Homeschooling That Works

By Guest: Alexis J. Ham

At-Home Mom/Recording Artist Leave a comment

I am a full-time stay-at-home, married mother of two children under the age of five; I am also a full-time professional musician. I have the extraordinary privilege of teaching my children at home, and because of my work, I get the opportunity to be with them more often than not. Even when I am working, my children get to accompany me in the workplace. This family life could pose a challenge to many parents, including me and my husband. However, we have developed a way to manage the life we have been given to the benefit of our children and ourselves. We get to stay connected with our children – maintaining hands-on support to one another. Here, we share what made this undertaking work for our family.

The Challenge is Real

Being a stay-at-home mom presents the enormous responsibility of caring for the daily needs of your children, like eating, cleaning, and behavioral/discipline efforts, and does not afford you much free space of mind to focus on other work. We are entrepreneurs; we create, work, and build our business from home. It is a challenge for me to be able to sit still and do other things, when daily from sunup to sundown, I am hands-on tending to the many needs of my children. There is a cost for the parent who takes on every day, full-time responsibility of raising their children and managing their education. For example, you will relinquish time to do other desires in life. You cannot make up time by staying up later because this will lead to other costs, including lack of rest, which is important to have to care for children. Another cost, if you allow it, is discouragement – feeling that you are not using your talent, skills, and abilities to create wealth for your family as you may have aspired to do. Then, of course, there could be a lack of outside support from family or friends. These challenges can be frustrating and appear never-ending. Yes, I see it as a blessing and opportunity to homeschool my children because I can trust the source of their education and nurture. However, I just have to know that the time will come when I can pursue other things. For me, it takes much patience and faith in God.

Why and How We Do It

Schooling our children at home is an extreme honor and allows us to be creative and do things our way when it comes to educating them. We get to explore various teaching styles and options that will aid in our children’s growth and development. We make it fun! I took the liberty to create a home prep academy to give our children a real sense of an organized structural learning environment. We call our academy, Hamshire Home Prep Academy. We even created our school song, which is a positive, upbeat, and inspirational song that affirms things that are important to us to instill in our children. We also have daily affirmations that we speak out loud one to another. Teaching my children at home is particularly important to me, especially in the day and age in which we live, because it allows so much liberty to tailor education to our children’s interests. Consider your children have many interests that can differ from each other. Being at home with access to so much diverse information and resources (like Ms. Monica’s YouTube channel and www.allkidsnetwork.com) as we have readily available at our fingertips, we can research subjects and find information that is important to our children and tailor the instruction primarily to them. Also, this instruction happens while introducing basic concepts like reading, writing, spelling, math, history, and other topics.

Positives in the Process

Another remarkable thing about being a stay-at-home mom, educating my children on my own is that we get to teach them things that they would otherwise not learn in a public or private academic setting like biblical/spiritual matters. We get to include these matters within the other subject matter that we teach. I believe this helps them to understand that it is just as important to learn spiritual matters as it is to learn academic ones. This is all-encompassing of their being and growth and development as humans. I love teaching my children at home because they get to teach me in the process. I am not a professionally trained teacher, however, because I teach them, I am learning to be patient and things about myself that are weaknesses but are being built upon and becoming strengths. I do not think this transformation would have readily happened if I were not teaching my children at home. Finally, one big plus in homeschooling our children is that I do not do so alone. My husband, and their father, assumes the role of the school superintendent. He is very educated, understanding of our children, and very observant of their learning styles. He implements his strengths, leadership, and direction for the things that we should teach. While I also get to administrate to our children, this partnership allows us another opportunity to work together toward one common goal – to educate our children the best way we know-how.

Give it a Try

I would say to anyone interested in educating their children at home to give it a try. It takes a lot of patience and faith to It could be a terrific way to build upon weaknesses that can become strengths; it allows you to form bonds between yourself and your children. When you instill in them information that they did not know before, it builds trust between you and them in ways that maybe would not otherwise occur. Homeschooling also allows you to become a highly influential person in their lives. Because there will be many people that come and go throughout their lives, making various types of impact, we as parents must be hands-on in every area of their lives so that we can be one of the main influences in their growth and development. I encourage interested parents to take it one day at a time, be patient with the process, have faith in God, and to call friends and family members who you know are educators to get advice and encouragement. Give yourself grace and in many ways, let your children lead. They teach us as much as we teach them. Make teaching and learning a lifestyle.