One of the BEST THINGS about homeschool is that I can do whatever. I. want. It is also the hardest thing, because I am responsible and accountable for whatever my kids learn. At first I wanted to stay in line with public school schedule so if and when they return to public school it won’t be such a shock. However, we kept falling farther and farther behind because of…I didn’t know what!
The immediate thing I knew would be unbearable was math. One lesson of math each day for each of my 3 kids. Their curriculum had one lesson as anywhere from 3-6 pages each! I didn’t see how we could do it long term, but I was determined to homeschool and not get behind where they should be so we kept pushing through until everyone hated math bleh! Haha! That only lasted 2 weeks. I knew we couldn’t keep up that pace because we were barely getting math done while ending the day alive, with no time for Language Arts lessons. I put my foot down and decided for the good of the family we would have to just do less math. I would homeschool through the summer if need be because it wasn’t doable. Before I settled on this, though, I went through each of their math mammoth workbooks, counting the pages and dividing it by the days left in the school year (solving math with math! heehee). It came out that they would only need to do 2-3 pages a day to finish by the end of the school year. What a relief that was to my heart! I think I was even happier than my kids when I told them the good news. We stuck to 2 pages a day of math each, and I was over the moon, thinking I had homeschool DOWN.
I didn’t think it should be so hard to do 7 pages of schoolwork each day with each child between math, LA, science, history. How long could it take? Turns out, it takes a lot of time for 3 kids to switch topics 3 times and get out their other book, and mommy has to take care of the baby now so take a recess, and where did Ali’s sight word chart go, etc.! This lasted until Thanksgiving Break, so I did this for 3 months before admitting that something more needed to change.
Talking to other people is like an idea stimulator for me. I talked to my mother and my sister in law about not enough time for everything every day. I remembered that one style of homeschool is tackling one topic in 6 weeks and moving on to the next. Because I have to report on 4 topics and an elective every 2 weeks with the homeschooling program we are in (tech trep), this wasn’t a possibility. However, I wanted to try something similar in the timeline I had. I thought about one week of history/math and the second week of science/LA with electives whenever. This idea seemed okay, except I have a cutie named Ali that struggles to read the word “the” if she hasn’t been doing language arts for a couple days. She just really thrives on review!
I determined that I would alternate one day of doing LA and the next day Math. This means we do 2 Language Arts lessons on Monday, 4 pages of Math on Tuesday, 2 Language Arts lessons on Wednesday, and 4 Math pages on Thursday (we only homeschool these Mon-Thus) . Friday is spent doing electives and field trips. As far as science and history, I stuck with the weekly swap idea. So one week after we finish our LA or math we do science. The next week we focus on history. That way my kids aren’t forgetting their Language Arts or Math skills and it is much more manageable for me.
I am constantly re-falling in love with homeschool. It provides my cuties with a personal tutor (little me) who caters to their strengths and weaknesses. We can dive into whatever their interests are when it comes to science and history and electives! Even with Language Arts, I can pick and choose the literature and art my chilren are exposed to. We pick really fun books to read like the Elephant and Piggie series, or adventerous reads like Little House on the Prairie.
One tool I have really come to love that changed homeschool for the better again is Epic. It is website my kids can go to during school hours to read books online or they can choose to be read to by the website if it’s a little hard for them. Many books to choose from and a much better option that letting my kids watch TV when I am busy helping their sibling. I also took the time to set up Prodigy for my kids which is a math game that my kids think of as a reward. They will gladly do their afternoon chores to qualify for math games haha!
Have you found any tools or strategies to make your homeschool life more managable? We would all love to hear your tried and true ideas!
Warmly,
Jexi Burke