12 ways to motivate homeschooled children

And when to give up

I recently had several people in quick succession ask me about how I motivate my children to do their work, including one mother who incredulously said “What, you mean your children actually listen to you and do what you ask?!”.

Regular readers will know that most of the time we follow a fairly traditional curriculum. The children are 6 and 8, so please don’t imagine that this is a full timetable which keeps their noses to the grindstone from 9am until 3pm. When I first started writing How We Homeschool we largely unschooled, simply following the children’s interests and making the most of whatever opportunities for learning life presented us with. So how did we make the shift, how do I get the children to do their work, and what do I do when they refuse?

Of course, even with all the ideas below, some mornings the children just don’t feel like working. I always encourage them to do just a little, and often I find that once they get going they can do pretty much everything I want them to. But there are also mornings when I can see it’s a lost cause. I don’t have a magic formula for knowing the difference—I think it just takes practice. Certainly, if I can feel myself being driven to the edge of reason, it’s time to take a break—possibly a permanent one. If the children are barely holding it together, there’s no point continuing.

I read that lying awake in bed for hours teaches your brain that bed is for lying awake in, and that instead you should turn on the light and read a book, or get up, or just do something instead of lying there awake. Similarly, we don’t want our children to associate learning with tears and stress and arguments. And learning goes much better when it’s done happily.

The goal is not to teach our children that they have to sit at the kitchen table for four hours each morning, whether it’s of any benefit or not. The long-term goal is a child who, mostly, loves learning. Who knows they can do hard things, that they can learn a whole new language or a passage of Shakespeare or a challenging mathematical idea if they put their mind to it and give it a few minutes a day. That there is a wonderful, tantalising world of knowledge out there, just waiting for them to dive in.

Sitka Vrijburg via Unsplash

But here’s what I do when nobody even wants to get their feet wet:

1. As I wrote in The Life-Changing Magic of a Homeschool To-Do List, the most important thing about how we made the shift was that we did it slowly, always building on what we already had. Initially we just had one regular item—Multiplication by Heart, which is a flash card system which obviously provides most benefit when used regularly. It became a standing item. I can’t remember what came next, but the important thing when introducing a regular programme of study, I think, is to do it gradually. Don’t expect your child to go from zero to sixty with no period of warm-up or adjustment. Find one thing—a popular thing!—that you can do every day. Make it a regular part of your rhythm. Maybe you always read a book together in bed with morning tea, or always do a page from a favourite activity book after breakfast. Slowly build from there.

2. My own children always benefit from some advance warning. If we’ve taken some time off, I give them several days to get used to the idea that we’ll be getting back to work soon:

• “I think next week we’ll go back to our normal homeschool mornings.”

• “After this weekend we’ll get back to work.”

• “Tomorrow’s Monday, and after breakfast we’re going to start homeschool again.”

3. Having a routine helps. Just like you get hungry when you have conditioned your body to expect a meal, once you’ve established a home education habit it’s much easier to stick to it. My children expect that I will ask them to do some work each morning. They’re not surprised or outraged when I tell them we’ll be getting the books out in half an hour. (I give them advanced warning each day, too. They like to be able to get their imaginary games to a good moment to stop, and even things that we do every day still benefit from a little lead-in time!).

4. A very wise friend once observed that a parent at home exerts a very different authority over their child than a teacher in a classroom. I’m my children’s mother, not their schoolteacher, and I want them to think of me as ‘Mum’, not ‘Miss’ (as teachers are often known in British schools). This observation alone shifts what you expect from your child and from your homeschool. But it is also a reminder that the parent’s relationship with the child is central to home education success. If you can’t communicate with your child successfully at the weekends, you won’t be able to do it during ‘school time’ either. Two books I found very helpful: Calmer Easier Happier Parenting, and How To Talk So Little Kids Will Listen (and all the other books in the series). Nothing to do with education, but incredibly helpful for greasing the wheels of communication and understanding. (Calmer Easier… is good but very long and wordy. I prefer the How To Talk books, which are much easier to take in for a tired parental brain.)

5. I tend to keep lessons short. For some of the learning, I sit in front of the blackboard on the floor, and the children sit on the sofa opposite. If we’re doing grammar or a new maths concept, it works for me to explain from the front in a traditional schoolteacher style, but I know I’ve got at most ten minutes before the children aren’t really engaged anymore. I ask lots of questions, so it’s not just me talking while the children sit and stare. (I’ve learnt that if I’m the one doing all the talking, the children will not be doing a corresponding amount of listening!) I often ask the children to come to the board, choose a chalk, and, for example, underline the noun, or do the sum. Charlotte Mason said the first lessons should only be 5-10 minutes, and less than twenty minutes before the age of eight. In school, a lesson might be about 40 minutes, but a skilful teacher will break that up: ten minutes listening, ten minutes working in pairs, 15 minutes working independently, and five minutes summing up at the end, perhaps.

   Conversely, sometimes the children will focus on an activity for an hour or more, even a challenging maths game. I am dubious about those tables showing how long children of different ages can concentrate. I have seen 5 year olds concentrate for hours, when it’s something they’re utterly absorbed in. And I have seen a five year old who after 5 minutes with a reading book is completely spent. Any further time spent forcing that child to continue working would be time wasted, and only result in frustration for both parties. Look at your child, not the clock.

6. When a subject is hard or the child is unwilling (or both), I make the lesson as small as possible. Let’s not spend ages on grammar this morning, let’s just identify the parts of speech in this one sentence, together. Let’s not do the whole page of the workbook, even if you normally do—let’s do one problem, on the blackboard, and talk about why we do all the steps involved. Let’s not move on to telling time to five minutes today, let’s just revise half and quarter past/to.

7. If a history book (or any other book) isn’t grabbing anyone, there’s no point doggedly pushing through it to the bitter end. Find a book that has the child begging you to read just one more chapter!

8. I think a child refusing to work is trying to tell you something. Are they telling you that they’re tired or hungry? That they don’t understand the work to the point of complete bewilderment? That you are expecting too much from someone so young? Sometimes, they’re telling you that they can’t really be bothered. It’s an important lesson to learn that we all still have to work even when we don’t feel like it. I don’t let my children off the hook every time they put up some resistance. Some learning, even with the best teacher and resources, is not super fun. Keep it short, keep the end in sight, plan together what you’ll do when it’s done as a break or a reward.

9. We take a lot of breaks. Some mornings we probably spend more time on breaks than on the actual work. I like to be able to say “Let’s look at these new Greek words for a few minutes, and then we can all take a break.” A few minutes is really all an 8 year old needs to revise new vocabulary, and it’s such a small task it’s really hardly worth the effort of refusing.

10. Rewards are tricky. You obviously don’t want to get into some kind of rewards arms race where you find yourself offering more and more in exchange for less and less. And I don’t want to teach my children that work is only valuable because of an external reward. Good work should be its own reward. I point out to them how good it feels to master something that last week you found really hard. In our family, we have a special tea when a child completes a workbook, and they get to choose the treat I’ll bake for tea. But this is intended as a celebration not a bribe, and workbooks take so long to work through that it’s not a regular occurrence. They’re also free to not do the workbook, and I don’t nag them with the promise of cake to get them to do it. We also offer money for poetry learnt (current rate: 10p per line of Shakespeare), but again, it’s up to them whether they want to earn the money or not. I wouldn’t want to offer bribes for maths, because they have to do the work whether they want to or not. It would feel more like compulsory purchase than a free exchange of goods!

11. Wherever possible, I give the children choice. The subjects are non-negotiable. But how we approach those subjects is absolutely up for discussion. If a child hates workbooks, as a homeschooler you have the freedom to focus instead on mental maths, or games. If the French story books aren’t working, you can try a YouTube channel, or Duolingo, or try out a local French class. Each morning the children give me their thoughts on what subjects they want to do first. (I’m not bound by their wishes, but I take them into account whenever possible.) Let them choose their own workbooks sometimes—if they don’t like their choice, it’s only a few pounds spent on the wrong resource. Having ownership helps. If it’s a nice day, ask the children if they’d rather work outside this morning. If it’s cold and miserable, maybe they’d like a blanket on the sofa. (Side note: we spend very, very little time actually sitting at the table. Most of the work takes place on the sofa, on the floor, or out and about. Learning is still learning even if it doesn’t take place at a desk.)

12. Ruthlessly prioritise. If my children are tired and whiny, what is the one thing I want them to do today above everything? This is also good for your own sanity, because it’s easy to feel bad when your child doesn’t work their way through every single subject every single day. By setting a very low bar for the day, you can all feel good about achieving it. On good days, you might even surpass it!

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