Avoiding Burnout in Home Schooling

Whether you’re studying in a traditional school or in a home schooling program, there will come a time when you will experience burnout. This is something that you have to avoid so that your learning progress is not affected.

Here are a few helpful tips that you can make use of to avoid possible home schooling burnout:

• Know your limitations. From the very start, you should already know your and your child’s limitations. You are capable of doing things slowly at a time especially if your child is still young since you have to consider your child’s learning capacity. Most of today’s students are average learners so you have to take the lessons based on your child’s learning pace.
Never expect your small child to read complicated reading selections nor your teen to ace SAT exams.

• Don’t follow strict schedules because this can pressure your child. You can simply set an interesting routine for your kids. Children spend most of their time doing their routine activities like getting up late in the morning, eat hearty breakfasts, read, write, do light chores, and some other things. You must insist that they finish first their routine activities before they can play outside or with the computer. Even the routine activities vary from day to day but you have to make sure that you’re child follows the routine activities. You can throw in occasional incentives or fun activities if they finish their routine tasks earlier.

• Enjoy home schooling together with your kid. This is one way to develop a good relationship with your kid. If you and your kid can relate to each other, you will find it very easy to handle curriculum struggles and motivation problems. Aside from motivating and guiding your child, you can also pursue some of your interests like gardening and cooking. If your child sees you pursuing your interests, then he or she will also be motivated in doing the same.

• Since your child is into home schooling, you should not mimic the traditional school environment. Try to use unusual methods when teaching your kid. Home schooling is also about flexibility and if you can achieve a light atmosphere, you can effectively avoid burnout.

Always remember that with home schooling, you don’t have to structure your teaching methods. You can simply do things in a fun way especially with very young kids and they can learn easily. Just keep the day in the right perspective to avoid burnout. Although your kids might forget some of the day’s lessons, that’s all right because somehow they grow in intelligence and even physically. And of course, you kids will always cherish your moments together and how well you’ve treated them. There is no other place like home and for little students this is the best place to learn the first lessons in life. Now, even your teens are already in high school or in college, they can still pursue home schooling if they want too. That is also a good decision because you get to monitor your child’s performance.

Parents are always looking after their child’s best interest. If after careful consideration you still think that home schooling is the best option, go on with it. Just follow the tips mentioned earlier to avoid burnout at home. Do fun activities from time to time to rule out monotony.