As a homeschooling dad — actually, my wife did about 95 percent of the teaching and other work related to schooling our three kids — I loved this comprehensive list of 100 Reasons to Homeschool Your Kids.
You can thank Kerry McDonald for sharing her experiences and encouragement (and I hope you do!), and if you would like to read more thoughts on parenting and education from Kerry and others, you’ll find them at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) site.
Having homeschooled all three of our kids from the very beginning until they began their university journeys, we were directly engaged in their education for over 20 years.
The article lists 100 reasons why homeschooling is great, but I thought I’d take a moment to narrow the scope and share my own choices for the top 10 from Ms. McDonald’s list.
However, there are so many great benefits to homeschooling that even after my every effort to whittle my own list to just 10 great reasons the best I could do was share 15 of what I loved about our own homeschooling experiences.
Here are my top 15 favorites from Kelly McDonald’s 100 Reasons to Homeschool Your Kids:
- Homeschoolers perform well academically. (1 [the number on Ms. McDonald’s list])
- Whether early, late, or somewhere in the middle, homeschooling allows all children to move at their own pace. (13)
- They can have more recess and less homework. (17)
- Parks, beaches, libraries, and museums are often less crowded during school hours, and many offer programming specifically for homeschoolers. (21)
- More military families are choosing homeschooling to provide stability and consistency through frequent relocations and deployments. (25)
- With homeschooling, you can inspire your kids to love reading. (44)
- You can preserve their natural childhood creativity. (47)
- With homeschooling, learning happens all the time, all year round. There are no arbitrary starts and stops. (50)
- You can take vacations at any time of the year without needing permission from the principal. (51)
- Many colleges openly recruit and welcome homeschoolers because they tend to be “innovative thinkers.” (67)
- Homeschooling allows for much more authentic, purposeful learning tied to interests and everyday interactions in the community rather than contrived assignments at school. (77)
- Homeschoolers interact daily with an assortment of people in their community in pursuit of common interests, not in an age-segregated classroom with a handful of teachers. (84)
- Homeschooling can create strong sibling relationships and tight family bonds. (89)
- Parents can focus family learning around their own values, not someone else’s. (93)
- Homeschooling is all about having the liberty to learn. (100)
Please note that I entered these in the order of Ms. McDonald’s list instead of prioritizing them according to my own preferences. These are all great reasons to homeschool your kids and my priorities will likely be different from yours.
If you’ve already made the commitment to teach your children, then good on you and the best of blessings on your journey.
If you haven’t decided that homeschooling is the right choice for your family, I hope you’ll give it some real consideration.
Feel free to reach out to me via Twitter — @GuyEWood — if you have questions or comments.
Onward!