Military families must adapt to frequent relocations and unpredictable schedules. These circumstances might force you to uproot your child and enroll them in a new school partway through the year, causing an awkward adjustment period.
Homeschooling is ideal for military families. It frees you to provide your child with a consistently high-quality education that fits your lifestyle, no matter where your orders send you.
This flexibility is one of the many reasons homeschooling is gaining popularity. It’s much easier to create the ideal homeschooling environment when you do your research and identify the perfect platform.
What Educational Challenges Do Military Families Face?
Relocating every couple of years is disruptive. Just as you settle into a new environment, it’s time to move again. Having loved ones deployed in unstable regions can also cause uncertainty. Military families must deal with several educational hurdles.
- Gaps in education: Military students can miss parts of the curriculum when transferring schools midway through the year. While these educational gaps may initially go unnoticed, they could crop up as your child moves on to other material.
- Lack of social connection: Frequent relocations might prevent military children from making lasting connections with their peers. However, in today’s connected world, they can stay in touch with close friends online.
- Constant adjustments: Every time a child moves to a new school, they must adjust to a different curriculum and teaching methods. They may spend more time learning another way of doing things than understanding the course material. Over time, these changes could erode their learning foundation.
Homeschooling through a supportive platform helps you overcome these obstacles by providing the stability and consistency brick-and-mortar schools lack.
Homeschooling Is Ideal for Military Families
Homeschooling offers significant advantages for many families, as its structure supports a demanding lifestyle.
- Stability in the face of change: Frequent relocation is part of the experience of serving our country. Years ago, every move meant adapting to new school schedules. Children would repeat work they had already covered or try to catch up quickly to classes where they were behind. Today, homeschooling bridges that gap and provides stability through consistent education. It allows military students to avoid missing valuable information and learn at their preferred pace, boosting their confidence.
- Individual focus: Homeschooling removes much anxiety about failure or achievement by encouraging your child to focus on learning. Children in military families already experience additional pressure. Homeschooling eliminates the competition and comparison to others. Their social time is separate from their academics, allowing them to make meaningful connections regardless of location.
- Scheduling flexibility: Military families’ responsibilities often clash with a traditional school schedule. Homeschooling allows you to suit a structure to your current environment. You can adjust based on your service member’s availability and even take a break when they’re home from deployment to focus on family time.
- Integration of new experiences: When you move, homeschooling allows your child to benefit from each fresh environment. You can adapt their lessons, plan field trips and take advantage of exposure to new cultures.
Children in military families learn to be resilient and quickly acclimatize to changing circumstances, allowing them to adapt to learning at home. Homeschooling also supports stronger family bonds through shared learning experiences.
Why Is Power Homeschool the Best Homeschool Program for Military Families?
As a leading online homeschooling platform, Power Homeschool empowers parents from all walks of life. We understand homeschooling for military families requires a different approach. Our Acellus® courses are ideal for families with needs outside the traditional school system.
Here are some of Power Homeschool’s military benefits.
Flexibility and Consistency
Power Homeschool’s robust platform means your child can learn anytime and anywhere with an internet connection. Even if your family deals with frequent relocations or deployments, you can rest assured that your child’s learning will be reliable and systematic. Your schedule is entirely up to you, and you can change it depending on your circumstances.
Your child also has the advantage of progressing at their pace. Instead of having to restart at every new location, they can stay consistent in their learning. Our homeschooling platform minimizes disruption. We also offer a standardized curriculum, maintaining continuity in education no matter where you move.
Family Support
At Power Homeschool, we offer comprehensive support for students and their families. We offer hundreds of professionally filmed Acellus® courses that allow students to self-pace their education. We incorporate these educational resources with innovative technology to support you and your child from wherever you are.
- Prism Diagnostics® identifies specific challenges your child might have in understanding core concepts and responds immediately with customized instructional videos. It’s like having a personal at-home tutor who delivers bespoke instruction when your child needs it the most.
- Vectored Instruction™ is a particularly powerful tool for students from military families. It fills in the gaps, enabling young learners to master foundational skills they might have missed. These skills are often prerequisites to success in their current course of study. Vectored Instruction™ bridges these gaps while keeping students within their credit-level course, enabling them to complete their coursework with flying colors and get on track for graduation.
The Acellus Learning System® automates grading and reports so you can focus on bonding with your child. We also understand the challenges of homeschooling as a military family, so we offer a robust collection of parent support resources to simplify the experience. You may encounter different state homeschooling regulations as you move around the country. Our comprehensive overview of homeschooling by state simplifies the differences, keeping you on an even keel as you move.
Comprehensive Curriculum
As a military family, finding a curriculum that suits your child’s needs can be challenging. Power Homeschool removes that challenge, offering hundreds of Acellus® courses beyond core subjects. You can design a flexible schedule that suits your military lifestyle and create a school day that aligns with your child’s focus hours and extracurricular commitments.
Alongside robust courses in core subjects, you can choose from world languages, music, art and science, technology, engineering and math courses to ensure your child has the opportunity to excel in their areas of interest. Our courses suit every learning style, providing an engaging and personalized learning environment.
Engaging Learning Materials
Concentrating in ever-changing surroundings can be challenging for children. Power Homeschool keeps students engaged in their learning with professionally filmed video courses taught by experts in their fields, allowing students to pause and replay them as often as needed.
After the video lesson, your child can work through the provided practice problems. They can move on to the next lesson after mastering the core concept. If they find the material challenging, they can access more support resources and videos to ensure they fully understand it before moving on.
Students have a personalized, user-friendly dashboard. They select classes from the dashboard, and the system returns them to where they left off. When they complete a unit, they undergo a review during which they can study past videos and help resources. From there, they progress to an exam.
Tips and Tricks for Homeschooling Military Families
While homeschooling is an excellent way to connect with your children, it also makes you responsible for providing a high-quality education. Use these tips to maximize your military homeschooling experience.
Find Social Opportunities
As homeschooling is a popular choice for military families, many homeschool support groups exist nationwide. Military bases also offer military homeschool groups. Consider local groups, extracurricular activities and volunteer opportunities that allow your child to make friends. The Department of Defense Education Activity also offers auxiliary services to eligible homeschooled children, including band participation, sports and library use.
Lean on Power Homeschool
Parents who homeschool don’t need to be experts in every subject. Instead, you can rely on Power Homeschool to fill in the gaps. We provide comprehensive Acellus® courses from K through 12. Trust the professionals to teach your child unfamiliar concepts so you can focus on giving them what they need to thrive.
Create a Positive and Organized Learning Environment
Moving can disrupt your family, and a cluttered learning space might affect their ability to engage with their course material. No matter how often you relocate, try to maintain a sense of order in the learning space. Wherever possible, create a dedicated learning area for your child and keep it organized.
Understand Your Child’s Learning Style
Your child processes and retains information in one of four primary learning styles.
- Visual: Visual learners understand information best when it’s in graphic format. They respond to charts, diagrams, colors and symbols. They work better with images than words, so use pictures to show them the relationships between concepts.
- Auditory: Auditory learners respond best to sound — lectures, conversations and music. They work well in collaborative environments, so joining study groups in the area can help them process information. They also benefit from revisiting recorded coursework.
- Reading and writing: Reading and writing learners excel with the written word. They love worksheets, books and other text-heavy resources. They often take excellent notes and read in their leisure time. Create a quiet learning environment where your child can focus on the written word without distraction.
- Kinesthetic: These learners often learn best by doing. They are physically active and learn with all their senses. They understand concepts better when they can try things for themselves. Integrate practice and simulations into your child’s learning environment for best results.
Go With the Flow
Being part of a military family means your situation can change quickly. One of the many benefits of homeschooling is that you can respond to these events without undue stress. The focus is on learning and relearning if needed, and if a move interrupts your routine, allow yourself time to decompress.
Immerse Yourself in the Local Culture
Welcome every move as a learning opportunity for your family. Once you’ve settled into your new home and routine, research local excursions and field trips to give your child real-life examples of the area’s history, culture and unique traditions. Military families often get to see more of the world, so taking advantage of your travels makes sense.
Connect With Your Community
Getting involved in your new community after a move takes courage, but getting out there is worth it for you and your children. The locals are a priceless connection point, and they’re often willing to share helpful information and support military families. You and your children can connect with your community in several ways.
- Join local military homeschool groups: If there are active homeschool networks in your area, joining these groups can benefit you and your child. They get to collaborate and socialize while you meet fellow military parents experiencing similar challenges.
- Participate in events: Attending local events is an excellent way to familiarize your child with their new home. Find out about local festivals, fairs and educational workshops. These events enrich your child’s learning experience and allow them to meet peers in a fun, casual environment.
- Volunteer as a family: Family volunteering opportunities connect you with your new community and teach valuable lessons in empathy and responsibility.
- Visit local libraries and museums: Many libraries offer educational programs, and museums may have child-friendly workshops. Both institutions provide excellent supplemental learning opportunities specific to your location.
Explore Power Homeschool as a High-Quality Option for Military Family Homeschool
Military families need reliable, flexible educational solutions that align with their lives. Power Homeschool provides that solution. As a leading online homeschooling platform, Power Homeschool gives you the flexibility to choose from hundreds of Acellus® courses your child can complete at their preferred pace and on the schedule that best suits your military lifestyle.
We understand every child requires a tailored approach to get the most from their education. Each of our engaging Acellus® courses enriches their learning, giving your student an excellent experience from anywhere in the world. Combined with cutting-edge technology and comprehensive support resources, these professional courses can streamline your homeschooling — the perfect complement to military life.
Feel free to browse our Acellus® courses to learn more about Power Homeschool’s offerings. If you’re ready to start, enroll with Power Homeschool and get all the support your military family needs today!
