Homeschooling is definitely a sacrifice of time and energy! And we thought about doing “real” School especially after everything is opened back up- but having done this for eight years, we have a system, a routine and the ability to work around our schedule and fit our vacation time in was a drop -of -a -hat- we also use a lot of accommodations like researching on Google, looking at stuff in Dictionary, using calculators, using hands-on tools to explain abstract concepts and even watching videos on YouTube to get a different perspective-
Many times we are traveling in cars and watching National Geographic and discussing the things that we’re seeing.
I only like to do about an hour to two hours of actual sitdown time of day, most of our days spent outside, cooking, shopping or doing other family things together.
We try to break up the school day a lot by doing a lot of field trips, part-time, libraries weekly and educational games.
do I feel like our kids are “behind?” There are some things that they need extra practice on but yet some concepts they’re grade levels ahead of everybody else. Everybody learns at a different pace and when it comes to end of year testing my kids always fulfill the requirement with no problem .
Because we take an untimed test and we spread it over the course of a week and we take extra time for mental breaks we definitely have less testing anxiety and frustration.
We also retake tests that no penalty to them.
We have no ABC style grades and we just talk through what we need to work on for next time.
We let them sleep in as long as they want to if they’re tired and we try to stick to a 9 o’clock bedtime so that way they get plenty of sleep.
We try to have healthy snacks and meals at home and cook everything at home instead of going out for fast food except maybe once-a-week. our goal is to have 10,000 steps a day minimum before we can watch TV or watch screens.
Since our life has been around homeschooling for so long it would actually be a step back for us to be in the public school system and private school is as much is a down payment for a house for each kid so there’s no way that we could do that yearly- plus- it would be taking away the individualized attention that we have here.
Each kid gets at least a one hour time with me and we work according to their own pace. Then they work with each other on games, reading and building time.
Unfortunately, there is no school system that does that.
We love being able to provide this for our kids and in the state of Virginia and surprisingly very easy!
See what we do here with our full list of paperwork requirements and suggestions on curriculum that we recommend: