By Nikki Waring
Early mornings suck – Daily battles to get dressed and fed during said early mornings sucks worse.
Enjoy your sick days – No stress about falling behind or extra homework to catch up. Especially since most homeschoolers work through the summer, those few sick days won’t even be a blip on the map. Relax and heal!
Learn in comfort – Some days are just good days to stay in your PJs and not comb your hair.
The whole school closes for your birthday – Take a day off and have some fun. Make every birthday special.
Rock out; Don’t burn out – Instead of waiting for Christmas break, or a 2 month summer holiday (where they forget so much information) to give your kid a break you can take a few days off anytime you feel they are getting burnt out or overwhelmed.
Cheaper family vacations – When school is in session destinations are less expensive and less crowded. Plus, working parents don’t have to fight for vacation time with every other child-bearing employee.
Always have an excuse to travel – Visiting museums, nature hikes, extra-curriculars, homeschooling groups, more field trip opportunities. Why not take a road trip to your nation’s capital when learning about government, for example.
More time to drive your kids nuts – It really helps create closer knit families. Even parents who work outside the home tend to have more bonding time with their kids since the night isn’t taken up with homework.
Turn your kids into Doogie Howser – Generally, home schoolers are a year ahead of their traditionally schooled peers. Teen home schoolers also have the option to take courses at most colleges while still working on their normal work.
Get to the Ivy League – Okay, so it won’t guarantee admission but post secondary education is more than attainable. Most ivy league schools actively pursue home-schooled applicants. Harvard even has special admissions officers who attend home school conferences to recruit applicants.
Become empty nesters faster than your friends – My unofficial, not scientific at all poll of my friends shows that none learned how to balance a cheque book or budget until they were on their own. No one taught them about interest rates, how credit cards or loans work. These are all great math lessons that can be applied directly to real life and get your kids off to a great start, financially, in adult life
Be a wild social butterfly, not one in a shoe-box – Learning how to be social with kids and adults of all different ages is much more applicable to real world than sitting quietly in a room full of kids the same age and, likely, racial and socioeconomic background as themselves.
You only need to compare kids to each other, not other kids – Every child learns differently and at different paces (possibly even subject to subject). Homeschooling allows them to fly through math while slowing down in science. It allows them to fully grasp a concept before moving on. Sometimes you need to slow down to grasp a concept, and sometimes you fly through it faster than others.
Your kids will think what they like actually matters – because it does. Being able to apply their current interests to different subjects keeps them interested in learning. Homeschoolers often get more curriculum done in less time each day leaving the rest of the day up for exploratory play and learning as well.
Your kids get to think they are the centre of the universe – homeschooling allows individualized learning approaches. Some kids learn better by sitting and reading on their own, others prefer to talk through a problem with someone else and some learn best hands on. Figuring out their personal learning style allows them to flourish in, and enjoy, learning.
Bonus reason to homeschool: It’s really fun and you’ll learn a lot too!
