5 Tips for Homeschooling When Family Visits
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Are you wondering how to keep homeschooling when family visits?
It’s a tough question, isn’t it? Can you keep homeschooling when family visits or should you come to a complete stop? Will it destroy your homeschool year? What should you do!
After all, it’s one thing when family lives close by and you see them every day. It’s easier to put down your foot and say, “No. We’ll see you after we’ve finished homeschooling for the day.”
But what do you do when family lives far away and are coming for a visit? Do you put your foot down and only visit after you’re done homeschooling for the day?
Or do you take the day off to enjoy time with grandma and grandpa?
So just how do you homeschool when family visits?
The problem is that you don’t want to take too much time off or you’ll never finish your curriculum for the year. But at the same time, family is special and you want to make the most of your time together.
So here are 5 ideas on how to homeschool when your family comes to visit!
Keep Homeschool when Family Visits with an Early Break
The first option is to take a vacation and enjoy time with your family when they visit. This works well if they’re coming near a regular break anyway.
As an example, if your family is coming during spring break, Christmas break, or summer break you may need to stop school early, but you can make up the time later – by working through the originally planned break.
Let’s say they’re coming in mid-March and you planned a spring break in April, move your break forward. And skip the spring break in April. Or you can move your break later and skip the earlier break.
This works well when there’s some overlap between planned vacation days and your family’s visit.
So play with your schedule the next time you hear that family is coming to visit and plan your vacation days around your family’s visit!
Plan Extra Days Into the Year
One secret I use to stay on track each school year is to plan extra days into my year. My kids suffer through a summer break that’s only one month long. Unless they finish their schoolwork early.
Which makes it easier to finish our curriculum even when we’re taking a few days off to enjoy time with visiting friends and family.
So when you’re planning your school year during the summer, plan extra days into your school year. This allows you to take a spontaneous break when you need a plan B-day or when family comes to visit.
You can take the time off as needed. It also helps when the kids catch the flu!
Now I recommend that you keep track of how many extra days you have each year. It’s too easy to take a day off here and a day off there and end up eating through the extra days and into the days you need to finish your curriculum.
So keep a log and track how many extra days you have in the school year that you can stop homeschooling when family visits.
Focus on the Essentials
Another option to keep homeschooling when family visits is not to take a day off at all. Instead, only focus on the essentials that your kids need to study. Do the phonics lessons. Complete just reading and writing. Do Latin and math.
The goal is to spend a short time homeschooling on the essentials and then spend the day with your family.
It’s a great way to have your cake and eat it too.
The biggest issue is that it’s hard to say exactly what essential school is. For my youngest kids, it’s phonics/reading. I need my kids to learn how to read and read well.
In high school, it may be history or science. It’s the subject that’s the hardest to keep the forward momentum going. The subject you hate to skip because it’s difficult to complete anyway.
So spend some time on the essentials – maybe an hour, and then head out to enjoy your family.
Keep Homeschooling when Family Visits with Educational Field Trips
Another option is to plan your educational field trips for when family comes to visit. Often these are fun trips that explore areas of your county you may not normally see. These are also areas that make great tourist destinations.
And your visitors have likely not seen these places either.
So spend time exploring all the tourist traps of your area with your family. Head out on a whale watching tour. Send the afternoon at a planetarium. Visit the zoo.
Drive into the mountains. Spend the afternoon at the beach. Pick a new area of your county to explore.
And journal about the fun field trips your family enjoyed.
Include Family in your Homeschool
Have you thought about including your family in your homeschool for a day? Grandparents may be interested to see exactly how homeschooling works. Are the kids running wild or are they actually learning something?
So keep homeschooling when family visits by including them in your homeschool.
Let them see the kids working through math. Let them help the kids learn long division. Include them in the science experiments and history projects.
Spend a day showing your family what a normal day at home looks like.
When you have family coming to visit, spend a few minutes thinking through how you want to fold homeschooling into the visit. Or if you want to fold it in at all.
Sometimes your best bet is to relax, enjoy your family, and pick up your homeschool again after they leave.
The secret to homeschooling when family visits are to have a few plans in place ahead of time. Plan on taking days off.
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