As believers we are exhorted to be good stewards of our time and resources. Your local public library and/or the Christian school library associated with your home school group are excellent ways to be in God’s will when it comes to stewardship. Libraries offer internet access for research, computer learning games, books, magazines, reference materials, DVDs, CDs, tutoring, special monthly activities, and so much more.

In my four years as a Christian school Librarian, I was amazed to see how little the resources we offered were actually used. I would get so excited when acquiring new materials and my elation would diminish when the students did not respond with the same enthusiasm.

So, how can we get our children excited about the library and all the treasures awaiting discovery? Here are some ways to spark their interest:

1. Make the library a regularly planned part of your home school routine. Using the library should be something your home schoolers anticipate as an exciting part of their week. Schedule weekly trips to exchange reading materials, to develop research and study skills, to use the online resources, to provide volunteer services, to work on a unit study or project, and/or to participate in a weekly library calendar item.

2. Know your librarian. According to Creative Homeschooling: A Resource Guide for Smart Families, “A home school family’s best friend is a good librarian.” (p.208) The Guide goes on to recommend developing a working relationship with the local librarian so that your children feel comfortable asking questions. Librarians are experts in the field of information. It is a science to organize information in a way that is most understandable and accessible to the user.

3. Plan to give back. Libraries need volunteers for various duties including: shelving books, leading book discussions, straightening, assisting new computer users, and reading to young children. The library is a great place for home school families to serve side-by-side.

4. Periodicals. There are many publications we as home school families will not afford ourselves at home. The library has tons! Plan a monthly library trip to peruse the magazine rack or assign a report based on current events best found in the newspaper. There are a variety of newspapers and journals, daily, weekly, and monthly, that your students can use to develop their research skills.

5. A change of scenery. Home school can get monotonous at times. Children are dynamic creatures with many interests. When the schoolhouse is your living room or your dining room table, boredom can creep in if we are not careful. The library provides another environment both literally and, within books, fictionally. It is a great place to feed their minds and stimulate their education outside of the four walls of your home. In addition, books introduce us to people and places we’ve never known before.

Plan some time at your local library. It’s a guaranteed learning adventure!

Another major theme: You don’t have to teach. They just need to learn. You don’t necessarily have to teach ANYTHING in high school, you only have to make sure your children learn it. I didn’t know the answers to a lot of the math or science. You’d think I would because I’m a nurse, but it’s not true!  I completely lost it with math about a month into Algebra 2. Everyone loses it in high school math – everyone. But, again, it’s not our job to learn the stuff. We just have to make sure our student learns the stuff.

My kids did chemistry and physics completely on their own. They did Algebra 2, pre-calculus and calculus completely on their own. I only gave them the tests, and had to look up the answers. By the time we got to calculus, I didn’t even know what the symbols meant anymore. I only knew that the answer had to look like the answer in the book. I had one mom tell me her high school wasn’t working because she could no longer teach them writing.  She said “they are better writers than me – and I’m a professional.” I just had to point out to her that homeschooling appeared to be working because they WERE succeeding. Once you get into high school, writing is mostly about practice. Edit the papers for spelling and grammar, yes, but it’s mostly important to practice, practice, practice.

I couldn’t keep up with the books either. I have confessed before that I didn’t do “literature analysis” with my kids. I just asked them if they liked the book (to which they usually said “yes” and not much more.) They have grown up and done fabulously with the honors literature courses in college, so I know they weren’t damaged by my weaknesses. I couldn’t keep up with my kids reading either, but you know what? They were reading thousands of books for fun, and I didn’t stress out about reading those books ahead of them. So why did I stress out about reading their school books ahead of them? I don’t know! Consider public school for a moment. Would the teacher pre-read every book? No, just the one or two they used in a year. Would the teacher be able to help with writing more than you? No, likely it would be just grammar and spelling.

What about science? I didn’t help my kids at science at all, but my boys both got straight-As in college science after homeschooling, so I know that it worked. My concern with the comments that “Homeschooling isn’t working” is that people forget the alternative. Homeschooling may be hard (OK, it absolutely IS hard) but it is much more effective than a public or private school. It is the 1 to 1 tutoring, the mastery before moving on, the absolute love for the student that make homeschoolers succeed. None of those things are available at a public or private school. There are lots of resources for homeschoolers. Online courses, tutors, co-ops, video programs, and curricula for every learning style. You may need help, but that doesn’t mean that homeschooling isn’t working OR that putting your child into school is THE one and only answer to problems.

For most single parents the biggest problem is simply one of finance because their primary goal has to be to get out and earn a living to support both themselves and their children. Surprisingly enough however the real problem is often not money but time.

We tend to think of homeschooling as being a full-time job along the lines of eight hours a day five days a week but in reality it is far from that. To begin with the normal public school day in most counties is just six hours and this includes such things as lunch breaks, breaks between classes and a lot of time spent sitting around doing nothing of any real value, bringing the true ‘working’ day probably down to no more than about four hours.

But that’s not the end of it because you also need to figure in such things as weekends and school breaks, including the long summer holiday. Spread this out across the year and you will probably be amazed to find that your child is only studying for an average of about two hours a day.

Against this background it is easy to see that with the right time management it might well be possible to fit in both a job and homeschooling. You may still feel however that this is going to leave you with no time for anything else and feeling more than a little drained at the end of the day. Until you consider just what homeschooling entails.

The majority of homeschooling parents do not follow the tradition classroom teaching approach but center learning very much around the child and his or her strengths and weakness and likes and dislikes. And here we see one of the surprises for many homeschooling parents.

Children who are given the resources and guidance but otherwise left largely to pursue the subjects that they enjoy at their own pace will, in most cases, develop an enquiring mind and a love of learning which will allow them to study very effectively and very successfully on their own. They will of course need your help and you will have to check over the work and provide correction and on-going guidance, but this can often be done quite easily and quickly in the evening and at weekends. Above all, you will find that there is certainly no need to sit with the child while he or she is studying and the child can simply be left to get on with the necessary work.

If this seems a strange thing to say then believe me it’s quite true. Many studies have shown that home schooled children are on the whole extremely responsible and adopt a very mature attitude towards learning.

But that of course this not the end of the story because the other thing that you need to consider is the fact that you don’t have to tackle homeschooling on your own even if you are a single parent.

Many parents, single or otherwise, make use of tutoring services and, while this is a subject in itself and not something to get into in this article, tutoring services range widely from employing in-home tutors to using online Internet tutoring. Costs also vary widely but a tutor can often cost little more than day care and indeed can often be combined with day care.

Another option for many single parents is to elect to work at home. This could be as simple as running your own business out of your home or looking for a job that allows you to work at home. Many companies nowadays employ telesales or customer support staff who are able to do their job over the telephone from their own home. These options won’t suit everybody of course, but they are an option worth considering.

And how about running your own Internet business? If you are starting from scratch then building an online business is not perhaps as easy or as fast as many people would have you believe and is certainly something that needs research in terms of both the investment required and the time that it would take to get up and running. Nevertheless, there are many thousands of people making a part or full-time living online.

Homeschooling undoubtedly presents its own special problems for single parents but as you can see from just the few examples given here there are ways to overcome these difficulties. In some cases it may be just a simple matter of organizing your time while in others you may need to consider tutoring or getting together with other homeschooling parents in your area to pool your time and resources. Whatever your particular problem though you will find that there is almost always a solution which will allow you as a single parent to give your children the homeschooling education that will set them on the right path for their future success.