10 Kids Later: The Honest Guide to Christ-Centered Homeschooling

After 10 kids and 16 years of homeschooling, I've learned something I really wish I understood earlier. You're never just teaching subjects in your home. You're forming a child's worldview, whether you realize it or not. And it's weighty work, not because we control the outcome, but because God has entrusted us with souls. And I didn't always understand the weight of that. We've been homeschooling for many years now, and I've learned that this is not just an educational choice. Home education is discipleship. And I didn't always see it that way. For many years, I saw it through simply the academic lens. But over time, it has become clear that all education is rooted in a worldview. And we make a mistake as parents when we think that education can be neutral. Whether it's intentional or not, we are shaping what a child believes about truth, about life, and about God. We often assume that education is just the transfer of facts. Math is math. Science is science. History is history. But math is God's design, and we're just seeing it for the first time. Art is his beauty, and we're just mimicking it. History is his story. You see, even facts are framed through interpretation. What gets emphasized, what gets left out. How stories are told. All of this reflects a worldview. A biblical worldview says that we were made by our creator. He's given us natural revelation through the creative work all around us. We can see his fingerprints everywhere. His design is amazing. And he's also given us his word, the Bible. In God's word, we learn of his plan of redemption through his son, Jesus Christ, and the salvation he offers to anyone that believes. One of the verses that's impressed this on my heart, most powerfully, comes from Psalm 78, where it says, We will not hide these truths from our children. We will tell the next generation about the glorious deeds of the Lord, about his power and his mighty wonders. For he gave his instructions, he commanded our ancestors to teach them to their children, so the next generation might know them, even the children not yet born. And they, in turn, will teach their own children. So each generation should set its hope anew on God. If you're a Christian, I'd like to ask you a simple question. Are you giving your kids a Christian worldview? Are you teaching them about the glorious deeds of the Lord, about his power and his mighty wonders? If this is your first time on my channel, hi, my name is Sheri. I'm a Christian homeschooling mom married to my high school sweetheart, Nelson. We've been married for 25 years. Together, we have 10 children, ages 21 down to 3. I love encouraging other moms here on my channel and on the blog, ourlifehomeschooling.com. If you would like to give your kids a faith-based, family-first framework for education, this is exactly what I teach moms in my new course, Beyond School, The Home Education Breakthrough. This is a course for new and current homeschoolers. You can learn more about it by clicking on the link in the description box. This is a free masterclass where I teach ordinary parents how they can give their kids a better education at home. We're starting off our school day with morning time like we normally do, but I've already dismissed the older kids and we're sitting and doing the Bible story together. Right now, we're going through Moses in the Old Testament and building the tabernacle. We're wrapping up our morning time notebooks for this year. We have a couple more art prints from our picture study from Mary Cassatt. I think one or two more spelling patterns that we're going to go over, another Shakespeare story, but we're mostly done with our work in our morning time notebook. I'm hoping to come out with next year's simple morning time notebook sometime at the end of May. Okay, Julia, which one do you want to do? The book by John Huggins. Okay, good. Who would your valor see, let him come hither. When here will Custom be, come wind, come weather. There is no discouragement, shall make him watch the wind. His first of all intent to be of favor. Whether the weather be fine. I'm going to say it and then you repeat it. Whether the weather be fine. Whether the weather be fine. Or whether the weather be not. We'll weather the weather. Whatever the weather. Whether we like it or not. When we finish morning time, we all split up and work on our assigned areas of the house. We do chores by zones and everyone has a different chore every day. This has taken a lot of time to perfect. It takes repeated practice for kids to get good at something and we're still improving in certain areas of getting our house in order. I usually help clean up the kitchen with whoever's in charge of that area and I get a load of laundry started. I also have to take time to go around and check and make sure everyone is on task and getting their work done. Back to the topic of Christ-centered education. This is something that shows up in everyday moments, in the books we read, in the way history is framed, how human identity is described, even in what's considered normal or good. And if we're not intentional, if we are not intentionally teaching our kids from a biblical worldview, the culture is teaching them and the culture will fill in the gaps. That's why a Christ-centered education isn't just about adding Bible time to a school day. It's about recognizing Christ as central to all of life and learning. Something that has influenced me personally, probably more than anything else aside from scripture, is knowing a person who is fully surrendered to Christ. I think often one of the biggest faith builders in our lives is a living testimony. Someone else who is walking daily with the Lord. Paul says, follow me as I follow Christ. And I want to be that person to my children and the legacy we're leaving behind us. Because it's not only about today, it's not even about the children right in front of us. We are reaching into our grandchildren, into the people, all the people that they will influence in their lives. Maybe you can think of someone in your life that when you met them or the more you got to know them, you saw their love for the Lord and it was so attractive and appealing and you wanted to have that same relationship with him. Think for a moment, how did that person come to Christ? Who was it that shared the truth with them or was a living testimony before them? I think of the story of the great evangelist, Billy Graham, who came to faith as a teenager at a revival meeting led by Mordecai Ham. But Mordecai Ham had been deeply influenced by earlier evangelists, especially men like Billy Sunday, whose preaching impacted a generation before him. So one life faithfully living out the afterward. He was still a little curious. Why? Those are called oars. I would like you to take him home with me. The man put his hat on the ground and of course George was curious. He came down from the tree to look at the large yellow hat. So while it is vital that we give our kids a biblical worldview, it's one of the reasons we read scripture in our home every day. It's why we present every subject from the viewpoint of God's word and our responsibility before him. It's equally important that we are the living testimony before our kids. So much more is caught than taught. And this is very humbling, especially when none of us are perfect. We're all sinners saved by grace. I know one quote that I've heard recently that's just been on my mind is just the reminder that it's not about perfection, but direction. A true humility where kids can see that we also struggle with sin. Although God's changed our hearts, given us a desire for him, but it's about running back to the Lord, relying on him, complete childlike dependence on our savior. And it can be easy to focus on outcomes when you think about Christ-like discipleship. But the truth that we need to remember is that our job is to be faithful and to trust our faithful God with the outcome. And this perhaps is one of the hardest parts of parenting. It's the kind of sacrificial love where you lay down your life for your children. You want them to grow up and share that same faith that you have, but those outcomes belong to the Lord. Our job is to be consistent and to be faithful and trust him. Galatians tells us, don't be deceived. God isn't mocked. Whatever a person sows, that he will reap. This one and this one wrong. So let's look at it. Okay. Okay. 135 and it's going to go all the way up to the two o'clock hour. And then it's going to go 10 minutes after two. So we need to count from here all the way around to here. We're at the part in our day where everyone's doing their independent work and I'm coming around to each child as I'm able and facilitating. Sometimes this is me checking their work. Sometimes they're on a new math concept and I'm sitting down and teaching a new lesson. If they're learning something new, my son here is working on learning time to the minute and elapsed time. And then my daughter is working on some word problems with volume and water displacement. If you want to learn a little bit more about our four step daily routine, I walk you right through it in a day in a life video. I did about a year ago where I talk about our relaxed method of homeschooling. I'll link it for you so you can check it out. My daughter here isn't technically kindergarten age. She will be next year, but she's already shown interest in writing and reading. She wants to do school every day like her siblings do. Um, so we take a little bit of time each day. It usually takes about 15 minutes with her for a little while. I was teaching her, her letters, but she finally got through all those. She knew the sounds. And so then we've moved on to putting the sounds together and she started reading Bob books. And then we've also started learning some math concepts with the abacus. I still am spending about 15, maybe 20 minutes with her every day, just reviewing these. And she just continually makes a little bit more progress every day. As we think about Christ-like discipleship, I think it's important to, to remember that God is a perfect father and yet Israel, his chosen people rebelled against him. They turned away and Jesus, son of God, he was also betrayed, denied by Peter, abandoned by his followers in his hardest moment. This is, this was perfect love. It is perfect leadership. And yet there were many who did not follow Christ. So we should not expect a certain outcome. We should just do, faithfully do what God's called us to do. And this is a sobering truth, but it's also freeing. Our job as parents is to be faithful. We are called to feed our children spiritually, reading scripture together, living a life, surrendered to Christ right in front of them, talking about truth in everyday life, loving them deeply and consistently disciplining them with wisdom, not in frustration, not reactively, living out a real visible faith in front of them that connects the thorax. This daily work of discipleship, it doesn't happen in big dramatic moments. It happens in the ordinary days, a moment of correction where we get to talk to our children and speak to their hearts in conversations, in the car, when they ask those hard questions. And boy, kids can ask some tough questions. It happens in choosing forgiveness again. It happens in trying again tomorrow when yesterday didn't go well, just getting up and doing the work God's called you to do again. Remember, it's not about perfection. It's about direction, completely relying on the Lord. When the kids finish with their checklists, we take a break for lunch and go outside. And then the last part of our day is gathering again to read aloud together. This is my favorite part of the day. We have been so many places together in all our years of homeschooling through the great books that we've read. I want to remind you, if you're in the middle of homeschooling right now, especially on one of those hard days, remember this, you are leaving a legacy and your faithfulness makes a difference. But control is not the goal. Your calling isn't perfection. Look up to the Lord. We don't get to choose the outcomes, but we can choose faithfulness and reliance on him. And we can trust our faithful God. I hope this encouraged you. If it did, would you do me a favor and like and subscribe? I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.