If I Were Homeschooling For The First Time, THIS Is What I Would Do

This is the basic routine that we have in our home and it's worked so well for us these past 15 years. It's something I've had to learn over time and we've perfected it, but this four-fold structure is basically what we've been doing for quite a while and it's working very well. Welcome to Our Life Homeschooling. My name is Sherry, Christian, wife to my high school sweetheart, Nelson, and thankful mom to 10 incredible kids. I'm the author of the blog and YouTube channel, Our Life Homeschooling, where I share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I believe that motherhood is ministry and homeschooling is simply an extension of parenting. My passion is to cheer on other moms who are at home doing the most important work of all, raising the next generation for the glory of God. Hi, everyone. It's Sherry from Our Life Homeschooling. This week, I'm going to be getting back to the very basics. I'm going to tell you exactly what I would do step-by-step if I were homeschooling for the first time. This is also for those of you who are maybe in a rut. I've had this happen to me multiple times over the years. You've been homeschooling for a while, you're just go, go, go, and sometimes you just need to rein everything back in, start from square one again, and rebuild. And that's what this video is about this week, getting back to the basics. And the four steps I'm going to share with you are steps that I would build one at a time. So I wouldn't move on to the next step until you've really mastered the first step. And not that it has to be perfectly, but until you feel like you have a good grasp on it. If this is your very first year homeschooling, or if you're in a homeschool rut and just need to get back to the very basics, I would just want to remind you to begin with prayer. This isn't part of the four steps, but this really is the foundation for everything. I think back to my husband and I, when we first started homeschooling in 2010, it was not nearly as popular as it is now. And I really resonated with the story of Abraham in the Bible, because God called him out to a country he didn't even know where he was going. And he was obedient, he was faithful, and God honored that. That's kind of how I felt with homeschooling. It was something that the Lord had called us to, and we wanted to be faithful and do it, but we didn't know where it was headed. And we didn't have anyone else in our family that was homeschooling at the time. And so it was something we really bathed in prayer, and I hope that is where you start, because the Lord has been so faithful to us. And looking back, it was a little scary at the time, but I'm so thankful. This was such a great choice for our family, and the Lord knew better than we did where we were headed. If I were to start at the very beginning this year, having no knowledge of homeschooling, if I were just to start at the very basics, I would start with home management. I would find a routine that fits your family and just establish a good family culture. This is something that I, looking back, I wish I had focused on more as a new homeschool mom. Everything was brand new to me. I had been, my husband and I had both been in a traditional school setting when we were in school. Homeschooling was brand new to me. I was reading all these philosophies, classical, Charlotte Mason. Having kids spend time outside was such a big deal, and it wasn't that we didn't have any order in our home. It was more that I had no idea about homeschooling, and I wanted to make this work. I wanted to prove to myself and to our family that this was a great option, and it was, but because of that, academics was a huge focus for me, and I think we could have been better at just, we could have spent more time on some simple life skills, on basic routines in our home, and it wasn't that our kids didn't have chores or we didn't do any of those things. It was that the academic work took a top priority, sometimes to the detriment of the order in our home. So for number one, home management. I think one thing that's important when you think about your family culture about home management is just a basic level of respect for authority. Kids just thrive on a loving, responsive mom, but they also need boundaries, and they need to know that whatever consequences you feel comfortable with, that you're gonna follow through on those. Establishing a basic atmosphere of respect for authority is so important. Who is running the show? Are the kids calling all the shots? If that's the case in your home, then this is worth stopping and making your first lesson. Make this your first lesson, because you are going to be miserable in homeschooling if your kids have no respect for your authority. Homeschooling will not be fun for you, and it won't be fun for the kids. They're not gonna learn. And not that kids, kids are not gonna be obedient all the time. This is always a constant struggle. We want our kids to listen, and we want to be responsive and understanding for them, but they must understand that mom is looking out for their best interest, and there are consequences for stepping outside these boundaries that we've put for their safety, and that I will follow through on those for their good and for the good of the family. Also under home management is just some basic routines and order. So when our kids are three years old, we start with the three rules. Get dressed, make your bed, and brush your teeth. These are three things that are just simple for a three-year-old to understand. Make your bed, brush your teeth, get dressed. That gives them something to do when they first wake up, and if you know kids at this age, they want to be productive. They want to be doing what adults are doing. They're busy. Usually if they have no direction, they're pulling things out, dumping things, and it can be stressful on a mom, but if you have something in place for them that they're expected to do, that is gonna help. And then just slowly adding to that, giving every family member a chore, and making your home atmosphere top priority. Your home doesn't have to be perfect, but having a daily routine. For us, we spend about a half an hour, sometimes two an hour every morning doing pretty much the same thing. Cleaning up just like we did the day before, but getting our home in a nice order so that we have a clean space to work in so that everyone is in a much better mood. I'm in a better mood. This is the first basic step, and if you need to stop and make this your only step at first, that's okay, because you'll get the other places faster. Maintain some order in your home. It's gonna really enhance the atmosphere in your family, and it's gonna make homeschooling so much smoother. The second layer that I would add next would be to read aloud to my kids. After we have established some respect for authority, we have some basic routines in place for our day, I would move on to reading aloud to them. Reading aloud has so many benefits for kids. I think this has kind of come to parents' attention even more so in the last decade. Reading aloud is your room for messing up. There are gaps in every education. There are gonna be things that you miss. As a homeschooling mom, you cannot cover everything, and you shouldn't feel the need to because in school they don't cover everything, and sometimes when things are missed, this piques your child's curiosity, and it's going to drive them to want to learn more about that one thing that they're not sure about. They don't remember learning about. But reading aloud is your margin for error. Reading aloud to your kids gives them exposure to so much content. It's where you can fit in history even before you have a formal history program, science, where biographies and fiction will just enhance their vocabulary and give them an imagination that's just a great place to start for them to want to read for themselves. And with reading aloud to them, I like to make it a habit of reading in short chunks throughout the day. So we read a little bit at breakfast. We read after lunch. We have our afternoon read aloud time. We read again at dinner. And then we sometimes, we haven't done it recently, but when my kids were younger, we would play audio books as they were laying in bed at night and everything was quiet. So reading to them throughout the day in short chunks is just gonna increase their appetite and give them a wider view of the world. It's going to increase their imagination. This is a great place to start. In fact, when parents are worried about a child that is struggling with reading, I just highly suggest scaling way back on the actual reading lessons and really increasing the read aloud time because they're being exposed to so many ideas and it's just gonna give them a desire to want to read on their own. They're gonna want that skill that everyone else has that they don't have. And that is what's really, really necessary for them to start reading. They have to want to. They have to want to be able to read. The third layer that I would add in after we have a good home routine, after we are spending time throughout the day just in small chunks reading together, I would begin with the three R's, reading, writing, and math. And truthfully, for us, many times we have 10 kids ages two to 20. Throughout our years of homeschooling, I was pregnant or breastfeeding. So there were just many times that I had to bring it back to the basics. We stopped homeschooling altogether, sometimes for a week or two just to adjust to a new baby. And then I would just slowly bring it in one thing at a time. And when I did, I started simply with exactly what I'm telling you, a home routine, reading aloud to the kids. Thirdly, reading, writing, and math. We would just keep it to the very basics. Make sure we're getting in reading, writing, and math every day. And if you're a new homeschool mom, you're doing this for the very first time, I would just start with the oldest child. Get them to a place where they are more and more becoming independent, because that is the ultimate goal. We want them to be intrinsically motivated to keep learning on their own. So get them started reading, move them towards independence, get them writing, spend time. I talk a lot about copywork. That's something that has just been such a super tool in our homeschool. I have a lot of free copywork on the blog. If you head over to ourlifehomeschooling.com, just type in copywork or you'll probably even see it on my main page. Copywork is something that is just so easy to do and yet is so effective. Get them reading, writing, and teach them the fundamentals of math. Start with your oldest child as they slowly become more independent than I would work with the next child. And that's pretty much been my method with our kids. And when I say get them independent, it doesn't mean that you're like leaving off. You're still checking in every day, but you're giving them more and more freedom to work on their own. And then when you check in with them, maybe initially you'll have them read a sample from the book chapter that they read that day. So you can just hear for yourself how they're doing in reading. Look over their math. Go over which ones they got wrong and correct them together. Look at their writing. Discuss the words that are misspelled. Discuss their handwriting, sentence structure, all those things. So it doesn't mean you're just handing them off and it's over. You're still checking in, but it's more loosely and they're moving on, they're moving forward more and more on their own. The final thing that I would add in if I were getting back to the basics, the last thing I would add in would be the beautiful subjects, the content areas like history, science, music, art, STEM study, nature study, all of these things. With science and history, we've done this somewhat in morning time, somewhat the kids have done on their own. For science, some of them are reading their science work as part of their daily checklist. That's also something that once kids are independent, you can give them a daily checklist. It's wonderful. I make one daily checklist that shows the whole week what they're supposed to do every day for a whole week. It doesn't change. I don't write down chapter numbers, page numbers. It's just each subject that they're doing and they get an idea over time of how much I expect them to move forward in each subject every day. But we keep that one checklist, keeps it really simple. So some of our kids do science on their own. For history, some of our kids do Veritas Press, self-paced history lessons. These are excellent. And we also cover history in read aloud time. But for the most part, we cover the beautiful content areas in morning time. We don't spend a lot of time doing it, but we do a little bit every day. Morning time, if you're unfamiliar with it, it's the part of the day where we gather. You don't have to do it in the morning time. Some people do it other times. I think people even have different names for it. For us, it's easiest to do after breakfast when we're all already gathered. We'll sit down. We have some subjects that we do daily, some subjects we do just on a looped schedule. Daily, we do Bible reading, hymn study, memory work, scripture memory. And then the looped schedule would be all those extra things that we have in there, like geography, nature study, composer study, artist study, grammar. We have some other things in there. I make a morning time notebook for our kids every year for our whole family. I print one copy off for each of my kids, put it in a notebook, and it stays in a bureau drawer in our kitchen. We get it out every morning. Everybody has this visual right in front of them of everything that we're gonna be learning together in morning time for the whole year. It's such a handy tool. You can take a look at the simple morning time notebook that we use, that we're gonna be using for this next year on the blog. I've made it available to those of you that are interested. It's just so nice to have a visual. I did this for many years, actually, without giving each of my kids a morning time notebook. I was the only one that had it. And when I stopped and printed one out for each of them so we all had that visual tool right in front of us, it made a complete difference. So that is where we add in all those extra subjects that sometimes get pushed by the wayside for the more formal subjects that are crucial, like reading, writing, and math. Those are the most important things. But we fit in this extra truth, goodness, and beauty in morning time. For me, these content areas are just the icing on the cake. When we get to it, it's great. If we don't, we just peel back and do the necessities in these basic steps that I've laid out for you today. We scale back to those. But when we're having a good day, these four things are happening. And actually, I have laid out for you really what our basic routine looks like every day. It's a little bit out of order. If you've watched any of my videos, our day is fourfold. We wake up, we have breakfast. After breakfast, we have morning time. After morning time, we have chores and clean up. So everybody, I stand and announce everyone's chores. We talk about any extra things that are going on, anything anyone needs to be made aware of. And then we all split up and we do our home cleaning. This is the time when we get our home ready for learning. The third thing is independent work, where they get out their checklists and go down through each subject of what they're expected to do for the day. We break for lunch and going outside. And then the fourth, the last part of our day, when our little ones are down for naps or quiet time, I read aloud to the kids. So this is the basic routine that we have in our home and it's worked so well for us these past 15 years. It's something I've had to learn over time and we've perfected it. But this fourfold structure is what we've been doing for quite a while and it's working very well. But if I had to scale it back, I would go back to that very first step, home order, establishing some respect for authority in your home and some basic routines, like for a three-year-old, get dressed, make your bed, brush your teeth, and then adding in some chores. We do these by zone. I think I forgot to mention that, but just breaking up our home into zones so that every area is getting covered each day. And sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it takes 30, 45 minutes, an hour. But just getting that together. Thirdly, I would add in reading, writing, and math, the three R's, those are the basics. And then lastly, adding in those content areas. If you liked this video, you may also enjoy watching the video that I will link for you. It's called Don't Overthink It. Are you overthinking homeschooling? And also, I'd love it if you leave a comment. If you've been homeschooling for a while, leave a comment and tell us the basics in your homeschool. What does it come down to for you when you have to peel back the layers and start just at the very bottom and start over and then slowly add to it? What does that look like for you? And in what order would you add in some extra things? Thanks for watching. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms.