How I Homeschool

When you have kids that love to learn, homeschooling is not only enjoyable, it’s almost therapeutic.

I read thousands of books to our kids as they were growing up. I went on daily adventures with them out in the natural world. I met their ever-inquisitiveness with thorough explanations that were never dumbed down. I valued my unhurried time with them above any busy-ness the world flaunted, and we soaked in every moment of life together.

They never stopped loving learning, reading, exploring, and understanding. While foreign-feeling to some families, homeschooling has just felt like a natural extension of life for us in the years we’ve chosen to do it. I homeschooled our older son in his 5th and 7th grades, and I homeschooled our younger son half-days (mornings) in 1st grade and full-time in 2nd grade.

With our now-4th-grader at home this year, I thought I’d share with you some of the resources we are using, and the reasoning behind picking them.

First off, there are myriad choices out there. I don’t believe in any one curriculum, nor do I believe in teaching all subjects from one organization. I don’t use dull textbooks. I won’t have my child home forever, so while he’s here I’m going to use resources we both thoroughly enjoy.

Secondly, I could choose to enroll him in OASIS through the Public School, which essentially means that we would have a certificated teacher overseeing our studies via weekly meetings with my son, making sure we’re on track with state standards. We’ve done that in the past, but I don’t feel it’s necessary as long as a parent is dedicated to incorporating all of the subjects at home and overseeing the work being done throughout the day, each and every day. I’m motivated, dedicated, and almost overboard when it comes to schooling at home. We go from 8:30 AM to 3:15 PM, and I have to intentionally check myself at times so as not to cram too much in.

This time around I’ve decided to make sure I never plan days that have so much work or so much rigidity that we are no longer enjoying the learning process. I figure that this year, considering that one alternative is distance learning with teachers via video Zoom classes all day, and another alternative is going to school at school in a class that may have to catch students up from last year when things got shut down, I’m really happy about being able to work solidly one-on-one with this boy who kept up last year and is ready to go full-bore into this year of learning.

To begin, I firmly believe that no child or adult should wake up from sleeping all night only to sit down for a few hours in a chair. We walk a solid 60 to 90 minutes right off in the morning – on beaches, through forests, across meadows. When my older son homeschooled for a few years, I used to bring a book along and read it aloud the whole way as we power-walked so as not to lose one minute of learning time. I learned from experience that that’s a little too much. My younger one and I converse, explore, bend down to look at little miracles we happen upon, and soak in the air and the views all around us.

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Once home, we go immediately to the kitchen table. I get easily irritated by long, distracted transitions, so we avoid messing around. He does a solid 40 minutes of math from his New Stone-Millis Arithmetic Primary book (it covers 2nd through 4th grades), which is actually quite old – copyright 1910!

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Why choose this rare old book when there are umpteen modern math programs and workbooks flooding schools these days? I’ll never forget being on a field trip to another island with kids from kindergarten through 8th grade. We came upon a historic schoolhouse and one of the older girls rushed me inside to show me the math book that the kids who attended the school in the past used. “I don’t know how to do anything in this book!” she exclaimed. I never forgot the name of the book – it was the New Stone-Millis Arithmetic Intermediate – the next level up from the one above (covering 5th and 6th grades), and she should have known every concept in that book by that point in her education. I later bought one copy of each level – primary and intermediate – in fact, they were the only copies I could find, and our older son did every problem in both books when he homeschooled.

Another reason I prefer the 1910 book over modern math “programs” is because it is surprisingly less dry, less dull, and more effective in its delivery and repetition of math concepts in my opinion. It is wordlessly fluid without the student even realizing how each math concept has progressively built naturally through each problem and page. In other words, Stone-Millis math isn’t tiringly burdensome, achingly dull, or wordy and difficult to understand, even if we cover hundreds of individual problems each day. Where modern curricula include thick teacher’s workbooks to explain how to convey math concepts to students, these Stone-Millis books teach children exactly what they need to know, with few words at all. I may be old school, but I don’t believe in every modern solution to teaching universal, basic concepts. Let’s not make math hard for young learners when it’s really quite simple.

‘Only 40 minutes?’ you might ask. Well, I used to have our older son do a solid, uninterrupted 60 minutes of math each day as I sat beside him. I realized that one full, undistracted hour is a lot. While you cover and practice plenty, it’s also a little grueling. While I firmly believe that it’s just fine for math to be rote and sometimes grueling, we were a little overly intense on a daily basis. This year, while intensity is good, grueling is something I’m not aiming for. If those 40 minutes we do each day are solid and undistracted, the amount of time seems just right.

Now, I don’t believe that there need to be movement breaks in between each subject. After our having already walked several miles, I believe the subjects themselves are breaks from each other. So the next thing we do after math is a smattering of worksheets in language arts.

We start with a sheet or two from Daily Word Ladders for grades 4-6, which is an easy and fun transition from math to English. Then we dive into a sheet from Daily Paragraph Editing for grade 7, which includes two sizeable paragraphs in which to catch capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and diction errors. I like it because it’s like a back-door, silent way of teaching my son how to write properly before he’s even set out to compose anything of his own.

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My kids have always enjoyed reading and being read to, and I’ve found that working out of language arts books for their grade levels is too easy. That’s one of the nice things about homeschooling – you can adapt your resources quickly for the levels your child needs.

The next two worksheets are from 240 Vocabulary Words Kids Need to Know for grade 6, then two sheets from Vocabulary Packets: Prefixes and Suffixes for grades 4-8. Some of these workbooks don’t go past 6th or 8th grade; if they did, my 4th grader would prefer about 10th-grade material in order to be adequately challenged. Mind you, this is vocabulary. If we were doing a language arts workbook that included a variety of concepts from parts of speech to writing, I imagine I’d use a 4th or 5th grade book so as not to unintentionally gloss over anything important.

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Those sheets set us up for talking about Latin and Greek root words, and the fact that when you know roots, prefixes, and suffixes, you can figure out the meanings of words you’ve never heard before. I have a box of cards called English from the Roots Up with roots printed on the front and words with those roots on the backs of the cards. We converse our way through about five or six of those cards each day.

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Finally, we move beyond words to the composition of them, first with a sheet from Success with Writing for grade 5. Each worksheet is fairly different, which I like. I don’t ever want writing to be seen as boring and laborious. I love to write and I want my kids to enjoy the process. On the other hand, interestingly, I don’t like to teach my kids how to write. I’m thrilled to have a workbook that is interesting and varied, and will guide my son through the skills of writing without my having to explain them.

Along the same lines of not wanting to teach writing but wanting my child to enjoy it, I then have him choose one page to do from Rip the Page! Adventures in Creative Writing. This is a total departure from most state-standards writing workbooks you’ll find, which in my opinion teach kids that writing is dreary and time-consuming – I come to loathe writing with those resources! This book, on the other hand, has a completely different exercise in writing enjoyment on each page. I would have loved it as a kid. I figure he has years of school at school to do more rote training in writing and until then, we’re going to have fun with this while he’s home with me. I can barely keep myself from doing some of the pages!

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By the way, all along I am right there with my son. I don’t watch every number or letter he writes, but I sit next to him and look at our resources, read a library book he’s currently reading, and glance out of the corner of my eye at his attentiveness to nice printing as he’s going along. He asks me questions along the way and reads me snippets of what he’s writing. While I might do some dishes or prepare food a few paces away, I never leave the room to write blog posts, peruse websites, or call relatives. I don’t answer the phone or call people back until we’re done in the afternoon. I’m fully committed to his learning, and that’s one of the reasons our kids continue to like learning – it’s a family affair that is important to us all.

Then it’s lunch time.

While I make lunch, my little education companion gets out his Archidoodle book and starts our latest audiobook from the library, To Kill a Mockingbird. He absolutely absorbs stories read to him, and he draws and draws as we listen.

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I like to fill all of our homeschooling moments with some kind of learning opportunity, and lunch time has always included an audiobook. (Life hint: if your kids are sitting at the table eating breakfast or dinner and having a brainless conversation or getting into a spat that’s bothering you, put on an audiobook from the library and they’ll immediately be in quiet, rapt attention.)

One of my favorite things about homeschooling is digging through all of the resources available at the library and on Amazon, and choosing the ones that I know my kids will like. I do that at night online. For instance, there are a lot of art books out there, but when I saw Archidoodle, it was a slam-dunk for both sons’ interests and drawing styles. Every page of Archidoodle has a different architecture concept, and the artist is invited to add to something already drawn or create something completely new. I found that my older son felt a heaviness in creating new ideas in this same book, so I decided to add the mental “distraction” of an audiobook for my younger son in order to allow ideas to just flow out of his hand without too much thought or judgment about them. It’s working beautifully. Here are some examples of pages he hasn’t done yet, so you can see how it’s set up.

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I serve a healthy lunch when it’s ready, and I allow my son to continue drawing and listening while dining. (That explains why my kids feel a little understimulated when we’re eating dinner at the table sans “things to do.” I don’t want them to devalue food and communal eating, but I’ve invariably trained them to multi-task instead – an irony for someone who wants children who are comfortable being present and conversational.)

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After eating, outside we go for some fresh air and movement in nature – either a half-hour of gardening, wilderness observation, or frisbee-ing.

When we come back in, we go to the table for some geography worksheets. I use some of the materials from The Complete Book of Maps & Geography for grades 3-6, and then augment the worksheets with blank maps printed off the Internet. We blend in a visual tour of the countries we’re learning about with Lonely Planet’s The Travel Book from the library, which is an oversize, beautifully-photographed tome of eye candy that alphabetically spans every country on the globe one spread at a time.

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Then to the couch we go for some snuggling and reading that involves social studies and science. I’ll never, ever tire of snuggling up and reading to my kids. We’ve been doing it almost since they came out of the womb. Why ever stop? We’d still be in the rocking chair if only we both still fit.

My son loves tactile, hands-on projects, so I decided he would love learning to whittle this month. In conjunction, we are reading books about wood: A Splintered History of Wood and Around the World in 80 Trees. We read two or three pages each day from the former, and the latter describes the uniquenesses of one tree per page, so we read a page or two each day.

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After that, we get out G is for Googol: A Math Alphabet Book, which talks about one math-related topic per page – abacus, binary, cubit, fibonacci, googol, googolplex, Mobius strip, rhombicosidodecahedron, tessellate, Venn diagram, etc. It’s interesting and entertaining – the best way to learn. Then we read a few pages of The Good Bee – all about the life of bees and the importance of saving them – and we will soon begin construction of a bamboo bee house.

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Our last chunk of time is spent on something tactile – for now, it’s painting, whittling, or bee-box-building. Who doesn’t love getting a paint set or a whittling knife in the mail for school? By that point in the day, it’s nice to use a different part of the brain, and I also like doing the tactile projects at the end because my son doesn’t have to stop at 3:15 if he doesn’t want to. He can go and go and go until dinnertime if he’s in a state of flow, and he often does.

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To round out the arts, we take weekly ukulele lessons with Gordon Koenig. I had no idea I would be included, but he encouraged me to attend as well, and I’m loving it!

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In the afternoons, if a friend isn’t able to come over and play outside (we aren’t doing inside playdates or visits during COVID times), my son has books to read that incorporate history, culture, current events, science, art, architecture, and hands-on projects. I choose themes, illustrators, and writing styles that I know he will like, and I leave them around the house – on the kitchen table, on the coffee table, and in the bathroom. The next thing I know, he’s glued to them. I did the same thing with our older son as he was growing up, and he responded the same way.

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When Stars are Scattered is a captivating graphic novel about the true life story of two Somali brothers in a massive Kenyan refugee camp. Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words and Transformed: How Everyday Things are Made are just plain fascinating books about the technology around us.

Of course, all of these materials will change to new books and themes when we come to the end of the current ones, so this gives only an idea of what this month looks like.

I love researching what we will do next. Our near future holds some learning in logic, many science experiment videos by Supercharged Science, reading The Pilgrim’s Progress, and diving into a book by the lovely naturalist and biologist E.O. Wilson called Tales from the Ant World, just to name a few things. By the way, if you’ve never heard of Edward Wilson, there’s a wonderful documentary about his life studying insects and ants called E.O. Wilson – Of Ants and Men. I watched it years ago with our older son and am now watching it again with the younger one. Click here if you’d like to watch it too.

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An important aspect of homeschooling is studying and writing things that feel real and apply to our lives. We are genuinely interested in what we’re learning. For example, tomorrow our son will be writing a letter to E.O. Wilson because he wants to do it, not because it’s a dull exercise in a workbook that asks him to write a letter to an imaginary person. As much as I’m enamored with the biologist and his joy for learning about the world, our son is passionately against some of the methods Wilson has used in the name of science – namely killing creatures in various ways, whether to study their ant hills, their scents, etc. I think it’s a really important letter for my son to write – to connect with and challenge a scientist whose love for creatures has led him to feel that it’s okay to kill them repeatedly and en masse. Most scientists, if not almost all of them, seem to share the same practice. But what if my son wants to be a scientist someday without killing the animals he loves? Will he be put down by colleagues? Will he put down other colleagues? I think a letter to Wilson is a good start in that whole conversation, and I can’t help but agree with my son. He opens my eyes every day to animal-related justices that I never previously examined.

In past homeschooling years I stuck to a very rigid schedule. Every hour, our subject or activity was regimented and predictable. This year, I decided to let life flow a little more in order to enjoy the process. We keep our subjects predictable each day, just not down to the minute. We don’t veer or waste time, but it’s much more enjoyable to conclude each portion of study at a natural, organic endpoint before starting the next. The rigid way made my blood pressure high all of the time in the past. The flowing style this year is wonderfully calming.

Here in the Northwest, we never know if the sun will be out. If it’s streaming in our windows, I let my son take his worksheets to the carpet where it’s bright and warm, or we go outside and sit in chairs to read our books together after lunch. It’s important to absorb the rays for Vitamin D production while you can here!

One last thing – I want to recommend two books to you that I read over the summer. The first one is called An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Colonel Chris Hadfield and the second is called The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson.

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I read the first one to the boys each night before bed, and it was my way of not having to spend $180 on an annual subscription to MasterClass.com in order to watch Hadfield teach about space exploration. He’s a really intelligent and intriguing guy, and he made a series of videos while in space in order to show people what life is like as an astronaut. Check out one of them by clicking here, and that will lead you to more. While I’d love to watch his MasterClass, I happened upon his book and decided that perhaps it would include most of what he says in the class.

By the way, if you’ve never heard of MasterClass, go to the website and watch some of the trailers for the classes. There’s Photography by Annie Leibovitz; Investigative Journalism by Bob Woodward; Documentary Filmmaking by Ken Burns; Violin by Itzhak Perlman; Building a Fashion Brand by Diane von Furstenburg; Writing by Malcolm Gladwell; Filmmaking by Werner Herzog, Comedy by Steve Martin, and on and on. Sometimes at night, I just stay up watching a bunch of trailers, drooling over the classes I’d love to “attend.”

The other book I’m recommending isn’t actually related to homeschooling; I just needed to tell you about it. It’s historical fiction and one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s about the Blue People of Kentucky, which I never knew about until reading it. I won’t say more, so as to keep you in suspense, except that I found it to be totally captivating. The cover is terrible, so don’t judge the book by its cover.

Well, that’s about all for now. I had originally assumed that our homeschooling days were over, but I guess you never know what each new year is going to bring. I am ever-grateful to my husband and his thorough provision of us, which has always allowed me to be present for my children. Thank you, husband.

Happy homeschooling, distance learning, schooling at school, or whatever education configuration your family finds itself in. If humans are anything, it’s adaptable. I hope this post is helpful to you in some way.