The BORING Homeschool Habits That Have Saved Us Thousands

Homeschooling doesn't have to cost a fortune. In fact, we've spent far less than most people think over the last 16 years, and I'm convinced our kids have received an even better education because of it. Let me show you some of the simple habits that made that possible. We are fully enjoying our summer, but we will be opening up the books again in a couple of weeks. One of our kids recently said to me, I can't wait to start school again. That's when you know you've had enough of a break and it's time to open the books again. When your child is actually excited about their schoolwork, when they start going to the bookshelf and looking at books they've read before, or for my kids it's in their workboxes, they'll pull things out and look at their math again. It's usually a good sign that summer has done its job. We've rested, we've been outside, we've done our projects, and now we're beginning to look ahead to a new homeschool year. If you're new to my channel, hi, I'm Sheri. I'm a Christian. I'm a homeschooling mom married to my high school sweetheart. We've been married for 26 years. We have 10 kids ages 21 down to three, and we've homeschooled from the very beginning, although neither of us were homeschooled ourselves. I'm a former public school teacher, never thought I'd someday be a homeschool mom, and I love encouraging other families here on my channel and on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com. If you're new to homeschooling or even if you've been homeschooling a while and you feel lost, you need some direction, I invite you to check out my new course, Beyond School, The Home Education Breakthrough. In the course, I take you step by step through everything I've learned in the past 16 years of homeschooling, and I also take you through a complete day from beginning all the way up until bedtime. Comment education breakthrough below or click the link in the description box to get my free family first framework, which will help you go from overwhelmed to a confident home educator. We'll be starting back in the next few weeks. And yes, I've been online shopping, making some purchases. I'm hoping to do even more of this tomorrow. I want to set aside a whole day and just sit down. I have some things that we need to replace that have been broken, and there's a couple of new things that the kids need for certain subjects. But as I've been thinking about what we have and what we need and what we've used over the past several years, I started thinking about how much money we've saved all these years of homeschooling. We've homeschooled for 16 years, and over that time, I'm convinced that a handful of boring habits, homeschool habits have saved us thousands of dollars, not hundreds, thousands. When I stop and think about how much we pay in school taxes compared to what we actually spend educating our own kids each year, it's honestly shocking. We spend just a fraction of the amount we pay in school taxes, and yet, I am absolutely convinced that our kids are receiving a better education through homeschooling. And the research consistently backs this up. Homeschool students, on average, perform as well or better than their peers academically, even though homeschooling often costs families only a fraction of what traditional school does. And before I share these habits, I want to read a quote from John Taylor Gatto that explains so well why an education does not need to be expensive. He says, one of the surest ways to recognize real education is by the fact that it doesn't It doesn't depend on expensive toys or gadgets. The experiences that produce it and the self-awareness that propels it are nearly free. It's hard to turn a dollar on education, but schooling is a wonderful hustle, getting sharper all the time. So just because it has all the bells and does not necessarily mean that it is going to be the best tool to teach your children. A true education is not expensive, and it can be very simple and yet very good. That quote has become more true to me with every year we homeschool, because home is not a miniature school building. It's a real living environment. The world is our classroom. Some of our homeschool supplies don't come from our curriculum catalog at all. They're the local wildlife attractions, the times that we go on nature hikes and the kids pick up wildflowers and seeds and nuts that we find on our nature walks and they bring them home. They sketch them. They look in field guides to find out more about them. It is home cooked food that we make together in the kitchen. It's art on the walls from pages of art books that I found at a local book sale. It's the deep conversations we have around the dinner table when we're reading the Bible together. It's the stacks of library books that are piling up around our house. The home projects that we try after watching a YouTube video. Learning is woven into real life, and when you live like this, you don't have to spend a fortune to give your kids an excellent education. It's all around you. It's living. It's breathing. Kids are captivated by what they see and hear as you play beautiful music, as they discover interesting things through the stories you read to them. It becomes a part of your family culture. Before I jump into these quote boring habits, I do want to say something. I don't want to give the impression that we never spend money on homeschool resources or fun learning opportunities because we do. There have been seasons when we've had a little extra in the budget and we've enjoyed buying a special curriculum that maybe wasn't necessary but I wanted to try, or taking a certain class, or paying for something that would outsource a subject to make it easier for me. Saying yes to an experience we couldn't have afforded before. But there have also been seasons when money was tight and we had to keep things incredibly simple. And that's the point that I want to make. A great education doesn't depend on having a big homeschool budget. It never has. Some of our richest learning has happened while baking bread in the kitchen, working in the garden, attending a local theatrical performance, trying to make our own kombucha or water kefir. I remember when we did that one time the kids absolutely loved it and they've been asking to do it again. And they learned a lot about chemistry from it. It's the times we were learning to sew or tackling a home improvement project together. Going through the stress of not being able to figure it out and then finally figuring it out. Preserving food from our garden and really just following our children's interests where they lead. So if you're in a season where you can't buy all the extras, don't think your kids are missing out. They're not. You can save so much money by resisting the pressure to buy every new shiny curriculum or subscription and just keep it simple. Focus on the things that matter most and your children can still receive an incredible education. So let me share the habits that have made the biggest difference for us. First of all, we stick with the same curriculum for the most part. I've been doing the same thing for almost 16 years. This is probably the least exciting homeschool advice on the internet. We found a curriculum we love and while it's not perfect, we've continued to use it and just adapt it as needed. If there's things I don't like, I take them out. If there's something I want to add, then we do that. Every time you switch curriculum, there is usually more cost, not to mention the time it takes you all to learn the new system, the new scope and sequence. You buy new teacher's guides, new student books, and sometimes you want the supplements that go with it. I think the most hidden cost is the adjustment period. In my experience, it can take almost a year for mom and child to fully settle into a new program and time is money. You could be making progress in something else that maybe isn't perfect, but you can just use it as it fits your needs. If I had a very limited homeschool budget, I would spend most of my money. The first thing I would invest in would be a solid math curriculum. So if this is you and you have to choose between buying the most needed thing and letting other things go, pick a good math curriculum. After a math curriculum for kids that are in the upper elementary grades, I would probably next invest in a good grammar program. But for so many of the other subjects, children can learn so much just through reading books. If you have a library card, if you have YouTube, if you can go out in nature and you have some field guides, you can watch documentaries and just have good conversations about the world around you, about politics, science, whatever it is that you're experiencing, learn along with your child. History, science, civics, health, all the peripheral subjects can be learned through the books that you get at the library. So if you have a very limited budget, get a good math curriculum. If you have a little bit more money, spend some on a phonics program and a language program and then just go to the library a lot, read a lot of books, pick an area of study perhaps for science and get everything out. Maybe if you pick weather, you can just go get all the weather books from the library. Now of course it is wonderful to be able to spend money on a specific curriculum, but I'm just talking about the times when you need to keep it bare bones. So when you're choosing curriculum, be picky and then stick with it. When you hop around from one shiny curriculum to the next, it does come with a cost. The second boring habit is that we practice copywork and narration. This habit is surprisingly inexpensive. All you really need are good books and spiral notebooks. Every August I go to Walmart to the back to school sales. I buy a stack of spiral notebooks that are usually like, I don't know, around 75, 79 cents each. They're not fancy. They are not something you're going to see on Instagram, but over the years I've learned that copywork and narration do something powerful in a child's brain. They train the habit of attention. Copywork teaches spelling, punctuation, handwriting, sentence structure, and really so much more. Narration helps kids learn how to sequence. It teaches them comprehension in a way that is not out of the context of the text. It teaches them how to transfer oral language to written language, and they, copywork and narration, quietly build excellent writers. And the great thing is they cost almost nothing. If you'd like to learn more about how we do this, I have done a video on copywork where I go through everything step by step and how we use copywork in our home school. You can also learn more about it in my course. I also have a second video and blog post where I talk all about narration. So I'll link those for you. A third habit is that our kids share textbooks, especially in subjects like science, because quite honestly, nature is one of our primary textbooks. We do a lot of family style learning. So instead of buying a separate science textbook for every child, I just buy one. We use it together. Different kids sit by me different days. Would it be nice if they each had their own in front of them while I'm reading? Sure, it would be nice. And sometimes we have borrowed textbooks from friends who've been doing the same thing as we have, and maybe they're in a different section of science. And so sometimes that works, but our kids share and it's not hindered their learning at all. The kids keep nature notebooks, which are just sketchbooks that you can buy for like a couple bucks. And the cost is small compared to buying multiple science packages every year. The fourth habit is taking advantage of the library and YouTube. Both of these are essentially free. I honestly don't know how we could have homeschooled for 16 years without the library and YouTube. We have slowly built our home library by shopping local book sales. But when we started out, it was actually pretty small. So if you see our house filled with books, this is something we've accumulated over 16 years. But what we don't own, we borrow. If we need books about the civil war, biographies, poetry, even field guides for science, we borrow them from the library. And YouTube has become an incredible education tool when you use it intentionally. You can learn any skill you want to on YouTube. We have learned how to make home repairs, identify plants. We've learned about when we're studying birds, we watch all the habits of their calls and them preying on different animals all on YouTube just to add to what we're learning. We've learned to sew different projects. I did a video on this a couple weeks ago. My daughter, who loves to make sourdough bread, has watched tons of videos on the different ways that people make it and they all do it differently. So she's just learned so much from that. Sometimes the most valuable learning in our home begins with someone saying, I wonder how this works. And then we just go look it up. And the fifth habit is that we focus on practical life skills. And this one has saved us money both now and in the future because we place a high priority on life skills. We intentionally teach our kids skills that they will actually use as adults. Some of our kids have taken algebra too, but it is a hard pill for me to swallow because I have never used it in all my adult life. And that was a whole year. I could have spent learning something practical like managing money or doing daily household chores, cooking meals, baking bread, gardening. I mean, my husband and I have been gardening for so many years and we are still learning new things. Preserving food, starting small businesses. These are life skills that the kids will use as adults. So I'm not against academic subjects. We absolutely spend, you know, that's a priority for us. But I've become much more interested in whether my children can function confidently in real life. Think outside the curriculum box. So if you're a newer homeschool mom feeling the pressure to buy everything, I want to encourage you start with a good math curriculum, good phonics program, get library cards, buy a stack of spiral notebooks, go outside, read aloud, talk together, learn together. An excellent education can be remarkably simple and surprisingly inexpensive. I'd love to hear from you. Comment below with the boring homeschool habits that have saved you money. Thanks for watching. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.