According to a recent Forbes article, more than 300 million children are all of a sudden being homeschooled because of the pandemic. There is a difference, however, between traditional homeschooling and virtual learning.

In a recent episode of MomsTown365, The Daily 10-Minute Podcast for Mom Creators, we talk with homeschooling expert Vanessa Wright. Vanessa is one of the leading writers for TheHomeschoolMom.com. We talk about the difference between homeschooling and virtual learning and Vanessa’s tips on deciding if homeschooling is the best choice for your family long term.

Q: Can you tell them a little bit about you and how you came to homeschooling?

A:  I have three kids. I have a son who’s 15, and then we have boy and girl twins who are 13. I never, ever expected to be home educating, ever! My sister-in-law and brother-in-law actually had started homeschooling their kids. And I was like, what is she doing? She’s crazy!

Then I happened to… it was 2009…I’ll never forget it…I went into a holistic moms network meeting …and I was in Northern Virginia at the time. I sat down at the meeting. I didn’t know anybody. The topic was homeschooling. I almost got up and left. But by the end of the meeting, I was raising my hand and asking a million questions. I went home and told my husband, okay, we’re going to homeschool our kids. He looked at me like I had six heads. We just kind of started from there. We haven’t really looked back.

Q:  With all that’s happened during the pandemic a lot of moms are being thrust into educating their kids from home, whether they like it or not. What, what do you see happening in homeschooling right now?

A:  I now have three teens that we are home educating and we’ve been talking about this for the past several months, making a distinction between home educating versus what we are calling pandemic schooling. I do differentiate because if you’re truly homeschooling you’re more in control of what your kid is learning and how you’re doing it.

Q: Do you have a lot of moms reaching out to you who are now in a virtual learning environment with their kids?

A: I have had a lot of people who have started out with virtual schooling through their public school and just said, you know what, this isn’t working. And so they pulled out of that and are now becoming true homeschoolers.

And we’re seeing a lot of people reaching out because, you know, especially if you’re pulling out a kid in middle school or high school, it can feel super overwhelming.

Q: What would you say are some of the greatest homeschooling pros and cons that you’ve encountered.

A: The pros are, I’m being dead serious when I say this, not having to pack lunches every day. Not that I don’t feed my kids lunch, but  it just wasn’t a rushed thing and we enjoy the freedom and flexibility of travel and going places and doing things. Also, two of my kids had some pretty major health issues. I could not imagine having to deal with that plus send them to school and then deal with the teachers and deal with the doctors and deal with the physical therapy. So having that flexibility for everybody’s emotional wellbeing has been truly a blessing.

Obviously there are also challenges. My house is never clean because there’s the dishes or there’s somebody always making food, eating food and that things are not always super clean all the time. I just actually wrote an article about homeschooling and the art of letting go.

Vanessa says not having a show palace is okay with her. To hear more of our conversation with Vanessa, visit MomsTown365.com and tune into episode #72

https://momstown-inc-25ead185.simplecast.com/episodes/vanessa-wright