Are You Overthinking Homeschooling?

It can be hard in some of these cold winter days to remember that spring is just around the corner but while we're inside more often we're trying to take advantage of this time to get some of our book work done and we are pushing through getting these things done so that when spring comes we can be outside enjoying the beautiful weather. That was six days ago. Winter can be a time of sickness and that was true for us this week. Ben was down with a little bit of a fever and then by the end of this morning time Will started crying and I could feel his head right away. He was warm and so he spent the rest of the day on the sofa. So a couple of the kids were sick this morning but the rest were feeling fine. We had a normal morning time, a normal school day. Because Ben wasn't feeling good I put him in the ergo and wore him for a lot of the morning because that was just exactly what he needed. He wanted to be held and sometimes I forget this with a toddler once they get to that age. They're walking around, they want to play, they want to be down doing things but then sometimes they'll be needy again and I can forget how much they love being in a carrier and love being held by mom. So I remembered that this morning and that helped us get through morning time. We are most of the way through our simple morning time notebook. We're finishing up memorizing the last two scripture passages. We are completing our map of North America and that's something that the kids were working on this morning. There's a couple more physical features that we are trying to fill in. So we got an atlas out and started with that. Let's find it. The Great Bear Lake. Which would be. I knew I could never trust you with it. Oh I found it. I just had to barely glance at it. What are we finding? What are we finding? Great Bear Lake. This morning we looked up the Great Bear Lake, the Great Slave Lake, and the Hudson Bay which are all in Canada. I don't really know that much about Canada's geography so this was interesting to me because that's something I don't remember learning about. So a lot of it was kind of new just finding where some of these places are. The next thing we worked on was our grammar and for this we write a sentence out on the whiteboard and then we label all the parts of speech using some of the charts that I have in the morning time notebook. Jumps. The subject is fox. One trap I see a lot of homeschoolers fall into is overthinking homeschooling and I will be the first to raise my hand here because I have done this over and over again. Sometimes I still do it in our 15 years of homeschooling. We forget that homeschooling is simply an extension of parenting. When your child is turning school age you've already taught them how to sleep through the night, how to eat with a fork, you've potty trained them, and the formal academic work is just the next thing. I love how Nikki Truesdell describes this. She says homeschooling is parenting with books and that really is it sums it up. That is what homeschooling is. It's taking our kids where they are and moving them forward. One of the first things we need to keep reminding ourselves of is that homeschooling takes so much less time than traditional school. We overthink it when we compare. When we compare homeschooling to what kids are doing in school or when we compare our home to someone else's homeschooling experience. Every family is unique. Your kids are unique and when it only takes you an hour and a half, two hours for an elementary age child to finish school and you are wondering what am I missing? What aren't we doing? We should be doing more. That is normal. It does not take as much time to homeschool as it takes for kids to get through work in a traditional school setting. I wanted to make sure to let you guys know that some of the sections of this video are muted because we are really enjoying the folk songs we're learning this year in the Morning Time Notebook. This is something new that we have not done before but the kids are loving it and so I can't play them because it's a copyright infringement but that's what we're doing a lot of the time especially during morning chores. We are playing these. A lot of them are old Scottish or Irish folk songs and we just love them. I'm working with Brinley here on problems involving distance, rate, and time. So we're talking about how to use the formula distance equals rate times time and move it around to find the different things that you might be looking for whether you're wondering how much time it takes or how far you have to go in a certain problem. William wasn't feeling well today so he was on the sofa and I never like it when my kids are sick but I am thankful that I can be here with them taking care of them. Whenever I start to overthink homeschooling, I bring everything back down to the very basics. Reading, writing, and math every day. We try to get a little bit of that done every day. Those are foundational. They're going to need them for life and then the next thing would be reading to them. Anytime you read to your kids, you are opening up a whole world of imagination to them. You're teaching them about history, about science. There's so much that's covered in reading aloud so making sure that I'm getting that every day and then we can slowly add in extras if we want to. The next for me would be morning time. Morning time is a staple in our house. This is where we observe truth, goodness, and beauty. We learn about famous composers, their pieces, folk songs, art study. We did like our grammar lesson, our geography. This is all group studies that we enjoy. I'm reading some rhyming books to Ben and Holland here. I'm working on a post on the blog of all of the best rhyming books for preschool and kindergarten ages. We have just a huge selection that our family loves that I've done with all of my kids. Rhyming books are so good for this age. A lot of times I'll read them and we've read them so many times that I'll stop at the end of a line and wait to see if they can fill it in and if they've heard it a lot then they usually can. So we did the chickadee and hey buddy come here. Come here. We did the chickadee. I was thinking we could do the dark-eyed junco. Here we're doing a lesson on the dark-eyed junco. This is from the Burgess Bird Book. The dark-eyed junco. Okay it's page 254 sticker number 63. So here I'll help you find page 250. Okay wait so page 63 sticker number 254. Yep it's the very last page. In cooler parts of North America. A lot of different white valleys. William of course wasn't feeling good today but and I don't expect him to participate in any of this but he loves learning the birds in the Burgess Bird Book and I know that I knew that doing this lesson beside him where he wasn't feeling good would actually entertain him and he did ask for his book and wanted to put his sticker in. So we just did this lesson and he heard some of it and the rest of the kids learned more about this winter bird. The dark-eyed junco is around in the winter. We see them on our back deck all the time so this was really fun. It's like a charcoal kind of like a grayish color. A dark dark gray. Julia do you know what a slate color is? It's like a dark gray. No matter what the weather is I think it's going to snow some more. I like the snow you know. You know I'm sometimes called the snowbird and when I am lucky enough to find them I use long hairs. Often I put my nest on the ground and never very far above it. I am like my friend Dottie in this respect. It always seems to me easier to hide a nest on the ground than anywhere else. Back to homeschooling. If you find yourself overthinking it just get back to the basics. Keep it simple. Make sure you're getting in reading writing and math every day. Make sure you're reading aloud to your kids. This is where a lot of times they're getting their science, their history. Sometimes I'll choose science and history books for our read alouds. And then thirdly morning time where they're getting those rich group subjects and getting some of the beauty, the foundational memory work. This is where we read the bible together. If you are not reading the bible to your kids you are missing one of the best curriculums you have available to you. You may not be up on all the fancy new trends in curriculum. I know I certainly am not, but I've definitely seen the benefits of reading the bible aloud to our kids. Lunch today was another random dish that we put together. I was hungry for some kind of creamy potato soup with bacon. So Afton fried up some Canadian bacon. I cut up the potatoes, the onions, and we kind of went along. I added some broth, some heavy whipping cream. We mashed the potatoes once they were cooked and added some spices. This turned out to be really good. Hot soup is perfect are the parent and we get to decide. We had a day this week where everyone woke up. We were like in a winter slump. I didn't feel like doing the same old, same old. The kids were tired of it and I knew that the best thing for us was just to do something completely different. So we dropped our schoolwork, we got on our winter hats and coats and boots, and we all went for a hike in the woods. I didn't have to get anyone else's permission. I didn't have to requisition any forms or see if it was okay to take this special field trip. I knew it was what the kids needed. It was what I needed and we all just did it. And I think we need to remember that we're the parents. We know what's best for our kids better than anyone else. No one knows our kids like we do and we get to It's similar to a turtle. A turtle lives, tortoise usually lives. Tortoises, they don't eat fish. You know what they eat? They eat green leaves, green things. I hope this video has reminded you to keep it simple. Don't overthink it. You know what's Thanks for watching. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms.