Simplify your homeschool! Keep it super simple! We have all heard this, but why don’t we apply it to homeschooling our children. How many of you have purchased way too much curriculum and end the year feeling guilty because you didn’t even touch some of those books? Me! I have been guilty of this too many times. I get excited by some new flashy curriculum and forget that I still have 24 hours in my day to homeschool six children and take care of all my other responsibilities. Here are some ways you can simplify your homeschool to create more joy in your homeschool.
Combine students
If you are homeschooling more than one student, combine wherever possible. Here are some subjects this could be applied to science, history, art, music, literature, foreign language, grammar and theology. We will never be able to teach our students all there is to know about any of the subjects, we just need to teach them how to think so they can learn the information they need to learn later in life. Your children are all interested in marine biology? Read a marine biology book aloud and have each of them retell it to you. There is no reason to have multiple different science curriculums and having everyone doing their own thing.
Note: I do not apply this principle to math and reading. These two subjects should be done in a certain order, because the concepts build upon one another. Math and reading are the two subjects I do individually with each child.
Morning Time
This is my favorite time of the homeschool day! We all sit together from 8-9am in the living room and then everyone splits up to do their own school work. This is the time when I incorporate the combing subjects principle. We always start with Bible reading and hymns, then Classical Conversations memory work, read aloud and then I either read our science or history text. This allows me to teach multiple subjects to multiple children and this is partly why it’s my favorite part of the day. It helps me to feel we have accomplished something that day, even if everything else goes haywire. On busy days, when we are out of the house all day, we still do morning time. Then I don’t have to feel as if we lost the whole day.
Count real life skills
Cooking, baking, cleaning, babysitting, laundry; these can all be included in homeschooling as well. These are important skills and should be written in our daily log. These skills are becoming a lost art and many people do not have basic skills in the kitchen or rest of the home. These skills all help to make our children become contributing members to society and absolutely should count towards your homeschool time.
Independent subjects
Have some independent subjects that your kids can grab while you work with someone else. Each of my children have a magazine holder for all their school work. Explode the Code, handwriting, latin workbooks, independent reading books are a few of the things we have included in there each year. This gives your children a chance to do some work independently, which is a great skill to learn. It also keeps children occupied while you are working one on one with another child. It does take some training initially, but is totally worth the fruit.
Simplify your homeschool! It will make you and your children’s homeschool day so much more enjoyable. Less is actually more in homeschooling. If you can simplify your homeschool, then you be able to see more joy in homeschooling.
