Does Homeschooling Mean My Child Has to Work Alone?

1 hour ago
4 min read

One of the worries parents often have about homeschooling is whether their child will spend too much time on their own.

It is an understandable worry.

After all, the word homeschooling rather suggests a child sitting at home. However, learning at home doesn't have to mean learning alone.

In fact, some of the best homeschool learning happens when children have someone to talk to, someone to ask, someone to work alongside — and sometimes someone to disagree with.

Meet your Study Buddies

At Orchard, we use the phrase Study Buddies, a lot!

A Study Buddy isn't necessarily another child of exactly the same age working through exactly the same lesson.

It might be a brother or sister.
It might be another homeschooler.
It might be Mum or Dad.
It could be a grandparent who happens to know a lot about gardening, engines, sewing or local history.

Sometimes a Study Buddy is simply the person sitting beside you saying: “Hang on. I don't think that's right. Let's look at it again.”

Learning alongside somebody else can make an enormous difference.

Brothers and sisters don't have to be learning the same thing

This is something we think about carefully at Orchard. If you have several children at home, trying to run three completely separate school days can become exhausting very quickly.

So wherever it makes sense, we try to create opportunities for children in a family to be exploring related ideas. They won't necessarily be doing the same work.

An eight-year-old and a thirteen-year-old need very different levels of challenge.

But they can sometimes investigate the same question, visit the same place, watch something together or talk about what each of them has discovered. One might need help reading the information. The other might be expected to question whether that information is reliable. They are learning at their own level, but they can still be Study Buddies.

Learning together doesn't mean copying

There is an important difference.

If your Study Buddy has worked out the maths answer, that doesn't mean you copy it.
If your older sister has written a brilliant paragraph, it doesn't become your paragraph.

Being a Study Buddy means helping somebody think, not doing the thinking for them. You can ask:

“How did you work that out?”
“Where did you find that?”
“Can you explain it to me?”
“Are you sure?”

Those are useful questions at any age.

Sometimes another person knows something you don't

Homeschooling gives us a wonderful opportunity to use the people around us.

Perhaps Grandad can explain how something works.
A neighbour might know the names of the birds visiting the garden.
Someone at the library might help you find the right book.
A family friend might work in a job your teenager is interested in.

You don't have to know everything yourself, and neither does your child. Part of becoming an independent learner is knowing who to ask and where to look when you don't know something.

And sometimes you need people who aren't your family

However lovely your family is, nobody needs to spend every waking hour together!

Children need opportunities to meet other people. That might be through sports, swimming, Scouts or Guides, dance, drama, music, faith or community groups, volunteering, homeschool groups, part-time work for older teenagers, or simply meeting friends.

Not every activity needs to be labelled education.

Sometimes children need to go somewhere because they enjoy it. They need friends. They need to learn how to join in, wait, listen, negotiate, cope when somebody has a different idea and occasionally deal with somebody they don't particularly like.

Those are useful life skills too.

Your homeschool teacher is part of the team

At Orchard, your child isn't learning without a teacher. I am their homeschool teacher.

My job is to plan what they need to learn, make sure that learning progresses, provide the work and resources, notice when something isn't going quite right and help when they get stuck.

But I don't need to sit beside them for every one of those 20 hours for teaching to be taking place.

Sometimes I have already done my part before your child even opens the week's work. I have thought about what they need to learn, why they need to learn it, what came before it and where we are going next.

At other times, your child will need to come back to me and book a " Call Back" call. We might need to talk something through, find another way of explaining it or work out why they are struggling.

That means parents aren't expected to become experts in every subject either.

We are a team.

I provide the teaching and educational direction. You provide the everyday encouragement, interest and oversight. Your child gradually learns to take greater responsibility for their own learning.

And around all of us are those valuable Study Buddies who make learning richer by talking, questioning, sharing their knowledge and sometimes simply saying, “Come on, let's work this out.”

Homeschooling can actually widen the circle

School naturally places children with lots of other children born within roughly the same twelve months.

Homeschooling can look rather different.

A child might spend Monday talking to a librarian, Tuesday working with a younger sibling, Wednesday seeing friends at swimming, Thursday asking Grandma about something from history and Friday meeting other homeschoolers.

That is a different sort of social world.

And there is value in learning to talk to people who are younger than you, older than you and very different from you.

So does a homeschooled child have to work alone?

No! However, there will be times when they should work alone.

Being able to sit down, concentrate and complete something independently is an important skill, particularly as children get older.

But independence and isolation are not the same thing.

At Orchard, we want children to become increasingly capable of learning for themselves while also knowing when to talk, when to ask, when to listen and when another person can help.

So find your Study Buddies.