Minimalist Homeschool Essentials | What You Actually Need

Homeschooling is easier with less. Less stuff, less curriculum, less pressure to do everything, but it's easy to fall into the trap of buying more, planning more, and trying to do it all. You only really need a few simple things to homeschool well. In this video I'm going to share the minimalist homeschool essentials, what you actually need. It is so easy to accumulate homeschool materials, or to think you should be accumulating homeschool materials. Before you know it, you end up with shelves full of curriculum, workbooks that were never finished, programs that you intended to try. I think specifically of one program I bought, it was just really pretty and I thought it was going to be a nice supplement to our history program. It ended up sitting in a drawer for years and I think I used it once or twice. It's these beautiful cutouts of historical figures that you can put on a timeline. I still think it's a great material. I think it's a great tool. It's just that I don't have the bandwidth right now with what we have on our plate to be able to add that in. It's just so easy to accumulate things. I think for some of the reason is just because we want to do the best for our kids. Sometimes we see things that we think will enhance what we're using, but the truth is that we buy things faster than we have time to actually implement them or learn about them. We had a few really beautiful days here where the weather was 70 degrees and above. On these days, I kick the kids outside. I tell everybody, go out. It's so beautiful. Get some fresh air. Several of the kids were doing their schoolwork out on the deck. If you're someone like me who has perhaps bought something faster than you have time to actually use or learn it, the good news is you really don't need most of it. You only need a few basic materials to homeschool well. Homeschooling works best when it's simple. Kids learn through consistent basics. Too many materials can actually make homeschooling harder. Simplicity makes it easier to stay consistent. Here, William is learning how to count change up to a dollar, and then we extended it up to $10. You can see I'm just using a simple whiteboard and some real money. One thing I've noticed is that if you bring your kids along with you and they learn a lot of life skills because they're with you at the grocery store, at the bank, when you're running your errands, when it comes to concepts, for example, like money, they already have so much prior knowledge and it comes much more quickly to them. Most great homeschool days come from a few reliable tools that you can use over and over again. And that's what we're going to talk about, the things that actually matter. But before we do, if you're new here, hi, my name is Sherry. I'm a Christian homeschooling mom married to my high school sweetheart, Nelson. We've been married for 25 years together. We have 10 children, ages 21 down to three, one graduate, another graduating this year. And I love encouraging other families here on my channel and on the blog, ourlifehomeschooling.com. I also help ordinary parents give their kids a better education at home through my new course, beyond school, the home education breakthrough. I have been working hard on this and I am so excited to launch it the first week in April. If you'd like to get on the wait list, the link is below. If I were to break homeschooling down to the very basics, here are some things you really need. The first is good books. And if you have a library card, this is an easy one for you. You can go and get whatever you want. We have accumulated good quality literature over the years. We've built up our library, but it was much smaller in the beginning. Quality books is probably the one thing that I could be accused of hoarding. It's really hard to turn down a good book. We have bookshelves in almost every room. And we also have a few bookshelves in the garage because I just know how much reading fuels learning. And when you have a great selection, kids are more likely to just pick some up and start perusing through them. So over time, we've built a home library. If you're looking for good book suggestions, I have many book lists on the blog, ourlifehomeschooling.com for reference. And make sure you have the best of books, the Bible. If you're not using the Bible in your homeschool, you are missing the most valuable curriculum available to you. Proverbs says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of true wisdom. The Bible is full of history, poetry, the wisdom books. The Old Testament has the laws that many of our laws were founded on. Most importantly, it introduces kids to our Savior Jesus and the message of the gospel. And this is one of the reasons that we read it in the morning at breakfast and again after dinner to our kids. So don't miss out on the best of books. A second resource that is really important is having a strong math curriculum. You don't need multiple math curriculums, but make sure your math curriculum is consistent, clear, and that it teaches strong computation skills so that kids are learning to add, subtract, multiply, and divide automatically. This is important because these are the basic skills needed for the next level, which would be fractions, percentages, and decimals. To teach math in our home, I use some very basic tools. An abacus, real money, as you saw me using when I was teaching our son to count to a dollar, counting tiles, a whiteboard. The whiteboard is useful for so many things. I also use it in morning time when we're teaching different concepts from our morning time notebook. It's just handy. It's handy to have a small whiteboard that you can just show something to everyone at once. But for math, some other tools we use are base 10 blocks, place value cards, some kind of fraction set, and you don't even need to buy one. You could just use a pizza and cut up your pizza and explain fractions or make a quesadilla, cut it up, and explain how things are part of a whole. I also use flashcards to teach our kids to add, subtract, multiply, and divide so they can do it fluently. Another essential for your homeschool is simple writing supplies. We use copywork and narration to teach our kids to write. It's the spine of our writing curriculum. I have many blog posts about this and plenty of free copywork that's free to you on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com if you want to learn more about it. But for this, you just need plain old spiral notebooks and pencils, paper. When I begin, before they can even do copywork and narration, I start by teaching them to hand write, buying simple k-lined paper that I get at the dollar store. I think with our oldest child, maybe our first two kids, I bought Handwriting Without Tears, the kindergarten curriculum, but then I kind of learned the methods and how to do it and ever since then I've just bought the simple k-lined paper or the paper with dotted lines through it at the dollar store. So writing doesn't require fancy materials. When our kids get older, usually around nine or ten, we start them on a formal grammar program. I use a BECA. IEW is another one I would also recommend. Another essential is any materials or equipment you have to help teach your kids life skills, and this is something that a lot of people don't think of. I know when I was a new homeschooler, I did not place a priority on this, but this is so important in helping prepare kids for the adult world. Things like cooking simple meals, doing their own laundry, organizing spaces, basic home care, time management, budgeting, saving, comparing prices. We take our kids with us when we go grocery shopping. They're along with us when we're gardening. We have a small homestead where we raise all the meat that our family eats, and our kids are there for all of it. Some other life skills would be learning to make an income and how to budget your money. We have some teenagers that have jobs now. My husband does the Every Dollar app from Dave Ramsey, and he really wants to sit down with them and help them to budget their money. This is such a valuable life skill. Teach your kids to problem solve. When they come to different problems and they bring them to you, don't solve them right away. Give them a chance to think about it and think of ideas of how they can solve it themselves. Once they get a car, teach them how to change the tire, how to change their own oil, or even just interpersonal skills like speaking confidently, asking questions, holding good conversations, and explaining their ideas clearly. These are all important skills for kids to learn, and they don't require special equipment. Another essential is a way for kids to explore their interests. Kids learn best when they're curious about something, and when you leave time in your day for exploration, learning becomes much more natural and memorable. I just think, as a mom who's been homeschooling for 16 years, I think of how many times I tried to drill a certain concept into a child, and they just weren't interested. But given the right moment, the right motivation, all of a sudden they learned how to do this skill in like five minutes. So giving them time to explore their interests, this doesn't require elaborate plans. It doesn't require expensive materials. Some of the things that have sparked interest in our kids is simply nature walks or going to the library. When we go to the library and we come back, my kids are quiet for usually an hour. They just all go to their separate parts of the house, and they're just looking at all the new things they brought home with them. Documentaries and watching YouTube to learn how to do different hobbies. Our older boys are into cars, and they are always learning how to fix things on their cars through YouTube. Simple projects or experiments. I think of the time our one son was able to get a hard-boiled egg to come through the neck of a bottle. It was so much fun for everybody. So a child who loves to learn is going to be intrinsically motivated. And I think one of the best ways to encourage your kids to be interested and curious about things is just to be that kind of person yourself. When they see you developing skills and trying new things, then they are going to do the same thing. Curiosity often drives a deeper kind of learning than curriculum alone. So your curriculum is important. It has its place, but really work to raise kids who love to learn, who propel themselves forward. I've seen it firsthand with my kids. When they're interested in something, they naturally ask questions, look for answers. They stay engaged much longer. Let me mention a couple things that you really don't need. You don't need pretty curriculum that you realistically won't have time to use. And back to my example of those history figures, they're really nice. And you know, maybe someday I will use them, but so far it's been 10 years and they're still in that drawer. Another thing you don't need is more than one curriculum per subject. The more curriculum you bring into your homeschool per subject, the more complicated you make it. You just add more ideas and it can just be simpler if you stick with one thing that's working well and adapt it to meet your needs. Another thing you don't need is complicated systems. We have simplified and streamlined in as many ways as possible. I have a list of meals that I make for lunch every day, and there's about five or six of them and we just rotate through them. And it's, yeah, it's not fancy, but you know what? It makes our day a lot easier. We've simplified our laundry system. All of our kids, 10 and older do their own laundry and the rest of the house. I run one or two loads a day. I only have one laundry basket so that when it comes out, I'm forced to fold it right then and not let it sit. You just don't need expensive extras. You don't need a designated school room with all fancy decorations, homeschool decorations on the wall. If you love that, and if that helps you, um, then good, stick with it, but you don't need it. It's not necessary. If you don't have time to actually use it, if you're not using it in your homeschool, it's probably not essential. A simple homeschool is a sustainable homeschool. Your homeschool can be very simple and still be very good. If this video helped you, you may enjoy watching a video I did a couple weeks ago called Why I Choose a Simple Homeschool, Understanding the Power of Enough. If this encouraged you, please like and subscribe. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.