A day in the life of homeschooling

Many of you know that I left my career as a teacher to stay at home and homeschool my oldest daughter, Emma.  For a variety of reasons, this was the best path for us at the moment.  There are certainly things I miss about working, but on most days, I am thrilled to be home. I never imagined that I would be homeschooling, but with my education background, I knew with a little help and prayer, I could do this.

Many of you have asked what a day of homeschooling looks like, so I decided to blog our day and show you some of the cool opportunities we have been doing at home each day.

My day tends to start early since I have one child still in “typical” school and she gets on the bus at the “crack of dawn.” I get up at 6:20 to get dressed and ready to feed Olivia and get her on the bus at 6:50.

After walking her to the bus, I joyfully have sometimes up to an hour to myself!  Yippee!  This time every morning makes me praise God every day that I have been given this new blessing.

My other charges wake up between 7:30- 8:00.  Yes, when you're homeschooled you get to sleep in!  After breakfast, I take Grant to his morning preschool program 4 days a week.

After drop off, then I head home to start teaching Emma.  We usually begin around 9:15a.m.

We begin with Bible followed by Reading. We are currently reading Amos Fortune free man by Elizabeth Yates. Our cat, Pokey, often joins in on the reading time!

After that, we work on Daily Language and Social Studies.  This year, we are studying U.S. History.

After our quick break, we are back to it with Math and Science.

Yes.  We are dissecting a rubber body. Emma looks thrilled about it.

We take a break about 11:30-11:45 for lunch.  I have been teaching Emma how to cook some of our favorite meals.  This is also a good time for prepping for our evening meal.  After lunch and a short break, we have quiet reading time for 20-30 minutes each day.  I love that I can mandate myself to read each day!  I am finally getting through that pile of books on my nightstand that I've been wanting to read for so long!

At this point, our “academic” part of the day is pretty much finished.  Emma has a different schedule each afternoon.  One day she attends a local homeschool program where she takes Mad Science and Spanish with other children.  Another afternoon is volleyball practice with her home school team.  We also throw in writing projects and on Fridays we do field trips.  I'll share some of those with you in future blogs.

But today, we are off to horse lessons.  Emma has been riding horses since she was 3 years old, but due to school schedules we had to lessen our lessons to once a week, but now that we are home, she has picked up a second lesson each week.

This just might be her favorite part of homeschooling; horse lessons for P.E. class!

Now that she has time throughout her day to complete work and projects, we do not have a lot of homework.  This has given her time in the evenings without stress and anxiety to relax, play games and be a kid! I will say this also has decreased the stress I feel each day as well.  I now only have one child I have to help with homework each evening instead of two!

Our evenings are like any typical families; dinner, practices and bedtime routines.  At the end of it all, we collapse and say, “Thank you, Lord, for another day!”

How do your days compare?

To life feeling like home!

XO,