How to Handle Homeschooling Children of Different Ages

K-12

Homeschooling is hard enough as it is, but balancing the needs of children of different ages makes the challenge all the more difficult. This blog post offers suggestions for how you can succeed when homeschooling your entire family.

Full House, Full School

If you're a homeschool parent with multiple children, then you're already familiar with the challenges of homeschooling different ages at once. After all, not even paid teachers have a 6-year old, 10-year old, and 13-year-old in the same class! If you're looking for some tips for how to handle your family's age diversity in the homeschool context, look no further! Here are our top suggestions.

Stay Organized

The first and most important thing that you can do to help balance the educational needs of all of your children is to stay organized. If you go into the school day without an idea of what you're going to do, you'll find yourself all the more overwhelmed by the fact that multiple children with different academic needs are awaiting you. But if you plan ahead of time, you'll learn that it isn't as hard as it seems to organize and balance everyone's schoolwork at once.

At least a month ahead of time, try to determine what each child's learning objectives are for a particular period of time. You can even plan for all of your children to study the same general subjects and explore the same themes at the same time, with differentiation for their individual levels and needs. That will make planning ahead that much easier.

Start and End Together

Children thrive on routine and this is something you can use to your advantage. For example, start and end the homeschool day with all of your children together. In the morning, prepare them for what is to come by previewing the topics they're soon to cover. In the afternoon, let your children discuss what they learned and what activities and topics they found most interesting.

Other ways to teach everybody together is to do an introductory activity that everyone can learn from with follow-up assignments that vary based on age. You can also have each child do something slightly different but related, like book reports on titles of varying levels. Finally, activities like science labs, studio art projects, current event discussions, and read-alouds can engage everybody at once.

Individual Work

All students, no matter how young, are capable of working independently. In fact, learning independence is one of the many advantages of homeschooling. When you need to teach or go over work with one of your children, let his or her siblings do individual work, be it a reading or writing assignment, hands-on project, math worksheet, or something else. Creating ''lesson kits'' with everything that a child needs to complete an activity or a lesson can be tremendously helpful in freeing you up to work one-on-one with your other children.

You can also plan the day based on each child's strong and weak points. If one of your children excels in history and can handle working independently, let her do so while you work more closely with your other child who may need more guidance with his math work. Then switch, working with the first child on a subject she finds difficult, while the other works on his own. This will ensure that you get your valuable one-on-one time in with each child while remaining as productive as possible.

Use the Internet

Don't hesitate to lean on online resources designed specifically to help you with homeschooling. As you probably already know, you can't expect to do this alone. You'll benefit tremendously from a homeschool-friendly site that you can trust, one you can use as a resource for different subjects, topics, and grade levels appropriate for all of your children, and all in one place. Further, quality educational websites frequently offer print and video instructional lessons, testing, and grade tracking. Score!

Teach Each Other

One of the best ways for students to study and remember information on a truly in-depth level is to teach the topic to somebody else. This is very much to your advantage, as you can enlist your older children to help teach your younger children. This will be a win-win for everybody: Your older children will get to test their understanding of a subject, your younger children will receive instruction in a new, fun way, and everybody will be involved at once.

Check In

If you're not sure whether your homeschooling strategies are working, the best way to find out is to talk to your children and ask them how they feel things are going. Ask questions like:

• Are you interested in the subjects you're learning? Do you feel engaged?
• Do you think you have too much free time? Not enough free time?
• Are there any skills or subjects that you're struggling with right now?

Your children may be your best guides as to their own education. Listen to them and you'll find you can determine exactly what you need to do.