Our Homeschool Day

NOT the 5 am club edition

I wake up around 6:30 and let myself lie in bed for 15 minutes. For months, I had to get up immediately to take care of a wailing baby. I'm catching up on 452 lie-ins because kids don't have snooze buttons. I'll get bored with it eventually and start getting up earlier.

I get dressed in my workout clothes and take some time for the lotions and potions that, again, I couldn't do first thing before my son learned to sleep in.

I head downstairs to make breakfast and listen to the Bible. I am probably washing dishes from the night before, too. Ideally, I would do all the dishes before bed, but if it has been a busy day, I'd rather use my evening to read, work on a project, or just hang out with my husband.

Somewhere in here, all the kids wake up, including the baby, who needs to be nursed.

I serve breakfast to the kids and eat mine, sipping my coffee in my new TopHouse mug, before sending the older two upstairs to get dressed at 8:00. They then read the bible with their dad.

While they do that, I lift weights and practice my physical therapy exercises. The baby hangs out in his pack-n-play while I lift weights and climbs on me while I stretch and do PT. He thinks that I'm waving at him when I do overhead presses. It's cute.

I only started working out consistently six weeks ago. I didn’t think I had the time or space for it. Frankly, I don’t currently have the time to take a run every day. But I’ve learned that my kids will take a habit for granted. They already make space for me washing the dishes or checking my phone, so they'll make space for a workout. They might not be happy every day about it. Sometimes they cry and grumble and have accidents; sometimes they barely notice that I’m busy.

Including stretching, my workouts only take about twenty minutes. I’m still only using two 5-pound weights for my arm workouts and two ten-pounders for my legs, but I’ve increased my reps and my sets steadily, and I’ve seen functional improvements in my daily life. All of that to say, if you want to work out, you probably can. Just start small.

I get myself and the baby changed, and somehow it's nearly 9:00 already. I toss a load of laundry in the machine, and we start the homeschool day.

At 9:00, we watch World Watch News, a 10-minute news segment from World magazine that condenses the big stories in a way kids can understand, and their human interest stories always teach a lot about history and science. Next we recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the national anthem. Then it’s time for a hymn. Last month’s was “Trust and Obey,” and now we’re working on “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” It usually takes about a month to learn a new hymn, but if it’s familiar, we only spend about a week on it. We finish up the oral portion of the morning with a folk song, a hand rhyme, and a poem.

Then we start schoolwork. I use Treehouse Schoolhouse for science, and we usually include handwriting and picture study in that. Depending on the day, Emma does copywork, or we read from books about the science subject for the week, or she copies a painting, or narrates for her nature journal.

While she does her written schoolwork, Eleanor paints or colors or plays with puzzles. John snacks in his high chair or plays with some toys on the floor.

Math (Singapore Math), reading, and spelling (All About Reading, All About Spelling) don’t take Emma very long, and that rounds out the first hour of formal homeschooling.

John goes down for a nap around 10:00. I set Emma her online Latin lesson (Picta Dicta) and instruct her to review her memory verses and catechism questions when she’s done. That gives me time to do Eleanor’s pre-reading lesson and read aloud some picture books to her. I’ll also switch the laundry and clean up whatever messes the baby made.

The girls come back together to color or fold laundry while I read aloud for about 30 minutes. We’re working through D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter. We just finished William Kamkwambe’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, an inspirational story about a Malawian youth who survived a famine, dropped out of school, but studied and experimented until he invented a working windmill to power his family’s compound.

At 12:00, we have lunch, and Emma learns history (Story of the World) with her dad.

After lunch, formal lessons are over. Depending on the day, the weather, and our moods, we read more, paint, bake, go to the library, do chores, run errands, go to ballet, have a playdate, or go outside. If we’re home, I try to wrap up housework quickly so that we can play and rest together.

I start dinner around 4:30, and we eat just before 6:00. The baby goes to bed at 6:30, the middle one at 7:00, and the oldest at 7:30. Each child gets some special reading time with mom or dad a few evenings a week. The oldest listens to Dad read Arabian Nights or me read The Secret Garden(I adore doing Yorkshire accents). The middle likes fairy tales or Beatrix Potter with either parent. The youngest wants any picture book, but I also find it hilarious to try to read Far from the Madding Crowd with him; he takes over and starts turning pages and babbling; apparently he lacks patience with Bathsheba Everdene.

I’m a very lucky woman; all three of my kids are in bed before 8:00. I use my evening to shower, tidy, work on a project, or read. I am only out of the house 3 or 4 evenings a month.

There it is! I don’t get up at 5:00 am; I don’t always wake up to a clean kitchen, but we still get the work done and have time to play left over.