Easing Into Our 16th Year of Homeschooling | DIL Family of 12

Our harvest is still coming in and so for us every year we start slowly. This is our 16th year of homeschooling. We have one graduate, seven in school, and two preschoolers. I can honestly say our kids are all excited to start again and I think that's because we had a really nice break and we're ready for some different routines. September is still very busy for us because we are bringing in so much of our harvest every day. Today it's green beans and tomatoes and peppers but many hands make light work. We do officially start our school year at the end of August but for us it's a slow start all the way through the month of September and then in October when our broiler hens are processed, our pigs are processed, all of our garden is finished, then we really jump in full speed ahead with our bookwork. If you're new here, hi, welcome. My name is Sherry. I'm a homeschooling mom to 10 kids. My husband and I have been married for 25 years and I love encouraging other moms here on my I know what it's like to be in the trenches with dishes, diapers, babies, dirty laundry, meals to make, homeschooling, and I want to encourage moms that are coming up behind me in the same way that so many moms ahead of me encouraged me when I was in that stage. If you're wondering what a slow start looks like for us, I'm just gonna kind of briefly go through exactly what that looks like in our home. Now normally during the average part of our school year, our day is fourfold. First, we do morning time. Secondly, is chores and cleanup. Thirdly, is independent work where our kids get out their checklist and go through all the stuff that they can do on their own. We break for lunch and going outside and then the fourth thing is read aloud in the afternoon when our little ones are napping. When we do our slow start in September, it pretty much follows this same basic routine, but it's just lighter. So in the morning, I usually read a little passage of scripture or a bible story. We'll watch world watch, but we don't go through our normal full morning time routine. I might start memorizing some scripture, pick out some the scripture we're going to do. I have already put together the morning time notebook that we will be covering for the whole year. If you'd like to look at that, I'll leave the link below. It's also on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com, but we don't get deep into that until October when our harvest is finished. After breakfast and our shortened version of morning time, we do our chores like normal. We've been doing this all throughout the summer, so this really doesn't change all that much. Just before the sand beds, lightning pulled into the leaf. Suddenly, a burst of dusty sand exploded around him. Lightning couldn't see a thing in the conning mess, but he remembered to keep racing forward. Jenna offered to read to Ben and Holland, so that really helped us to get things cleaned up a little bit more quickly this morning. After we do our shortened morning time and our chores, then I have the kids do their independent work, and during our slow start, I ask them to do reading, writing, and math. I don't even have all of their checklists printed out. I spend the first two weeks, as I get time, sitting down individually with each of our kids. I sit down with each of them, and I go over the things that I'd really like for them to complete in the school year, and then they talk about the things that they would like to do, and we just kind of find a happy medium, and we make the checklist up together. I really like doing it this way because it helps them take ownership of their work, but before we have the checklist put together, I ask them to do some reading, writing, and math. The ones that are old enough start with their individual bible reading, and then they move on to a math lesson. Now, we don't start a new math curriculum and finish it necessarily all in one year. Some of my kids do. Some of them finish it and move on to whatever is next, but we just make our goal progress. So, for most of our kids, they are right in the middle of a math book somewhere, like at the end, or even like a couple chapters in. They're all at different places. We just pick up where we left off and start again. Now, of course, since they had a break over the summer, some of them need some review. So, we just take this one child at a time, one day at a time. Some of them were able to just pick it back up and get right in. Others, like my one daughter, for example, was in the middle of studying percentages, and this is a little harder concept for kids to understand, so I needed to take the time to go back and review from the beginning of that chapter on percentages to help bring her up to speed. So, everyone gets out their math and does a math lesson, and then for writing, we do copywork, and the kids that are old enough, I also ask to do a page in their language notebook. Okay, so you need some copywork. Okay, take this. Take this pencil. Go sit at the table. I'm going to bring you some copywork to do, okay? Am I doing cursive yet? Um, yes. We have a couple different things that we use for copywork, but one of the main things that especially my younger kids use is the seasonal copywork that I have on the blog. This is fall copywork. It's all taken from quality literature and scripture verses. So, I pulled this out for William to start on. So, just as a little recap for a slow start other than morning time, and I'm going to get to our read aloud in the afternoon, I have the kids do reading, writing, and math on their own. For reading, they'll do some of their bible reading, and then each of them are always working through some quality literature book, whether it's summer or school time. Our kids are always reading something, so that's something that they'll do in the afternoon right before I read to them, usually while I'm putting my little ones down for naps. Math, they pull out the next lesson and work on that, and then for writing, they do copywork, and the older kids do language pages. Now, I think it's important for me to mention that this is the first year in a while that I don't have a beginning reader. Our youngest son is reading on his own, and then the next child up, Holland, is not quite ready for that yet. So, that changes things a little bit for us. In the afternoons, I'm still reading to the kids, and so this will be the last thing that we do, but the reason that we start like this slowly is because we have a small homestead, and we raise all the meat that our family eats for the year on our property. We also have a huge garden, and we're bringing in so much of our harvest, and our kids help with all of it. They help process the food. They are out there with us pulling up potato plants today. That was what was on today's agenda. They're part of so much of it, and so it just works out well for us to do a slow start until all of this work is finished at the end of September. When I had young kids, all young kids, this really looked a lot different. It was hard for me to really get anything done. If I wanted to do anything like canning or preserving or anything like this, I had to do it when the kids were in bed at night or when my husband was home. It's so different when your kids get older. When you have all little kids, they're all completely dependent on you for everything, but as they get older, the more independent kids that you have that outnumber your dependent kids, you are able to become so much more productive because they not only help, but they are productive themselves. Here my daughter is working on her weekly micro bakery that she started at our home. She puts a stand up at the top of the driveway every week. She is so excited about this, and she's been doing an incredible job. She's been making sourdough loaves, chocolate babka. The past week, she made these s'mores cookies, chocolate chip cookies that were outstanding. She makes these cinnamon rolls. Our house on Saturday morning smells like a bakery, and honestly, it is so hard not to eat all of the yummy stuff that she makes for us. Today, I made some chicken quesadillas for the kids for lunch. This is just an easy throw together meal, but when I had all younger kids, this looked so different. We had babies pretty much every other year. I was pregnant a lot. I was nursing a lot. They were all little, and I remember just feeling many times like all I could do was stand there and hold the baby. It was hard for me to make a meal. It was hard for me to clean up from a meal, and it just seemed for a very long period of time like I could get almost nothing done, and when you have little kids, it is like that sometimes. These are the investment years, and the more kids you have, the longer your investment time is, and that's really what it was for us since we have 10 kids. Our investment time, that time where you can't get a lot of things done, where your kids are all undoing things, and you can barely keep up, and you are drowning, that time when the kids are all little was longer for us than it usually is for an average-sized family. However, I will say that to the degree that you aren't able to get things done when your kids are little, that's the same degree that you are able to be productive when they all get older. When they get older, this has the opposite effect. You are incredibly productive, not only because you have so many kids that can help, that are useful, but because they're producers themselves. Our older boys have a car detailing business. We have three drivers right now. We have a couple older girls that have babysitting jobs. Our daughter wants to start this micro bakery. It's just, it's so different. They are all producing themselves, and it just changes the whole atmosphere of the home. So I hope that encourages some of you moms that are in that investment stage like I was. I was in it for a long time. You're putting in those hard years of just changing diapers, keeping up with meals, keeping the mess contained because they're all little, and they're just pulling things off shelves, pulling things out of cabinets, and it's just a different time, but it does pass. The kids helped cut all the green beans, and we got most of those processed later this day. There were a couple batches of them, but I had some time to myself to work on the tomatoes. I got them cleaned, got the cores stunned, and got them in the boiling water so that we can pull the skins off, but then I had some helpers later in the evening help me finish off the batch. So for the next couple weeks, we're going to be finishing up the tomatoes that are coming in from the garden. We're still getting green beans. A big project that we'll be doing this weekend is our applesauce weekend. This is kind of a big deal. We do about ten and a half bushels of applesauce. My in-laws come down, and it's a whole family affair. It takes us two full days, but when we're finished, it's all the applesauce that our family eats for the whole year. We finished canning all the beets that we got from the garden, so that's done. Not sure if we'll be doing corn this year. We didn't do it last year, and I really missed it, so if we can get a good deal on corn, we might take one day and work on that, but as far as our schoolwork, I will continue having the kids do a little reading, writing, and math every day. I will be pulling our kids aside one by one to write up their checklists to get them printed out so that they're ready to go. Probably in the next two weeks, we'll have those all done, and we'll be ready to get into our schoolwork full steam ahead when it comes to October. Now, I did forget to mention the one thing that we pretty much do year-round, and that is reading together. I read aloud to the kids after lunch pretty much every day. In the summer, I do it when everyone's here, so it's a little bit more sporadic, but I'll read to my little ones, put them down for naps, then I'll come out and read to everyone else. Right now, I'm reading Little House on the Prairie to my four-year-old and seven-year-old, and that just seems to be right at their level, and then to the rest of the kids, the older kids, I'm reading The Endless Step. This is such a great story about a young girl who was taken from her homeland in Poland during World War II and sent to Siberia. I did forget to mention that some of our kids are doing their Veritas Press self-paced history lessons. I absolutely love these. We've been using them for probably 10, 15 years, but this is something that's completely independent of me. They can do it on their own. Sometimes, I have them do it in the evenings after 8 30 when I put my little ones down. I hope this video encouraged you as you were able to get a sneak peek into what our homeschool looks like when we have a slow start. I'd love to hear from you what your homeschool year looks like when you begin. Leave a comment below. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.