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Can I Homeschool and Work a Full-Time Job?
Mar
When most people think of homeschooling, they picture it in the context of a nuclear family where the dad earns daily bread, and the homemaker mom takes care of the homeschooling of the children. However, in reality, homeschooling is not just for any particular family type.
Even if it is a single-parent family, they can proceed with homeschooling. Similarly, if both parents are working full-time, they can also manage a homeschool routine. Nonetheless, homeschooling is a tricky option for parent(s) with a full-time job. For many parents, homeschooling is out of the question with full-time jobs. They have plenty of reasons for coming to that conclusion.
At the onset, homeschooling certainly seems an impossible task when you are already committed to a full-time job, but when there is a will, there is a way. If you are convinced about the multi-ranging benefits of homeschooling, you can take it on despite working full-time.
This post will share some tips on how you can successfully take up homeschooling when working a full-time job.
Table of Contents
Choose the Curriculum that Needs Minimal Tweaking
Parents taking on homeschooling are not just responsible for regular teaching classes of their child. They also have to do continuous homework in terms of academic planning. Homeschooling essentially puts parents in-charge of curriculum planning. They have to put all the educational material together and devise the lesson plans themselves. All of this takes a lot of time and mental energy.
A parent is working full-time, working on a detailed syllabus, and then making daily and weekly lesson plans can turn into overwork. However, they can better manage this aspect of homeschooling by searching for ready-made homeschooling curriculums with complete lesson plans. There are many tested homeschooling curriculums with complete lessons available online.
Dedicate an hour from your schedule to run the online search to find those ready-made curriculums. Assess them and select the best option you think is tailored for the academic requirements of your child. Hundreds of homeschooling children use these ready-made curriculums. So, you don’t have to worry about their quality and usefulness.
Having a ready-made study programme with all the lessons ready, you don’t have to do extensive coursework to conduct homeschooling sessions. In other words, you can directly take homeschooling classes without needing to do any prep beforehand. This time-saving will undoubtedly come in handy when you have to schedule your homeschooling hours around your work hours.
Break Down Your Homeschool Schedule
Human learning is not bound to any particular time of the day. We keep on learning throughout the day as long as we are awake. The same goes for children who are even more avid and excited learners than adults. They don’t just learn in the window of 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM and switch off their learning beacon after that.
Therefore, you don’t need to stress over your homeschool schedule if you work full-time. There is no rule to have your homeschooling classes at the same time as traditional schooling hours. You can be flexible with your scheduling.
As a full-time working professional, you should break down your weekly homeschooling hours into three sections.
- A session before going to work
- A session in the evening after coming back from work
- Long sessions on weekends
By following this routine, you will complete the weekly hours prescribed by the homeschooling syllabus you are following. This spread-out homeschooling schedule is also doable because kids are malleable and adjust to a new routine with no trouble. You can quickly get them adapted to this segmented homeschooling routine.
Become a Part of the Community
If you are a full-time working parent and want to homeschool your child, you must become a part of the local homeschooling community. Being a part of a network of homeschooling parents can be of a lot of assistance for you when homeschool plans seem like an impossibility with a full-time job.
In your local homeschool groups and communities, you may come across parents who are working full-time but still successfully managing their homeschooling commitments. Moreover, when you are a part of a homeschooling community, you can schedule co-ops and other group activities where all parents can share the supervision of those sessions in line with what time is available in their schedule.
For full-time working parents, sharing this responsibility comes in useful. They can offer their service on weekends or in the evenings. Meanwhile, stay-at-home parents can take up their sessions during the usual 9-5 slot.
Hire a Tutor for Some Subjects
Homeschooling your child doesn’t mean you have to assume the role of teacher/instructor for every academic activity and subject. If you think that you struggle with a topic and your busy schedule doesn’t let you take out time to improve your command on it, there is no harm in hiring a tutor for that particular subject.
By hiring an expert tutor, you can ensure that your kid can complete the course for that subject without struggling. Also, you will have one less subject to worry about when you take an expert tutor on board.
Manage Your Work
While managing and adjusting your homeschooling routine, you should also see room to tweak your work schedule. First of all, if you are two full-time working parents, try to adjust your working hours where one parent can take on homeschooling when the other is at work. COVID-19 has made remote working (work-from-home, etc.) a very feasible prospect. Therefore, see if your workplace can allow you WFH or you can find any remote job.
It will become a lot easier for you to go about homeschooling activities even if you have to work full-time as long as you are doing it from home.
Home Education Shop can help full-time working parents take on homeschooling with a vast collection of its teaching resources and learning activities. If you are new to homeschooling, you can subscribe to HES’s informational newsletter and get a free eBook to learn about how to start homeschooling in the UK.
Useful Links:
https://www.edplace.com/homeschooling/communities-support
