Large Family Homeschooling Week in Review is simply a glimpse into the day-to-day homeschooling of our larger-than-average family. It’s not fancy, but it will hopefully give you a taste of what it is like to be us. For more homeschooling tips and inspiration, visit the Homeschooling section of Raising Arrows. You can also see a list of our 2017 Homeschool Curriculum choices.
~Amy
The beginning of this week, my mother-in-law and her mom known as “Granny”, were preparing to head home after spending the weekend with us. I don’t usually do school when we have company, but I felt like we needed to go ahead with the bare bones of our day. The older kids did their usual independent work – Math, Science, Literature, Spelling for the middle schoolers, and American Sign Language for my 16 year old daughter – after we read in our story Bible as a family.
Later in the day, the middle schoolers and high schooler finished this documentary on Mao Zedong. I’ve been utilizing YouTube for some of our Tapestry of Grace needs because I like to mix things up with books and video to tell the story of history.
Tuesday was Halloween/Reformation Day, so we skipped regular school work and followed the plan I outlined in my podcast and post on Celebrating Halloween and Reformation Day as Protestants. The only thing I didn’t do on that list was making Mummy Calzones and I didn’t bother to put “mummy” frosting on the brownies. I had run out of energy by that point, and plain ole brownies are good enough.
Wednesday was a normal school day. However, I skipped our read-aloud (The Secret Garden) because I had been up in the night a lot with Baby Mercy and I knew sitting and reading was not going to be a good thing. Instead, I grabbed some coffee and dove into school work after Bible Time.
My 4 year old is back to doing Rod & Staff ABC series books because his preschool time is in the afternoon and he wants to do something “school-ish” while his brothers are working on their school work. This has added to my responsibilities in the morning hours, but I try to keep him to 2 pages in the workbook and then send him off to play. That seems to be pacifying him at this juncture. I can also honestly say I’ve seen a lot of growth and maturity in him just since starting the school year. You can read about how we started structuring his day and also what preschool curriculum we started using to help facilitate this structure.
My 7 and 8 year old boys worked on their handwriting, math, and phonics during the morning hours. I also added piano practice to their daily list of school work a couple of weeks ago, and that has made a big difference in how often they practice! My 8 year old usually ends his school day with Reading Eggs before all the boys run off to play until lunch time.
I had all intentions of doing more Tapestry of Grace Wednesday afternoon, but because I had a slow start to the morning and then had a mid-afternoon eye appointment, I decided to regroup for next week on the TOG stuff, and let this week go.
Thursday was our “official” last day of school for the week because we school year round and take Fridays off, but this semester I’ve been taking the girls to a co-op where they take French from another homeschool mom.
We had a normal day of school on Thursday, including my 8 year old finishing Cyrus the Archer and the 7 year old finishing The Brave Monk (good timing on this since it is about Martin Luther!) in their Phonics reading. We also did our PictureSmart Bible lesson on this day (the first part of Acts), since we still had company Monday morning when we usually do it.
Thursday afternoon, I went grocery shopping (I’m trying to switch over to Thursdays as my shopping day and this was the first week for that.) On Wednesday I had planned out our meals and also looked through what I needed for our November preschool lessons from A Year of Playing Skillfully, so I was able to purchase those supplies while I was out as well.
When I got home, I did an apple craft with my 8 and under crew using toilet paper rolls and cupcake liners (what can I say? we have a lot of toilet paper rolls around here!) and we all ate pumpkin muffins and apple pie in a cup. The apple craft was supposed to have stems and leaves on it, but as you can see, I didn’t get that far. Besides, who leaves the stems and leaves on their apple cores?!
If there’s anything more specific you’d like to know about my large family homeschooling week, leave your questions below!
Jamie says
Can you detail a bit what Mercy and Aspen are doing during school? My 2yo and 1yo are quite distracting during school time these last few weeks and I am finding myself frazzled after just a bit.
We have a closed off school room, with a play kitchen and baby toys, everyday one of them pinched their finger in the kitchen, spills their last swallow of juice and the other baby slides in it, shares a candy with their brother and is then covered in chocolate…WHAT IS GOING ON!? I have six kiddos age 12 and under and I am all of a sudden feeling incredibly ill-equipped.
Sarah says
Bless you heart. My “baby” is potty-training this week. I forgot how much time and what a distraction that can be. Not to mention poor aim and messes! My second youngest seemed to get hurt a lot this week (with tears), too. Hang in there, Mama! I think there are just weeks like these sometimes.
(Hugs!)
Sarah says
Oh, I also put the October 31 candy for everyone 7 years and younger up high and out of reach. Nine year old was told a limit. Now the sugar is controlled. That helps!
Amy says
Hi Jamie! Mercy is usually pretty close to nap time when we start school. She crawls around during Bible and read-aloud time. The 2 year old sits pretty good during this time. My 4 year old is the one who is typically pretty disruptive, but he’s getting better. In the past, I’ve worn the baby, put them in a high chair with a snack, waited to do school until nap time, given the toddler coloring pages and other activities nearby. I also did a whole post and podcast on keeping preschoolers occupied, so that might help too – https://raisingarrows.net/2017/07/how-i-occupy-my-busy-preschooler/
Reggie says
Ha! Not laughing at you, but most definitely with you! My toddler/baby drama has included A LOT of #1 messes lately. Be thankful yours is just juice! I was struggling with this exact dilemma very recently and a shift in perspective helped me greatly. I realized I had begun putting life ‘on hold’ in order to do schoolwork. Each day I dreaded school time because it felt like such a burden, especially with the constant interruptions. I made some simple but meaningful changes, the primary one being I no longer stay at the table/desk with the kids while they’re working. I do a ‘together time’ with my 7 and unders (the older ones typically join us too but aren’t required to), then I send them off to their individual seat work. They are supposed to do whatever they can independently, moving on if I am unavailable to answer questions. I come to them to see if they need help, not the other way around and should they complete all they can and I am still unavailable due to ‘life’, they have permission to leave the table. I have tried multiple means of occupying little ones and none ever seem to last long. They want to be right there with us, so I figure, why not? They are required to stay out of the room that school is taking place in until it is completed, but other than that, we just keep on living, #1 messes and all.
Ramica Branham says
I love the pictures, go.ahead and keep them.coming. I can’t wait for more “independent studies”. Right now my 6th grader is going through speech therapy and reading comprehension (taught by his God Mother) so all work has to be supervised so that I know he is actually READING the directions and vocabulary sentences.
Thanks for keeping it real. My 11 month old Tobias doesn’t always sleep through the night so some days are a “roll with the punches day”. As long as we do something every day I’m happy and so are they.
Have a blessed week,
Ramica
Bridget says
Thank you for sharing your day. It’s always helpful to see how other large families do their homeschool days. I also was glad to find out about the curriculum you use for your four year old.
Christina says
Thanks for sharing. I enjoy reading about other large families days!