Month: January 2021

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What I changed during my first 6 months of homeschooling

One of the BEST THINGS about homeschool is that I can do whatever. I. want. It is also the hardest thing, because I am responsible and accountable for whatever my kids learn. At first I wanted to stay in line with public school schedule so if and when they return to public school it won’t be such a shock. However, we kept falling farther and farther behind because of…I didn’t know what!

The immediate thing I knew would be unbearable was math. One lesson of math each day for each of my 3 kids. Their curriculum had one lesson as anywhere from 3-6 pages each! I didn’t see how we could do it long term, but I was determined to homeschool and not get behind where they should be so we kept pushing through until everyone hated math bleh! Haha! That only lasted 2 weeks. I knew we couldn’t keep up that pace because we were barely getting math done while ending the day alive, with no time for Language Arts lessons. I put my foot down and decided for the good of the family we would have to just do less math. I would homeschool through the summer if need be because it wasn’t doable. Before I settled on this, though, I went through each of their math mammoth workbooks, counting the pages and dividing it by the days left in the school year (solving math with math! heehee). It came out that they would only need to do 2-3 pages a day to finish by the end of the school year. What a relief that was to my heart! I think I was even happier than my kids when I told them the good news. We stuck to 2 pages a day of math each, and I was over the moon, thinking I had homeschool DOWN.

I didn’t think it should be so hard to do 7 pages of schoolwork each day with each child between math, LA, science, history. How long could it take? Turns out, it takes a lot of time for 3 kids to switch topics 3 times and get out their other book, and mommy has to take care of the baby now so take a recess, and where did Ali’s sight word chart go, etc.! This lasted until Thanksgiving Break, so I did this for 3 months before admitting that something more needed to change.

Talking to other people is like an idea stimulator for me. I talked to my mother and my sister in law about not enough time for everything every day. I remembered that one style of homeschool is tackling one topic in 6 weeks and moving on to the next. Because I have to report on 4 topics and an elective every 2 weeks with the homeschooling program we are in (tech trep), this wasn’t a possibility. However, I wanted to try something similar in the timeline I had. I thought about one week of history/math and the second week of science/LA with electives whenever. This idea seemed okay, except I have a cutie named Ali that struggles to read the word “the” if she hasn’t been doing language arts for a couple days. She just really thrives on review!

I determined that I would alternate one day of doing LA and the next day Math. This means we do 2 Language Arts lessons on Monday, 4 pages of Math on Tuesday, 2 Language Arts lessons on Wednesday, and 4 Math pages on Thursday (we only homeschool these Mon-Thus) . Friday is spent doing electives and field trips. As far as science and history, I stuck with the weekly swap idea. So one week after we finish our LA or math we do science. The next week we focus on history. That way my kids aren’t forgetting their Language Arts or Math skills and it is much more manageable for me.

I am constantly re-falling in love with homeschool. It provides my cuties with a personal tutor (little me) who caters to their strengths and weaknesses. We can dive into whatever their interests are when it comes to science and history and electives! Even with Language Arts, I can pick and choose the literature and art my chilren are exposed to. We pick really fun books to read like the Elephant and Piggie series, or adventerous reads like Little House on the Prairie.

One tool I have really come to love that changed homeschool for the better again is Epic. It is website my kids can go to during school hours to read books online or they can choose to be read to by the website if it’s a little hard for them. Many books to choose from and a much better option that letting my kids watch TV when I am busy helping their sibling. I also took the time to set up Prodigy for my kids which is a math game that my kids think of as a reward. They will gladly do their afternoon chores to qualify for math games haha!

Have you found any tools or strategies to make your homeschool life more managable? We would all love to hear your tried and true ideas!

Warmly,

Jexi Burke

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How I chose to homeschool with 5 kids

I did not decide to homeschool because of the Covid-19 virus. In fact I seriously considered homeschooling when we lived in Utah a few years ago. Our applications had been accepted at a homeschooling program there…but it just didn’t feel like the right time. Back then my husband and I both thought other benefits of public school outweighed our limited concerns. Then Covid-19 came to Idaho and public school changed dramatically. Everything that was worth keeping our kids in school for came to a screeching halt. The social interactions, the loving professional teachers, the open spaces to play, learning how to be a good friend, etc.

When the school decided to do home packets and online work, it was a disaster. It was hours every day just dealing with technological difficulties, and zoom meeting hiccups. I couldn’t stand it because honestly, I became my kids’ teacher, but was told what to teach. My kids were given the same packets that every other kid in that grade had been sent home with.

As I looked over my 4th grader’s writing assignment attempts that first week, I came to the shocking realization that he didn’t know how to write a complete sentence. He also wasn’t sure when to capitalize or not capitalize a word. Every writing assignment was a big run-on sentence. I never missed a parent teacher conference and my son is in 4th grade. How did I miss this??… I was shocked.

Now you might be asking yourself why I never noticed this issue in the work that was sent home. His teachers all had him do online writing-I saw 1 writing assignment in the past year. The school policy was no homework besides reading ‘since research hasn’t shown that extra work at home helps’.

This was all in my mind as summer went on. I waited to see what the district would do amid the Covid crisis. If I knew they were going to resume full time school for sure, I wouldn’t be writing this post because my kids would be in public school. I would just be doing extra writing practice with my son at home. I LOVE my kids’ teachers and everything they do to teach my children and communicate with me. However, the district did not reveal their plan for the school year. I had to make a decision if I was going to have a chance at acceptance into a homeschooling program by the deadlines.

The whole time I agonized about what to do, I kept having the same thought. If I’m going to end up teaching my kids at home either way, why not teach a curriculum that I choose, based on their individual needs? The main concern I had was social aspects. I wanted them to have those social experiences with different personalities at school and in different situations. Learning to cope and deal with other people as practice for real life when they have roommates and coworkers is one of the great things about public school.

While glancing through facebook, I noticed a post about homeschooling programs that provide state funds to help with educational materials. The program we were accepted to in Utah had provided funds as well but I didn’t remember how much. I was relieved to see a comment that Idaho did have two options for homeschool funding programs. I brought up the topic to my husband about homeschooling vs public school. He told me I could do whichever I prefer but I could tell his preference would be public school. This deflated my persistence in finding out more information about homeschool for a bit.

One night he sent me a screenshot of a facebook post saying that registrations for Tech Trep Academy were due by midnight the next day. Because of his willingness to send me this info, I knew that he would be supportive enough. I didn’t want to homeschool with the extra stress of his disapproval. It took a lot of divine help for me to register my 3 school age kids in that amount of time. Birth certificates, immunization records, proof of address, etc. had to be downloaded onto the enrollment and all of the questions answered. Everything seemed to fall into place much easier than anything I usually can do computer-wise(haha)!

We have been overly blessed to be enrolled into Tech Trep as homeschoolers. Every day is a testament to me that for at least this year, it is definitely the correct choice for our family. I pass no judgements on the education choices of other parents…how can I? I chose to homeschool because I disliked the lack of agency that I had as a parent teaching my children at home what other people wanted me to. All parents should have the agency to do whatever suits their family best.

 

Good luck with your school planning!

Jexi