Minimalist Homeschool: How to Keep Things Simple

It’s really easy as a homeschool parent to get caught up in the trap of needing more things: more curriculum, more resources, more activities for your child, more experiences, more, more and more. Our culture tells us that if we give our kids more, then their education will be better. We hear our friends talk about the things that their kids are doing. And we think that to keep up with them, our kids need to do those activities too. But that’s not the truth. The truth is that sometimes less is more. And in homeschooling, this is the case. This concept is called minimalist homeschool. In this post, we’ll talk about why you might want to implement minimalist homeschooling. I’ll also share some strategies for how you can get started.

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What is Minimalism?

First, it’s important to understand what minimalism is, and what it is not.

Minimalism is not…

Minimalism is more than just getting rid of stuff. We’ve all heard about the KonMari technique. We’ve seen people that are just trying to get rid of all the things, or who are living in a tiny house with few belongings. But minimalism is a lot more than that.

Minimalism is also more than just decluttering. There is an aspect of decluttering that happens with minimalism, so it’s easy to get confused. But minimalism is about focusing intentionally on the things that are important.

Minimalism also is not just being lazy. It goes beyond just deciding you don’t want to do something. You are choosing very intentionally to do the things that are important to you.

Minimalism is…

Minimalism is more than just getting rid of the things that we don’t need. It’s intentionally choosing the things that we do need, and choosing to make them a priority. We focus on those things because they’re the most important.

Minimalism encourages us to look not only at our possessions but also at how we spend our time. Minimalism frees up both space in our home, and time in our schedule, to focus on the things that are important to us.

Why Minimalist Homeschooling?

It allows you to focus on what’s important.

One important reason for choosing minimalism in your homeschool is that it allows you a lot of time to focus on what’s most important. It allows you to think intentionally about your priorities for your child’s education, and to make sure that you have plenty of time to spend on those things.

It also allows you lots of time to spend on your relationships with your kids. If you aren’t running around from activity to activity, trying to do all the things, you will be able to spend more time with your child. This is a great benefit of homeschooling in the first place, and it’s also a reason to consider minimalism in your homeschool.  

It allows you to go deep into what matters.

Homeschool minimalism allows you to take a step back from the rat race. You can stop trying to do all of the activities, and instead, you can focus on the things that you think are important. This will allow you to prioritize the most important things with both your resources and your time. Your kids can take their studies to the next level when they have time to go deep on a specific topic.

It helps you let go of perfectionism.

Minimalism allows you to let go of perfectionism in your life. You don’t need to do all the things. Your child doesn’t need to finish every curriculum. You don’t even need to do every problem and answer every question. Instead, you can focus on only the important things. This process will allow you to let go of perfectionism and learn to trust yourself and your child more.

It helps you face the fear of not being enough.

As homeschool parents, it’s easy for us to fall into the trap of feeling like we’re not good enough. We think that if we don’t enroll our kids in all the extracurricular activities, teach all the subjects, and provide them with all the experiences, that we are doing them a disservice. We fear that we are not living up to the standard set by a traditional school. But that’s not the truth.

The truth is that, as homeschool parents, when we practice minimalism we are modeling for our kids how to make priorities. Our kids learn from our example about how to create balance in life. They see us choosing intentionally to focus on the things that matter. These skills are important for our kids to learn as well.

How to Implement Minimalist Homeschooling

Know Your Why

The first step and one of the most important is to start with your why. You need to know why it is that you’re homeschooling your child in the first place.

A lot of people know why it is that their kids are not in traditional school. There might be certain aspects of a traditional school education that they are choosing to avoid.

Your reason for homeschooling needs to be bigger than the things that you’re avoiding, however. You need to focus as well on the homeschooling advantages that you are gaining by homeschooling.

If you haven’t done this already, it’s important to spend some time thinking about your why. Knowing your why will also help you find motivation when your homeschool journey gets difficult.

Start with a Blank Slate

When choosing minimalism in your homeschool it’s important to start with a blank slate. You don’t want to make any assumptions about what is going to be part of your homeschool day.

Instead, take some time to think about each activity that you’re doing. Before choosing subjects for homeschool, pray about whether that activity is a priority for you and your family.

As you start to discover your priorities, you’ll be able to focus more and more on them. You can then eliminate the rest of the things that aren’t important.

Minimalist Homeschool Resources

Evaluate Your Stuff

The next step is to take a look at your homeschool room, and any homeschool-related possessions you have.

It’s important to keep in mind that every home has limited storage space. It helps to limit the amount of homeschool-related stuff that you have. This means limiting the amount of curriculum that you buy, as well as the number of school supplies and extra materials.

The good news for minimalist homeschoolers is that there are some easy and practical ways to limit our stuff.

Use Common Household Items

The first thing you can do to limit your stuff is to use common household items instead of purchasing specialized homeschool supplies. Often, with a little creativity, items you already have in your house will work just as well as supplies you would need to purchase.

One area that new homeschool moms often struggle with is math manipulatives. It can be helpful to purchase a few specific math manipulatives that can be reused over and over again.

For the rest of your math lessons, choose manipulatives that you have around the house instead. For example, using your child’s small toys as counters is one way that you can avoid having to purchase specific items just for math.

You can also look at your curriculum choices with a minimalist approach in mind. Will your science lessons require lots of specialized equipment, or can you use items from around the house in the experiments? Will your reading curriculum require a huge book selection you can’t find at the local library? If so, it might be worth it to consider a different curriculum.

Borrow Instead of Buying

It also helps to borrow homeschool items instead of buying as much as possible.

The library is a homeschooler’s best friend. You can usually find lots of reading books at the library, but many libraries have homeschool curriculum sections available as well. Last school year we were able to find a supplemental book to practice addition facts from the library. Because I was able to use the library’s copy, I never had to buy my own copy.

Many libraries also offer inter-library loans. If your library doesn’t have the resources that you need, you can ask your library to get the resources from another library. This will increase the options that you have available to you.

Local friends who homeschool are also a great resource for borrowing things. You may be able to find a family that has children that are different ages than yours that you can share curriculum and resources with. This is another way to help limit the amount of curriculum that you need to purchase.

Use Digital Resources

A great way to access good books and curricula with less clutter is to take advantage of online resources. Online courses like Schoolhouse Teachers allow kids to learn with digital books. YouTube channels and streaming services like Amazon Prime are a great supplement to homeschool lessons.

Avoid Comparison

It’s important when you’re looking at your homeschool room and materials not to compare yourself to others. Every homeschooler’s space and materials are going to look different, and that is okay. Just because you have a friend that has a beautiful home environment doesn’t mean that you need to have a beautiful homeschool room as well to give your kids a quality education. It’s easy to get sucked into the comparison trap but it’s important to remember that it is just a trap.

Evaluate Your Time

Minimalism in homeschooling goes beyond just the materials that we choose. When we’re adopting a minimalist homeschooling approach, it’s important that we also look at how we spend our time. Time is one of our most precious resources and how we spend our time is a better indicator of whether we have a minimalist approach than how we use our resources and how we spend our money. A minimalist lifestyle means being intentional with our daily routines.

Be Intentional with Subjects

In a minimalist homeschool approach, we must be very intentional with how we choose to spend our time. We want to make sure that we are thinking about which subjects are the most important ones to cover.

After we decide what we want our kids to know, we can allocate our time to focus on those most important things. We need to choose our subjects, and our activities, intentionally in our homeschool.

Don’t Compare with Traditional School

It’s important not to fall into the trap of doing things just because a traditional school does it that way. We want to be intentional about what we are doing and how we are doing it.

Limit Extracurricular Activities

It’s also important to make sure that you limit the number of activities that your child is involved in, especially those activities that occur outside of the home. There are many benefits to extracurricular activities, but it can be easy to choose to participate in way too many of them.

Choosing too many extracurricular activities can cause us to be run ragged and not have time to be able to spend on the most important things. Instead, choose just one or two activities that are important to your child, and focus your time and energy on those activities. This gives kids an opportunity to explore their own interests at a deeper level.

Keep the Schedule Simple

Less is more, and it is important to keep your homeschool schedule simple. Where possible, try to combine homeschool subjects, so that more than one child is learning the same subject together. This will limit the number of lessons that you have in your homeschool schedule.

It can also be helpful to limit the number of subjects that you study at one time and to keep the schedule consistent from day to day.

One of the best things you can do to simplify your schedule is to limit the number of field trips you take. Although a field trip can be a fantastic learning opportunity, be intentional to choose the trips that will enhance your child’s education. This is a great way to prevent overwhelm, and less stress will help you stay focused in your homeschool.

Include Unstructured Time

Keeping the schedule simple will allow your kids to have more unstructured time and more outdoor time, and both of those things are important. Kids learn a lot from unstructured playtime and from spending time outdoors. It’s important that we save enough time in our schedule that our kids will have time to spend in unstructured play.

Embrace Minimalism in Homeschool Planning

It’s also important as homeschool parents that we choose minimalism for ourselves. We can apply the concepts of minimalism to homeschool planning, choosing curriculum, and lesson planning.

As parents, we should consider our own time each week. We should make sure that we are choosing a curriculum and lessons that are easy to plan. We can make lesson planning as simple as possible as well.

Often my lesson plan is just a sticky note on the front of the book with the page numbers I want us to work on or the activities I want us to do. It’s important to keep homeschool lesson plans simple, and not to spend too much time over-thinking the process of lesson planning.

If you are spending a lot of time lesson planning every week, you can look at the curriculum choices that you’ve made and decide if your family might benefit from choosing a curriculum that is easier to plan.

Beware Perfectionism

It’s very easy to get caught in the trap that we think that we must finish everything that we start. We might choose the wrong curriculum for our family, but then decide that we need to finish it, or else we will have failed as a homeschool parent. The truth is that’s not the case.

It’s okay at any point to stop what we’re doing to evaluate, recognize that what we’re doing isn’t working, and choose something different. That’s not a sign of failure. It’s a sign of strength. As minimalist homeschoolers, we learn to make those kinds of determinations and to evaluate critically in our homeschool.

Trust

It’s also important to trust yourself and to trust your kids. Your kids will learn what they need to know. You will be able to teach them. Have trust and faith in the process of homeschooling. Remember that your kids don’t need to learn everything that they need to know today. You have the entire rest of their childhood to teach them. For now, just focus on the important things.