By Guest Author Pamela McVeagh-Lally, MSEd

As the number of homeschooling families continues to grow in the U.S. and across the world, many home educators are eager for resources to incorporate essential life skills into their curriculum. On homeschooling pages I follow on social media, I see almost daily requests for support teaching emotion management, agency, social awareness, compassion, resilience, ethical decision-making and many other capacities, demonstrating how valued these competencies are across all kinds of teaching and learning environments. 

As both a public school and homeschooling parent, as well as an education professional, I know research-based practices designed for traditional classrooms can be adapted and made accessible to parents and caregivers who are home-educating students, but resources are often few and far between. One of the challenges homeschoolers experience is that most evidence-based curricula that teach these skills are designed for a classroom of students (not just one or a few) and involve many larger group activities. For those of us who live in areas without access to an in-person homeschooling community or co-op where our children learn with other families, adaptation of this type of curriculum can be tricky. (Hello, curriculum developer friends?! This is an opportunity for you!).

Intentionally Teach the Essentials

Most homeschooling parents are, of course, supporting their children’s growth as well-regulated, compassionate, and responsible humans without a specific curriculum or other educational tool. Some educators, home or otherwise, consider this kind of learning to be the “hidden” curriculum, that is not overtly taught, but modeled and implicitly learned through watching and interacting with others. 

I completely agree that children develop socially, emotionally, and ethically in these ways. How we, as parents and teachers, handle stress, respond when something goes wrong, take action when someone in our community needs help, or show gratitude, deeply informs how our children will behave when faced with the same challenges and opportunities. 

At the same time, we know from decades of rigorous research evidence that in addition to modeling these competencies, intentionally creating supportive, nurturing environments, direct skills instruction, and integration into academic content, leads to even stronger skills. It can sound complicated and overwhelming, but I’ve found starting with a few basics and then layering in practices that work for us has helped to cultivate these capacities in a variety of ways over time. 

What follows are some of the concepts, practices, and resources I’ve found helpful over the last six years as a homeschooling parent dedicated to fostering essential skills with my children. I encourage every family to adapt and customize to fit their children’s needs and their family’s learning goals whether they’re homeschooling or not. Our family includes two academically precocious students, one of whom is twice exceptional, so we’re frequently gauging what seems to be working and what doesn’t and adjusting our approach, particularly as they’ve grown into a tween and a teen. 

Start With the Big Picture

For us, the foundation of meaningful learning rests on cultivating an environment of joy, curiosity, and connectedness. At the start of each school year, or as needed, we ask: how can we learn together in a way that makes us feel whole, healthy, and happy? I think of it as our touchstone question, guiding decisions about the best and highest use of our time and resources. 

When I first started homeschooling, I read Julie Bogart’s, The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life, and found myself circling, highlighting and adding tabs to almost every other page. Though I could share many quotes from this inspiring book that are representative of my own philosophy, this one sums it up: “Because people are innately social and in search of meaning, our relationships and emotions–not rote memory of the right textbooks–are key to learning. In other words, when your child feels connected and happy, your child is learning the most” (p. 22). 

I encourage anyone who is a new homeschooler, or a veteran seeking inspiration, to read her book to help you ask the right questions to clarify your own big picture or philosophy. If you don’t have time for her whole book right now, this 2023 talk by Bogart is another option. 

Shared Expectations Builds Connection

A foundational tool we use to provide the opportunity to name the kind of homeschooling experience we want to have and how we plan on having it is a set of family agreements. We’ve adapted this family charter created by Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence to inform our approach. Having a co-created set of agreements to refer back to has been helpful to reinforce that we’re in this together. 

Importantly, our charter is not a list of “rules” or an adult-driven “contract” with our children. It’s also not used for punitive purposes, but to gently hold ourselves and each other accountable. In our society, where schools and parenting are so often focused on threats, compliance, and consequences, co-owning shared expectations and nurturing your children’s agency and intrinsic motivation can feel counter-cultural (and that’s ok!). This short article by Cecilia Hilkey on the common pitfalls of creating agreements with your children is a quick and helpful read on the topic.

Morning meetings, where we check-in and each member of our family takes a turn to plan and lead a short activity, are excellent opportunities to intentionally revisit our agreements and reflect..

Leverage Emotions for Learning

One of the biggest myths in education is that emotions can be “left out” of learning–as if students could somehow learn more efficiently in a vacuum of feeling. But this notion flies in the face of everything we know about how learning actually happens. Mary Helen Immordino‑Yang, a neuroscientist and human development expert at University of Southern California, has shown through her research that emotions are not the opposite of reason, rather they are its foundation. Her work explores how students’ emotional states and social relationships deeply affect their ability to process information, retain knowledge, and apply skills in real-world contexts. Her studies show that meaningful learning happens when children care about what they’re learning, who they’re learning from, and when it’s connected to their lives, their relationships, and their sense of self. In fact, the parts of the brain involved in emotion and social interaction are the same ones activated during complex reasoning and decision-making. That means trying to “keep emotions out of things” doesn’t lead to better learning, it actually undermines it.

Practically, identifying an emotionally engaging angle in every lesson isn’t possible and can sometimes come across as gimmicky, and that isn’t what is being proposed. But always inviting curiosity about topics, finding relevance and connections to your children’s own lives, and taking time to make meaning out of what they’re learning, can be good places to start. 

Cultivate A Safe Place

Building on those insights, emotional safety is a key element of creating an environment conducive to essential skill building. By designating what we call a “peace corner,” where your children can choose to regulate their emotions or just take a break, reinforces that all emotions are welcome and can be managed. Design this simple space in partnership with your children, and consider including soft seating like a bean bag, and developmentally-appropriate calming activities like drawing, reading, or mindful breathing guidance. 

The space doesn’t need to be elaborate or expensive. Household items can easily be used. In our peace corner we have sensory items like fidgets, lego, a hoberman sphere, and a finger labyrinth, along with beloved books, and small posters with calming images. Regularly using this space helps children recognize when they feel overwhelmed and allows them to practice re-centering themselves independently. Whether for younger children or teens, the focus remains the same: fostering awareness, reflection, and healthy emotion management in a supportive way.  

Provide Direct Instruction 

For most of us, raising children is generally an exercise in humility, particularly when it comes to teaching them skills that we might struggle with ourselves! Teachable moments occur every day that allow us to provide direct instruction in essential skills as they’re needed, but proactively teaching core strategies as part of our homeschool curriculum before the need to use them arises when we’re all calm and regulated makes it more likely those strategies will be applied. Greater Good in Education’s website has a repository of hundreds of lessons that teach essential skills, which are searchable by key word, age, and duration, many of which are adaptable to a homeschool setting. I find the core lessons we repeat in increasingly sophisticated ways center around naming, managing, and harnessing emotions to support well-being and learning.  

The power to name the emotions we’re experiencing with specificity, what researchers call emotional granularity, contributes to our ability to regulate or manage those emotions. As psychiatrist Dan Siegel states: you’ve got to name it to tame it! By building an emotional vocabulary, children can identify that they might feel “frustrated and disappointed,” that the Chemistry experiment didn’t turn out as hoped, not simply “mad,” allowing richer conversations about simply honoring those feelings or using strategies to shift the mood.

Emotion regulation strategies include not only stress reduction and calming practices, like mindful breathing but also positive self-talk, and reframing. We also work on recognizing when we need to “upregulate,” which is a term for getting energized when feeling sluggish or unfocused. Engaging in brief exercises like jumping jacks, or taking a short walk, as well as drinking ice water or even chewing gum can help. For my twice-exceptional teen, executive functioning is something we’re continuously working on. Building cognitive capacities like organization, planning, time management, and working memory, rely heavily on strong underlying emotion management skills and the instruction my teen has experienced has laid the foundation for the demands of high school.

Perspective-taking is the gateway to humility, empathy, and compassion. Given the complex and fractured world we’re living in, it’s heartening to see so many families redoubling efforts to raise and educate children to be open, curious learners, able to collaborate across lines of difference, hold competing ideas, and see beyond their own experiences and opinions. Learning to advocate for ourselves and others and bounce back when our changemaking efforts don’t succeed the first time (or the tenth!) are incredibly important agency and resilience skills and the best way to learn is to do. Helping your students identify a project or issue that is important to them and working to make productive change transforms learning from something they complete into something they believe in and shows them their voice has the power to shape the world around them. 

Integrate Skill-building into Academic Instruction

Something that most home educators already know is that every lesson and subject offers an opportunity to be intentional about fostering essential skills. The first step to becoming more intentional about this is to design or refine lessons to utilize teaching practices that identify and build those skills. This simple resource adapted from a CASEL tool, provides seven strategies to be more intentional about building capacities and this resource also developed by CASEL provides sample teaching activities to promote competencies like social awareness, self-awareness, self-management, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. 

Integrating essential skills development into different academic subject areas looks different depending on the subject and your children’s age. Social studies subjects like history provide ample opportunities to discuss ethical or unethical decision-making by historical figures and build compassion for those different from ourselves. English can invite questions about characters’ thoughts and feelings, encouraging perspective-taking and empathy. Through science we can cultivate critical thinking, and awe. My colleague and friend, Lybroan James reminds us “math is emotional” asking questions like “what influences your opinions and beliefs about math?” By addressing both the intellectual and emotional impacts of math, it becomes an opportunity to develop productive mindsets about challenging subjects and who gets to call themselves a mathematician (everyone who does math!). My experience is that once you’re actively looking for the emotional and social development opportunities you’ll start to see them embedded everywhere.

Closing Thought

At the end of the day, many of us homeschool specifically because we’re deeply dedicated to raising whole, healthy children who will be happy, fulfilled, empowered adults and feel the best way to do that in our context is for them to learn at home. While all of the ideas put forth in this article may be worth exploring, cultivating essential skills in more intentional ways doesn’t always mean adding a lot of new activities. Sometimes it simply requires reflecting together with your children about how you’re already cultivating an emotionally supportive environment and naming the skills that are being practiced every day. Once you’ve identified what’s going well and what capacities are being nurtured, you can fill in any gaps and shore up any areas in need of support. I like to think of raising and educating children as weaving a tapestry together: strength comes when all the threads of learning combine. Happy homeschooling!

References

Why Homeschooling Is Still on the Rise – Newsweek

Homeschool Growth: 2024-2025 – JHU Institute for Education Policy

State of evidence for social and emotional learning: A contemporary meta-analysis of universal school-based SEL interventions | Child Development | Oxford Academic

Twice-Exceptional Kids: Both Gifted and Challenged – Child Mind Institute

How Emotions Affect Learning

Links Between Emotion Word, Usage, Understanding, Accuracy, and Emotion Dysregulation: An Integrative Analysis

Dan Siegel: Name it to Tame it

Five Deep Breathing Exercises for Kids and Teens | Cedars-Sinai

Self-Care: Self-Talk for Elementary School | Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility

Cognitive Reappraisal: A Calming Strategy for Kids with Emotional Dysregulation

My Teen Struggles with Executive Function | Harvard Graduate School of Education

Checking Your Perspective | Greater Good In Education

Self-advocacy: how to help children speak up for themselves

How Do We Cultivate Agency in Our Kids and Ourselves?

Resilience guide for parents and teachers

Sample Teaching Activities to Support Core Competencies of Social and Emotional Learning

Math is SEL

Pamela McVeagh-Lally, MSEd is an education, non-profit, and philanthropic consultant dedicated to helping all children thrive through advancing the effectiveness and impact of whole child-focused organizations. She is a homeschooling parent and lives in Ohio with her husband and two children. 

*CPCK Note: Extra special thanks to Pamela McVeagh-Lally for her comprehensive work on putting together this article as a guide and support. It will find a home on our website as an evergreen resource for homeschooling families.