Last Term Homeschool Update: What's Working Well

(Photo from a visit to our friends' ranch last fall.)

Between the months of September and May, it seems my life revolves around being a homeschool mom.  That's a bit of an exaggeration, but not by too much.  There may have been a time when that fact would have bothered me - I wanted time to do other things, to be other things.  But I've come to recognize that there is a time and a season for everything, and this is the season that we are in the thick of homeschooling. Instead of kicking against the goads, I've come to embrace homeschooling as the equivalent of my 9-5, my career if you will. When viewed through that lens, I don't think I could pick a career I love more than educating my own kids, being with them all day, watching them grow and change and learn and thrive.  What a blessing!

Since we've established that I can't think of much else beside homeschooling right now, why not embrace it on the blog too?  I thought it was high time for a little 3/4 year homeschool update (actually more than that now, since by the time this post goes up we'll have a mere two weeks left!).

State Of The Homeschool

First, lest I scare any future homeschoolers out there, the last couple school years have been more all-consuming than is normal for us, or than is typical for the average homeschooler.  

I am, after all, homeschooling five kids this year, even though one of them is just in kindergarten. On top of that, we've been in a transition period with some of my kids as I work on getting them to be more independent with their schoolwork - teaching independence surprisingly still requires alot of supervision.  So we are very much in the thick of it right now.  I said at the beginning of this school year that I anticipated this year being the hardest year of homeschooling for me as the mom.  In reality, I think the 2022-2023 year, this year, and possibly next school year, will probably be the three hardest homeschool years we will have to go through.  So I'm really just in the middle of the hard.  

In some ways this year has been easier than last year, and in some ways it's been more difficult.  I anticipate that I'll say the same thing next year, and after that we may be fairly home free (oh wait, after next year my oldest will be starting high school, so maybe not).

For the rest of this post, I wanted to share some things that are working well for us this year.  There are alot of things that didn't work that we've changed this year, but I think I'll save some of that for a different post.  These are the successes thus far.

Daily Checklists

A couple years ago I started creating daily checklists for my kids, and the effect it had on our productivity was incredible.  At the time we started, most of my kids were not completely capable of following a checklist on their own, but just having everything laid out on a checklist helped me to help them keep on track.  There are alot of subjects that would have fallen through the cracks if it weren't for our checklists!  I understand there are alot of free-spirited homeschoolers out there who are probably cringing right now, but if you have ever had a sneaky feeling that you aren't accomplishing what you had hoped for in your homeschool days, let me just extol the virtues of the checklist.  There are so many subjects and books that we would just forget about if it wasn't for my checklist system.

Weekly Planning

Every weekend I set aside a half hour to take a look at my plan for the week and make adjustments. This involves adjusting our checklists and taking a look to make sure we are on track with different subjects.  At the start of the year I set lesson "checkpoints" for different weeks of the year, and that way I can quickly look and see if we are falling behind on our quarterly goals.  Then I adjust our checklists as needed.

I originally modeled my checklist system after Sarah Mackenzie's notebook system, but I got tired of writing everything out each day, so now I just keep a "Weekly Checklists" file on my computer.  This is our "ideal" homeschool week, but since we often have appointments, Bible study, or homeschool support group meetings, I just adjust the schedule depending on what we have going on that week.  Just being able to look ahead and plan for the days where our school hours will be cut short has helped so much in keeping us on track this year, with a minimal amount of stress from me.

Front-Loading The Year

I admittedly pushed everyone a little harder than normal during the fall semester of school.  I had so many things I wanted to get to with the kids this year, and with my middle schooler I had some tougher schoolwork to add to his plate.  Did I over-plan a bit?  Considering I was pushing all of us through THREE different history curricula and TWO science curricula, yes (why did I do that?).  Were we a bit miserable in the fall?  We were, and yes, it was my fault.

Don't worry, I came to my senses. I relaxed everything a bit this spring, but pushing us a little harder in the fall ended up giving us some space to pull back a bit this semester.  It's actually been very nice, and we ironically are still going to get to most of what I planned, just at a more reasonable pace.  I won't be so crazy in my ambitions for next year, but I might keep that idea of front-loading the year and having a more leisurely spring.

Morning Time

We've been more consistent than ever with morning time this year, and it's been a really lovely time for us as a family. We've read through the whole New Testament together during morning time (we're finishing up with Revelation right now), and this is my favorite accomplishment of the year.  We've had time to discuss all this Scripture together, and I think of the promise that God's Word will not return void, and I know that it will hold true with reading through the Bible as a family too.  We've also finished several chapter books together, done some art and music and poetry study, and sang hymns and psalms together.  Morning time has been a staple for us for a while, but I'm really happy with how fruitful it feels this year, even though we've kept it simple.

A New Science Curriculum

We've always used Apologia Young Explorers for science, but this was the year for us to branch out a bit.  My oldest is solidly in middle school now, and I thought it was time we challenge him a bit more with science.  With my younger kids, I was admittedly getting a little weary of the Young Explorers format (even though I do love that curriculum), so I decided it was time to just try something fresh.

For middle school science, I chose to let my oldest go through the first edition of the Apologia middle school textbooks, mainly because my mom gave me a box of my old curriculum and my science book was in there.  Now, I know, science textbooks do need to be updated periodically since science is always changing and new discoveries need to be added.  However, when looking over my old science textbook, I realized that middle school science really hasn't changed that much.  At that age, you are still learning alot of scientific basics.  There might be little things here and there that are slightly out of date, but the important facts that they really need to know are the same, so I felt comfortable with using an older, but really rigorous and solid, textbook.  What I love about the first edition Apologia textbooks are that there are no bells and whistles required.  There is no "student notebook" that needs to be purchased, there isn't a ton of excess information that you really don't need to know.  All that's required is a basic lined notebook (that the student uses to create their own scientific notebook), basic household items for experiments, and the textbook.  I think the format has done alot to help my oldest learn some valuable study skills, and teaching him how to write up experiments.  I'm quite pleased with how well the old Apologia has fit into our homeschool, so I'm going to be looking into the middle school Berean Builders texts for next year, because they are written by the same author as the first editions of Apologia and follow a similar format and philosophy.

For elementary science, we're tried out a new-to-us curriculum this spring called Science In The Ancient World by Jay Wile at Berean Builders. This curriculum series goes through different scientific discoveries through history.  We have been studying the Greeks and Romans in morning time, so having some of our science tie in with that same time period has been really interesting for us all.  The lessons are short and explained in a really great way for this age group.  With Young Explorers, I felt that alot of the textbooks were more at an upper elementary level, and I had to simplify it quite alot for my younger kids.  I think Science In The Ancient World is much easier to use with young elementary and older elementary at the same time.  Each lesson involves an experiment, but most of the experiments use basic household supplies and are very quick and easy to do.  We've been doing many more experiments than we usually do just because this curriculum makes it so simple! I am excited to get as far as we can before the end of the year (we only started in January, so we won't have time to finish - remember the TWO science curriculum thing), and I'm interested in picking up the other volumes so we can coordinate our science with history in the future too.

So these are the things I am really happy with in our homeschool right now.  I'm sure I'll be back over summer break to share some lessons learned or plans for next fall, but for now, in the home stretch, it's good to review some of our wins as we try to finish the year strong.

Please let me know if you want a deeper dive on any of the things I mentioned!  If you want to hear more about anything, I'll write a longer post and maybe even put together some IG stories to give you a peek at our homeschool!