Happy Friday, dear friends! We’ve almost made it! I hope this series has been helpful for practical ideas, trouble-shooting your home school, or perhaps thinking through whether homeschooling might be for you. If you have any other questions, please let me know through comments or email! Last few for now … Q. How do you homeschool multiple grades? A. I feel barely qualified to answer this since this is really the first year you could say I’m schooling “multiple” grades, but here we go. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how smoothly the transition has gone to homeschooling three grades. My best tricks for helping this go smoothly are to: 1. Be…

Good afternoon! This is the second of a three-part series answering homeschooling questions. Part one talked about Classical Conversations and homeschool groups. Today I’ll focus on curriculum and planning. Friday, I’ll speak to homeschooling with littles and homeschooling multiple grades. Friends, I know all of this is super information overload. Truly, it’s easier for me to write in all here in one week, but do not try to read it all at once! The minute it becomes a burden or overwhelming, just stop! You can always file it away and come back to it as you have time. The last thing I want is to discourage you or make you…

Hi there, friends! First things first: I love hearing from you, whether by email, text or comment! Please don’t ever feel the need to leave a comment, but if you want to (hint, hint), I know the system I used was a little un-user-friendly. I had it installed because of spam, but I’d really love to encourage more dialogue here, so I just switched back to the original format. I’ll be on the lookout for spam, and I hope it makes it easier for you to chime in! Remember when I wrote a blog post about homeschooling, oh, about five months ago? I fully expected to write a follow-up, giving…

This year a friend of mine organized a little book-and-field-trip group. We meet the first Friday of every month during the school year for a field trip and three times we’ll read a book and have a “book club party” to discuss and celebrate it. Today was the first book club meeting. It was scheduled for tomorrow but we decided to move it a day forward due to all the hurricane craziness around here; we showed up at a local park but discovered all government building/organizations are closed for the coming storm. So our friend Kristin offered to host us last-minute in her backyard, and it turned out to be…

To be honest, I was scared-stiff about attempting to homeschool with four kids in our family. Especially when two of them are new-to-us. David and I considered and prayed through our options this summer, and in the end, we both felt in our gut that, even with its challenges, this is the right path for our family. But it was with fear and trembling that I began school on August 3rd. Like I said in last week’s post, every moment of the day is not smooth. We have lots of interruptions, and Mommy loses her temper sometimes. There was one particular Disastrous Day when David stopped by the house at…

We’re in our fifth week of a new school year. Our days are not idyllic or without interruptions, but I’m here to report that we’re off to a great start. We are learning and laughing and, for the most part, very much enjoying being together. This is due to a whole lot of God’s grace, and also, I think, two main factors: 1. We found a great daily schedule, and 2. We love our curriculum. More on that later this week, but for now, some photos! Happy Labor Day!

Yesterday was back to school for us, after almost a three-week break. If you think it sounds crazy attempting to homeschool with two new-to-our-family toddlers in the house, you’re right. It is. I spent an hour during naptime on Mother’s Day spread out at the table, trying to make it all work on paper. Legally, we have to both complete 180 days of school a year, and also get through a certain amount of curriculum. Thankfully after looking everything over we seemed to be in good shape: 17 days of school and we’re on track to complete our material by then too. It’s been a three-ring circus around here in…