Transcript- EP15: Homeschool 101- What to Homeschool Your Children With

Amy: And that gentle feast of learning will just help them into adulthood every single day.

Hi friends, and welcome. I’m your host AmyElizSmith. I’m a homeschool mom of three and have homeschooled each from the start. While I have a master’s in elementary ed, I want to teach other mamas that you don’t need a fancy degree to have the passion and knowledge to successfully educate your children from home.

I hope to bring you encouragement to jump in and start your homeschool journey and provide my absolute best recommendations to help you begin your homeschool journey. Thanks for joining us along for this crazy, messy grace-filled homeschool ride.

Hi everyone. Hi homeschoolers. I am so excited to chat with you more about homeschool 101. What to homeschool our children with. This can be a very overwhelming decision and it can feel overwhelming, so I am here to truly help you fight that overwhelm, take a deep breath, and help you to just jump in and get started.

The first thing you’re going to want to do as you make the decision to homeschool is you do need to check your state’s homeschool laws first. When you check those, you’re going to look at HSLDA.org, and that is an amazing site about homeschool laws by state and many legalities involved with some of the requirements that your state might have.

Some states require nothing from parents, not even a declaration, and other states require you to maybe attach yourself to a public or private school. Other states require you to show a folder of what your child learned at the semester or throughout the year. You’re going to want to make sure that you are legally doing the right thing by your child on that site.

Everything I’m going over today is available for free. This is a guide for Simple Start Homeschool and that’s gonna be available in the show notes. You can just click on that link and it can be sent right to your email and you will be able to have a lot of these links that I talk about today in the episode for what to homeschool. You wanna give yourself grace and start with nothing. Let’s say you have just exited the government school system. It’s the next morning. Take a deep breath, go outside and take a walk. Maybe go to a park if you’re able, and take a walk. Then go inside, grab a snack. And read a book aloud.

Read just the picture books you have in your home. Maybe if you have a read aloud book already going, you can read that. If not, I have a fantastic list of chapter books that we just absolutely love. You can grab one from your local library. Or really your local used books sale. And begin just reading aloud.

Snuggle up and enjoy your time together. Now that means your preschoolers, your kindergartners, your elementary, your middle school, and even your high schoolers can take a day, take a week to just relax and get used to this new decision. It’s a really, really big decision. But when you’re ready, then you can set up your schedule and begin one or two subjects at a time and solely grow.

As you begin to implement those things, your confidence in homeschooling will grow. For us, I’m gonna just talk about our schedule real quick. We like to enjoy the morning time for our lessons, and the reason for that is because truly brains are best in the mornings. Now some people do homeschool in the afternoons, or sometimes if one or both parents works, you have to do ’em in the evenings, do lessons on the weekends.

Those things are all okay. But you can, if you’re able to do things in the morning, that’s the best scenario. I do not allow screens in the morning. Those can really disjoint the time. And getting kids off of screens, as you know, is very difficult. I would truly advocate for you not to allow screens in the morning and jump right into those lessons.

Now, if the lessons are a trip outside. Go outside and find a little creature that can be an insect. Go outside and draw a plant or a tree or a flower. Even in the winter, they can draw the tree with no leaves on it. That can be a lesson. For older kids they will label the tree. They will write a sentence about the tree.

They can look up what kind of tree it is and write a full paragraph about the tree. Or they could write a story about little ferries who live in the tree. So, so much can be done with just a short nature time. You can go inside and have a read aloud too. For us, we like to have some independent work in the mornings. We have our workbooks out for their spelling and their cursive and some grammar, and definitely some math. I go through lessons with each of my kids individually, and then at lunchtime we come back together. But that morning is a good time. If you’re able to have breakfast together and sing together, maybe have some Bible time, it’s a really nice time to come together, light a candle, have some muffins, baked together, clean together.

These are just some ideas for you in that morning. But that lunchtime can all be incorporated with cooking together, cleaning up together, and then that afternoon after you’ve had those lessons, can be cultivated in, their interests and cultivating what they enjoy. So for example, my son enjoys coding. My daughter’s knit and they teach each other art lessons or have them do a fun art video. So many options can be had for those afternoon times after lessons are done. Your family will look different. Every single homeschool family looks different. In the morning, we like to come together and at lunch we like to come together as well.

Make sure that your kids are being taught those chores and they’re being taught the value of hard work, and they’re cleaning up after dinner and for dinner and setting the table. They’re helping with the younger ones. My older two, they are required as part of their homeschool checklist, they’re required to read a story to their sisters and they’re required to also have her read to them.

There’s that extra practice amongst siblings. One of the most beautiful things about homeschool is that siblings are not separated, and it’s so wonderful to be able to see those relationships blossom. In this free guide I have for you, I have some core curriculums that are free. You can find a complete Charlotte Mason curriculum at Ambleside Online, and you can also find a complete free language arts and math program at thegoodandthebeautiful.com.

Both of those are wonderful curriculums that you can start with that are absolutely. I highly recommend both, and I think both are really excellent, even if they were paid programs. But I do wanna help give you resources that are free so you can see that homeschool can be accessible to your family immediately.

For children younger than five and six, they don’t need to be taught to read and write just yet. They need to be read to during those early years and working on play. Play is their work. They also should be working on fine and gross motor skills, character building and, being just read aloud to and having sensory experiences outside and being outdoors as much as.

Hopefully that’s given you some ideas for what to homeschool with. We also enjoy having a Bible time where we simply read a chapter of the Bible. We don’t have bells and whistles, we don’t have any extras. Of course, you can include those and that’s wonderful, but children in a Christian home just need to be read the Bible.

I would recommend starting with a gospel and also then working on a memory passage that you read aloud every day for a month. And singing that beautiful hymn too. We also love to have a fine arts time and a fine arts time, and I’ve included this here in the guide, can include a composer study just listening to a beautiful composer, looking at beautiful art from just a classical artist, or one from the Baroque period or the romantic period, or today.

And also listening to beautiful poetry and listening to fun folk songs. That can be incorporated in a fine arts time where you do do just one or two of those things throughout your morning or during your lunchtime, or even during an afternoon tea time. I know homeschool families who have an afternoon tea time and that is wonderful. I can’t say that we do it. It’s not something we’ve cultivated yet, but I just find that so beautiful that family can come together. Maybe make some muffins, have some afternoon tea like the British, and enjoy the read aloud story. Our family loves to listen to Audible. Right now, we are really enjoying The Wing Feather’s Saga and I would just encourage you to really structure your homeschool day around literature and living books and beautiful picture books that will help build your child’s character, and their morals. Hopefully that’s given you some ideas for what to homeschool your child with.

Cultivating that togetherness time that will come from being in close proximity. And yes, there will be fights and nagging, and sometimes it will be hard and it will be difficult, but please know that you are doing a noble work. Whether you have one child or many children, you can begin homeschool easily and quickly. You can let your school know that you’re taking your child out, making sure that you’re following your state’s laws, and then just enjoy life together.

Cultivate those disciplines and those habits that you may or may not already have in your home. The habits of hard work and helpfulness. And patience and kindness, and each day you are helping nourish that child so that they can be better equipped to live in this world.

Us as moms and dads need to know that you can grow the fruit of the spirit in yourself too. Galatians 5 writes, “The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” So as for me in my house, we will serve the Lord and we will raise our children to teach the fruits of the spirit and to teach the beauty of those liberal arts, that education where they have a spark and that gentle feast of learning will just help them into adulthood every single day.

Way to go Moms and way to-go Dads for doing the hard now for the good later. And I’m so proud to know many of you and to walk alongside you in this journey of homeschool. It’s not always easy, but it is so, so worth it.