When it comes to their children’s education, many parents have concluded that the public school curriculum does not provide the appropriate knowledge and skills their children need to have a successful career and make a meaningful contribution to society.
Many parents decide to homeschool their children as it gives them more control over what their children are learning.
With homeschooling, parents can also accommodate their children who have special needs. Children who have learning difficulties or have ADD/ADHD for instance, often fall through the cracks in the public education system.
Homeschooling gives these children a real shot at education as the curriculum and teaching method can be tailored to them.
Another reason why parents prefer to keep their children out of the public school system is the fact that they feel their children are not safe at school.
There is a lot of bullying, which teachers and school principals seem helpless to resolve. At the same time, there are increasing incidents of assault and theft in many schools.
So, you have decided to homeschool your children but you have a full-time job or are a single parent trying to juggle everything.
Do you think like many other people out there, that only stay-at-home moms can take on the task of educating their children?
Actually, that’s not true. Many parents who homeschool their children work fulltime. It requires some planning and commitment, but it’s possible.
Tips for homeschooling and working full-time
#1 Plan Homeschool Around Your Work Schedule
Look at your work schedule to see when you have free time to teach. If you work full day from Monday to Friday, you’ll be able to teach your children in the evenings and on weekends.
If you have a night-time schedule, you could teach your children for one or two hours during the day. Your children don’t have to study for hours on end.
They will be able to concentrate for 40 minutes at the most anyway. Remember the quality of your teaching is more important than the number of hours you teach.
Make the most of the time that you do teach. Make sure you cover something the kids have to learn for that day, whether it takes 40 minutes or 20.
You can easily fit a few segments of 40-minute or 30-minute classes into an evening. The children can do homework and practice what they’ve learned during the next day when you are at work.
- Your teaching schedule can look something like this:
- Arrive home and check homework.
- Prepare dinner together and eat.
- An hour or more teaching, give homework.
- Bedtime and reading. Go over the following day’s schedule.
#2 Choose a Done-For-You Curriculum
One way to save time is to not develop the curriculum yourself. There are many ready-to-use curricula available online, including free ones.
If you don’t have a ton of time to put lesson plans together yourself, find a curriculum that provides you with lesson plans. You can also choose an online curriculum.
There are many resources online. You can have a look at these. They are widely used already.
- Khan Academy’s free, self-paced web courses
- The Good and the Beautiful (my 1st favorite)
- Abeka (2nd favorite
- YouTube’s Crash Course lectures
- My Father’s World
- CK12’s open-source textbooks
- Calvert Education
Choose a curriculum that is designed for students to do a lot of independent work. This will save you time as your children will always have something to work on even if you are not available to give your input.
#3 Consider Hiring a Tutor
In some situations, you might want to consider hiring a tutor. A tutor can take care of a subject that you don’t feel confident teaching or that your child needs extra help with.
In my case I use teaching textbooks, not because I don’t math but because I don’t have the patience to explain it. Math comes easy to me but its hard to explain and I want my daughter to be able to learn and enjoy it.
Teaching textbook is completely online all you have to do is monitor the progress we are really enjoying this.
Another option is if you can to also hire a tutor to simply take some of the teachings over from you so you have some free time to yourself.
If you have more than one child, the tutor could teach one child while you teach the other one. If you can afford it, seriously consider it.
If you choose your tutor carefully, it can take some of the weight off you.
#4 Join a Homeschool Co-op
A homeschool co-op can be a great source of support for you as a parent who works fulltime.
What is a homeschool co-op?
A homeschool co-op is a group of parents who homeschool and come together to share in the education of their children.
A homeschool co-op will offer some classes, both academic and extracurricular through the participation of parents.
So, you might be able to drop off your child for some lessons or activities, but you will also be required to offer some classes.
This is great because you will gain some free time and your children will be exposed to other teachers and ways of learning, not to speak of interaction with children their age.
I don’t do co-ops as much as I should. the reason being is that I really don’t have the time I work full time as a nurse and have a set of twins that are 2 years old, so its hard now but hopefully in the future it gets better.
Look out for other parents who homeschool while working fulltime. You can get valuable advice and support from them.
#5 Share The Homeschool Duties With Other Families
Another way to make the workload less for you and give you more time to do other things like keeping up with the housework duties, is to join forces with other families who homeschool.
These families usually agree on days that each parent would be teaching all the kids at one home.
You could come to an agreement that each parent teaches one week a month, for instance. The larger the group of families, the fewer lessons a parent would have to teach potentially.
Families could also agree that certain parents take responsibility for certain subjects.
All of these arrangements would mean your kid’s education wouldn’t come down solely on you. With this arrangement, parents can cope with homeschooling their children while keeping up a fulltime job.
#6 Take Care Of Yourself
Keeping up a fulltime job and taking responsibility for homeschooling your children will take its toll on you.
It will be challenging to get to everything and you are bound to feel stressed. It’s important to remember this and prepare for it. read this post on how you can deal with homeschooling anxiety.
While teaching your kids, take regular breaks – it’s good for them too. You and the kids will be more productive after a break. Get up, walk around for a bit and stretch. Have a drink of water.
Make sure that you have a healthy and balanced diet and take a multivitamin every day. Have some fresh fruit and salads every day; they are great if you don’t have time to cook.
Get enough quality sleep and make sure your kids do too. Sleep is restorative for the brain and enhances learning.
What Our Homeschooling & Working Full Time looks like
It has not has not been easy! the adaptation process it has taken its course but we are here and we are committed to make it work.
Our homeschooling schedule
so my husband and I take turns homeschooling and we homeschool year around. to us this makes more sense since it gives us the flexibility of taking vacations when ever we want and also if one day we are not feeling well due to sickness or whatever you know life happens, then we take take that day off.
We Only homeschool 4 days a week the 5th day is used as catch up on anything that might be behind, extra reading
that being said lets get into our daily routine.
Daily Schedule
Mama bear me wake up at 5 am to have some time for myself. I need to drink my coffee without kids or husband calling my name and that’s how I can have that.
I make breakfast for the kids they wake-up at 730am.
school starts at 8:30 am usually but this is not set on stone its flexible. and it ends at around 11 am. Yes, we homeschool for 2.5 to 3 hours our daughter its on 3rd grade so that all she really needs.
I work as a home health nurse that means that I go to see people at their house and I have the flexibility of going anytime during the day to see them. Which works out great for us.
Thanks to this I can go to work from 12 to 5pm twice per week and do the rest of the work from home. The other two days belong to my husband.
husband takes care of dinner and bathing the kids. But let me be honest with you this does not always go down like this.
We do teaching for like an hour and the rest is independent work where we guide her when she has questions.
Sometimes things just don’t work as planned and we have to deal with the punches. give yourself graze and time to get used to doing it. I’ve been homeschooling for only a year so I am still a rookie learning what works every day.
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