During my three years of homeschooling two children, there have been many ups and downs. There have been times when I feel such gratitude for all it encompasses, and times I have looked longingly at the yellow bus driving by. However, those overwhelming times can teach valuable lessons. Those times showed me where I needed to make changes.

Today, I’m sharing those lessons with you. Here are 5 tips to make homeschool a little happier.

1. Start your day with laughter.

For the longest time, I wanted to get up and get right to it. Math, check. Language arts, check. Reading, check. I wanted to get through my lesson plans as quickly and efficiently as possible so that we could be done with “school” and get to the fun part of our day. As you can imagine, that didn’t make for a very happy homeschool. I’ve learned that starting our day with laughter makes my children more cooperative, makes us feel more connected, and enhances learning. I like to start with mad libs or a few jokes. It’s so much nicer to start our days in good spirits. 

2. Ask them what they want to learn this week.

This may seem like an obvious one, but it was lost on me in the beginning. I had a curriculum and a teacher’s guide, and by golly, we were going to follow it. I liked having it all planned out, but my kids were bored to tears. Our science curriculum told us to study the moon phases but they had zero interest in it at the time. I read the material but I don’t think they retained much of it because it wasn’t interesting to them. It’s still very hard for me to pull myself away from the curriculum, but I make a point to ask once a week “what do you want to learn about?” We set aside our lessons plans for one day a week and follow their interests.

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