. I’m not quite sure because the only time I ever went to school was one day in China, when I visited my cousin’s private school. But it seems like kids are probably on their best behavior at public school, unlike at home.
We have plenty of meltdowns when we don’t do what we should. Like when the person who is in charge of washing dishes doesn’t do them, so then the person who is in charge of lunch has to, it all ends up in a big fight. Or if we sneak away from school to read our library books and mom has to call us back over and over, and then she’s upset.
Dance parties are a great tool for bringing everyone back together cheerfully, so we can all refocus on the things that need to be finished. Exercise helps us to concentrate better, too. And dance parties are a lot of fun!
3. We get to eat like hobbits: first breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, luncheon, afternoon tea, then dinner, followed by supper then dessert.
(Let’s just be clear, this is not mom’s favorite thing about homeschooling. There are days when I feel like I’m going to die of cooking. But the kids love the constant access to the kitchen!)
One of the best things about homeschooling is that we don’t just get 20 minutes to hurry up and eat lunch and then rush back to class. And we have plenty of time for breakfast, too, because we’re not rushing out the door in the mornings.
My friends tell me that they eat pop tarts, and I think pop tarts are disgusting. My mom makes real breakfasts, like bacon and eggs and pancakes, and I have time to eat as much as I want. And we always have a homemade lunch, too. We usually heat up leftovers from last night’s dinner, and we can eat while we’re working. Plus, there are snacks!
4. We love DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) camp.
DEAR Camp is my favorite thing in the whole world, next to Christmas. When my mom needs uninterrupted time to work on a project, she tells us we get to have DEAR camp. So we hurry up and do our chores and practicing and then we all go to the library.
We usually take a laundry basket to the library, but we make extra sure to have it on DEAR camp days so we can check out a lot of books. After we choose our books, we head to the grocery store and pick out a couple of snacks, and we always buy a family size bag of m & m’s.
Then we head home, where we disappear to enjoy our books and our snacks for the rest of the day. And if we’re lucky, mom will need another day to work and we get a second day of DEAR camp.
5. We have fun extracurriculars.
One of my favorite things about homeschooling is that we have so many fun, extracurricular classes to go to.
On Mondays we go to Makerspace class at the children’s museum, and we get to build amazing stuff. They have a lathe and all kinds of woodworking tools, a CNC machine, a laser cutter, two 3D printers, sewing machines and just about every building tool you can imagine. They taughts us how to use all the tools, but I already knew because we help my mom build stuff at home all the time.
Makerspace class has two teachers so they can supervise us kids and we’re allowed to build pretty much anything we want to. We even made a class quilt to donate to a shelter.
Skiing is another fun extracurricular class. On Fridays during the winter we get to take a 2 hour class and then we get to use the lift pass for the rest of the day to ski on our own as a family and with our friends.
But our favorite class is orchestra. Our orchestra program requires an audition to get in, and they require private music lessons and a high level of practicing. So they are pretty advanced orchestras and we sound really good. Our orchestra friends go to different schools all over the state, and some of them are homeschooled like us. They’re all ages, since the orchestras are grouped by ability and not age. And it’s fun to get to hang out with other music geeks like us!
6. I get WAY more play time.
I feel so bad for my friends who have to go to school and sit in a desk all day. I mainly do my school work at the kitchen table from 9 am to noon, but we have snacks and fun stuff mixed in there, so it’s really not 3 hours of sitting. And then I have the rest of the day to do whatever I want.
Mom makes us practice and do farm chores if we didn’t get them done before school. But if I get everything done quickly then the rest of the day is mine. I like to read, build legos, jump on the trampoline and ride my bike outside.
Plus, we can skip school whenever we want to take a field trip or go skiing or have a DEAR camp.
7. I can make my own schedule.
We live in a rural area, so the school bus that picks up the kids around here has to drive a long way, and it picks the kids up really early. I hear the bus go by while it’s still dark outside, and I love that I’m still snuggled up warm in my bed.
But whenever I want to, I can get up super early and hurry to get all my stuff done. I can surprise my mom and hand her my school work before everyone else even starts school. Sometimes I even like to get all my math for the whole week done on Monday, so I don’t have to worry about it for the rest of the week.
My cousin is coming to stay with us for a whole month, so I’m working hard to get ahead in all of my subjects so I can just play with him the whole time he’s here.
8. I get to choose what to learn.
My mom makes us do Saxon math every day, but I’m okay with that because I like math and because I know I’ll need to know it when I’m older. But we get to mostly choose the other things we study.
We just finished a unit study on the human body. We traced around ourselves on butcher paper and used the outline to create a body model. Each day we’d study another body system, like the nervous system, the digestive system, the circulatory system and the skeletal system, and we learn about all the functions of all the components, then we add it to the outline we made of our bodies.
Sometimes we learn about stuff before we take a big field trip. Like we learned about lots of geology before we took a trip to Oregon to see Crater Lake and Mount Saint Helens and the Redwoods.
One time, we went to the Scottish Festival and we all loved the huge bagpipe bands. My brother said he wanted to learn the bagpipes, so my parents bought him a chanter and found a teacher right there at the festival. And then he got a full set of bagpipes for his birthday. He’s really good on the bagpipes!
9. I don’t have to learn the things I don’t want to.
We all hate writing, so my mom doesn’t make us do it. We play grammar games sometimes, and we all love to read, so she says she figures we’re getting enough exposure to proper English.
She also says we can’t escape writing forever, we’ll have to do it someday. My older brother and sister in college have to write research papers. But she’ll let us wait until then.
10. I don’t have to miss mommy at all.
Mom speaking here: this is from my youngest and it totally melted my heart. I love that I’m so integral to her life that she really would miss me. I remember just loving and practically worshipping my kindergarten teacher. She was pretty with long, shiny hair, and she was always patient and soft spoken.
I feel that some of the affection and admiration kids should feel for their parents is naturally transferred to teachers. It’s inevitable when the kiddos are in their care for so much of the time. I wouldn’t mind so much if I had a say in who my children’s role models were.
One of my teachers in high school taught our class that LGBT lifestyles were just alternative lifestyles, no better or worse than the monogamous, married, Christian homes most of us had grown up in. Then he told us our parents were homophobic and not to share with them the things we learned in class.
But that’s a subject for a whole other post!
The rest of my kiddos added that they also loved having so much time to spend with their siblings. My oldest and my youngest are 16 years apart, but are inseparable. I can’t imagine that they would be if my oldest spent her entire life away from home at the local high school.
That’s not to say that everything is always rainbows and unicorns. My children don’t always get along. Some days I want to move into the treehouse in the backyard. But overall, I’m so grateful that my children are each others best friends. They play together all day every day. I can’t wait to see what it looks like as they grown up and have families of their own.
What do your kiddos love about being homeschooled? If you’ve never asked them, you might be surprised. Please share the funny ones in the comments below. We could all use a good laugh!
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