Our homeschool would most likely be looked at as being on the “school at home side.” We loosely follow the local public school in terms of scheduled holidays (although we typically take more days off than they do!), we also use curriculum…and planners. These things are closely followed by the fact that we grade schoolwork. But in lieu of honesty concerning my personal homeschool mom guilt… <sigh> I have pretended to grade my child’s work, but didn’t actually grade it.

Homeschool Mom Guilt

Guilt, we all feel guilty or responsible for something in our lives, in terms of guilt, it is often something we feel we have fallen short with or done wrong. As homeschooling moms we have added pressure due to the fact that we are solely responsible for our children’s education. As if we weren’t already second guessing our potty training methods, or stroller choices, and at what age our children said their first word or learned to read, add in their entire education!

When it comes to homeschooling my children you will find a take a more school at home, curriculum based approach. Ultimately, I keep records, make schedules, I use planners, and yes, I even grade their work. I used to be so “by the book” that we HAD to finish every page, every lesson, every problem, in EVERY book! I couldn’t let go of anything, and it was stifling. It made me tense, angry, and sometimes downright mean. It took joy from the kids and I when the schedule drove everything. Talk about guilt! When I realized what it was doing to us, I knew I had to work to find some middle ground.

Pretending to Grade

I used to grade everything. Every subject, every project, every word corrected, red marked, and graded. It was oh so time consuming and super tedious for me.

Was it even necessary? NOPE, I don’t really think it was.

As time passed I grew weary, and realized not only that I couldn’t keep grading everything, but that I shouldn’t and didn’t need to. While I know many people do not use grades at all, it wasn’t something I felt I could totally throw out the window, so I found ways to in which I could modify what I was doing to take some of the stress off.

How did I begin grading less? I found curricula that was self grading like Teaching Textbooks, I stopped grading writing altogether and only went through and made corrections and adjustments without assigning a grade, and I started using the built in quizzes and tests in some of our curriculum as a measuring stick instead of grading every assignment and every lesson.

How do I pretend to grade? It’s not that I set out to do it, or even did it on purpose when it happened, it just sort of worked out that way. So this leads us to my youngest and our current school year. She is using one of my favorite grammar programs – Growing with Grammar. There are daily lessons to read with a front/back worksheet to do. Then there is a mid chapter test and a post chapter test. My plan was to use those tests to indicate if she had learned the concepts or not. The problem is I would actually have to grade them to know that! She turns them into me and asks me if I am going to grade them. I tell her I am, because I truly plan on doing so! But we are halfway through the year, I think there have been 8 tests, and I may have graded 2 or 3 of them.

The truth? The truth is that while I do feel guilty about not grading them, I do not doubt that she knows the concepts.  Why? Because she is great about asking questions and asking for help. If she is unsure she asks. I often think she over asks, almost as though she is not as confident in herself as she should be. She is smart. She reads the chapters, she does the work. So while I have told her I am grading them (and I do have good intentions), even if I never end up grading them it will be ok. She is thriving and learning. We work together, and that time is more well spent then on grading every page, problem, and test.

Homeschool Mom Guilt BINGO from iHN Bloggers

From time to time we all, as moms, feel a bit of guilt from time to time. This can be especially true when we are homeschooling our children. Life sometimes just gets in the way of a consistent homeschool schedule. Or, we take shortcuts in housework, or meal time in an attempt to keep up with school and it causes us some homeschool mom guilt.

We are right there with you in this regard. Even though we’re homeschool mom bloggers who write about the joys of homeschooling, the reality is we often feel the homeschool mom guilt. We’re all human and no one is perfect. So we’re keeping it real today by sharing a variety of ways that we feel homeschool mom guilt in this homeschool bingo game. Click on it and see what we mean!