As home educators, we work hard to provide our children with comprehensive, well-rounded educations. We read countless hours of curriculum reviews to choose the best one that aligns with our children’s learning styles and family beliefs. We search tirelessly for innovative and fun ways to make learning meaningful, engaging, and something besides just another worksheet. But one thing we may overlook is the importance of including community service in our homeschool. With so many other required subjects and already enough on our plate, it’s an easy something to forget!
Community service takes learning beyond the classroom (or kitchen table) and allows students to apply skills to real life situations. Students get a first-hand experience for the real world outside of their life at home. This is something that even the best homeschooling parent can’t teach well with a book, video, or worksheet.
So how exactly can including community service in your homeschool benefit your child (and you)? Here’s a list of ways:
1. Provide Real Life Experiences
“When am I ever going to need this in real life?”
We’ve all heard it before. And if you haven’t yet, you probably don’t haven’t homeschooled a middle-schooler yet! But it’s true! Many skills we teach our children are difficult to justify using beyond books and paper. Like diagramming sentences. Or long division, especially since we have these handy little tools called calculators.
Community service provides instances for your child to actually gain, use, and transfer skills as he or she engages in activities. If your child volunteers at the library, he will use important communication skills in order to work with librarians and assistants in his duties. If your child offers her services at the animal shelter, she will learn compassion, responsibility for life, and a great deal about various animals. Imagine the skills that your child can learn from volunteering with Habitat for Humanity! Sure, you can expose your child to these skills using a textbook with an accompanying video. But your child is much more likely to really learn them if he or she is given the opportunity to use them in a real-world context.
2. Produce Socialization Opportunities
Any homeschooling parent is keenly aware that their child needs socialization opportunities. Guess what? Community service provides just that! Socialization happens naturally through most community service projects, but especially if your child is involved in something that piques his or her interest. Homeschooled children need to know how to socialize with people of all ages (not just their peers). Community service gives them that opportunity. Community service also offers a chance for homeschool groups to gather and perform a function together. Perhaps your child or group can volunteer at a nursing home, clean up a section of a highway, or even help stuff envelopes for PETA.
3. Prepare Awesome College Applications
Community service experiences provide your child with a competitive edge when applying for college, trade school, or a job. Your child will be able to write fluently about his community service experiences and the skills and knowledge he gained. From short bullets for a resume to a longer essay over a specific experience, your child will have no shortage of experiences to pull from. His authentic community service experiences will set him apart from his peers. Colleges and employers will be impressed with the skills gained from his community service, along with his extraordinary home education!
4. Develop Interests
The wonderful thing about community service is that it pretty much is available for almost any interest out there. Any homeschooled student who wants to develop an interest further can use community service as a platform to do so. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a local nursing home was asking for pen pal letters. This would have been an excellent opportunity for any student interested in writing to hone in on this skill. Students interested in horses may contact a local equestrian farm to see if they have volunteer opportunities. Students interested in history might want to contact a local museum to inquire about community service. In my experience, most places will welcome community service or volunteer work as long as it doesn’t present a liability to the place of business.
5. Establish Work Habits
Sometimes, community service is less about “interests” and more about “work”. But that doesn’t make it less important or meaningful. Your child can still feel a sense of accomplishment from helping clean up the community. She can learn to organize by volunteering at Habitat for Humanity’s ReStores or Goodwill stores. Your child can be part of a larger effort by helping to beautify local parks, rivers, or public areas. All of these efforts are admittedly less fun but equally as important in community service. They will help your child understand the value of hard work and develop their own strong work ethics.
6. Allow for Networking Opportunities
Including community service in your homeschool may also have an unforeseen benefit for you–networking opportunities! If you attend the community service events with your child, you will have a chance to meet other adults. You never know what will come up in conversation! You may meet a new friend. Perhaps you will find a contractor to fix that leaky toilet. Maybe you’ll find someone who can get your child a more permanent gig, like a job, at the organization. You might just find a new recipe or get a new hack or idea for homeschooling. You might even enjoy engaging in the community service yourself (which is a great idea since children learn by their parents’ examples). Whatever you take back from the experience is something gained!
7. Reduce Shell Shock
Homeschooled children are sometimes more sheltered than their public schooled peers. And that’s ok….that’s probably one of the unadmitted reasons why I chose to homeschool in the first place! But we know we can’t shelter our children forever. By providing them with community service opportunities, we can slowly introduce them to the “ways of the world” in a controlled, safe environment.
For example, my child is young still. We are very blessed, and she has never gone without anything. She doesn’t know that hunger and poverty exist in this world. Instead of releasing her off to college to figure that out on her own (a little dramatic, I know), I plan on volunteering at at a local food bank or soup kitchen as part of our homeschool curriculum. This is one of the most authentic ways of teaching her that others are less fortunate than she is. It’s also a wonderful way to teach her how and why she should help people in less fortunate circumstances. We can read about poverty statistics and food insecurity all day, but until she sees it herself, I doubt it will really resonate!
A Few Final Thoughts
Homeschooling is flexible, unlike public schools, and allows you to be able to pursue community service opportunities during “normal” school hours. This opens up so many more opportunities for you and your child! As the teacher, you also have the power to decide how often you want to include community service in your homeschool. Once a week? Monthly? Per Unit or as the occasion arises? The choice is yours?
If you are looking for volunteer opportunities, may public entities have volunteer information on their websites. Places such as animal shelters, thrift stores, food banks, shelters, the YMCA, and libraries have a large demand for volunteers and regularly update their websites with opportunities. You can also check websites such as VolunteerMatch.org to search for events in your area. Finally, you may be surprised what a phone call will do! If you aren’t sure about volunteering at a local place (such as a fire station, for example), give them a call!
Now that you know how beneficial community service can be to your child, try including some opportunities into your curriculum. Your child will grow in ways you hadn’t expected! Your child will mature, become more confident, and learn skills that just aren’t able to be captured in a textbook or YouTube video. By providing your child these opportunities, you are giving him or her an even better home education. And that’s our goal!