For those of you that don’t know, my husband used to be the headmaster at a small private Christian school here in Florida. After we had the triplets, the school created a nursery for us so that all our kids (at the time, we just had six kiddos) could go to school with Fred. It was such a blessing for the kids to be there with Fred and to know that they were in good hands with the most loving teachers. Being a headmaster means being at the school early for meetings and staying late for extracurriculars so after a while it just got to be really hard on our family. I felt like I never saw my kids or husband and it was creating a lot of stress. After praying long and hard, we decided as a family it was best for Fred to step down from his leadership role and that we would homeschool full time. Even though we both had education backgrounds ( I used to be a first grade teacher), it was such a scary decision.  

It’s now been 5 years since we started homeschooling and I can tell you it’s been such a blessing to our family! There are hard days and our house is constantly a mess but it gives us so much freedom as a family and creates a much more balanced lifestyle. I love that we can go outside and do school if the weather is nice. We can stay in our pajamas and have a slower morning if the kids were up late or aren’t feeling well. We can go on field trips whenever we’d like and learn through exploration. If the kids are interested in a particular subject, we can study it and take our time instead of rushing through things. At the beginning, I really struggled because I felt pressure to get through a certain amount of curriculum and have them reading/writing etc at or above grade level. My friend suggested I read the book Teaching from Rest by Sarah Mackenzie and it completely changed my outlook on homeschooling and teaching my children. If you are new to homeschool or just feeling weary and burnt out, I highly recommend the book. It was a breath of fresh air and has allowed me to better enjoy the process.

As far as curriculum is concerned, we currently do Classical Conversations and pair that with math and a language arts curriculum. Some of what we use now includes All about Reading, My Father’s World, Saxon Math, and Writing without Tears but we review and make changes each year based on the needs of our children and the season of life we are in. We are thinking of trying something completely new next year so I can’t wait to share more about what it is and how we like it.