5 Things We Prioritize in Our Homeschool

hi friends it's Sherry from the blog and YouTube channel our life homeschooling I want to talk to you today about five things we prioritize in our home school we're getting to the end of July getting close to August and soon I'm going to start school planning I haven't started any of it yet um I have a whole workbox section that needs to be totally cleaned out and organized I'm probably going to do a video on that in the next coming weeks but I am still in summer mode we are still doing a lot of gardening putting up food this week we did some sauerkraut I've been pickling cucumbers string beans uh we have tomatoes that are coming applesauce corn beets lots of things that we have yet to do so we are still in summer mode I haven't started planning for school but I wanted to give you just a little teaser thinking about starting our home school again in the next couple weeks and talk to you about some things that we prioritize in our home school and afterwards I'm going to tell you some things that I don't prioritized if this is your first time on my channel my name is Sher I'm a homeschool mom to 10 kids married to my husband Nelson he's my high school sweetheart we've been married for 24 years this year we're starting our 15th year of homeschooling I love coming on here and encouraging other moms in the great work you're doing in your home I've been so encouraged and inspired recently by some of the comments that you all have been leaving if you've left a comment I just personally want to thank you just knowing that this content is reaching people encouraging you and helping you to stay the course hopefully giving you some ideas I started this channel because this is this will be our 15th year of homeschooling we've been doing it for a while I remember the very beginning years years where I was unsure of myself where I didn't know what I was doing I had been a public school teacher but homeschooling was completely different um I had the Lord provided some great friends for us but it still can feel very lonely and can be a heavy burden um on you as a homeschool mom knowing that your child's education rests on you now that I've been homeschooling I have a couple years under our belt so to speak um I have that confidence I have I can see the fruit I can see the reward and I want to go back and encourage some of you that are behind me that are in the place I was 15 or 10 15 years ago I want to encourage you to stay the course what you're doing is really good for kids it's really good for families so if you've commented thank you you have in turn encouraged me although I haven't started planning for the next school year one thing I have done that's kind of a little bit of relief to me is I have everything together that we're doing for morning time I put together um I've done this for several years but last year was the first year that I published one and shared that you can get for yourselves a simple morning time notebook this is The Notebook I use all year long with my kids if you look back at all my day in the life videos from last year from our school year you'll see we were using it every morning for morning time this is the way we make amble side online work for our large family we do our composers our hymn study our artist study um our memory work everything is in this simple morning time notebook you can find it on the blog I'll leave the link below so that's one thing I do have done that gives me a little bit of relief when I start looking at my kids schedules for next year making their checklist thinking about what what we're going to cover I'm just going to be looking at their independent work and at the books I want to read aloud and maybe a little bit at our Science and History curriculum so you'll be seeing more of that from me in the next couple weeks I was thinking this week about some things that we prioritize in our H school and I narrowed it down to five things the first thing we prioritize is relationships and our family culture am I am I taking time to look my kids in the eye every day am I listening to them and um when I say this I'm not saying it because I am successful at it every day I'm saying it because this has become a priority to me when I started homeschooling I've shared this in several other other videos I was very academically minded um I was driven by completing the curriculum by doing it really well by my kids being on grade level and as our kids reached middle school and high school um my thinking shifted quite a bit and I started seeing how little time I had left with them and what really mattered was my relationship with them so our home school became much more relaxed um much more relationship driven than academically driven prioritizing relationships and our family life for us has meant clearing our schedule keeping a very limited Pace it means and I I know this is probably going to be unpopular with some people but we've said no to a lot of things that are really good things one of them specifically is high intensity Sports programs we prioritize our oldest kids first and um they're involved in sports our oldest son was in soccer our second Luke is in basketball he's in a great basketball league our girls are starting volleyball um but for us this year our oldest son has graduated our second Son who's doing basketball drives so he can drive to his practices he has two a week um and then our girls have volleyball once a week the sports that we are involved in are very minimal as much as possible we try to clear our schedules so we can have meals together so we can have relaxed nights at home and this is really hard the more kids you have and the more older kids you have we've also chosen to do either club sports or homeschool leagues other leagues that are less involved because they just simply take away so much family time with practices 4 days a week gains on weekends it's just not something that we feel we can afford and still enjoy a great family life Um this can be a little tricky and difficult if you have a child who's really athletically talented we have won specifically that this was a hard decision for us but we were able to find something that was a really good fit for him that's keeping him busy enough and keeping giving him enough competition yet allowing us to have a family life prioritizing relationships also means that curriculum takes a back seat it's not the most important thing it's important it's good to get through your lessons it's good to reach goals and to be able to cross things off the list those things are important but your relationships are more important stopping a lesson to correct a behavior um that's important that's something that we prioritize number two we prioritize our kids friends since we are homeschooled and we have chosen to step off the beaten path and do something that's completely countercultural that's a hard enough decision on us as parents I think it would be even more difficult for our kids if we didn't surround them with friends who are doing something very similar rather than having our hands in a lot of places too many irons in the fire we have honed down to the things that are most important to us so that we can be fully involved and have deeper friendships with those few things rather than being spread too thin so for us this is Co-op and church our kids have grown up with the friends they have in Co-op um whenever our Co-op has a field trip a special activity um any kind of events we try to make it a priority to be there we're not we can't always do it but we prioritize that because we want our kids spending a lot of time with their homeschool friends now I I know not everyone does a co-op and that's okay um people live in different areas homeschooling looks different and in different places I've come to learn that the more we've been doing it for us a homeschool co-op in this area is a really good fit it's given my kids great friendships and so whenever they have an opportunity to spend time with those friends we do it another area of friendships that we want to invest in is our church so we want our kids there for church services for youth group for events um serving and getting involved these are friendships that we want them to be invested in we want to go deep rather than wide number three we prioritize reading and I've said this before I think reading covers a multitude of sins you can blunder your way through homeschooling you can have no idea what you're doing you can feel like you're doing a lot of things wrong but if you're reading to your kids frequently throughout the day then it's going to cover up so many gaps reading makes your kids interested in things it helps them become better readers if your kid is struggling to learn how to read I suggest taking a big step backward and spending more time reading to them less time on reading lessons more time reading to them reading gives shared experiences for the whole family when we talk about some of the books I've read over our 14 years of homeschooling it brings back a shared memory that we have together with no one else it we've gone places we've been places through the books we've read it covers history it covers science it covers um hard topics big questions you know sometimes you come to things in a book where something's just not right or the reader made or the character has made a bad decision and it gives you a chance to talk about it the fourth thing we prioritize in our homeschool is free time to pursue interests now when kids are really young this means a lot of free play kids need free time to be able to experiment and observe to fail to try things um so lots of free time when they're young this means a lot of free time outside out out side is where your senses are the most Keen where the sense of smell and taste and touch the the lights and the color outside everything is so sensory which is perfect for young children they need to spend a lot of free time outside if they're inside using raw materials imagining for our older kids we like to give them plenty of free time to pursue their interests our kids have um tried so many things some of them they failed out miserably and and they had to try again or they just realized they weren't interested in that but a lot of things they have been successful at are girls do a community bake sale every week in our neighborhood this is a way for them to make money our son Luke um he asked for a forge when he turned 16 we bought it for him he's been forging medals um has been making some really cool things he started building a treehouse our girls started a YouTube channel they have time to play their musical instruments our 16-year-old loves to work on his car and our 19-year-old who will be coming home soon they love to work on their cars they just take things apart put it back together when kids have free time they're inspired just think about it as an adult when you have a little bit of time where you have nothing planned nothing scheduled you start getting ideas you think of things you want to do around your house or improvements you want to make you think of goals that you want to set for yourself free time is inspiring so that's why it's a priority for us the last thing that we prioritize is housework and life skills and I have come to appreciate this more and more when I was in my early days of homeschooling like I mentioned I was very academically focused I felt that if we tried to get everything cleaned up before starting school I would never get to school and while that that may have been true in that season of life when I had all Littles the more we went on in homeschooling I realized that daily hygiene picking up the house keeping order maintaining a home this is part of learning this is part of life our home life has been more fulfilling and peaceful by learning to have daily habits of for young kids it's getting up brush your teeth make your bed get dressed um and then after that as they get older they have chores every day it takes us probably anywhere from half an hour to an hour in the morning to get all of our housework and chores done before we start on our school and that used to bug me I used to feel like that was an obstacle to what I needed to do now I see it as our first schoolwork because it's part of living it's important having a clean space before you start trying to learn something or try to be inspired that's just crucial you're more apt to really care about what you're learning to really listen when your environment is pretty and clean and in order life skills are super important to us I've talked about this all this summer during summer we spend a lot of time learning life skills cooking gardening preserving I've shown you a lot of videos on this on paper we do our book workk from the the traditional school year from August through May but during the summer we spend so much time doing life skills that for us it's hard to tell the difference between school and not school it all meshes together because you're constantly producing you're constantly learning it doesn't stop anywhere just this week my kids have learned how to make sour cut we've dehydrated basil and oregano to store in our spice cabinet we've been pickling cucumbers we've been working in the garden I got some new perennial herbs I found at our local Greenhouse for just a dollar so I got some horse radish and beebalm and rosemary and just tons of things that we put in our garden and now we learned what all of them are and we're going to learn how to take care of them our garden is ripe we have to pick and tomatoes all this is stuff that's happening every day and the kids are learning so much from it I do want to touch a little bit on some things that I don't sweat about that are not a priority in our home school the first one is worrying if they're on grade level I don't worry if my kids are at the level that the state says they should be on at a certain grade now things are different in every state in Pennsylvania your kids have to be tested in third fth Fifth and 8th grade unless you teach with unless you have a teaching certificate which I have from my time teaching in public school so my kids don't have to be tested and because of that I haven't had them tested however when my oldest son was in fifth grade I thought maybe I should have him tested at that time he was my oldest I was worrying is he on grade level I was kind of still in that mode I had him tested and he performed on grade level or in every area and since then I've done evaluations for a lot of homeschoolers and I'm in the homeschooling Community this is something that is not uncommon kids are usually on or above grade level plus over time I realized that what the state decides is a certain level that a child should be at what they think is important for a kid to know at a certain age or a certain time is not always what I think is important or what I would want them to be at and some of the things that they don't emphasize as being important are really important for me for them to learn at a certain age or a certain time so it's become less it's become something that I really don't stress about another thing I don't stress about is keeping track of days I used to um just meticulously keep track of our time but but over time and the more kidss we had um it was just really confusing okay Julia was sick Monday and Tuesday but now she's better and now William is sick Thursday and Friday so he missed and what I have come to accept is that our lifestyle because of the life skills we do all summer long and the book work we do from August through May is a lifestyle of learning if I were to keep track of all our our days meticulously we would definitely do more than what's required so I don't make that something that I get all worried about having everything just perfect another thing I don't sweat over anymore is curriculum and I know if you're a new homeschool mom um you may be in a little bit different spot because you're picking curriculum for the first time you're not familiar with it it is a big deal when you first start out because you want to find something that you know is going to work you don't really know yourself yet you don't know your kids yet and you don't know the curriculum so it's kind of a big deal in the beginning but I look at homeschool curriculum similar to I to the way I look at marriage there is no perfect person there is no perfect curriculum and you make the best with what you have and that doesn't mean that there's not ever a time to switch a curriculum but there are many benefits to staying with a curriculum that is working pretty well for you one of them is that it trickles down to your other kids they pick up on it they understand the format they see the older kids doing it and so when they go to start they kind of have an edge they have a leg up and it makes it easier for you as a mom it also makes it less of a learning curve if you are familiar with a curriculum and you don't have to learn it new every year so curriculum is something I don't stress over ours isn't perfect there are things that I don't love about certain parts of our history curriculum or our math from time to time but it's working pretty well so we just move forward I hope this has been helpful for you um just getting you thinking about school starting I know some of you do year round school either way a fresh start is what we're looking forward to in the next couple weeks and I want to bring you along to show you how that looks in our home school I'm excited to get started on a new school year if you like this content please check out some of the other day in the life videos I've done so you can take a look at what a homeschool day looks like for us thanks for watching I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms