Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatulahi wa barakatuh,

 

May Allah reward you by trying to do the best you can for your children and trying to help them achieve their full potential. Homeschooling is a big responsibility as well as a big challenge. There are a few things you can do to try and make it easier on yourself and more successful for your boys, in sha Allah.

 

Join homeschooling support groups. There may be something local where you can actually meet with other homeschooling mums and arrange outings with all the children. If you don’t live near any, there are plenty online that you could join, even those that are specifically for Muslim families. You will also find plenty of resources to use in your home curriculum.

These groups will provide you with support from fellow home schoolers who will have gone through similar struggles as you. They may be able to advise based on their experiences, or at least give you advice or point you in the direction of someone who could help. Further to this, simply being part of such a group with like-minded people is often enough to provide the psychological comfort that you are in the company of similar people and that you are not the only one who has faced the struggles that you have.

• Regarding the use of YouTube, during study time, turn the internet off. This way they can’t access YouTube as a distraction. It may be that you need to get together and agree on a more structured timetable that they will study from a certain time to a certain time and when they are complete and have shown you their work then they can have free time and use YouTube. One of the most important things here is to involve them in this. Let them have a say in the times of study and agree on an amount of time they could watch YouTube. If they are part of the process they are more likely to stick to the rules themselves since they were the ones that helped to come up with them and agreed upon them. Beyond this, at the end of study time, if the condition is that they show you their days work, then you will also get the chance to provide ongoing feedback and keep up to date with where they’re as well as being sure that they have done what they are supposed to and understand it properly. If they don’t, then that will give you an idea of what to cover the following day.

 

• As with the above suggestion try and make the experience more engaging and fun for them by involving them in everything along the way. Have a dedicated space where they study and work together to decorate it in such a way that they will enjoy being there and not want to go off elsewhere and do other things. Make it an art project and involve different subjects in designing the area such as maths to measure certain areas and cut out things to fit the space, for example. Being a part of producing this will make it somewhere they like to be and somewhere that they can be proud that they achieved it. Likewise, involve them in deciding a schedule of what times they will study and what they will study when. You tell them what they need to learn and they can tell you in what order they want to learn it during the week. Then you can all sit together and draw up a schedule that you can out up in the room. This way they know what to expect each day and are more likely to comply and engage since they played a major part I the decision-making process. As part of this, you can also agree upon how they will spend their free time and for how long they can do so.

 

• Another benefit of taking this collaborative approach is that the boys will also be working together to help produce the schedule and decorate the study space. This will contribute to developing the skills of cooperation between them which may be less likely to result in them ending up in fights.

 

May Allah make it easy for you and reward your good intentions.