Integrative Approach to Supporting the Homeschooling Family

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this presentation on an integrative approach to supporting the homeschooling family. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Now, you may or may not be asking yourself, why exactly is she going over this right now? Well, a lot of people are considering whether they're going to start homeschooling in the fall. A lot of school, schools are only talking about having students go in two days a week, and many families feel that that would be more disruptive than homeschooling completely. When people start to homeschool, though, there are a whole host of changes and challenges and issues. Homeschooling is not just, you know, not sending your kids to school. It is a full time job. Let me tell you, did it for 16 years, almost eight, well, actually almost 18 years. And you know, it at times had a lot of challenges. So I'm going to talk about a little bit of those challenges and maybe some things that I learned along the way. So if you start working with families who have chosen to start homeschooling or felt the need to start homeschooling, you are aware of some of the issues that they may face. So you can work to prevent them when possible, but if you can't prevent them, at least you may understand some of the resources, resources that are available to intervene. So hopefully that'll make more sense. As we go through, we're going to explore the impact of homeschooling on the family, identify issues that may come up during homeschooling, and explore creative ways to help families effectively homeschool. Now, I want to put out the PSA or whatever you want to call it right here. Homeschooling is not for everybody. Let me say that again. Homeschooling is not for everybody. It is not suited to every child. It is not suited to every family. It is not necessarily the best answer for everyone. So it's really important for families to recognize that and to be able to explore what other options that, that they may have if homeschooling is not for them and to not feel, feel like they failed in some way if they decided that homeschooling was not for them. You know, there's a lot of things about the individuals and the family that go into deciding what is the best setting, what works for certain people. Basically, I'm just going to go through using the PACER method, looking at the impact of homeschooling and trying to talk about the benefits and, you know, maybe some of the drawbacks of homeschooling and what we may be able to do with them. Okay, so the first thing, physical aspects of homeschooling or impact of homeschooling, when Junior does not have to get up at 5am in order to get ready to catch the bus at 6, 15 or something, when there's not that pressure that if I don't do this, you know there's going to be really bad consequences, it's a little bit harder sometimes to get them out of bed. It is super important, super, super, super important that families and caregivers are consistent in enforcing the schedule. This helps keep children's circadian rhythm set. It will help them get better quality sleep. Now, one of the good aspects of homeschooling in terms of sleep, a lot of youth, when you look at some of the sleep studies, a lot of youth, their, their biological clock is really not set to get them up at the morning or six in the morning. They actually naturally sleep a little bit later and they need a little bit more sleep. Especially the younger kids need, you know, sometimes 10, 11 hours of sleep. So it's really important to recognize that homeschooling can allow them to do this. They don't have to be up necessarily at 6 anymore. Maybe they get up at 8 from now on and start their school day at, at 9 or whatever it is. A consistent schedule is really, really important. So they have to be up at a certain time, they have to eat breakfast. Just like when you work from home, it is really helpful if you also do the same thing for children and have them get dressed into their, whatever you want to call them, street clothes, day clothes, whatever you want to call it. Don't let them stay in their jammies all day long. That really helps set the tone and change the perspective to, okay, we are working, we are doing school. So schedules are really important. With homeschooling, there is a risk of greater weight gain and related physical problems due to lack of enforced physical education and the 247 availability of food at school. Junior can't just randomly go to the kitchen and graze on whatever looks yummy. If Junior is trying to avoid doing homework, if, if he's stressed out, whatever's going on where at home, that's a lot, you know, more, a lot easier to do. So it's important as a homeschooling caregiver to pay attention to teaching mindful eating. You know, it doesn't mean that Junior's not going to get hungry at 10 o' clock and need a little bit of a snack. Learning using your brain actually burns through a ton of blood glucose. So, you know, junior may need a snack along the way. Helping him or her them be mindful eaters. Knowing when they're actually hungry and when they're just looking for a distraction is going to be important. Knowing when they, you know, are dehydrated is going to be important because of the fact that you're around food all the time, you know, you can do things. I said mindful eating. You can also encourage the youth to start learning how to cook. You know, so at lunchtime, in addition to just eating, they're preparing their meals and they're learning developing nutrition literacy. They're learning about healthy foods. There are tons of books out there for, you know, cooking with kids and making eating fun and making trying different foods, including vegetables, fun. So that can be something that you can do. So the onus isn't on you as the caregiver to think, all right, I've got to make lunch, I've got to make dinner. What do I have to make? Again, get the kids involved. That is one way of encouraging their participation. Some children may rely on free and reduced breakfast and lunch and will no longer be able to access that if they are being 100% homeschooled. I don't know what the rules are in your district, but if that's the case, all right, you know, let's not panic. Work with food pantries to make sure to identify resources for families who need additional food. Make sure that they are accessing any SNAP or ED EBT funds that they can. But if they need food from food pantries, make sure that they can access it. Do they have transportation to go there and get it? If not, work with volunteers in the community to, you know, maybe from churches or wherever, or even at the food pantry who are willing to deliver packages maybe once a week or once every two weeks to families that need an additional little bit of food to get them through, to make sure that everybody's getting adequate nutrition. Unfortunately, and people bring this up a lot. They're bringing it up on the news this morning. When children are not going to school, when they're not leaving the house, There is an increased risk for unnoticed child abuse or neglect. That doesn't mean it's going to happen. That doesn't mean homeschoolers are being neglected, but there is an increased risk of it going unnoticed if that was going on, you know, to begin with. So it's important to, you know, pay attention to signs. If you're working with homeschool families, pay attention to Signs of increasing distress within the parent, pay attention to signs of acting out from the child. That could mean a whole host of things. It may not mean abuse or neglect at all. But we do need to pay more attention if the youth is not going, you know, to school every day. We do need to, you know, be an advocate for the child. Now, conversely, children, you know, as I said earlier, could get more sleep, be able to sleep on something that is more of a natural rhythm for them. They're going to be exposed to fewer germs if they're homeschooled. If your child has a low immunity, that could be an issue, an issue that is, you know, positively addressed if they're homeschooled. For children who have autoimmune issues, for example, and there's unfortunately, a lot of those, we can create environments in the homeschooling setting that may be less stressful. Now, my son doesn't have autoimmune issues, but I can tell you, when he was in first grade, he was so afraid. They had that red, red, yellow, green, the stoplight system of behavior. And he was so afraid of going from green to yellow at school. He was so afraid of disappointing his teacher that it literally made him physically sick. He would throw up before school. He would tell me, mommy, I can't eat breakfast because I've got carnotaurus in my tummy. And that just broke my. So there is potentially stress, whether it comes from the teachers or other children. There is potentially stress from a public school that may be eliminated in a home environment. That's not always the case. But, you know, let's look at what's working well or what might be a good situation for each particular child. In homeschooling, children are encouraged to be active in meaningful ways. And what I mean by that is maybe they're not learning to play basketball, maybe they're not learning to square dance or whatever that they teach in PE these days. But they may be learning how to do yard work. They may be learning about, you know, going on walks and learning about the different trees and going on exploration type things. They may be learning how to play with the dog. There's a lot of different things you want to ask them. What do you want to do? When we lived in Florida, my children lived in the pool pretty much every single day from 3pm until 6pm you know, they were little fish and. And that was what they found to be extremely rewarding. They loved doing that. And, you know, so that worked for them. And this is one of those opportunities we have to teach children about physical activity. Exercise doesn't have to be boring, it doesn't have to be intimidating. What can you do to move your body? That's fun. And as I mentioned earlier, children can learn how to eat mindfully, being aware of when they're eating for hunger and maybe what their body wants. Sometimes your body will tell you, you know, I need, I'm craving carbohydrates, or I'm craving, you know, whatever. I know when my iron's low, I will crave tomato paste. It's one of those weird things. But children become more in tune with themselves if they are encouraged to pay attention and become mindful. They also become more aware of when they're eating because they're sleepy instead of hungry. And they can develop culinary skills, which is so important. Eventually, most of us have to learn how to cook something. And we want children to really be able to explore. We don't want them living a life, you know, in college where the only thing they can cook is instant macaroni and cheese and ramen noodles. That's not a well rounded diet. Affectively, homeschooling does affect us. It can. Now, there are some good things, but I'm going to talk about the things that families might present with. So I don't want you to think that I'm, you know, knocking homeschooling, but it's not ideal for everybody. If children are forced into homeschooling, they may be frustrated and feel some depression and grief and loss because they're separated from their friends and the things that they used to do. And in some situations, in some school districts, this is happening where children are told, you know what if you come back, you're only going to come back with half of your friends. But some districts aren't even planning on reopening, so children are experiencing some grief. Before the end of the last semester, before COVID even started, we had a really bad tornado that came through here and decimated a couple of schools. And the children were told, you know, you're probably not going back to school this year because we don't have a building to put you in. And that was devastating for a lot of youth because it upended their routine. They didn't get to see their friends. You know, there's a lot of adjustment that has to happen. And, you know, some children are all about being homeschooled and this isn't as big of an issue. Other children are not wanting to be, which again, like I said, homeschooling is not the Right. Fit for everybody. Sometimes caregivers will make the decision that it needs to happen for some reason. And so we'll need to deal with some of those grief and depression issues. Additionally, many youth this year and probably this upcoming year who aren't able to participate in school as we knew it may be grieving may need to grieve the fact that they can't have the experiences that they dreamt of. You know, they wanted to be student body president, they wanted to go to prom, they wanted to walk in a graduation, and instead of doing it virtually, they wanted to be on student council or just interact on a daily basis with real life friends. IRL stands for in real life. Well, there is a little bit of a caveat, and I don't know what it's going to look like in the fall in this world of COVID but with homeschooling in most districts throughout the country, if your child is homeschooled, they are able to participate in extracurricular activities at the public school district. So it'll be important for you to reach out to your school district and find out if your child can participate in extracurricular activities and what those activities might be. I don't know what they're going to look like in the fall because of COVID but, you know, there are options. There are other options too that, you know, we're going to talk about a little bit more as we go through. People may also feel hopeless and helpless when they're learning a difficult subject and don't have peer support. There are online resources and I'm going to go over a bunch of those at the end of the presentation that students can tap into in order to learn things like, you know, calculus or, you know, factoring an equation or math is not my thing. So we were constantly looking for math resources. If the person is. If the child is involved in some sort of predetermined curriculum, a K12 type schooling or a connections academy where it's free online public school. You know, then the. The adult is not having to be the one to. To teach it. It's like having them. Well, they do have a teacher that is teaching them those topics that's available by text and by phone, which is really awesome. My children did that for a while and the teachers were amazing and they loved what they did. And there was a lot more actually interaction between me and the teacher. And there were a lot more parent teacher conferences because they were mandated to have them. But, you know, I was a lot more involved in my son's education when he started homeschooling than I was when he was going to public school. You can also look at virtual or in real life study groups. Just because public school is not meeting, you know, anymore, because the person's not in public school doesn't mean they can't participate in study groups. If you're with a homeschooling organization, try to find out what study groups they may have. If you are doing the online public school, the free online public school, contact your district to find out if there are any in real life study groups or virtual study groups available. Loneliness is another issue that can impact a lot of the whole family. Extroverts and competitive youth may struggle more than others in a homeschooling environment. Extroverts draw their energy from being around other people. So being at home by yourself or with your siblings all day long and, and not having a lot of other people to interface with may be exhausting for that person. We do need to factor that in. If you have an extroverted child, they will crave extracurricular activities. And it's going to be important to figure out what that looks like. And if your youth is competitive, they may struggle to get motivated to do their assignments because they're not trying to be, you know, number one in the class or valedictorian or whatever it is. They're not competing against anyone but their themselves. So it may be challenging. And it's going to be important for the caregiver to figure out how to make this environment, this situation motivating to them. What can you do to tap into that competitive edge? Can you, you know, get them involved with other youth who are studying the same topic? Can you encourage them to get a certain score? Can you involve them? Like if you're working on STEM things, science, technology, engineering and math, there are a lot of clubs and like robotics competitions and stuff. So maybe, you know, involving them in something like that, where they do have that, that competition, that maybe they're not competing against other people in their group, maybe they're working with a group to win a competition. But it gives them something to strive for. It gives them a reason to get excited. Introverts, on the other hand, sometimes thrive with homeschooling because they enjoy having quiet time, they enjoy thinking. And being around a lot of people can be very exhausting for them. Just depends on the person. Caregivers now, not just introverts and extroverts when we're talking about kids, but caregivers may feel very isolated, especially if they have to quit work to homeschool where they're not interfacing with grown ups every day. They may start feeling very isolated. They may start, you know, feeling like they're losing themselves. And it's going to be really important to encourage them to connect with homeschool parenting support groups as well as to plan time in, to engage with their friends, to do things that they used to enjoy doing, their hobbies and those sorts of things to get out and not just be a homeschooling caregiver. Other aspects of affective impact include parental stress. Deciding on a curriculum can really be stressful for a lot of parents. And you know, this was, for me, one of the most exciting parts of every year was when we decided what is the curriculum going to look like once we weren't doing a, you know, an online public school. So, and we're going to talk about different structures for doing that later. Encouraging parents to, you know, take a breath. And there are homeschool coaches out there that can help them design the curriculum. There are pre designed curriculums like Saxon that are out there that parents can just, you know, plug and chug. There are things out there. What's important is to figure out how your child learns best. Some curriculum curricula are online and some are written and, and that's really important, especially if your child has dyslexia. My daughter had difficulty, she still has difficulty reading on the computer because of her dyslexia. She really needs to have something that's, you know, printed out that she can read. She's an avid reader, but she has a lot of difficulty focusing on the computer because the, the letters seem to move around on her is how she describes it. And you know, some people are auditory learners. They prefer to listen to activities. There are a lot of different options. I get excited just talking about different options for homeschooling if you couldn't tell. So if you have questions about homeschooling, please feel free to drop me a comment down there. And you know, after this is over, if I haven't pointed you in the direction of a resource, I am happy to talk all things homeschooling. Some parents feel unprepared to teach certain subjects right here. You know, our children were very lucky because my husband excels in math and, and science and I excel in English and, well, English. I can do sciences too. I can do history, I can do psychology. My husband loves history. So they naturally bonded over that and would talk about history and those sorts of things. So it can be really exciting. For caregivers, when they connect on something that you know, they enjoy and all of a sudden the youth starts to enjoy. But if you feel unprepared to teach a particular subject like calculus, rest assured that you're not expected to know everything and there are resources out there for you. Another issue of parent parental stress, which we as clinicians can help with, is parents having difficulty getting youth to do what they're supposed to do when it is a teacher, when it is outside of the home environment. For some reason, children tend to often, you know, be more compliant and be more, you know, on the spot with getting their lessons done. When it's parents, a lot of times children will try to push boundaries and see how much they can get away with not doing and dragging their feet. So it's going to be really important when you don that hat of homeschool teacher that you set those limits, that you set those expectations, and that there are consequences for failure to do something. Working with parents though, it's going to be important for them to understand child development as well as, you know, what is that behavior saying to you? Sometimes children aren't doing something because it is intimidating or it is too hard and they don't know how to communicate that. Other times it's boring or they don't see the point. So we can help them understand that, but we want to help support parents in being curious about what is this behavior saying when my child is not getting this done, what is this communicating to me and how can I address it? And sometimes we just get exhausted from being on youth are doing their lessons or switching gears to going on a walk or making lunch or dinner. You know, I'm even squishing them together and making them lender now. There's always something to be done when you are a homeschool parent. So again, homeschooling is not a cakewalk. There's a lot to it. It can be exceptionally rewarding, but it can also be exceptionally challenging. And even if it's a good fit for your student, there are going to be days that it's still exceptionally challenging. With homeschooling you can also have happiness. Not only depression and grief and loneliness and that other stuff that may bring people to counseling, but there's also happiness, which is really awesome. Being able to do some self directed learning and get frequent, getting frequent feedback from their primary caregiver can be really excellent for people. They can really enjoy the fact that, you know, hey, I'm able to do this and mom's interested or dad's interested. I remember when we first started homeschooling, I was teaching the laws of physics to my son. Now mind you, he was in first grade, almost second grade. But you know, so he was a little bit and teaching, you know, about friction and equal and opposite reactions. We were bouncing balls, we were running down the, we had solid floors. So we ran down the, the hallway in our socked feet and slid. And then the next time we took off our socks and ran down the, the floor and tried to slide. And of course you don't slide very well on naked feet. And we talked about friction and opposing forces and things. And he enjoyed it. And he said, mommy, look at this. And he starts trying to create his own experience, experiments to demonstrate. So decided that he was enthralled with birds. I actually thought he was going to be an ornithologist for a while. And he would just pour over the Peterson's Guide to Eastern Birds or Eastern Songbirds or whatever it's called. You know, even as a second grader he was learning he knew just about every bird in that book. And we would go and look at, we would, we would go bird watching. And he learned to identify the birds by sight as well as by sound. Now, you know, it's a good science activity. We would talk about the environments and the habitats that they needed. So there were a lot of things that we could do. But I encouraged him, you know, if he wanted to know about habitats, okay, let's go to the library and get a book on it. So it was up to him. I wasn't going to give him everything. And kids, one of the biggest benefits, especially from the older children that I've heard, is they don't have five hours of homework each night and they have time to actually still be a kid. Some of my children's friends who were in public school would come home from school and literally have five hours of homework. So they would be doing homework until, you know, 9 or 10 o' clock at night. Then they'd pass out tired at 10:30 or 11 and have to be back up at 5. Now you can do the math, you can tell they're not getting enough sleep on top of the fact that they had no recreation, they had no school life balance. So that is a benefit to homeschooling. Cognitively, caregivers may not be able to adequately identify learning issues like adhd, learning disabilities, autism, fetal alcohol spectrum issues, hearing or vision problems. And those can, can all confound the learning process if children are not, quote, doing what they're supposed to do, or if there is a lot of power struggling with the caregiver or refusal to do work, it's important that we take a look at what might be causing it. Maybe it is not a power struggle with the caregiver, but the child trying to say, I can't focus for that long, or when I try to read that, all the letters get jumped badly. To think of their child as behaving, period, their child is behaving now, what is this behavior telling us? We can listen to what's going maybe ADHD or a learning disability or something else going on, and then provide referrals as needed to the appropriate professionals. Work with the school district or the home school group to have a clinician available for consultation. If you are a clinician, this is something you can do as a side gig or a flat rate or for individual consultation at a reduced rate or something if that is something that you want to do. Connect with early intervention services. If there is a child under three in the family that's demonstrating developmental delays, you know, obviously most school children are older than three, but if you're working with a homeschool family, you may have children in the house that are under three and you may, you know, learn that they are struggling developmentally, you know, working with blocks or whatever, because homeschooling is a family activity. And if you're aware that this is happening, you can refer to early intervention services, which is covered under Medicaid Part D, I believe, and they can get evaluated for services to make sure that those youth are as ready to as possible to be developmentally on task and to start school. And if a child has any sort of learning disability, hearing, vision problem, you know, adhd, we want to provide practical tools and information to support the family. So it's going to be up to us sometimes to go online and find some credible resources that we can provide families to connect them with appropriate resources. For example, if their child has Asperger's, you know, they may not know where the best resources are to go. So we may develop a list of really good resources for parents or for homeschooling parents who have a child with Asperger's that we can provide to them or we can point them in the right direction because there's a lot of really great information out there on the Internet and there's a lot of crap, too. So because we have some education about that, we can help them sort through and identify the helpful resources. Caregivers, as I said earlier, may not feel prepared to Teach. You know, it's one thing if you don't know how to do calculus, but sometimes that just the notion of how do I even teach this little human is mind boggling to them. And it's important for us to empower them, to remind them that nobody knows everything. To ask them, you know, how do they learn best? You know, what helped them when they were in school to learn? Thinking back to their favorite teacher, what did that favorite teacher do? If their children have been in school, you know, they're older, ask them what things have other teachers done that your, your student has interacted with that's been helpful and what's not been so helpful? And so you can learn, you know, strengths based, solution focused. You can learn and the parent can learn what teaching tools work best for that individual to be, you know, a sit around a circle homeschooling support group. But it is helpful to, for people to be able to have at least two or three people that they can call or they can text if they run into a problem. The other great thing with homeschooling support groups is usually there's somebody in the group that is good at, you know, there's at least one person that's good at one thing. And so you have all the subjects covered. So I may reach out to, you know, my friend Susan and because she was good with early American literature and that, you know, if that wasn't my forte and you know, other people reached out to us because my husband was really good in math. Cognitively, some children thrive in this environment because they're able to be taught in ways they learn best. Not every child actually, they can actually manipulate the information whether it's doing worksheets or whatever. And I pro, I should have put that in this PowerPoint. There is a book and I can't remember the Lisa, I want to say Fairhurst, but the book is called Effective Teaching Effective Learning and it's a very, very old book. You can find it for cheap used. Effective teaching, effective learning. And it breaks it down for the best teaching tools based on your child's temperament. Such a help. Children are able to be taught in a way that they learn best instead of a generalized way for the that's designed for the whole class. They're able to be in a conducive environment. My son did have adhd. It was really important for him when he did his lessons. He had a room that he would go to, but we had to shut the blinds. If we left the blinds open. He was noticing the lizards and the Birds and, you know, every time a leaf blew because his attention was being, you know, distracted, it was important for him to be able to be in a room that he could focus. Children are able to work, get on with the. The curriculum, and they actually are learning it. Other times they'll hit a wall and they have difficulty. My daughter struggled for the longest time. She was able to do so much other stuff and other different types of math problems, but rounding, for some reason, it took us forever to get her to master rounding. And, you know, for some children, there are particular segments of topics or particular topics that they need to go slower than their classmates. But then, you know, once they get through kind of that mud bog, then they take off like a rocket again. So children can work, and it depends on what style of homeschooling you use, but you can encourage your children to explore things that they might not normally learn in school. One semester for art class, my daughter took an online interior design course because she was really fascinated by interior design. Okay. You know, and for her final exam, I gave her a certain amount of money, and I said, okay, this is how much money you've got. Help me redecorate the living room. And she drafted up some suggestions and we worked together to, you know, redecorate the living room. They are able to use the skills that they learn for practical purposes. A lot of times my kids would say, you know, what's the point? With math, for example, you can show them why it's important to learn fractions and basic math. With cooking, they can use math. With woodworking and geometry. With woodworking, you can use, you know, you use math in money management and budgeting. There are a lot of different practical uses for math. Now it's going to be important for you to think, and sometimes you can go on and online and find, you know, practical algebra problems and where somebody's already come up with equations and ways to use algebra and in real life. And that's what kids want to know. How am I going to use this a year from now? English. You can teach them how to do research so they can become selves about different things. They can learn about a topic of interest. Like I said earlier, my son just gravitated toward birds and dinosaurs. My daughter gravitated toward art and interior design. Or, you know, sometimes some things, like some of the classics, you can appreciate for what they are. But you can also, you know, I found when my kids were younger and hadn't quite grasped the importance of the classics, we would talk about, you know, how it helped them improve and answer more questions on Jeopardy. Or Trivial Pursuit. My children were competitive, so if they could answer something that I couldn't on on Jeopardy. They were very proud of themselves. History. You can talk about history in terms of what kinds of lessons we learned from what happened in history and compare it and contrast it with present day to see if we actually learn something or if history is repeating itself. And finally, children learn how to, how to learn and to be self disciplined, which prepares them for the future. And my daughter actually brought this up the other day. She was very disappointed because her first semester in college is going to be online and she really thrives and craves that in person, college experience, in person, classroom interaction. She's not going to get that. But you know, she kind of embraced the dialectics and she said, however, because everybody's having to learn online, I'm probably going to have a leg up because I know how to be disciplined. I know when I run into a problem that I can't answer, I know how to try to solve, solve the problem or find the answers. So I am probably more prepared for learning online than youth who went to traditional high school. And I was like, well, score. Environmentally, part of the house or times of day will need to be dedicated to homeschooling. Just like when you work from home, you know, there are times of day where you have to turn off the television and, you know, maybe put away other things. For a lot of children, you know, they, they do better if they have a particular, like a corner desk that they can work at where they can leave their stuff. Not all families can do that. There are some families that meet around the kitchen table and do their homework or do their homeschooling together. From there every day, whatever works for your family is going to be, you know, what works for your family. But it is important again to keep that structure. Some families may have to move to reduce bills, which can cause stress, anger, that if families feel like they have to choose this option or they want to choose this option, it may cause a lot of financial hardship. And, and we do want to be sensitive to that and help them process their feelings associated with, you know, potentially up, up and including having to move to a cheaper house because they no longer have a two income household. That is a huge issue for a lot of people. One potential option that has been proposed is what I'm calling homeschool daycare for children who are not old enough to stay home by themselves. And that one person gets paid just like you would if you had A when you had younger children going to daycare, the down to you. And finally, relationally, relationship dynamics with the caregiver may become strained during homeschool. They may become better, but it also may become strained. So it's important to recognize the impact that that might have and help caregivers work through this. If they feel like they're always the bad guy and their, their children hate them. Between caregivers or between the homeschooling caregiver and other family members may also become strained. I know when we started homeschooling, my mother was always adamantly against it. And you know, that's important to recognize the, that some of your caregivers may not have supportive family. There were times where my husband and I were at odds over, you know, holding our children accountable for things and supporting each other. And again, it's important to recognize that non immediate family may may not be supportive of homeschooling. And caregivers who have decided to homeschool may feel like they're always having to defend their position relationally. The other issue that, you know, regularly comes up is children are not going to be interacting with their friends in the same way, which is why exploring extracurricular activities really can be, you know, super helpful. We want children to be well socialized. Homeschooling does not mean you are poorly socialized. Homeschooling means that you're spending your work day focused on your lessons, but that also frees you up, allows you more time in the afternoon, in the evening, on the weekends to socialize. Relationship dynamics with the caregiver may become strained or improved because it's easy, too easy to focus on misbehavior failures and limit testing. We can feel like the children are constantly testing us. It's vital that we force ourselves to turn our attention and focus also on positive behaviors, responsible actions they take, and successes and comment on those we don't want to have them think, well, the only time that my mom says something is when I've done something wrong. We want them to hear praise from us. We want them to hear support and encouragement. Relationships among siblings may become strained or improved because they're together all the time. And if one day sibling feels like they are getting less attention than other siblings, they may feel jealous. You also may have children that are at odds with each other because one sibling is really good at something and can't understand why the other sibling is not good at it. And I know we had this issue between my son and my daughter. Now he's four years older, so obviously cognitively he was more advanced than she was in addition to not having dyslexia. So the two of them butted heads sometimes. It was really important for us as caregivers to step Caregivers need to remember the uniqueness of each child's temperament, interests, abilities and learning styles. They're not going to learn the same way. My son did great with video based interactive online type stuff. My daughter was totally the opposite. She did better with old school stuff and hands on things. Children will not be interacting with their friends in the same way, so explore extracurricular activities and ensure at the very least they're interacting with regular video and in real life activities to promote their communication skills. They will need these in the future. So let's talk real quickly about types of homeschooling. All levels of school. They also use classic books and Socratic dialogue to teach critical thinking, rhetoric and self expression. It often incorporates Greek and Latin learning and subjects are taught as much as possible in chronological or historical order. So they can see how you know, art. They can see how language changed, how writing changed between the different periods. The Charlotte Mason approach uses short periods of study, typically 15 to 45 minutes depending on the age of the child, coupled with nature walks, journals, history portfolios, and practice in observation, memorization and narration reading, especially biographies, classics and other stories with heroes. Life lessons and you know, important socioeconomic ethical implications are also a mainstay of the Charlotte Mason method. The Montessori Method Now a lot of us think of Montessori as preschool, but the Montessori method can be used in homeschooling. It's a humanistic student based approach using free movement, large unstructured blocks of time, up to three hours even, and interest based and individualized learning plans. Teachers instruct indirectly through kinesthetic activities and encourage students to choose from a range of learning activities. So you may have three hours or two hours where you're going to do science and you can say, all right, what do you want to learn about in science today? So you're encouraging the youth to identify topics and to identify, you know, how they're going to do it. You'll give them some options, especially when they're younger, of different things that they can do to explore that concept. School at home is another philosophy, and it's basically the same as your local public or private school classroom, but at home. School at home education is typically organized around complete curriculum packages and often arranged by school year. So you've got things like connections Academy and K12, but you also have books and curriculum like the Saxon approach that you can order that's you know, everything that you need in one pre structured curriculum. Unschooling is a freeform learning model which is student centered, unconventional and individualistic, focusing largely on the student's interests with a high priority on experiential activity based and learn as you go education. Youth are taught reading, writing and math, but it's often administered with a variety of technology and materials and typically without conventional testing or evaluation. I was always a big stickler on testing, but we did do a lot of experiential activities like going to museums and you know, we did a lot of field trips. And finally, unit studies are thematically related learning plans where students will study the same event or object from the perspective of each subject area. So for example, they may learn about food and when they're learning about food they will learn about math like weighing food and serving sizes. They will learn about, you know, English maybe they'll look for poems or stories written about food. They'll learn about history, you know, who created peanut butter, for example. You know they're going to learn about that topic using each and every different class that they're taking. So finally, let's finish up with some homeschooling options and resources. The hslda.org is the home school legal defense association I believe and you can go there to find out about the homeschooling laws in your state. If you are interested in homeschooling. Once you figure out, you know what your school, what your, what the laws are in your organization or in your area, you know, you can decide how you want to homeschool, whether you want to be a homeschooler, whether you want to be part of a co op or whether you want to use free online public school. You can go to this website that's thoughtco.com free online public schools 414-8138. I don't know why they have that number, but whatever. If you go to this website you can find a lot of different homeschooling options and they have it broken down by state. So you can find out what Free public school Online public school options Free online public school options in your particular area are available to you and some of them will include K12, the Connections Academy or state sponsored online charter schools. There are other options if you don't want to go through your public school. If you don't want to have your children doing the public school curriculum, you can do other fee based options like ed helper Time for Learning you can find what they call complete curriculum books. We used when my children were really young, like first and second grade. We got these from, you know, Sam's Club or Costco and they went through, they had sections for every subject. Textbooks, you know, you can go the old fashioned way and order to use textbooks offline or find something like the Saxon curriculum topic specific resources that are available now. I've mentioned math a bunch of times. My son's favorite professor, he just thought that this guy explained everything so well is Professor Rob Bob. And I've linked to his YouTube channel here. It's Prof. Robbob and he has hundreds of videos on different math topics that a lot of people find useful. If Prof. Rob Bob doesn't work for you, there are tons of other people who've actually gone online and created little mini classes to help students learn some of these math concepts that, you know, trip, trip other people up. They can also go on YouTube to crash course. Crash Course provides these short little summaries, kind of like the video Cliffs Notes versions of a variety of different topics. They're free, they're really well done. I really enjoyed using them. Khan Academy is free and provides a lot of different learning resources, especially in the STEM area. Brain Pop, this is another one where you've got little animated videos that teach defined concepts. You know, two, three minute videos. IXL is a website that youth can go on and learn different topics. They're timed, they're given questions. My daughter found it too stressful. The whole timed thing just threw her for a loop. My son loved it. So it just depends on your, your child and their learning preferences. Now clep, the college level exam placement I believe is through the College Board. But the interesting thing is this company called Modern States and you can look online for clep, Modern States and Modern States actually will pay for your students to take the CLEP exams. You have to purchase. Well, you don't have to purchase the materials either because they provide you, you know, step by step units to walk you through, you know, the studying for the CLEP examination and then they will give you a voucher to go take the test. So it is a free resource. It is so awesome. My, my daughter started college with 31 college credits already because she did so many CLEP classes. My son had 24. So this is one of those things. It's sort of it, it's a, an alternative to AP courses. But you can, Modern States also does have AP courses that you can take on there too. So I encourage you for your high school Students, if they are college bound, to consider looking at modern states, other things. Spelling City is great for little kids to learn spelling. And if your child wants that college experience, you know, online, of course, there are a lot of very prominent universities that are offering free online college courses. So you can go to these. Let me see if I can open these up really quick. This one is called openculture.com free online courses. And wow, you know, I wish this had been around when my kids were, you know, still homeschooling. It goes through every topic and it will link you to a host of different free online courses. You know, they're from UC Berkeley, Penn State, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, you know, really reputable universities. So, and, and they're free, which is really awesome. Obviously your student won't get credit for taking those courses, but if they just want to learn at that level, that's an option. And then this one, 10 best sites for Free College Courses Online. This is a collection of sites like the one I just showed you. EDX, MIT OpenCourseWare, Carnegie Mellon Open Learning. So you can, if you just go online and search for free college courses online, you'll find a lot of different resources. Again, it'll be important for you to or your, your learner to explore the classes and find ones that work best with their learning style. Social resources. Look again to your school district to see what extracurricular activities are being offered. You can also call your community center or your local, local app, local parks and recreation department to find out about sports teams and clubs that they may be offering. There's one around me. It's a city called Murfreesboro, and they offer basketball, cheerleading, football, track and field, volleyball, baseball, lacrosse, soccer, and tennis, all in intramural, you know, community leagues. So youth do have options for what they want to participate in if there aren't things that are offered through their actual school. And finally, Meetup, if you've been on meetup.com there are a lot of homeschooling groups that you can find on meetup. You've gotta, you know, look for your area. You go to meetup.com homeschool and you can find homeschooling cooperatives and groups of homeschooling families that get together to go on field trips and those sorts of things on meetup.com if you're looking for another source of socialization. Homeschooling is not right for everybody. It may be chosen by families due to mental or physical health concerns of the child, religious ideals, or just personal preferences. Homeschooling Caregivers will need support to make this transition. Even if they're doing it willingly and the children are doing it willingly, there are generally times where you can use a little bit of support. Families may need additional help learning how to effectively communicate and access resources that can facilitate the learning process. Alrighty. I know that was a long one, but I am hoping that provided you some information that might kind of point you in the right direction of some of the issues that you are probably going to face when you are seeing clients over the next six to 12 months. Especially if schools don't reopen and more families are forced into homeschooling. One question did come in for children with special needs or IEPs, at what point does it make more sense to reach out externally for coaching or guided expertise? And that is really going to be up to the individual. And you know, at the point where they start feeling, where the caregiver starts feeling that they are not able to meet that child's needs or, you know, they're missing something is a good time to reach out. It doesn't mean they're going to have to start going every single week, but it's always good to establish a relationship, touch base and then, you know, maybe be able. Coaches especially will work with people where, you know, you call. It's a 15 minute thing. It's not like you have to have an hour long session every time. So if a child has an iep, the first thing that I would do is encourage them to contact their school board, their school district to find out what services in this new Covid world are going to be available. Especially, you know, if the child is doing online public schooling, what resources are still going to be available to that student? Alrighty, thank you for being with me and I will see you tomorrow. Were you doing something computer intensive. Party? It. Put in the orders, it.