How to Homeschool (Even If No One Ever Taught You)

If homeschooling feels complicated, you may be starting in the wrong place. Nobody ever taught you how to homeschool? Good! Let's forget everything you think school is supposed to look like. Let me show you where I would start. If you're homeschooling or maybe you're thinking about homeschooling and you're wondering, how in the world am I supposed to do this? Nobody ever taught me how to homeschool. I want to tell you something right from the beginning. You can do this. You don't have to have been homeschooled yourself and you don't need a degree in education and you certainly don't need to recreate the school you remember from your own childhood. I know this because I was never homeschooled. In fact, my first real experience with homeschooling was actually as a public school teacher. I had a homeschooled child come into my classroom. He had been homeschooled from kindergarten through fourth grade. He came into my classroom in the middle of fourth grade and observing this child completely upended the way I thought about homeschooling. He excelled academically but that wasn't the only thing that stood out to me. He was in general just a great leader in the class. Everybody looked up to him. He was fun. He was curious and he just changed the atmosphere in our room. I had some assumptions about homeschooling like many people do. I had assumptions about what it was supposed to look like and then I met this child and I thought, wait a minute, this is not really what I expected at all. It made me start questioning the way I looked at education. A few years later when we had our own children and we were starting to think about school, I had no idea where to begin and we decided to try homeschooling and I did what most of us do. I looked back at how I had learned in school but I quickly learned something that changed everything for me and my husband. Getting an education and going to school are two completely different things. Seeing shall take heart again. Let us then be up and doing with a heart for any faith. Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait. Ready to ride and spread the alarm through every middle-sex village and farm. For the country folk to be up and to arm. A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door and a word that shall echo forevermore. For born on the night wind of the past. Once you begin to understand the difference between schooling and education, homeschooling starts to look very different. When you decide to educate your kids at home, you begin asking different questions like we did. We started asking what do I want my kids to learn? What's important to us as a family? How do we want to spend our time? What do we want our kids childhood to look like? And these questions for us began to shape the way we educate our kids. So today I'm going to break this down into three really simple steps. I'm going to explain it to you like you're five for those of you who want that because sometimes when you're brand new to homeschooling you don't need another 47 things to think about. You just need someone to say okay start here. If you're new, hi my name is Sherry. I'm a Christian. I'm a homeschooling mom married to my high school sweetheart. We've been married for 26 years. We've been homeschooling our 10 kids from the very beginning. We have two graduates. Our third child is graduating this year. We have seven in school and one preschooler. I love encouraging other families here on my channel and on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com. I'm also a contributor in the Made to Homeschool community. Made to Homeschool is an online community designed to encourage and equip homeschool moms so they don't have to figure everything out alone. It's a place to find encouragement and connection with other moms who are homeschooling right alongside you. On September 21st at three o'clock I will be doing a live workshop on Made to Homeschool talking about practical tips for teaching math. I'll leave the link for you below if you're interested. If you want to know exactly where to start in homeschooling the first thing you should do is probably the simplest. Be a family. You are a family. You're not a classroom. You're not a school and I think this is especially important for families who are coming out of a very busy school lifestyle. Maybe your children have been going to school sports, to activities, to lessons, to church activities, and appointments and sometimes a family can get so used to being busy that they don't even know what it feels like to simply be together. So now we want to find all the things that make seven. Okay so look we can do one, one plus six. You have how many here Colin? How many here? Three. Three plus how many over here? That's four. Four. So the place to start is to be a family first. If you're new to homeschooling you may actually need to learn how to just be a family again and that's okay. Go on a hike. Watch a documentary together. Go visit that historic site that you've always been curious about. Start by reading really good books. Cook together. Go outside in the evening and look for bugs. My kids right now are so into the monarch caterpillars. You'll see later in this video that we've been collecting several of them and they've been each making a little chrysalis and soon we'll be watching them emerge as butterflies. It's so exciting. But just go for a walk around the neighborhood. Sit around the table and talk. You don't have to turn every experience into a lesson. Just live together. One of the beautiful things about homeschooling is that you don't have to squeeze your family life around school. Your family life is actually part of the education and when you start there I think it takes a lot of the pressure off. You don't have to wake up Monday morning and suddenly become a classroom teacher. You're a mom. You're a dad and I think that's one thing we really forget is that we were their first teachers. We taught them how to eat with a fork, how to go to the bathroom, how to sleep through the night. We were their first teachers. So start there. You are a family. Be a family not a school. Once you've established that foundation then you can begin layering in the academics. I've talked about this before in a video called If I Were Homeschooling for the First Time this is what I would do where I explain what I call our layered approach to homeschooling. I'll leave the link for that for you if you'd like to look at it but in our 17 years of homeschooling we've had many ups and downs. I've been pregnant for many years that we were homeschooling. Had an infant. We had different home renovations, sicknesses, moving. There's just an ebb a natural ebb and flow to life and I learned to layer homeschooling so when we're in one of those seasons where there's just so much going on we peel back the layers and we approach it by prioritizing things in a certain way and then eventually adding more in as we are able to. Now this isn't a routine that I'm talking about here. We do have a simple four-step routine. I'll leave the link for the video where I teach that as well but this is an approach to homeschooling a way of adding more in or pulling back when life circumstances happen. The idea is simple. You don't have to do everything at once. You build. You layer and then you add in as you're ready. The first for us is home order. Get your home into a workable rhythm. You don't need to have it super planned but have some basic order so that everyone knows what the day generally looks like. Start with teaching your kids to get dressed, make their bed, brush their teeth. Give everyone a chore in an area of your house so that certain areas of your house are generally clean. Secondly, read aloud to your kids. This is something so easy you can do. It doesn't take a lot of preparation. You just open up some good books, sit on the sofa, and start reading aloud to your kids. If we're in survival mode, these are the first two things that I really work on. We make sure our home is in order and I make sure I'm reading aloud to the kids every day. The third thing we focus on is reading, writing, and arithmetic. The three R's. This would be the next thing I would add in. These are the basic academic skills your children need to help them become independent learners. These are the monarchs that our kids have found. We have a patch of milkweed and it is just covered in them. My husband found this really cute butterfly house at a local thrift shop and it's been perfect for watching these. The final layer we add in after we have home order, we're reading good books every day, we've focused on the three R's, reading, writing, and arithmetic. The last thing is to add in the riches. Science, history, geography, art, music, foreign language, handicrafts, and there's so much more. But notice what we're not doing. We are not trying to do everything in the first week of homeschooling. We're building and that's one of the biggest changes that I made as I grew in homeschooling. The more I learned you don't have to do everything right now. You can layer in. Start with base layers, add things in, and then pull back when you need to. If you'd like to learn more about this layering approach and my simple four-step daily routine, I teach you this thoroughly in my course Beyond School the Home Education Breakthrough. I talk about moving beyond simply bringing school at home and creating an education that actually fits your family. Comment education breakthrough below or click the link in the description to get my free family first framework which will help you go from an overwhelmed mom to a confident home educator. So I told you I was going to give you three simple steps to approaching homeschooling. The first is be a family. The second is layer the academic work. And I'm going to give you the third now. See homeschooling as a process, not an end goal. This is probably one of the most important things I could tell you. Homeschooling is a process. It's always changing. And while you learn systems, you learn ways to do things, and it gets easier, you get better at it, it still is always shifting because we never hit a point where we finally arrive and say, okay, I figured out homeschooling. I'm done. It doesn't work like that. Your kids are always changing. Their interests change and their abilities as well. Your family circumstances ebb and flow. You may have babies right now while in three years you may have a teenager. So there are seasons when things are just going beautifully. And then there are other times where you just think, I don't know if I'm going to get through fifth grade math with this child. I think sometimes moms think there's this magic formula. You see other homeschool moms that seem to have it all together. There is no magical formula. There's no right answers. There's a constant ebb and flow. But what I have learned overall is that this has been such a wonderful lifestyle for our family and I love the childhood that we've been able to give our kids. But if you're still reaching for the golden key, let me just let you in on a little secret. I still haven't found it. Things are still changing in our homeschool and while many things have gotten easier, it's always something, we're always learning new things and I am having to still make changes. For many years I had nappers and now we're coming out of that stage. My youngest child isn't always taking a nap and so we're just relearning how to navigate that since that's usually when I do my quiet time, my time alone. So there's no point of arrival, but the process learning along with your kids is so rewarding. So you're not trying to find the perfect schedule or curriculum that's gonna work for the next 12 years. You're learning how to educate these children right here in this family right now and that takes time. So if you're brand new to homeschooling and you're sitting there thinking, I don't know what I'm doing. It's okay. You're not supposed to know everything yet. I certainly didn't. I started by looking what I already knew, which was school, and then I slowly learned to think differently. I learned that education doesn't have to look like school. You don't have to know how to homeschool before you start homeschooling. You were your child's first teacher. Teaching them the bookwork is just the next step in their learning. So remember, be a family, layer the academics, and don't forget that homeschooling is a process. I'd love to hear from you what's something you wish someone had told you when you first started homeschooling. And remember to check out the link to my Family First framework. It's in the description box below. Thanks for watching. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.