Google the questions homeschoolers ask! It takes seconds and can send them (and you) down rabbit holes of learning.
Learning how to research traditionally, using reference books and talking to real people is an important skill set..But! In today’s increasingly AI-driven world, to ignore the internet and not ensure homeschoolers are confident using both internet search and AI as a learning tool would be a mistake.
‘I’ll Google-it’ is where most of us would have started a few years ago, now we’re just as likely to turn to AI like Chat-GPT/Gemini etc – homeschoolers need to learn how to do that too! In fact, because of the increasing daily usage of AI, learning how to ask clear, concise questions is a skill that should be encouraged and developed by homeschoolers.
Utilising the internet makes it easier to add more depth to the answers to innocuous questions, and doing it together passively teaches homeschoolers how to safely research online/using AI. Modelling learning behaviours is the easiest way to teach.
Use homeschooler’s questions as skill-focused lessons
One of the tricky things about homeschooling is keeping lessons on track. It can be hard, as a parent, not to answer any unrelated questions homeschoolers ask. In your role as parent, you’re used to answering their questions; as their teacher it feels wrong to tell them “now’s not the time for that question”.
“Being willing to ask ‘dumb’ questions is, ironically, one of the smartest things you can do.”(Allen Gannett – The Creative Curve)
Harvard Business Review found that where on average childrens’ dialogue includes 70-80% questions, in adults that drops to 15-25%; as adults we presume we’re meant to have the answers and feel silly admitting we don’t. Home education allows you to change that mentality – we don’t need to know the all the answers, we just need to know how to find them.
So we want to encourage home-learners to ask questions..and we need to teach them how to answer questions independently..and we also want to keep lessons flowing. A simple way to do all three is to ‘Answer Questions’ as a lesson in itself.
Keep a list of the random questions home learners ask throughout the school day…as a post-it note wall, on the fridge, in a notebook.
By writing down their questions, you’re continuing the validation you’d give in parent mode – that every question is a valid question – without allowing the lesson to stray from its objective.
You could either schedule ‘Question Time’ into your home-ed timetable or, whenever there is a gap in the homeschool day, search for the answers together.
Internet Searches
What resources appear when you search for the question online? How do you choose which link to click? How do you read a website?
These are all questions homeschoolers need to understand and the best way to teach them is through practice. Look at the search results together – ask homeschoolers to think about the type of sites that are showing up. How do we assess credibility, can we trust the answer we’ve found?
Using the internet to research questions together is an effective way to slot in a passive ‘safe surfing’ lesson. Internet safety is easiest taught whilst online!
If you’re just starting to give home-learners unsupervised access to the internet, Common Sense Media’s Digital Citizenship course is a great place to start teaching internet safety.
If they’re genuinely interested in the topic around the question, the answers to the question will send them down rabbit holes of learning; if they just want the answer to the question, they’ll be satisfied.
Answering questions using AI
All learners should be honing their AI skills. By the time our homeschooler’s ‘graduate’, AI proficiency will be as necessary on a CV as maths or english.
(Integrating AI into a Home-Ed Curriculum)
Practise using AI to answer their questions
