I think most parents of school children could be forgiven for having a minor/major panic last Monday when they learned at 8 o’clock pm, that school was to be cancelled for the foreseeable future and that twelve hours later they would be sitting down to a day of home education. I don’t think I would have managed that situation very well. However, as the dust settles and we acknowledge that ultimately God is in control, then there is no choice but to take this as from the Lord.
To parents who did not want to find themselves in this situation again, I just want to offer some encouragements on your way. You may well feel bounced into COVID-19 home education, but God still requires us to ‘do all things without grumbling’ (Phil 2:14) and who knows but, at his point in time, perhaps this is just what your family needs.
1. Believe it or not, home education is fun! I have had expressed to me a number of times how other people would feel in my shoes and I am not very good at saying that I have my dream job! I love what I do. I love the time spent with my children. We laugh a lot. We have some great memories. My desire to learn has been set on fire as I discover more and more about God’s world. Every gift and ability that God has given me has been tested and tried as I use all the skill and knowledge I have to juggle a household of seven under eleven. Life is NOT boring! You will probably discover along with the rest of us, that children do not need six hours of bookwork each day. Smaller families may well find they can get everything done well before lunchtime. There is lots of extra time for games, walks, cooking and learning to do jobs around the house and garden. Take this as a gift from the Lord and pray that God will open your eyes to show you how you can make the best use of this time.
2. Now is the time to purposefully teach a Christian worldview. Start the day off with prayer and Bible reading, remember that our children need to be evangelized and purposefully draw conversations and learning to God throughout the day. You now have the opportunity to dedicate your best hours of the day to training your children. Those of us who home educate as a matter of course often profit from Christian curricula and a lot of the graft work in how to think about a subject has been done for us. However, God is viewed through the lens of any subject if we have the eyes to see it. Now might be a wonderful opportunity to do lots of reading with your child and introduce them to the godly men and women of our heritage. I really recommend the ‘Trailblazer’ and ‘Christian Heroes: Then and Now’ books.
3. Try to be as flexible as you can with the tasks you are set. Something home educators are good at recognising, which parents of school children might not get straight away, is that it is far better to stop after twenty minutes of a subject if your child’s brain is in overload, than to plough on through to the frustration of both of you. I don’t think you have to be a slave to the way school sends you the work. I have heard mothers feeling frustrated that the day is spent waiting for emails to arrive and the schools sends work through, culminating in maths at 2 o’clock which is the WORST time to do maths! Well, why not work a day behind? That way, the work is all set at the beginning of the day and more taxing subjects can be ticked off first thing. It seems a revelation to do things the way that suits us best, but it is your homeschool! Nobody knows your children as well as you do and you can run it how you like!
Also, learn to spot ‘busy work’ and don’t worry about it too much. What is busy work? Essentially, ‘busy work’ is work set to kill time that bears absolutely no relation to anything else being taught. For example, if your child is told to build the pyramid of Giza out of lego, but he cannot find Egypt on a map, has never heard of a ‘Pharoah’, and hasn’t come across solid shapes yet, then this is busy work. It does not reinforce anything your child is learning and it is far better to send him outside to dig up worms than make him spend large amounts of time on a task just so you can send a picture to the teacher.
4. Try to get an idea of how knowledge works and give them a framework for the things they are learning. I may be wrong on this, but often work set for school children appears to be a bit random. History is rarely taught in order. Geography and Science seem to jump all over the place without children having the opportunity to explore the subject. Maths seems to plough forwards regardless of whether a child has grasped a concept fully or not. Now is the time to stick a timeline on the wall for your child to fill in as they learn so that they can see how history fits together. Now is the time to memorise the English Monarchs, to nail those timetables, to help your child learn the names of the countries of the world and where to find them on the map (I really recommend the app ‘World Map Quiz’ for this). All of these things will stand them in good stead whatever they are expected to learn in the future.
5. Finally, if you are home with your children all the time, you will become more aware of both your sin and theirs. This is not a bad thing! It is a gift from the Lord to have areas flagged up that need addressing and a means of sanctification in your life and theirs. If my children were in school, they would probably get fairly good reports. I might be under the illusion that all was well. However, being home with them all the time, I am much more aware of their weaknesses as well as their strengths. I used to feel quite stressed when my children misbehaved. As the years have gone by, I do find that I am becoming more dispassionate about it. First of all, my expectations are far more realistic than before. I expect tensions and difficulties. Secondly, I find my heart is often thankful that God has shown it to me. If my child completes work perfectly with a bad attitude, God is graciously showing me that all is not well. The answer is not to send them to somebody else so that I do not have to deal with their bad attitude or can pretend it doesn’t exist. The answer is prayer and training.
I realise that some parents may be struggling with the huge change in situation. However, I also know that God only blesses us, even when we might not realise it. Be thankful that now you can know for sure what your children are learning and that you child has a Christian teacher who loves him more than any school teacher can.
