Maximizing Your Homeschool ROI

Posted by Jimmie | 0 comments

Have you ever considered your homeschool ROI? ROI means return on investment and is a term used in the fields of business and marketing. Although homeschooling is hardly a business venture, the idea of ROI can help us evaluate what we are doing and why.

The Return

Your return is your motive for homeschooling. Why did you choose this path in the first place? Whatever it is that you want to achieve through homeschooling is your return. It may be a combination of any of these benefits:

• Understanding (of a concept)
• Appreciation (of a field)
• Mastery (of skills)
• Character development

The Investment

Our investment into homeschooling is not small. We homeschool moms pour loads of resources into our children’s education:

• Time planning lessons
• Energy doing projects and cleaning up
• Money for books, crafts, and extracurricular classes
• Enthusiasm as we read and teach
• Prayers for God’s blessing

Maximizing the Return on Investment

Although we have lofty expectations for homeschool returns, what we have to invest is limited. Therefore it is essential to maximize our ROI with these six tips:

1. Know your children’s learning styles and personal preferences. Working with, rather than against, the strengths of each child will bring more results from your efforts. (A book I found exceptionally helpful for identifying learning styles is The Way They Learn by Cynthia Tobias.)

2. Spend more time doing than planning. The cliché “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail,” does ring true for homeschooling. However, there is a point at which planning becomes procrastination. Give up the ideal of a “perfect” curriculum and a “perfect” lesson. Doing less than perfect is better than doing nothing at all. Plan until your outline is good enough, and then work the plan.

3. Combine academic areas in your lessons. We all love a two-for-one deal at the grocery store. Make your own two-for-one homeschool deals by overlapping content areas. Mix math with poetry, art with history, writing with science, and music with reading. Kill two academic “birds” with one stone, so to speak.

4. Research curriculum choices thoroughly before you invest money. Buy used, borrow from the library, or make do with what you have rather than risk a costly mistake. Ask the curriculum company what its refund policy is before you lay down the debit card. And remember that expensive does not necessarily mean better.

5. Assess and evaluate. Ruthlessly ferret out busywork or cumbersome projects that do not lead to the return you desire. A project that looks fantastic on another mom’s blog may cause tears of frustration in your home. Decide if you are getting enough out of what you are putting in. Then make the changes you need to increase your ROI.

6. Keep praying. We have God’s promises that we will always have a full ROI with prayer (Matthew 7:7-11). Be persistent in prayer even when – especially when—all seems to be falling apart.

In your experience, what are high ROI homeschool activities? What have you purged because of poor ROI?

Jimmie is a former public school teacher turned homeschooling stay-at-home-mom. Her only child, Sprite, is a creative middle school student who loves the arts and living books. Jimmie uses a loosely Charlotte Mason approach with lots of notebooking and field trips. Visit her blogs Jimmie’s Collage and The Notebooking Fairy.