Highs and Lows of Homeschooling | When You Have a Hard Homeschool Day

[Music] the seasons of fall and spring are by far my favorite parts of homeschooling the weather is beautiful we can be out there to enjoy it even with the beauty all around us there are still some very challenging parts to homeschooling managing the home taking care of children that have needs I want to share with you some of the struggles we had this week and also some of the highlights things that we just loved come along with us for another day in the [Music] life okay so there were twice as many boys as there were girls so you're going to draw a line like this and then half one this is boys and this is girls and then together they make 1,650 all right so how many parts is that 1 2 3 so you can take 1650 and divide it into three parts 1,650 divide it into three parts and that will give you each of these parts how many boys were there in the grade then you would take take two of those parts that make sense okay I'm starting out my morning here just behind and we have systems in place each of our kids has chores I have a whole plan of how things are supposed to run but you know some days it just seems like for all the planning and all the hard work that we do there can just be setbacks and it can get it can be hard to sometimes rain everything back in and still have some order if you're new here my name is Sherry I'm a Christian homeschooling mom to 10 kids I'm married to my high school sweetheart we've been married for 24 years this is our 15th year of homeschooling I love writing on the blog rlif homeschooling tocom and showing up here every week to encourage you my passion is to encourage other moms who are at home doing the greatest work of all raising the Next Generation for the glory of God as I was saying I I started out this morning just behind one step behind everyone and for all of our planning and all our systems that we have going some days are just like this and it can be easy to get discouraged but the best thing is to just go with the flow just start moving start doing the next thing right in front of of you that needs to be done we got a new piano last night and actually we got it so late at night that both pianos are still in our house and so throughout the day there was someone playing the piano at almost every moment because everybody wants to try the new piano and then meanwhile the old piano is still there because my husband came home so late he wasn't able to get the old one out so inevitably some young child is also playing on the second piano so it was quite noisy this morning we've had some highlights to our week the first being just the beautiful weather we've had several days in a row of just tons of rain and finally uh I think this was a Thursday a Wednesday or Thursday we just had a beautiful day and we were able to go outside this is the time when I do love homeschooling because we get to enjoy all the beauty together we also went to co this week our family Co-op which is really fun for all the kids I help out teaching a chemistry Labs class and also a sewing class but on this day we were all home getting in a good day of school my son James was inside working on his satara geography he's working on South America and I took my little guys outside to read the story of Pocahontas yeah you didn't know that no I didn't yeah one day when smth Smith was in the woods some Indians came upon him and made him their prisoner to lie down with his head on it then two tall Indians while I'm reading you can probably hear someone is still playing the piano on the inside sometimes we have to just tell people okay we need a break from the piano we just need to have some quiet there you can see the other piano that's still in the room that my husband is going to move out as soon as he gets back [Music] home another highlight to our week was that I read this morning the story of CS Lewis from trial and Triumph on every Friday I read a Christian hero instead of our Bible reading so that was really fun we started a new hymn for the month of October we're doing near The Cross and we also started a new folk song which is early one morning I'm trying to be better this year at doing folk songs with my kids and I'm really laidback about it just make a playlist and we go from there up there W woohoo woohooo woohoo hey you want some lunch you want some [Music] lunch your mommy make you snack [Music] look at Mommy hey hey there are so many things I love about homeschooling I love that my kids are growing up together the siblings are really close I love that I get so much one-on-one time with my kids I love that we can enjoy these fall days and be outside as much as possible but I also have to admit that there are some really hard times as well it's not easy being home with kids all day my kids are normal they argue we have struggles nobody likes to clean up um we have teenagers that can have attitudes sometimes I struggle with my own attitude a lot of times and when this happens I think we really tend to focus on the difficulties and the challenges more than the benefits we can't kind of just remember those hard times and forget the Great we have with our kids is uh three more so look you have 30 10 20 30 what's three [Music] more I had a day kind of like that this week it was a day where I just felt so behind and like I just couldn't pull everything together and everything just seemed kind of chaotic and a mess um here my kids were outside they brought me some mushrooms they're finding mushrooms all over our property it was um a day where I just felt like I woke up in a great mood I was happy I had started out my morning right but um it kind of just started with a barrage of problems random things and um by the time I got my kids down for afternoon nap I was kind of just exhausted and didn't have know where to start to pick up the pieces now I don't know why it is those of us who homeschool when we have a bad day we tend to question ourselves we think of all the things we're doing wrong we think that someone else would be doing it better now I've been homeschooling long enough to be able to spot this kind of thinking as soon as it surfaces you can be doing a really great job but if you're homeschooling you will question people will question everything you do kids can be having tons of problems in school and no one questions the school system why is it that we as homeschool moms doubt ourselves so much now here we are starting a new day I made eggs for my kids this morning with toast I want to get back and tell you what I did on this particularly hard day but let me just tell you a little bit of what we did for morning time today I only had my younger kids my older kids were at their drop off Co-op so it was a little bit easier morning we did Bible reading I did some memory verses just for the younger kids some poetry and we did world watch funny thing for all the piano playing we've had going on this week we all sat down and something was playing the piano and we realized it was our [Music] cat I'll do okay a child should always say what's true and speak when he is spoken to and behave merily at table at least as far as he is able listen up the lame man in the temple one afternoon at 3:00 Peter and John went together to the temple at the place called The Beautiful gate where people went into the temple a poor lame man was lying on a rug this poor had never walked in in his whole life he was helpless every day some of his friends carried him to the beautiful gate of the temple people who pied him sometimes gave him a little money to pay for his food and clothes he had no money he had no money but what did he had power of the Holy Spirit he had the power of the Holy when Peter saw the crowd Gathering he said in a voice loud enough to be heard by all why do you look at us as if we had cured this man by our own power in this man God has glorified his servant Jesus you brought Jesus to Pilot and would not permit pilate to let Jesus go you asked the governor to give you a murderer instead you killed the Prince of Life why do they call Jesus the prince of life people in Jerusalem who had been baptized in his name not even two months after Jesus had gone to heaven the morning after Peter and John are thrown into prison the Chiefs gather their R Elders describes the Augustine converts to Christianity you've already done this card right so I'm just just going to read to you about it and see if there's anything more that you can tell me about Augustine's devout mother was concerned about his Wild Life as a student and young Professor she prayed for him tirelessly back to the challenging day that I had this week I want to share with you what I did to pull everything back together first of all I can recognize those kind of doubting thoughts when I see them and I have to remind myself to get my head back in the game and then secondly when I got my two little ones down for nap time I sat at the table and I brought my kids to me one by one and went through their checklist and just sat down looked over everything looked over their copy work sat down and made sure that they're checking their math checking to see if they had any difficulty with any subjects that morning um just sitting down one by one until I got through each of them it didn't take a lot of time but just that short checkin helped us just pull everything together help me know where they were at what we need to work on this is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony I've been playing on YouTube um this is the composer that we're studying and the fun thing about him I love the opal wheeler books I'm reading the opal wheeler book we have on Beethoven it's just a short biography of his life all my kids kids um are here for this in morning time and they all really like it I get so inspired to read about real people and in the back they have some of his music now this day was really beautiful this is the one that the weather just turned Sunny so we decided to get out of the house and we took a trip to our local library and then we went to a park afterwards [Music] on [Music] after the library we went to the park and they happened to be switching the trains which Benjamin thought was so cool I mean he was wide eyed the whole time this was a beautiful day taking the kids out here they were in the Little Creek here and um we just really enjoyed being out together the fresh air and just so many pretty things to see the kids loved playing together it was a time when I could just let my hair down relax and enjoy being with the kids so in spite of the really hard day I did have this week this is what I want to remember and I hope you can do the same remember the good times and maybe it helps to just write it down so that when you have that really hard day or when you feel like things are chaotic and just everything fell apart and didn't go well or you just think that you're not doing the greatest job remember write down these moments and remember them and then just move forward just start wherever you are make a different plan make a better plan for what you're going to change and how you're going to fix things and just take one child at a time and move forward [Music] boy this week was full of highs and lows I'm remembering the highs and specifically this beautiful day we had outside if this video helped you I encourage you to watch the video I did a couple weeks ago why moms give in to easily and how to avoid being one of them thanks for watching this week I do one video a week offering homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms have a great week