How to Finish a Difficult Homeschool Year Well

It doesn’t matter whether you are a year round homeschooler or if you follow a traditional school schedule, every homeschool mom wants to ensure that they finish their homeschool year well. After all, we’ve poured our hearts and souls into our children’s education, lost countless hours of sleep due to planning the year and spent an insane amounts of time finding fun field trips and activities to encourage them to love learning. Finishing the homeschool year well is essential!

Every homeschool year is unique, they all have different ups and down, celebrations and difficulties. There is no way to ensure that every homeschool year is perfect. We must learn to take each homeschool year as they come and do the best with what comes our way. Our children need us to stay strong throughout the homeschool year, it is our dedication and excitement for their education that greatly influences them to do well! If they see us consistently struggling to remain motivated and excited about homeschooling, then they will lose focus and become uninterested in learning. Even if the homeschool year has not gone well, we still need to ensure that we remain devoted and encourage our children to finish the year well. Our homeschool year may not end the way we intended it to, but we can still end the homeschool year well!

3 Tips to Finish a Difficult Homeschool Year Well

This year may not have gone as you planned, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t finish it well. You can make the best of the time that you have left, it’s not too late!

If you aren’t going to finish your textbooks before the end of the year, think about this…

Did you ever finish your textbooks before the end of your school year? Most people did not, public, private or homeschooled. Take a peek at next year’s homeschool books and you’ll find that the first 1/3 of the textbook is a review of what was covered in this year’s lessons! Don’t fret not finishing every single lesson in every single book. Put the books away and enjoy learning life skills for the rest of the year! I do encourage you to keep your kids working on Math and English in some way (fun apps, worksheets, games, etc.) throughout the summer because those are subjects that every child will need throughout their lives and you don’t want to have to relearn simple concepts at the beginning of the new school year. 

If every homeschool day has been a fight to get the lessons done, consider this…

Do your children learn differently than you are trying to teach them? My kids are very visual learners and are naturally drawn to different subjects, so we had to change our homeschooling method to fit their needs. Your kids may need a different type of homeschool curriculum than what you are using now, perhaps try using Unit Studies and let your child pick what they’d like to learn about! Maybe you need to reassess your homeschool schedule? Try starting at a later (or earlier) time or even consider year round homeschooling if a traditional school schedule isn’t working for your kids or your family.

If you’ve already hit your state’s requirements for homeschooling, maybe you should…

Take the summer off from homeschooling or focus on fun summer activities that just happen to count for homeschooling. There are a lot of summer activities that count for physical education; swimming, hiking, biking, team sports, etc. As a family you could go camping for a week and cover nature, geography, map skills, cooking and much more! Just because the calendar says that your homeschool year is not over doesn’t mean that you have to keep going, as long as you’ve fulfilled your state’s requirements what you do with the rest of your school year is up to you!

Whatever reason that your homeschool year has not gone as planned doesn’t mean that you can’t end the homeschool year well. Your attitude towards homeschooling, your children and their education is what will make the biggest difference in the end of your homeschool year! If you’re upset and angry, then your children will be too. Instead, look at this year as a lesson, take time to look the year over and find out what wasn’t working and make adjustments before the new year. Homeschooling can work for any family, we just have to realize that it won’t be picture perfect (after all, nothing is!) and that each year will have challenges unlike the year before. Just like in life, we have to make adjustments and do the best with what we’ve been given!

Finish your homeschool year well, make the most of the time you have left, and enjoy learning with your children! Even if that means putting the books away and spending the summer outside together side by side! There is so much more to education than what textbooks hold!