"Essential Homeschooling Tips: Lessons Learned and Planning for Success in Our First Year"
How is it already August? I can’t believe the days of swimming, catching fireflies, and sweating our butts off are going to come to a close for 2024 within the next month or two. Soon it will be time for the leaves to fall, bonfires, cooler evenings, and…school! In our case, homeschool! If you’ve never seen my content before or didn’t already know, yes, we are a new homeschooling family. I’ll do another blog on why we chose to homeschool, but it’s pretty much summed up to our family values coming first and not agreeing with what’s being taught in the public school system.
Last year was our first year homeschooling, but it was really a practice year more than anything. Jemma had just turned four, so I didn’t want anything too rigid or strict. I also had a pretty rough pregnancy that made general life activities difficult. But we still tried out a few curricula to figure out what we’d like, what we didn’t, and how we’d want to move forward with our homeschooling journey. I’ll also do a much more in-depth blog on the curricula we tried and why we didn’t like them or why we did, but here’s what I learned in our first year.
First, Jemma loves workbooks. Easy, open-and-go books that have activities she can do and that challenge her and aren’t repetitive. We tried The Good and The Beautiful Preschool, but she would easily get bored with how long it would take to move on to other letters or numbers that she would start making mistakes on purpose because she was bored. We also tried All About Reading, but each letter involved the same activities, and again, she got bored. But workbooks? Those were her favorites. The preschool workbooks you can grab for like $3-6 at Walmart were some of her favorite gifts at Christmas. Books like those can keep her busy for hours, and she learns so much!
Second, Jemma also loves music. The Good and The Beautiful did a good job of having cute songs to go along with learning the alphabet and each specific letter. She loved those! Every single day, she walks around singing songs that she’s heard to help her learn something, or she creates her own songs.
Another thing I learned is that accountability is going to be essential for us to be successful with homeschooling. Being a first-time homeschool mom, I’m having to completely unschool myself from how I was taught in public school. But if there’s one thing I enjoyed about public school, it was the accountability that came with needing assignments done by a specific time. Having had a rough pregnancy made it easy for me to make excuses for us to not do school on some days. And yes, flexibility of schedule is a major perk of homeschooling, but you still need discipline in getting done what needs to be done.
Lastly, it’s already very clear to me that each of my children are going to be very different in their learning styles. Henry, who’s only two, is already vastly different in how he learns from Jemma. He loves songs, too and learns a lot from music, but he already fits the boy mold of needing to be hands-on and learn shoulder-to-shoulder. He also probably won’t be ready to start as early as Jemma. We are well aware Jemma started school early, but we only did it because she showed a desire to start. So this coming year will technically be her official preschool year with her age; she turns five on October 1st. But Henry probably won’t be ready to officially start until he’s closer to six. The nice thing is, the curriculum we’ve decided to move forward with, which I’ll talk about here soon in this blog, doesn’t really consider “grades.” Instead, we just count the year. This is our official “year 1” of homeschool. And Henry and Josie will both hear everything we are doing over the next few years, so when they do start, they’ll likely be very familiar with the material already.
Our first official day of the new school year for us is September 10th. So I’ve been busy prepping everything for the new year but am also planning to enjoy these last few weeks of summer in August. Taking everything into consideration that I learned from our “practice year” of homeschool, it’s time to dive into what we are doing moving forward to homeschool our almost five-year-old in a way that best suits her learning style. Here’s the breakdown of our homeschool curriculums and essentials to begin homeschooling our preschooler this year.
Planning
The key to any successful homeschool year, or anything really, is solid planning. I have this really bad habit of buying new planners all the time and never using them to their full potential. EXCEPT for when it comes to our homeschool planner. There is only one planner out there that I loved and trusted from last year and will never use another kind. It’s the Orthodox Homeschool Planner from Parousia Press! It’s fantastic because it has plenty of planning room for multiple siblings, it can be used with any curriculum of your choice, I love the month, weekly, and daily breakdowns, and aesthetically it’s beautiful. I also love that I can reverse-plan using this planner. Sometimes my actual homeschool plans don’t work out the way I hope, so instead of writing down everything I intend for us to complete, I write down at the end of the day what we actually completed. But my favorite part of this planner is all of the liturgical Orthodox information we need for the year. The planner has feast days, fast days, and most Saints’ name days, so as I’m planning out our curriculum, I can include our Orthodox lifestyle into what we are learning. This allows me to print specific information about Saints that we can learn about that week, create coloring pages of feast days and Saints for my kids, and it ties together our homeschool life with liturgical living beautifully. I cannot recommend this planner enough!
Morning Baskets
Morning baskets have been working really well in our home. I have a simple basket, actually it’s a diaper caddy I had purchased but didn’t use for diapers, so it instead works really well as our morning basket, (linked here). In that basket, I organize our morning materials each week. I LOVE the morning basket curriculums from Harbor and Sprout! They have so many little unit studies to choose from, and they make for fun activities that my children can wake up to, learn, and keep busy with until breakfast is ready. For August, we are using the Homestead unit study. And in September, we will use the Back to School unit study. We will sit down to breakfast together, and I’ll go over with Jemma what she did from the basket. Then after breakfast, we do one or two read-aloud stories, some Bible time, and prayers together.
Book Work
As I stated, Jemma LOVES book work. And though the inexpensive pre-K and Kindergarten workbooks from Walmart are fun, I wanted to find Christian workbooks that were truly open-and-go and would work as great supplemental material for our main curriculum. A friend recommended Christian Light, and I haven’t looked back since. She originally recommended Christian Light because of their great math open-and-go books, which once Jemma gets older we will utilize those for sure. But I found Christian Light also has Kindergarten 1 and Kindergarten 2 workbooks. We’ve been flying through the Kindergarten 1 books all summer, and Jemma loves them so much. They’re so easy to just open and work through together, she’s learning a lot, we can take them anywhere with us, and they’re Christian! We will be using the Kindergarten 2 workbooks to supplement our main curriculum this coming year.
An example as to what the inside work pages of the Christian Light workbooks contain.
Our Main Curriculum
After TONS of research and trying out various curricula last year, we’ve finally found a curriculum that we love, are excited to use, and pray will be fruitful for our family for the entirety of our homeschool journey. Drum roll please… CLASSICAL CONVERSATIONS. My husband and I first learned about classical learning from friends before we ever had kids who put their own children through a classical private school. We immediately fell in love with the learning style and wished we had been taught that way growing up. So we knew it was how we’d like our children to learn; we just weren’t sure how. When we started having kids, we began doing more research. There are classical private schools around, but they’re expensive, and we are very much aligned with wanting to homeschool rather than private school because we want to spend as much time with our kids as we can before they’re grown.
We heard about Classical Conversations Homeschool Community a couple of years ago, but when we moved home to Pennsylvania, there wasn’t a group local to us. Fast forward to this past spring when Jemma participated in a science fair, and I learned that they were looking for someone to start a Classical Conversations group in our area. I applied, got the position, and now we have a Classical Conversations group officially starting this year. I will write a blog that further explains Classical Conversations and why we chose it, but here are the primary reasons why we chose it and believe it to be the best fit for our family:
It’s truly Christian. They welcome Christians from all denominations, and the core mission of Classical Conversations is “to know God and make Him known.” Its roots are in Protestant Christianity, but my husband and I will help our children learn Orthodoxy with their schooling and pray this helps them become better apologetics of Orthodoxy.
Foundations, (the first program of Classical Conversations ages 4-11) is all memory work. So it’s primarily made up of songs. Jemma, who loves music, I believe will thrive with this style of learning.
Community Days are probably my favorite thing about Classical Conversations. For one, having a Community Day once a week helps me stay accountable to making sure we get our work done for the week. Secondly, it’s so cool watching the kids as young as four get up to present each week and build the skill of public speaking. Third, almost all of the moms in our community are brand new to homeschooling, so we all get to grow on this new journey together.
I am very excited for our family to officially embark upon our first full year of homeschooling with our daughter and to see where this journey takes us. There is a massive wave of families choosing to homeschool for various reasons, and I know many have opinions on what ages to start their kids with school. My opinion? Start when you believe they’re ready. Some may think we are starting my daughter too soon, but she’s beyond excited. She loves to learn and she’s been asking to start, so we will honor what she’s asking and are excited for her schooling journey to begin. As for my son, he might be older than she is now when we decide to start him. Every family is different and every child is different. But what is most important is that you find what works best for YOUR family. And who knows? Maybe some of the ideas I listed above will work for your family too!
If you’re a first-time homeschooling family this year or you’re experienced and looking forward to another year, I wish you the best and pray for a fruitful year of learning, experimenting, memory-making, and fun! May your homeschool journey be blessed!
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