Welcome friends! Today I’m going to talk about why we chose to homeschool this year. I’ll also be covering some of the curriculum that we are using and I’ll be giving a few tips if you’re looking into homeschooling yourself. I’m not going to get heavily into those things since I am currently uploading an in depth video on YouTube but our internet is wonky so I’m having trouble. We ended up deciding to switch providers so the new service is supposed to be installed by the end of the week. The video is over 10 minutes long and my first attempt to get a video on YT. I didn’t realize how hard it can be to get videos to upload sometimes.
Anyways, back to the blog. I have gotten a ton of questions in regards to homeschooling and I cover this in my video but in brief, most people have been shockingly open hearted and embracing of us homeschooling. Most of the comments or messages that I get about it are actually other moms asking me for the details about what we are using and how I’m organizing everything. So many moms are planning (or preparing) to school at home this year through virtual learning due to Covid 19. It makes total sense that they are all looking for newbie advice. Remember, I am a newbie too. I’m not a veteran homeschool mom. However, I have spent roughly 7 years (since my oldest was a toddler) researching homeschooling and trying to convince my husband that it was the right fit for us. I also have talked to HUNDREDS of HS moms. For that reason, I feel like I’ve been doing this my whole life ha. It feels so familiar and comfortable. My husband jokes when I’m talking to someone about it that I sound like I’m speaking another language because I know so much about the lingo and terminologies. He feels lost when I get fired up and has to remind me that he doesn’t speak HS Mom hahahaha. Ope 😅
It’s a lot though and I totally get that.
I have said this several times but from day one of meeting my husband over 12 years ago I told him that ‘I want to have a lot of babies and pets and I want to homeschool them all on a little farmstead’. He laughs when we talk about it because he says that back then he thought that 3 kids was what I meant by a lot of kids. Now we have 5, plan to have another bio baby within the year, and are going to be adopting in the future as well. I have no clue how big our family will get but I’m so thrilled to be on this journey.
I’ve just always wanted this lifestyle for my babies and for my family. However, my husband was against it. He believes that the social aspect of it in regards to not being around peers or missing out on extra curriculars is detrimental to a child’s future. For that reason, he never openly considered homeschooling. He will tell you now that he had made his mind up on it and wasn’t open minded at all. He is definitely apologetic about that but he does have valid reasons for feeling the way that he does. I get it. What changed? Well Covid 19 happened. Distanced learning happened. From early March until now (nearing mid July) I have been schooling at home. We do school year round but that’s a post topic for another day. With our public school’s distanced learning it was very basic. Make a map of your room, write a letter to your teacher, read a book, make a treasure hunt map, ect. Right away, I added my own sourced curriculum and made my own lesson plans for all of their work. Double digit mathematics with regrouping. Sight word flash cards. Retell. Grammar. Science. It was stuff that I found the sources to and added to the schools ‘curriculum’ completely on my own. My middle daughter was having huge issues with math regrouping. After one day of me helping her, she mastered it. Brian came home that day and watched her solve sheet after sheet of problems. Mind you that a week prior to this at parent/teacher conferences we were told how badly she struggled at it and couldn’t figure it out. That was honestly Brian’s light bulb moment and when everything changed. I’ll never forget it. He said, “I can see why moms homeschool!”. Y’all, my insides and soul lossssssssst it. I knew that in that instant a wall had been broken down. I never looked back from there and here we are. I showed him grace and gave him space to consider everything but I also modestly brought up the idea of us homeschooling next year (2020-21 school year) a few times a week. No pressure on Brian. I just simply kept planting that seed while I was gathering my own game plan. In the mean time my mom had spent the whole year telling me about how awesome the program that she uses it. My mom was a middle & high school teacher. She has experience in education so her advice outside of her being my mom was greatly respected by me. She’s seen both sides of it. Public school and homeschool. In March after Brian made the comment that started it all, I began to research programs even more obsessively. During the first week of April I attended my first meeting at CC. CC is how Brian and I found compromise. With CC there is once a week classes so the kids get that school type setting and interaction. There’s fun community days with the other HS families. They can still do 4H and livestock showing. They can still do cheer, basketball, and baseball. We also do riding lessons with the girls (they are learning barrel racing, reining, pole bending, and western pleasure). Not to mention, our church family and friends that we see often. We are plenty social and highly involved in extra curricular things. We travel for cattle shows and for fun so the schedule flexibility of homeschooling was also a perk that Brian couldn’t ignore. It’s just all around the perfect middle ground and I’m so thankful that God softened Brian’s heart to it.
Since I covered so much in my video, I’ll try to keep this next part short.
For beginners, it can be extremely overwhelming. Countless programs. Countless curriculums. Countless homeschool styles. Countless terms that you may not understand. Firstly you want to know which homeschool style you are. I’m an eclectic. A blend of traditional and Charlotte Mason. Mostly CM, for sure. There’s a lot of styles. Traditional, classical, unit study, un schooling, Charlotte Mason, ect. Then you need to decide on what program you’ll use. Knowing your homeschool style will help you narrow down programs. Also if you’re religious or exclusively seeking a secular program, that helps narrow things down too. We use Classical Conversations, Abeka, The Good and The Beautiful, Right Start, and some McGraw-Hill stuff but I also have Life of Fred, Blossom & Root, math u see, and Exploring Nature with Children stuff so we will try different things to see what fits us best. Another awesome aspect of homeschooling. You can make your school completely one of a kind and customized. There’s Horizons, Saxon, Singapore, Explode the Code, Mastery Books, Lessons for a Living Education, First Language Lessons, to name a few resources that you can look into. In relation to your homeschool style, you should consider how your children learn. Mine are mostly visual and kinesthetic learners so programs like Singapore aren’t as ideal for us. If you’re schooling through your public school or programs like K12 or Epic, they can hook you up with the resources that you’ll need. Contact your school’s virtual learning coordinator for more info.
My next bit of advice is the advice that multiple HS moms gave me. It’s use a binder system with subject dividers and don’t try to recreate public school at home.
We are using 2” binders for all 4 kids plus one for me. I put lesson plans, grade charts, and visual boards in mine. In theirs, it’s 4 weeks in advance of curriculum divided by subjects. I do not assemble binders in advance for the whole school year. I explain why in my video. We also use a cart system but I’ll be posting a detailed video of our school house area next week so I’m not going to get into that right now.
As for not trying to recreate public school, Enjoy your babies. Adventure and school outside around the ranch or at the park. In your back yard under a tree or picnic by the creek. School in jammies all cuddled up on the couch by the fire on a cozy winter day. School in the barn with the show cows and horses. On the trampoline or the top of the swing set. On the patio, by the pool. Listen to classical music and have tea time with your kids while you read poetry. The options are endless. These are just a few that we’ve done or plan to do. Have flexibility in each day for adjustments. Homeschooling has so many benefits and adjusting to your child’s specific needs is one of them but spending that extra time each day learning and growing together is in my opinion the biggest benefit of all. You can have a traditional approach to your curriculum and still leave after 1-2 pm free for playing with your kids or be flexible with your school house depending on what is presented to you that day. Since you are schooling one on one or even one on eight, it’s still much smaller than a classroom size. You are able to give higher concentrations of attention to each student which results in shorter school days. Children do not need 8 hour school days! A few focused hours a day for work is plenty.
I hope that this blog post helped some of you that feel lost in the HS world. If you have any questions at all please feel free to contact me. If I can’t answer them, I’m blessed to have a large outlet of friends that are HS vets and can also help.
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