Slow Spring Homeschool Days | Large Family Homeschooling

[Music] everything outside is green and starting to Blossom and open up and we are just drawn outside with this beautiful weather follow along with me in another day in the life a slow simple spring day in our home [Music] school we have just finished up with morning time this morning and we're moving on to our chores so I have my little ones helping me get started with laundry all the other kids know where they're supposed to be and what area of the house that they're supposed to work on William is aton's helper in the bathroom so I found this works really well just when they're starting to do their own chore to have them work alongside an older kid to learn how to do it this is the part of the day that U most people wouldn't even consider homeschool but I think um learning to take care of of our home clean up after ourselves get things back in order is a great life skill and I consider it part of our home school day if this is your first time on my channel let me introduce myself my name is Sherry I'm a homeschooling mom to 10 kids I'm married to Nelson who's my high school sweetheart we've been married for almost 24 years our oldest son is graduated we have seven in school and then two preschoolers a 2-year-old and a 14mon old I en just an everyday homeschool mom I've been homeschooling for 14 years and each morning is just another day of faithfully doing the work that God's called me to do and I like to bring you along with me and hopefully just seeing someone else doing the same thing that you're doing will be encouraging to you today on this morning for our morning time which was what we did before chores um I did just the Bible reading our Bible memory and then the last last thing that we have to do in our simple morning time notebook before we finish the school year is to read the Shakespeare story King Lear I read that from the book Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare it's actually just a couple Pages the kids really love it it's a great way to introduce them to the plays so they can get familiar with them and then after that we did current events with world watch I'm just getting my little guys dressed and ready for the day and I find that if I spend some time with them in the morning first thing reading to them playing with them that just helps get our day off on the right foot my daughter Holland has recently just fallen in love with the Raggedy an stories and you can see this book actually the cover is torn off and some of the pages are ripped I need to get a new one but she has asked me to read this over and over to her the same stories like there's like three or four of them in this book and she just wants to hear them over and over and she just loves this so I I just love to see that enthusiasm with them if you see behind me the red Solo cups um these are in all of our window cells right now and it's basically this way every time this year from about the beginning of April until the middle of May those are our seeds that we planted for our garden so we plant cucumbers tomatoes peppers Sometimes some basil and we do that back in at the end of March beginning of April and they sit in our window cells until we're ready to plant them in May our big kids are started on their independent work Aton is working on measuring angles with a protractor we had we've had to buy so many protractors and we finally realized that we're just buying a metal one because the plastic ones get stepped on they get broken um so that's what she's working on um bren's on copy work Jenna's working on her French the other kids I'm about to sit down with William outside for a math lesson once the weather gets nice we really take everything outside we do as much school workk outside as possible and on the one hand this is great because I love to be outside and I don't want to be in when it's really nice but on the other hand it really is kind of distracting to be doing work outside so um I've mentioned this in several other videos but we get a ton of work done from January through March and then when spring comes we have about 6 weeks more of school um we're still doing work we're still doing um Reading Writing math I am still doing science and history reading to them in the afternoon but um things just ease up a little bit because we all just want to be out and even during this lesson with William we had a couple bees that were flying around us that were just honestly so distracting we got through it but um he just kept swatting at the bees and talking about them and so that's just kind of how it is but I still like to be outside we just don't want to be in on these beautiful spring mornings so we're wrapping up a lot of things around here our family Co-op ends next week and then we have a spring program um our high school kids their drop off Co-op ends at the end of April and they just have some projects that they need to work on so I'm helping them finish those up I want to take a break real quickly in this video to tell you about a mini ecourse that's launching Tuesday April 16th called how to take the stress out of homeschooling this is being put out by Kelly Crawford of generation Cedar I've been following Kelly Crawford for probably 10 years she's a she's been blogging since 2007 she's a mom of 11 with 23 years homeschooling experience I can't recommend her enough everything Kelly writes about on her blog and shares is just excellent and this mini e course is going to be like having someone come alongside you and just help you navigate the waters of homeschooling whether you're a new mom or a veteran homeschool Mom this is going to help you avoid some of the common mistakes it's going to be just a shot in the arm of encouragement it will help you relax click on the link below in the description box to take a look at the first lesson for free and also to get on the wait list so you can get the course half off in the first 24 hours our cherry trees are just starting to Blossom and up in this cherry tree there is I don't know if you can see it there there's a bird heard that's been making this really interesting like tapping and smacking sound I don't know what kind it is but we've been watching it but all these things are just making it really hard for us to focus on our book work right now so we might have finished a little bit early this morning and went outside we have these layer chicks that we got about 8 weeks ago and now they're almost big enough to be let out to Grass we still have them in the garage but the girls wanted to get them out of the garage and take them out on the grass to just play with them and introduce them to the outside so they were outside they actually found out the name of this spring wildf flower that was in that shot I can't remember what they said it was we've seen it on some of our nature hikes with our Co-op um but they just wanted to be outside these um I went and helped James and William go catch a chick for themselves um they're just ready to be out of the Brer out on the grass so that's something we're probably going to be doing in the next couple weeks getting a spot for them outside some of the kids have been trying to train chickens I don't know why they think that's something that they can do but it sure occupies their attention and they were really having fun with it this morning one thing we've always tried to have around here um wherever we've lived is a basketball hoop so we're just so happy to have this one in the barn but even before we moved to this house we had a basketball hoop out in our driveway at our old house um anything like this I just feel like is so great for boys in the winter in the summer um trampolines we have some soccer nets that we keep in our backyard uh they just need to be outside and to be moving and to be physical I did a video on homeschooling boys a couple weeks ago you can take a look at it my husband was home for a little bit this morning and so it's hard for us to be inside doing a lot of school workk and not to be just enjoying this time together so while he was here before he left we spent a little family time outside just enjoying the beautiful weather now when we're outside for any period of time and we come back in uh the house tends to go downhill so um the kids have been doing their school work in here we had lunch we just headed right outside um so when we came in we had to clean up and um the way it works in our home is that I have one person assigned to the kitchen every day and if it's an older person then I am their Helper but if it's a younger kid then I'm cleaning up the kitchen and they're my helper I've really had the itch lately to just do some deep cleaning I feel like this happens every spring I want to just pull out some of our furniture clean behind it vacuum back there and we just have spider webs and things just have gotten Dusty with winter and and we have our spring clothes to switch over all these things are just on my mind as things that need to happen in Spring and if some of these things feel overwhelming sometimes we'll just take a day and tackle a bunch of them we'll just divide up some of the things I want to get done and just divide them up among the kids and we'll all work on different areas when we have some of these extra responsibilities that happen when the seasons change and just more things that need to be done around the house I think we can sometimes have be torn and feel like we need to do school but we also want to do these other things and I'm constantly reminding myself that family is first home is first it's just one more way that I have over the years moved away from a school mindset to more of a family and home mindset School fits in around the edges for us and our family is first while I was finishing up here my little ones had gone down for nap and my other kids were outside playing so I took this time to just pull out my Bible I hadn't gotten a chance to do this today and with having little ones for 19 years now we've had either babies toddlers I've been breastfeeding or pregnant it would be just wonderful I would love to get up early in the morning before the kids are up and spend some time alone in the word but that is just has not been a reality for me what's worked better for me is whenever I get that first moment alone at some point in the day I do get a little bit of a alone time to just go to the Lord first and seek his face look for his wisdom rather than going to social media or something else I think what we do with our time when we get free time as moms really is a reflection of our heart and our motives and I just know how much over the years spending time a little here a little there in God's word it's like building it's like an investment and I know how much it's helped me in my mothering given me strength and Joy To Face whatever I have for the day before we finished for the afternoon I read the kids the child's history of America we've been going through that this year uh normally we do Veritas press self-paced history we've done that for so many years we've gone through um their fiveyear rotation twice we took a break this year and I read this book to them I've really enjoyed it after we finish in the afternoon my kids spend their time just following their interests and for my girls that's usually baking on this day they made these soft pretzels um and they're just taking shots of those they love doing a lot of stuff in the kitchen and they're so independent with this it's great the other kids um they were all randomly doing different things I took William aside he's been asking me for a couple weeks to plant these carrots and um I can see him being one that is going to really like gardening because whenever I've noticed this before whenever my husband and I are out in the garden he's always there with us and he's always asking us questions always talking about things he asked if he could have his own little garden which I think is adorable um so he's been asking about planting these carrots I took him outside and we got started on those I feel like our kids have learned so much from us having a garden they can recognize all the different seeds the different plants when they come up they can go out in the garden and tell you what everything is they know what's going to come up first and when something is ready to be harvested they've just learned a lot by having this for us having this Garden in our right in our backyard I think it's something just really simple you can do that teaches your kids so much I want to touch on one more thing before I wrap up this video I run into a lot of new homeschool moms and one common thread that I see among a lot of them is that they just don't think think they're very good at homeschooling or they think that it takes a certain kind of person to homeschool your kids or to be good at it maybe you have a friend who is just really academic and her kids are so smart and just watching that just seems intimidating and you think that is not me or maybe the opposite maybe you have a friend who is just really laidback and it's just too much and you think I really want my kids to be challenged maybe um you know someone that's just constantly out the house they're always going places always having all these experiences or maybe they're unit people whatever it is whatever it is we all know someone that is just different and I think that there are no special skills required to be good at homeschooling it looks different for every family when it comes to our family life we don't feel like we have to be a certain way or look a certain way we just live our life and why should it be any different with homeschooling just just be you be the mom who brings her kids alongside of her and whatever you're learning follow them in their Pursuits when they're interested in something give them the tools that they need just be a good Mom that's what makes you a great homeschooler thank you for following along with me today I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday [Music] moms