Guest Writer

If you are considering homeschooling, you are definitely not alone. Homeschooling is on the rise. In 1999, fewer than one million U.S. students were homeschooled, and in 2016 the number was still just over 1.5 million. No surprise, after 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, the ranks of homeschool students have swelled to over 5 million. So perhaps you wonder if homeschooling really is good for students, and if bringing your kids home to learn is a good idea for your family.

“Is homeschooling better?” is a great question, though its answers may be more complex than you first think. Better than public or private school? This decision deserves thoughtful consideration, and we can help weigh out the case for each. The crucial question is, Is homeschooling better for your family, and why? By prayerfully looking at the pros and cons of homeschooling and answering some common concerns that parents have, you can come to a confident decision regarding homeschooling.

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Success is defined in many ways—from a favorable outcome to the attainment of wealth and prestige. It can simply mean the accomplishment of your goals. So, for many homeschool families, measuring homeschool success can look different from family to family. For some families, measuring your success may simply be based on setting appropriate homeschool goals. For others, it may mean setting up a student with a complete homeschool transcript, a progress tracker that reflects good grades on homeschool testing and completion, or even doing well on standardized testing. When you’re determining how to measure homeschool success for your family, you’ll need to consider what your goals are and how you will measure whether you’ve achieved them. How can you declare homeschooling a success when it is all done? What key performance indicators will you measure?

Learn about homeschool testing

Thinking back to when I chose a curriculum for homeschooling language arts from a biblical worldview, I remember what I wanted my three young sons to learn most of all. Nothing was more important than them knowing the truth of the Bible—that God loves them, and that the greatest joy and purpose in life come from living in relationship with the God of the universe.

Of course teaching my boys these truths began way before the days of homeschooling. My husband and I began sharing a biblical worldview with our boys at home as we read our Bibles, prayed at bedtimes, explored the world God made, and celebrated holidays. Our church supported us as the kids learned in Sunday school, vacation Bible school, and worship. When the time came for the kids to begin school, my husband and I knew we wanted a homeschool curriculum that also supported our faith values. Since language is how humans learn all things, making sure our language arts curriculum was built on a biblical worldview was a priority.

Learn about language arts with a biblical worldview

One of the greatest blessings of homeschooling is being able to make the Bible the foundation of our children’s education. Not only do we have the privilege of teaching our children God’s Word, we also get to teach every other subject through the lens of scripture. We can ensure our children are receiving an education taught from God’s perspective, not the world’s. The more they learn the Bible, the more they will be equipped to recognize, resist, and refute the lies of the world and Satan. It’s an enormous responsibility, one that can seem daunting in light of all the Bible curriculums, Bible studies, and devotionals out there. To help you choose for your homeschool, we’ve researched, compared, and contrasted different methods and resources. The main criteria is making sure that any resource you use lines up with scripture and doesn’t add to or take away from God’s Word.  

Learn about Homeschool Bible Programs

I will never forget when my sixth grade math teacher presented the class with the largest multiplication problem we had ever encountered. He gave us a huge sheet of paper and asked us to multiply 123,456,789 by itself. We had a week to work on it at specific times of each day, and the first person in the class to finish correctly would win a prize. This was the perfect exercise to finish our year. Math for 6th grade homeschoolers should take all the basic operations students have learned in elementary school and apply them to larger numbers, fractions, decimals, and even negative numbers. Sixth grade is a year of transition from elementary to middle school. As such, it is a pivotal year for mastering basic math facts and starting to apply them to algebra, geometry, statistics, and even some physics.

Learn what 6th graders learn in math