What I learned my first week of homeschool

Let me start off by stating that my intention is to help others who want to homeschool. I am telling my story from the beginning because I think it’s important to hear about homeschooling from more than just those that have been doing it for years (although I’m VERY grateful for those who share their stories).

My kiddos are in grades 2nd, 3rd and 5th grade this year and have always been to an amazing public school all prior years. Yes, I do think the school they went to is wonderful and I’ll share why we decided to pull them out at another time.

This summer we began some homeschooling here and there but nothing too intense or scheduled. Just a little history and science every once in a while so I could figure out how everything was going to go down once we started. Are my kids going to listen to me as a teacher or try and prove me wrong? Are they going to actually learn anything? How do they learn best? These were some of the questions that went through my head.

I felt like that was a good stepping stone and would do it again if I had to start all over. It gave me a chance to prove that they needed to respect me as a teacher when learning instead of just “mom”. After all, my 2nd grader son likes to try and tell me I’m wrong on EVERYTHING.

Now… fast forward; summer ends and we need to start our academic year. We began this past Monday (a week after the public schools near us) and it went pretty well. I figured out pretty quickly that I had forgotten a lot of grammar terminology and a lot of grammar rules have changed. Whew! Thankfully, my husband was able to help explain things to the kids when the kids didn’t catch what I was throwing at them. So we worked as a team, I taught during the day and he helped answer or reexplain questions if they didn’t understand the way I explained it in the evening.

One of our many reasons for homeschooling was to teach them so that they actually remember instead of brain dumping after testing so this was great team work between us.

The kids loved it and I found it more relaxing that we weren't rushing our day away since we had all day to complete things. Did homeschool take as long as public school? Nope! Because we can focus on each of the kiddos, school is taking us about 2-4 hours each day which includes lunch. That includes all english, science, social studies and history and handwriting. This week we will include math so that will take a little more time but overall we have been able to go to the park and do things we normally wouldn’t have time for after the kids came home, unpacked their lunch boxes, did homework, ate dinner and showered for the following day.

The biggest worry for me was that I run 2 businesses so how in the heck will I do all this PLUS homeschool? Well, I found it went smooth this week and this week was busy for both businesses! Also, before you assume…. my kids DON’T stay on electronics such as iPads all day. They play with each other, go outside, play games, listen to things like “ Fifty Nifty United States” (best song ever, haha!), watch documentaries that go along with our history and such.

I’ll keep you posted on how week 2 goes after we add in some math! Wish me good luck!

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