Elementary School Dropouts, Homeschooling Failures, and Moving Forward

Perhaps it won’t come as a surprise to learn that I had no plans to homeschool my children in the Chilean countryside this year. My kindergartner and 2nd grader started the school year in the U.S. back in September. The plan (oh how naive we were in 2019) was to give them a couple of months of K and 2nd in the U.S. before we moved, and then to start them over in the same grades after a summer break in Chile. We enrolled them at a school in Viña del Mar with the hopes that they would learn more Spanish, make new friends, and settle into a normal life in Chile.

After months of paperwork, planning, school supply lists and uniform purchases, our kids attended just one week of classes before everything shut down. And after just 4 months of settling into our new home and our new life abroad, we abandoned our apartment in the city in exchange for a cabin in the country to avoid the pandemic. Although our school transitioned to a distance learning model, our countryside internet could not support the demands of daily Zoom classes for two children on top of my husband’s internet-based work load. So it wasn’t a matter of choice, but a matter of circumstance that brought us to this point.

Considering I have zero experience in anything that would bestow me with the confidence or the skills necessary to be a homeschooling mom, it has come as no surprise to me that I am struggling with it. For the past few months we have been plodding along through some textbooks that I retrieved from the school, but I have failed to bring much to our little kitchen table other than an official start time and the privilege of chewing gum. Maybe if I had some time to plan ahead, or a curriculum to follow, or a bigger workspace, or Amazon Prime deliveries of books and art supplies to my door it would be different. Or maybe having a tumultuous year followed by a global pandemic is what has made this new challenge it feel so hard. I don’t know.

What I do know is that it’s time to put an end to this wild ride of a school year and think about moving forward. Here in Chile, mandatory quarantine is still in effect in several communes in our region and, as far as we can tell, schools will remain closed for the rest of the academic year that ends in December. That means we have another 5 months ahead of us followed by summer vacation without formal school learning. YIKES!

So, what’s the new plan? I’m still working on it, but here are some things I’m trying to accomplish in the second half of our year.

Incorporate learning in a less formal, self-guided way. As it turns out, the only thing I will be keeping from my previous model of homeschooling is the chewing gum. We have a lot of time on our hands, so there is no reason we need to complete a certain lesson at a certain time on a certain day. My plan for my older son is to give him a list of assignments at the beginning of the week that he can complete when he chooses. For my younger son who is still learning to read, I will attach his worksheets and activities to clipboards so he can see what needs to be done. I hope that giving them some freedom with the schedule will make our learning more relaxed and more enjoyable.

Embrace and exploit country life. Our cabin is a cozy 600 square feet. Fortunately, our “yard” is about 25 acres of wilderness, so we generally don’t notice the tight quarters indoors – except when we’re cramped around a small table trying to study. Some days we’ve taken our textbooks to the greenhouse, but I think for the time being we’ll be prioritizing nature walks, family hikes, bird watching and star gazing over school books. I’ve been learning about native plants from my in-laws and I’d like to do some nature journals with the kids.

Learn about things they don’t teach you in school. I’ve never considered homeschooling before, but in the two years that I’ve been sending my kids to school, the long hours have bothered me. My kids come home after a long day completely drained. Traditional school takes up so much of a young child’s time and energy that it can be difficult to find space for other important life lessons and personal growth. Now that we have the time, a few things I’d like to focus on with our children are: family values, family history, and developing a growth mindset.

I have already been working with the kids on chores and some cooking skills in the first half of the year and plan to continue building on those skills.

While I haven’t really found my groove in this new normal of homeschooling, there is comfort in knowing that the whole world will be learning differently this year and that whatever we end up doing will probably be just fine. And so far the kids like it just fine. They told me that they don’t want to go back to school, but I’m not really surprised by that!

So tell me, what will school look like for you in the fall? What does it look like for you currently if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere? Would you ever consider homeschooling?