How To Avoid Home Schooling Burnout

It doesn't matter whether you are learning in a traditional school or in a home schooling environment, there will come a time when you will come across burnout. This is something that you ought to prevent so that your learning progress is not negatively affected.

Here are a couple of useful tips that you can make use of in order to avoid an incident of home school burnout:

Know your own limitations. From the very start, you should already be aware of your limitations and those of your child. You must be able to doing things slowly sometimes, especially if your child is still very young since you have to bear in mind your child's capacity to learn.

Most students are average learners (clearly), so you will have to take the lessons based on your children's learning speed. Never expect your small child to read complicated selections nor your teen to get supa-dupa marks in SAT examinations.

Don't adopt rigid schedules, as this can put undue pressure on your child. You should just set an interesting program for your child to follow. Children spend most of their time doing routine activities like getting up, eating hearty breakfasts, reading books, practising writing, doing light chores, etc.

You must ensure that they finish their routine activities before they can go outside or play with the computer. Even these routine activities change from day to day, but you must ensure that your child completes them. You can throw in occasional incentives or fun activities if they finish their everyday tasks earlier.

You should try to get into the spirit of home schooling with your child, since it is one way of developing a strong relationship with your child and if you and your child can relate to each other, you will find it very much simpler to handle curriculum struggles and motivational problems later on.

Besides motivating and guiding your child, you can also pursue some of your own hobbies like gardening or cooking. If your child sees you enjoying your own interests, then he or she will also be motivated to do the same.

Since your child is in a home schooling program, you should not try to copy a traditional schools environment. Try to use non-conventional ways when teaching your child. Home schooling is also about flexibility and creativity, so if you can achieve an easy-going but firm ambiance, you can more than likely avoid burnout.

Just always try to keep in mind that with home schooling, you don't have to structure your teaching techniques in the traditional manner. You can simply do things in an enjoyable way especially when educating very young children, so that they learn naturally.

Make sure you keep the day in the right balance to avoid burnout. Although your children may forget some of the day's lessons, that's all right too because somehow children develop their intelligence as well as their stature.

Your children will always think back on your home schooling days together and remember with affection how well you treated them. The old song goes: "... there's no place like home" and for little pupils, home is the best place to learn the first lessons of life.

If your teenagers are already in high school or college, they can still do home schooling if they so desire. That would also be a good idea since you would get a chance to watch your children's development.

Parents almost always try to look after their children's best interests, so, if after careful consideration, you still reckon that home schooling is the correct option for your family, then run with it. Just follow the tips stated above in order to avoid burnout.

Make time for pleasurable activities from time to time in order to prevent monotony, which could lead to burnout.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on numerous subjects but is currently involved with Home School Games. If you want to read more, visit our website entitled How To Stay At Home From School.