This week on Homeschool Highschool Podcast: 3 Ways to Model Lifelong Learning for Your Homeschoolers.

3 Ways to Model Lifelong Learning for Your Homeschoolers

7Sisters Sabrina was recently on a road trip with one of her homeschool-graduate sons. He was in the mood to reminisce a little bit about what he remembers about homeschooling: the things that went well and the things that didn’t work so well. One of the things that he feels homeschooling cultivated in him was an attitude of lifelong learning.

He said that there’s always something to be curious about, that he should stay humble enough not to be afraid to ask people to explain things to him that he knows nothing about. In other words, he learned to love learning!

This conversation got Sabrina to think about what a useful skill lifelong learning is!

Some ways to help cultivate an attitude of lifelong learning

Our 7Sister Marilyn always used to say,  “All of life is education.”

For instance:

Sometimes, when our homeschoolers were on a field trip, and we stopped to buy snacks, they paid for their own snacks with an “allowance” for that field trip. That’s budgeting!

Since all of life is education, we moms would educate ourselves, as well!

Modeling lifelong learning for our homeschoolers

We were blessed that our homeschool community was fairly large, with co-ops, support groups, and an umbrella school. There were so many homeschool moms around! Our kids saw all of us moms getting excited about learning new things and sharing what we learned with other moms.

Sometimes we moms would find something that we wanted to study together, so we would make our own classes. For instance, after our homeschool high schoolers studied Cinema Studies for Literature one year, we moms did the course ourselves over the summer. It was fun (and the teens were totally amused that the moms were doing a high school course).

Or we would simply learn about things of interest out of our relationship with each other. For instance, we co-op moms learned to cook some really cool dishes from each other! That’s lifelong learning.

Of course, we tried keeping a stack of books on whatever topic we were interested in.

In tougher areas of life, we would run up against situations that we did not handle well. When you are a mom of homeschooling high schoolers, you have a sharp-eyed audience! They want to know what you will learn from a tough moment! We have learned to find a book,  video, or even an online class to learn how to do things better! This is also modeling a growth mindset.

Some of us moms (like 7Sister Vicki) went to graduate school and then became a counselor in the community to help support the family’s homeschooling habits. This definitely gave our high schoolers a chance to watch us learn! (Here’s a nice conversation from Vicki about working homeschool moms.)

7Sister Kym wanted to serve her church community, so she received training on youth leadership (and also officiating weddings- which she performed for Vicki’s youngest son’s wedding).

And remember: Go on field trips! Family vacations count as field trips, for sure. Also, sometimes we moms would take a day and go on a mini-retreat for planning and praying. Those counted as field trips. You learn a lot when you change locations!

The way you choose to live as a learner is impacting your homeschoolers in strong and positive ways

So be curious in front of your kids! Over time, our homeschoolers will watch and learn lifelong learning from you! So, pat yourself on the back!

One thing we homeschool moms can learn is our to manage our self-care and not get overwhelmed with all our responsibilities. That’s why we love our 7Sister Cousin Teresa Wiedrick. She is the Homeschool Mama Self-Care Coach. Teresa offers online trainings, awesome support groups on Patreon, and an encouraging podcast.

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