Behind the Scenes of Our Actual Homeschool

My purpose is to invite you into my home and I only show a very small part of our homeschool week. It's only 15 to 20 minutes. This week's video is going to be a little different because I want to show you some behind the scenes and talk about what's actually happening in our homeschool. So you're used to seeing videos of me with shots in our homeschool and me doing a voiceover. This is going to be a little bit different. I'm going to be a little bit more vulnerable and talk to you about the things that you don't see and I really hope that you walk away encouraged. We have a lot going on in our homeschool. We finished this week so it took me about one day to do each child's portfolio, to sit down with them, to go over it, and I just tried to do one a day. We finally got through those. We ended, I wasn't feeling good on the last day of school so it kind of petered out. I mean normally on the last day of school I really like to do something special. In the past we've gone out for breakfast on the last day so that was a little different this year. A little bit of a letdown for me and I don't know maybe we'll still do something fun. But then we also have a graduate this year and our son is graduating on Friday. There's been a lot of planning going on for that, just getting ready for his graduation, going to graduation meetings. We're also transitioning so as we end our school year formally, close the books, we really just pivot this time of the year because we have a huge garden. We have animals. Our chicks just came in recently. We raised two batches of 80 broiler hens here on our small property. We raised four pigs. Our garden is all planted so that's done but there's just the daily weeding. So all of our outside work really picks up and if you've heard me before on this channel, I emphasize teaching our kids life skills. So while the book work ends, we shift into life skills mode and we still relax. We still have fun but we're learning a lot of things in the summer and I hope to share those with you in the next couple weeks. If you're new here and this is your first time on my channel, I hope you'll go and watch some of my other videos. But hi, my name is Sheri. I'm a Christian. I'm a homeschooling mom. I'm married to my high school sweetheart, Nelson. We've been married for 25 years and I just love encouraging other moms here on my channel. I also have a blog ourlifehomeschooling.com. I love providing resources to help other families in homeschooling. So let's talk a little bit about what actually is going on in our homeschool on a normal day in a normal week. I thought it would be best to just kind of share with you a little bit of the reason why I started my YouTube channel. I started it about five years ago. Originally, I wanted to start a blog to encourage other families and that's where I started. I took Lisa Bass's blogging course and that helped me get my blog going. At that time in our homeschool, I was getting a little bit more freedom because we had some older kids but when I got my alone time, when I was by myself, I found myself wasting time and I had lost interest in hobbies. I didn't have a hobby. I loved to read but I just wanted to pick up something that was something I could learn to improve my skills but also be productive. And so that was when I got the idea to start a blog and it was a way that I could share the experience I'd had in homeschooling, pass it on to other people, but also just learn some of those technical skills, create something I was proud of while also helping other people. So I started the blog and once I got going, I started putting YouTube videos in each blog post so that those blog posts could be more easily found. If you put videos into your blog post, at that time at least, it helps it to rank higher or it can help. So I started doing that just to supplement my blog and I did that for a long time and then it took about, I want to say like 50 videos, I started noticing that my YouTube videos were actually doing even better than the blog. So it kind of shifted and I realized that maybe I'd like to put more into my channel as well because that's a way that you can be more personal. There's so much online, especially with AI, how do you know what's real, what's not real, but with videos, you can actually connect with a person. So I started showing some day in the life videos. One of the reasons I wanted to show day in the life videos was because I remember when we started out, there were no YouTube channels. There were hardly any blogs. I just knew a couple of homeschool moms that were ahead of me and one of the things I really wanted at that time was to be able to just go into their home, watch them actually homeschool in a day because I felt that by watching and seeing that, it would just help me just to practically know how to do this. So because of that, I thought showing our homeschool would be a great way to encourage other moms and so that's what I wanted to create, but there are many things that you don't see that are not in the videos. So my videos are about 15 to 20 minutes long. My purpose is to invite you into my home and I only show a very small part of our homeschool week. It's only 15 to 20 minutes, but I want to encourage you. So I try to share things, but what you're seeing really is real. This is our actual homeschool day. I turn the camera on when we're in the middle of a homeschool day and just catch little glimpses here and there of what's happening. You are actually seeing our homeschool in action, but you are only seeing a part of it and you are seeing the highlights and I share that very openly. You're not seeing everything. We have all the same problems and struggles that you have in your homeschool. Homeschooling is hard. It's not easy. You're not seeing the problems, the mess. You're not seeing the toddler interruptions. When a child loses a book and it's so frustrating and I spend like 30 minutes looking for this book because the child didn't put it away. You don't see when my washer breaks and we have to figure out what to do or we're way behind in laundry. We have all the normal problems that you have. If I invited you over to my home to come see our homeschool, I would clean up because I don't want you to see my dirty laundry. I don't want you to see all of that. It's there and while on the one hand I've learned, we've learned how to manage it better and I have found systems that are super helpful and I think our homeschool is run very well. I am proud of what we're doing. It also is imperfect. So when I show you our 15 minutes of our homeschool week, you are seeing the 15 minutes you would see if I invited you over as a friend to come see what we're doing. You're not seeing some of the hard parts of our day but I assure you they're there and we're working through some of the same issues that all of you are working through in your homeschool. Homeschooling is hard. It's not, it's not easy. I choose to show the highlights. You don't want to see the mess on a morning after we've had a late night because we celebrated someone's birthday or when we've had a leak in the faucet and our whole day is hijacked and you can imagine how that looks. It's not pretty. We are actually homeschooling so I take the time to show the highlights to encourage you but when we're getting the most work done and making the most progress, those are moments you don't see. They're messier. There are more problems to solve. It's not always pretty but that is what our actual homeschool looks like on many days. We have days that are wonderful where everything is smooth and it's like how can we just duplicate this day and then we have days where it just seems like everything goes wrong from the get-go. I am showing you our highlights. I enjoy being able to have this creative way to share our homeschool life with you but those are the things you're not seeing. It is a little bit of a risk to open yourself up on YouTube to share your family life so I have made myself vulnerable to do that but I also want to protect our family's privacy as much as possible and so that's why you see the good parts and hopefully when I am talking about our homeschool you can take away the encouragement that I'm trying to share. There are other things that I also wish I could show you that you don't see so it's not just the mess, the problems. I want you to know we're normal and those things happen but there are also amazing things that if I knew you personally, if we were together, I could open up with you more and share things that you just can't share publicly. I wish I could show you our son's graduation on Friday. It's going to be amazing. This is our second child graduating and we're part of a co-op but in our area there is an organization that was started by parents. It's kind of the hub for all the co-ops in the area and they put on an amazing graduation. I wish you could be there for the kids leading worship and going through their bios and hearing the music and seeing the slides and seeing that this has been a wonderful option for so many children. I wish you could see our co-op and all the classes we offer that are taught by parents and we've just had some amazing teachers. They've had unique opportunities. I wish I could just take you in there and you could see it practically. You know all these things I don't do for privacy reasons but what I want you to see is that there are really good things that you don't see that are a part of our homeschool that I wish I could show you. I wish I could show you the friends our kids have, how normal it looks. They're really close with friends from their co-op. It's a very tight-knit group. They've grown up with them but they have friends outside of co-op. They're friends in many different circles and we're just so thankful because the kids that your friends have have a huge influence on them as they grow older so it's so important that they have good friends. I wish I could show you without bragging some of the excellence I've seen in our kids. Some of them academically, not all of them. Some of them just in other areas that have just completely surprised my husband and me. We worried about a certain child or children being able to read or you know they just weren't picking up some of those academic things but then they totally excelled in this other area that took us completely by surprise. I wish I could show you what our kids are all doing after graduation and how homeschooling has turned out for them. We have one graduate and we don't at this point we don't have any kids that have been college bound. He chose to do one year of Bible college because he knew he didn't want to go the college route but he wanted a little bit of the college experience without the debt. He did that for a year, worked for a year and he's now been accepted into a law enforcement agency and really seems to love it. Our second son who's graduating would like to follow that same path at this point. Would love to do law enforcement but he doesn't meet the age requirements so he's going to be working. I wish I could share more personally some of these things with you but it's a delicate balance sharing about homeschooling while also keeping privacy for our family. Overall what I want you to take away from this video is that there are many things you don't see. Homeschooling is hard and there are messy parts that you don't see. The discipline, the attitudes whether it's the kids attitudes or my attitude but I wish I could show you the whole package because there are also amazing parts that because although it is messy and imperfect and I've certainly made my share of mistakes, I also think it has been a wonderful choice. It truly has been life changing for our family and that's what I try to share on my channel. I am very passionate about home education because I've seen the change in our own lifestyle and how good it's been for our kids. So back to my story of starting my channel and the blog as a hobby as a way to encourage other moms. It began as a hobby and it was something that I could fit in in either the early morning hours or a little bit in the afternoon during quiet time and it gave me a way to be productive and help other people. The more I did it the more I realized this actually takes a lot of work. Creating a video, I don't know what people think but having an online business, having a YouTube channel, creating videos is actually a lot more work than I think most people think. There's so much more involved than I realized when I started. So what started as a hobby slowly became a business because we hit a fork in the road where we realized this is doing well. I really love doing this but I can't afford to spend this much time on a hobby. So it either needs to be worth the time that I'm putting into it or I just can't keep keep doing it. For us, we decided that we would love to keep going with it and it turned from a hobby into a part-time business which has been wonderful. It's allowed our kids to be able to take some lessons. It's given us a little bit extra income for things like a nice family vacation. So it's just been great in that way and for me it's also been a ministry because my heart is to encourage other moms in their walk with the and encourage them in homeschooling. So I hope it does all of those things. I hear from many of you and so many of you have been very kind in your comments and I just thank you so much. I do hope that this is an avenue to help other families. So for myself and others who have opened up their homes or are sharing their expertise publicly, we don't always do it perfectly and you don't always see all of it but I hope you can appreciate that we live in a time where there is so much support for home education. I remember back to the early years where there just wasn't a lot out there and I can speak personally for myself. I have started this to provide the kind of support that I wanted in the early years of teaching my kids at home. So I'd love to hear your comments. Let me know what you think about what you don't see, what you do see, what I would love to share with you, the amazing parts that you can't always show in a YouTube video. Leave your comments below. Thanks for watching. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.