A Sanctuary Not a School: Why We Educate at Home

We didn't decide to homeschool because we wanted to recreate school at home. We wanted to create a sanctuary for our children. A safe haven where they have room to grow, wander, play, and flourish. And a sacred place where they come to know God and see his hand in everything they study. These formative years are too important not to be intentional. We want to give our children both a safe haven for childhood and a chance to learn about the world God made. That's really what I mean when I use the word sanctuary. A sanctuary is a safe place. A place of refuge. But it also means a sacred place. And both meanings are important to us. Our children are growing and developing so quickly during these years and we want home to be a place where they feel safe, known, and loved. A place where they have time to play and ask questions, to develop relationships with their siblings, and just to have a childhood. We want to give them an environment where they can flourish, not just academically. We're thinking the whole child here. Physically, relationally, and spiritually as well. We want our home to be a sacred place where our children are learning to know their creator. We want them to know, as Psalm 78 says, about the glorious deeds of the Lord, about his power and his mighty wonders. Because everything that can be learned or understood belongs to our creator. The relationships we discover in math are his design. The beauty we see in works of art, literature, and history are all part of the world he created. This is his story. I have been surprised how many times I am showing my kids some art or reading some classic literature and there are references or stories from the Bible depicted or are woven into the story. As Christians, our desire is to know him and to make him known. So we want our children to understand that every subject belongs to him. We want them to understand not just how the world works, but why it matters. The meaning of life, the tragedy of the fall, how the whole earth is under the curse of sin, and the beautiful story of God's redemption through our Savior Jesus Christ. So when we talk about making home a sanctuary, we're talking about both. A safe haven for childhood, where our children have the space and security to grow, and a sacred place where they are learning to see the whole world as God's world and to love the one who made it. That's the kind of education and childhood we want to give our children. If you're new here, hi, my name is Sheri. On this channel, I love encouraging other homeschool families from the experience that we've had homeschooling our 10 kids from the beginning. This is going on our 17th year. We have two graduates and our oldest daughter is going to be graduating this year as well. I also have a blog, ourlifehomeschooling.com, where I share free copywork and just lots of resources for homeschoolers that have been helpful to me over the years. We've started back to our book work after a wonderful summer, relaxing and working on life skills and going different places together. The kids have been really excited to start again, which I love to see. We had our first day of co-op and our high schoolers on this day went to their high school co-op. Our family goes to a co-op, all of us older and younger, but then a second day, our high schoolers go to another co-op where they get some additional classes. I just had my younger kids. Our homeschool now looks quite a bit different from how it did even five years ago. For many, many years, I had infants, toddlers. Now our youngest child is three years old, so it's a little more calm and orderly, and I feel like it's a little easier now than it was, but for many years, I put in that foundational work, the hard work of getting started. I can relate to so many of moms who are in that place right now with your young children. It does get easier as they get older. I'm hoping to do a checklist video in the near future. I've done this every year for the past couple of years where I share with you each of our kids' individual checklists. You can pretty much see exactly what our homeschool looks like, and just to give you a snapshot if you're not familiar, we have four parts to our daily routine. The first is morning time, which I don't really show in this video, but we have morning time pretty much every morning. This is where we study the beautiful subjects. I have a simple morning time notebook that I create every year. It's available. I'll leave it in the description box for you. Many families are doing this along with us this year. For morning time, we're doing a bible story, memory verses. We learn famous speeches and poems, composer study, hymn study, folk songs, and picture study, as well as nature study. So just a lot in there, but we just take it a little chunk at a time, one day at a time. After morning time, the second thing we do is our chores and cleanup, and we have a system for this that we've developed over the years. I share more about it in my course, which I'll tell you about in a little bit, but our morning chores are really part of our schoolwork. I don't see them as an obstacle to what we're doing. They're life skills that the kids are learning, and it's part of our day. The third thing is independent work, and this is where each of our kids grab their checklists and go through down one by one through each subject and work through all that they're studying this year. We take a break for lunch and going outside, and then in the afternoon, we sit down together and I do a read aloud, usually a couple read alouds, depending on what we're working on. So that's kind of our day in a nutshell. Now I also spent some time on this day talking with our graduate about all the work that she needs to be working toward this year for her graduation. She needs to apply for scholarships at the school that she's hoping to attend. She needs to get her graduation photos done, and we have an organization here in our county that kind of is the hub of all the co-ops, and they provide a really nice graduation for the high schoolers. And they meet once a month to plan out this graduation, and each graduate has responsibilities for it, and so she's going to have some of that to do as well. I love some of the classes that our kids are taking at co-op. Actually, at the end of this day, when my older girls came home, we all sat around the island and were talking, and they were so excited about their new classes. And it's just a very laid-back, cozy environment where they're learning, and I just love to see the joy in their faces because that just means so much to me. Our kids had a little break in their day and decided to make this little throne out of a laundry basket for our three-year-old and carry him around. And, you know, it's just one of those little things that kids do, childish play, that seems so innocent. But I love that our kids are growing up together. They are close friends. They have many other friends, but they are very close, and these are moments in the day I just cherish. I also wanted to show you our work boxes. This is where my kids keep their individual work. They have a work box for reading, writing, and math, and that seems to be enough for what we need since so many of our other subjects are done at morning time or read-aloud time. And each one has a different patterned label so that they can kind of just look at their pattern and know which boxes are theirs. Now, I also have some wardrobes, two in the basement and two out in the garage, where we just keep extra homeschool supplies, basically a lot of their old portfolios from previous years. We have so many of those. And just maybe curriculum that I'm not using this year or no child is using. Just some of those extra math manipulatives that I need to go out and get. It's good to have those in a separate place so they're not cluttering up our home, but also I can access them easily. Back to some of the classes our kids are taking at co-op. One is an entrepreneurship class. Another is relationship skills class. Some of them are doing a book club. They have a logic class and a literature. Another one is a writing class, which is kind of nice for high school. I like for them to get other perspectives on their writing other than just mine. Some of our younger kids at co-op are taking U.S. geography and science and then they get an elective where they can choose either American Girl Literature, Art, Conversational Spanish, Creative Builders Club, or gym. And usually my boys pick gym because they love movement in the middle of their day. My daughter picked Spanish because she's just shown an interest in that lately. And as you can see here, we also collect monarch caterpillars this time of year and we feed them milkweed and we watch them form a chrysalis and turn into butterflies. It's something we do we have done for many years in September and so the kids kind of anticipate it at the beginning of our new homeschool year. I love one of the verses we're learning right now in Morning Time. It's from Deuteronomy 32. May my teaching drop as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, like gentle rain upon the tender grass and like showers upon the herb. I love that picture of teaching our children slowly, faithfully, pouring truth into their lives and impressing God's truth into their heart just as softly as the rain falls on the tender grass. And really at the heart of it is one simple truth that we want our kids to know and that is that Christ is King. Jesus is not just somebody we hear about in stories on Sundays. He is King of the earth. He's Lord over our homes, our children, our work, history, science, literature, everything. And if Christ is King over everything, then every part of our children's education can point them back to Him. So since this is true, it has changed the way we educate our children. We don't want our kids to simply know about God. We want them to learn to see the world through Him. When we study human anatomy, as we did a few years ago, we want them to see that they're made in the image of God. When they study history, we want them to see it as His story. And by the way, when we learn history, we don't learn world history and Bible history separately. They happened together. So they're both part of the same story. When they read a beautiful story of literature, we want them to recognize truth, goodness, and sacrifice. When they study creation, we want them to stand in awe and wonder at the God who made it. Because education isn't just filling our children's heads with information. It's shaping what they love. It's teaching them what is true and what is worth pursuing and ultimately who they belong to. As Christian parents, we have this incredible opportunity to say, this world belongs to Christ. So let's give our kids an education that helps them see that. And there's another reason that these years matter so much. They're formative. Our children are only little for a short period of time. And during these years, we want home and family to be central, not the other way around. We love that our kids are growing up together, not just going to the same house at the end of the day, but actually living together, reading books, playing outside, working, talking, laughing, having adventures. Our kids have made so many memories over the years. Of course, friendships matter. And our kids are a part of a great community. We love our co-op and the other areas that we're involved in. Our kids need other people in their lives, and we want them to have good friends, but we don't want their peers to become the center of their world while their family gets pushed to the edges. And we have this great opportunity to give them a childhood where family is home base. I don't want to wish we had spent more of their childhood together. I want to know that we were there. We lived it together. And if what I'm talking about today resonates with you, maybe you've thought, I want to do this, but I just don't know how to make it all work. I've created a course for moms for this specific reason. I remember being in that position myself many years ago. It's called Beyond School, the Home Education Breakthrough. And in the course, I walk you step-by-step through how to move from being overwhelmed and uncertain to becoming a confident home educator. So if you're ready to stop second-guessing yourself and start feeling confident about educating your kids, giving them a family first lifestyle, click the link below this video and join me in the Home Education Breakthrough. I'd love to walk through this with you. So the heart behind creating a sanctuary at home for us is giving our kids a childhood where family comes first, not the other way around. And then giving them an education that not only prepares them for adult life, but prepares them for eternity. I'd love to hear from you. What is one thing you value most about homeschooling? Is it the freedom, family relationships? Maybe it's time out in nature. Our kids have certainly been doing that today. Pursuing their own interests, learning at your own pace, or maybe it's something completely different for you. Let me know in the comments. And then be sure to check out the Home Education Breakthrough in the link below. Thanks for watching. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.