What's it like?

I think the most important ingredients we’ve had to have to homeschool a big family are dependence on God,
a passionate love for each child,
age appropriately disciplined children, flexibility,
and a balance between family needs and individual opportunities.

Someone once told me that homeschooling got a lot easier when they realized that “you can’t ruin a student overnight”, that education is something you are giving your child over the course of 18 years. It is natural for me to dream big and make all these plans of things we could do for school and then to fret over the things that we don’t have time for or that don’t work out as expected. Instead I’ve learned to “hope for the best but plan for the worst”. I see plans as a direction we start at or launch from and then I constantly monitor and adjust as we go along. We dont’ have a “schedule”; we have a “routine”. We have a basic order of doing things with get up and go to bed times but how things progress in between is pretty unpredictable from day to day. We usually end up in a very different place than I expected. In the long run we are most successful when our activities are based on daily decisions rooted in our priorities and doing what is most important that day rather than striving to check off the most things possible on my “to do” list so I feel like a success.

I’m the “boss” but my decisions constantly adjust to accomodate the needs of my children or teachable moments or biological disasters or opportunities that just “pop” up. If after a few weeks of juggling multiple subjects someone is struggling in math—we do nothing but math for a week. If we hear about a really cool history speech contest, we ditch our regular curriculum and dig into researching, writing, memorizing and performing based on the life of a figure in history. If dad mentions how awful someone’s handwriting is looking, guess who gets a bunch of handwriting practice for the next few weeks?

Our most important resources are the public library, the internet, educational videos/tv programs, field trips, hobbies/clubs/sports/music/drama, etc., educational games and various curriculums that enable practice of basic skills like phonics, handwriting, grammar, math, etc. (That stuff is extremely boring to my kids so it’s helpful to have a variety of publishers so I can change the worksheets or approach to the practice of learning skills that are heavily rote.)

It also helps to accept that in many ways we are just plain “weird”. We have to do a lot of things differently than others, even compared to other Christian homeschooled friends. We’ve got a lot of people to mobilize or consider or accomodate, a very tight budget, limited space and privacy, constant decisions about doing for our own family or helping others, those who clean well outnumbered by those who make messes, and people who love to spend a lot of time talking, cuddling, listening to music, sharing anything humourous and reading together. Just the basics of housecleaning and “family time” take up a large part of our lives.

On the other hand, it’s never lonely—there is always someone to be an audience or lend a hand or listen to you, creativity abounds, our kids are pretty confident and willing to try new things at any age, the older ones have so much skill in caring for little ones and the younger ones have an advantage in having older kids to follow and look up to, my kids connect me to so many hobbies and people and ideas I would not otherwise experience, regular doses of humor and cuddling promotes great mental health, and between birthdays/holidays/accomplishments there is always something to celebrate.

It's a busy, demanding, exciting, very full and blessed life.