How We Home School

(Or Saturday, you know, whatever…)

I’m often asked, “How do you get it all done?” when talking about the different ages of the kids and home schooling. To satisfy the curious and encourage the faint hearted, here’s a post in pictures of what our home school looked like in the first week. Let me know if I can answer any questions!! 🙂

We start each day at 8 AM with our Bible time. We’re still working through the Psalms with Draw to Learn the Psalms. We’re on Psalm 113! Woo-hoo! The home-stretch.

A few years ago, I had a really hard time fitting Bible into our day. A friend encouraged me to make it the number 1 priority. Now, it’s just habit. The kids expect it. It took work to get here, but the habit has been established.

After Bible, I have a preschool time with my youngest. We are starting a letter of the week curriculum using a combination of books on my shelf. I haven’t done preschool for years, and this is a lot of fun. I forgot how much I enjoyed those early years. Resources: ABC I Believe, A is for Adam, Alpha Tales Letter Books, My ABC Bible Verses, & Scripture Memory Songs.

After preschool, I move to my first grader. His work includes handwriting, math, poetry, and reading out loud to me both books and sight words. He also does the fun preschool activities that I’m doing with Kevin. It really doesn’t take more than 30 minutes with him.

During this time, my preschooler watches a LeapFrog video. 🙂

For fun, I bought him the 1st Grade Jump Start game. He loves it! He’s learning and having fun.

My girls are very diligent, starting their school work even before breakfast. I don’t know where they get it. Probably their daddy, who used to get up at  5AM and take care of his horses. I was the girl running out to catch the bus because I slept in until the last moment. Regardless, they’re early-risers and get started on their seat work quickly.

They each have a check list for the week of what they must accomplish each day. On the computer, my sixth grader does Grammar Key, Teaching Textbooks for math, Typing Instructor for Kids, and sometimes they read their book on the Kindle for PC.

Other daily seatwork includes Wonder Devotional Bible reading, copywork, math worksheets, practice of Bible verses, practice their dance, read alone book and/or report, writing lessons with Writing Strands, and spelling with Spelling Wisdom.

After Bible, Preschool, & First Grade Time, I take about 30 minutes my 4th & 6th graders individually to do a few subjects with them and check their work. Sometimes they haven’t finished, and they complete the rest after lunch.

After checking the girls’ work, we all get together again for history and science. We’re using Mystery of History this year, and so far so good! We will be starting BJU Science 5 in 2 weeks. After our lesson, we snuggle on the couch for our read aloud. If it’s getting late, we’ll do this after lunch. This week, we read The Magician’s Nephew. Needless to say, they were begging me to read it all day! Gotta love the Narnia Series!

Laundry still needs to get done! I do it all in one day. Lights, Whites, Darks, & Towels. This week, we paused whatever we were doing to fold and put away each load together. Usually, we do it all in the evening before bed.

Chores! We have three bunnies now, and it’s 100% the children’s responsibility. This, along with house keeping responsibilities, is on their chore list.

When the weather’s warm, I try and get outside for lunch. On this day above, we hiked through the corn field to a tree in the middle where it’s cleared out and has shade. During lunch, we review our Bible Memorization. It was in this corn field that we decided to rap our passage.

After we’ve finished, we play outside!

This year, I want to actually PLAY all those board games we have in our cabinet. I’m putting on the schedule “board games” to play in the afternoon or early evening. This way, it’s a constant reminder of something fun to do with them. I know it seems bad that I need to remind myself to play with them, but my brain often goes other places.

So there you have it! Our first week of school, and that’s about what our year will look like, except that our Co-Op will start in September.

Happy Learning!