Strategies to Incorporate More Rigor into Your Home Learning

Creating a rigorous homeschooling environment means providing your child with the intellectual stimulation and practical support they need to think and process on deeper levels. This kind of learning challenges your child mentally so they can engage with their learning beyond the superficial.

Here are some specific ways you can do it:

Understand What Your Child Already Knows

Before you can begin to deepen your child's knowledge, you have to know where they currently are with a subject.

What does this child already know about the topic? How well can they apply the foundations? What skills do they already possess? What more would they like to know and experience?

Use Curriculum Materials that Engage Your Child in Diverse Ways

Invest in curriculum resources that dive deep and challenge your child through diverse activities.

Look for materials that encourage critical thinking, transfer of knowledge, and problem-solving. Seek out lessons that look at problems from different perspectives and introduce the child to a variety of sources and voices. You can also try curricula that teaches topics through different disciplines, for example a literature-based science curriculum, or a project-based math unit.

Breaking Concepts Apart and Making Connections

Many times learning involves parts of a whole. By helping your child to break concepts down into their parts, and understand their progression, they can better analyze how ideas work together. This also leads to them recognizing and identifying similar parts and patterns in other subjects and topic areas later on.

Encourage Independent, DIY Projects

Give your child the chance to dive deep into subjects they love by encouraging independent projects of their own design. This could be anything from a science experiment, to a mini business, to writing a short story.

Through projects, children learn to apply knowledge and skills in new ways. They also learn first-hand about planning, management, and follow-through. Along the way you can have them document their learning and progress through project logs, journals, or even online apps.

Include Real-World Opportunities

Help your child see the relevance of what they're learning by connecting it to real-world situations. If they're learning about money, have them manage a budget. If they're studying plants, start a greenhouse. If they're diving into civil rights, help connect them to current changemakers in your local community.

Meaningful real-world experiences makes learning more engaging and can bring learning to life for your child.

Reflection, Reason and Debate

A great way to add rigor is to encourage your child to question, reflect, and argue what they are learning. At first, this can be done simply by asking questions like "why do you think this happened?", "what else could have been done?", "do you think it was right, why or why not?"

As your child gets used to questioning and reflecting, you can then begin to have them debate ideas by taking positions, researching, and trying to defend them. Activities like this encourage critical thinking and help intellectually stimulate the child.

Seek Out Expertise

Don't hesitate to bring in experts or take advantage of community resources. This could mean virtual meetings with professionals in a field of interest, attending workshops, signing up for that museum class, or asking your homeschool bestie to help you teach a subject they majored in.

Remember, adding more rigor to your home learning is not about the quantity of the work, but the quality of the educational pursuits. It's about moving beyond the basics and deepening uderstanding and thought.

It's also important to adequately support your child along the way and work with them to build the foundations they need to think critically and solve tough problems.