Finding Your Child’s Motivation to Homeschool

We all experience periods of time where we find ourselves lacking motivation to homeschool and our children are no different. I’m sure you’ve experienced what I’m talking about, those homeschool days that end up taking much longer than they normally would. With kids dragging their feet, digging their heels in, and seemingly just being plain uncooperative and sure it may very well be exactly that with our kids, plain old uncooperating from time to time, but also it could simply be a case of the ‘unmotivated blues’.

I’ve certainly experienced my fair share of that with my own kids over the years. In fact, my then seven-year-old was right smack in the middle of one of those unmotivated moments during what was his 2nd-grade year.

I do need to preface this story about his lack of motivation with this – We never expect more of him than we know he is capable of. We have homeschooled our three children since 2007 always on the premise of ‘better late than early’ and our approach to homeschooling is quite relaxed in nature. At such a young age our primary focus is getting reading happening, along with some basic math skills. Young children really can learn all the extras such as science and geography for example, simply by living a full and varied life. With adults that are genuinely interested in them. They do not need a curriculum to take care of those subject areas.

How we found motivation to homeschool

The structured learning that we were doing together was never any more than 30 – 40 minutes a day and only took place three times a week. He, however, went through a period where that 30-minute block of time was most often dragging out to 90 minutes! That was at least until I found his motivation and by that, I’m not talking about bribes or punishment in any way. At times sprinkling the path with a little extra dose of motivation can really invigorate the child and help them on learning the true value of perseverance and a job well done.

For us, during this time we made it a game. A game of racing me and it worked a treat. He grabbed onto this and ran with it. Of course, like many motivational tools they only work for a period of time, but we ran with this one whilst he was enjoying it and it was getting the job done.

On the spot, I came up with the idea for him and me to race each other! He simply needed to choose something that he could most definitely do independently and that was obviously suitable for a ‘race off’. He chose his math practice sheet, which was perfect! Who knew we could find motivation to homeschool lessons in such unexpected ways?

I challenged him.

I was planning on unloading the dishwasher and putting away the clean dishes. He was going to race me with his math practice.

And just like that, he was off like a shot! You know what, he beat me every single time we did this, and my kitchen got cleaned up at a lightning pace! This was so beneficial for both of us.

One unexpected element to this was that of fostering even more independence in him. When it was ‘racing time’ I always ensured that his choices were things he could do without needing me to be sitting right there beside him (even if I had previously done so). After spending some time on these fun race moments, we both concluded that he was actually much more capable than either of us had realized.
Often the simplest of things can bring about the biggest changes in motivation to homeschool, for our kids!