One of the best advantages of homeschooling is that it enables you to give your children an education that is tailored according to their needs, goals, and desires. As a homeschool CEO, this also gives you a unique opportunity to use your business to teach them skills that will be useful to them no matter what career they choose to pursue.
How then do you make your business a part of your homeschool life? Here’s how.
Identify skills you want your kids to learn.
The skills you choose will vary depending on your child’s age, preferences, and learning goals among others. After you have identified them, you then have to determine how you can use your business to teach them those skills.
For instance, you can teach your children about financial literacy by showing them how you manage your business finances. Budgeting, saving, and listing expenses are useful skills that everyone needs to learn.
Incorporate business activities into your lesson plan.
Once you’ve identified the skills needed, match them with specific aspects of your business then figure out how to incorporate them into your lessons. Be creative. You will be surprised to learn that you can incorporate these into many different subjects.
For example, you can teach marketing skills by showing them how you promote your products and services. Then, you can ask them to do their own take on these through art projects such as making posters, designing social media ads, and the like. For language arts, you can even have them write a marketing spiel.
Immerse them into your day-to-day business operations.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” That is so true. Let your children learn by doing. Instead of just telling your children how you manage your business, show them and let them help out in some way. The point is to give them actual real-life experiences on how to run a business.
Do you create products? Show them how they are made and let them try it themselves, assuming it’s safe for them to do so. Do you provide a service? Let them watch how you do it. Let them see how you interact with your staff and with your customers. If they’re old enough already, you can even turn this into a job opportunity for them.
Use your business to guide your children to start their own.
Chances are, your children’s exposure to your business will also inspire them to create their own. Let them! It’s an opportunity for them to be creative, think out-of-the-box and come up with new solutions for problems. It can be a simple lemonade stand. What matters is that it gives them the opportunity to put their learnings into practice.
Aside from the practical skills they will learn, entrepreneurship can also teach them leadership, perseverance, critical-thinking, courage, and decision-making among others. These will all serve them well even if they don’t turn out to be entrepreneurs in the future.
There are many different and fun ways to make your business a part of your homeschool. All it takes is a little creativity and imagination on your part.
