Hi, my name is Jessica and I am a homeschooling mom
and this is--
Parker!
Jacob!
And, Bailey.
We also have baby Duncan.
You learning a lot, buddy?
(laughing)
We have been homeschooling since Bailey
was a baby, essentially.
I went into parenthood planning to homeschool.
We haven't needed to go elsewhere thus far.
Who knows?
You never know.
We often get asked about our homeschool day,
what it looks like, what our routines look like,
how it works for us.
I thought I'd share a little bit of that with you today.
So, for us, our first part of our homeschooling day
is cleaning off the table
because the table we school on is also the table
they eat breakfast on, so we do our breakfast,
cleaning up dishes, cleaning up the table,
wiping it down 'cuz you don't wanna put books
in sticky messes and kids make sticky messes.
(upbeat music)
The majority of our schooling is done at the kitchen table
and I always like to make sure I have some sort
of delicious beverage, like my tea.
This is Morning Thunder by Celestial Seasons.
I like that one.
Gotta get my Morning Thunder.
I also have my cold drink.
This is a La Croix.
I love La Croix.
So, that puts us in the mood to do our school
and that's really important.
Don't forget to do that part.
If you're not in the mood to start your day
and things are settled, it can be rough.
So, that's what we've found really, really helps us.
Maybe you have special suggestions or things that you do
to begin your morning or begin your day.
Go ahead and share them with us below.
We'd love to hear what they are.
The next thing that I do is I set up our board
and it looks like this.
♪ Good morning, good morning ♪
♪ Good morning to you ♪
♪ Good morning, good morning ♪
♪ Good morning to you ♪
So, we sing that little song every morning
and then, the kids come and sit around me
and we set up what we're going to do.
We go over what day it is, what month,
and we talk about what season it is
and that's all done right here together.
So, right now our calendar says yesterday
and I'm going to update everything
while sitting with the kids.
Sometimes I do this before they come to sit here
and sometimes I just do it on the fly with them.
Parker, what day of the week is it today?
Tuesday.
- [Jessica] Jacob, what month are we in today?
October.
- [Jessica] Tuesday, October--
Bailey, do you know-- Third!
- [Jessica] Nice.
Third.
- [Bailey] 2017.
- [Jessica] 2017.
This stands for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
We've had breakfast.
This is outside play time.
Last time I went outside, I got a wasp sting.
Jacob got stung by a wasp yesterday.
It was kinda scary.
Yeah.
So, what happened was it got into his woolen jacket.
I was like, get off me bug
and then, it flew down here and I saw it.
It was a wasp.
Then, I started crying.
Then, I went all the way downstairs,
I went, mommy, my arm!
And then, I didn't even know if I got stung or not.
And then, she took off my sweater
and then, I'm like, I looked down
and there was something yellow
and then, I looked down and I saw the wasp on my knee
and we were inside.
- [Jessica] This is an area where they can keep track
of how much water they've had for the day.
This is an area in case they wanna share something.
They can share here.
This is how many donate bags they've put together.
This is something called a quest.
It's a bonus activity that they can do
to either remove a consequence or to earn a bonus.
These are different things for our kids,
100 pieces of trash, sort a Lego bin,
do a Music.ly, do a donate bag.
We have all different kinds of things
that we like to do as quests and those change all the time.
Homeschool with Winnie is an activity
they do on the computer for our
classical conversations work.
Sew on patches is just a reminder for us.
Because we always are earning patches from programs.
So, those are mostly kind of our extra life stuff
and then, this is where the school is.
So then, I write down all the different things
they need to do for their school work for the day.
These are Bailey's various school things that she does.
Here are Jacob's, here are Parker's.
So, those change every day,
but I make sure that they have whatever they
really need to do for that day on there.
Parker has a big list, you may have noticed.
He's not in Kindergarten yet, but he does have schoolwork
that he works on.
A lot of that is to get him into the routine
of doing schoolwork, more so than actually going,
yes, Parker knows Calculus.
He's doing a great job.
He works on cutting and pasting,
he has a little book where he writes a letter a day
and he just writes that one letter over and over again.
For his math, he usually does dot to dot
or he has a color by number project
that he likes to work on,
and then, he also has a little drawing book
where he learns to draw a little thing.
This is my drawing book that I do a lot of days.
This is the first one I did, an apple.
I did a page right here.
And then, I did this baseball.
It was pretty hard for me.
That one was pretty good, but this one wasn't
because I was trying to make it farther,
but it just went across.
This one's a balloon and I tried doing it on here.
- [Jessica] Those look great.
And the balloons were automatically good.
- [Jessica] They were automatically good?
Yeah, but these were really hard to try doing.
So, yeah.
These are cherries.
- [Jessica] Let me see the cherries.
Oh, yeah. These are cherries.
- [Jessica] Parker's learning how to write his name
on all of his work.
Yeah, and this is my egg.
This is my ice cream cone
and this egg was pretty hard to make
and this was a coconut.
- [Jessica] That's an acorn.
An acorn.
That's an acorn?
It's pretty funny.
That's what squirrels eat.
Squirrels are not to be touched,
just the ones that are pets.
Oh, this is pretty good.
This one is pretty good.
Here's a mushroom.
I haven't write my name yet.
(laughing)
- [Jessica] There's Parker's eggplant.
Yeah, there's my eggplant.
That one was pretty hard too.
And, here's my hotdog.
That was my hotdog.
This is my hamburger.
It's pretty messy.
And, that's my hamburger.
And, that's my boot.
It's pretty good.
- [Jessica] Where's your last boot?
That's my boot.
This one's pretty cute.
This is my doggy I haven't worked on.
- [Jessica] Oh, that's what you're doing today?
Yeah, but I'm trying to find
a light brown and a brown that is dark.
- [Jessica] I bet we have those things.
Go look.
Okay, but I need help looking.
- [Jessica] Okay, well, you look for a little bit
while I show what Jacob's been working on, okay?
Good job, Jacob.
Thanks.
- [Jessica] Some of these things stand for different things
that you wouldn't necessarily know,
but this is how we schedule everything out.
What the kids need to do, all those right there.
By the end of the day, if they have these little stars
for the donate bags, then they can watch a movie
or something special.
Whatever they want to do.
That's the heart of our routine.
I found this board really helps me a lot,
so that's the main thing that we use.
Oh, here's their feeling chart, too.
Feelings.
And, we do things like sharing
and talking about our feelings
and making sure that everything we need
to stay healthy at, not just school,
but our overall being is all written on this board.
I'm going to talk about what I do
for when I do writing.
So, what I do for writing is I work on mommy's computer
and I work on my book and it's really fun.
So, Jacob's doing something called
Draw Write Now.
This is a really cool program that I've used
with all of my Kindergarten, first grade, second grade kids.
He reads me these sentences, then he writes them all out,
then he learns how to draw the picture.
So, it's like he's illustrating his own story.
This is what Jacob's working on right now
and in the past he's done this pig, sheep.
One thing that I love about that book
is that it also has a little bit
of a social studies aspect in it.
This one has things on a farm,
but there are other ones that have American history
and a variety of topics that the kids can learn about
and talk with me about as they're writing them out
and drawing them.
So, it's really cool.
I love it.
Bailey is working on memorizing these concepts
for her grammar.
These are five principle parts of a verb
and she's writing out all of these irregular verbs.
She does these charts several times within a week.
This is chart D and then, this is chart C
for learning verb types and attributes.
She has like 20 different charts that look like that.
She can write out from memory chart A and chart B.
She's close to having chart C completely memorized.
She's doing a really great job with that this year
and it's been very cool for her to develop her grammar
because she's such a strong writer
and this makes her stronger in that.
I really appreciate this work that she does.
It's a part of our classroom conversations homeschool group
and the program's called Essentials,
which is for fourth grade and up.
My book is called Adventure Wars.
It'll be out in about a year or two probably.
If not, maybe a little longer or shorter.
I don't know yet.
I'll send out things when I'm close to finishing it.
It's about adventure in space.
So, this is our main school area.
The kids all have baskets.
Here's their reading a spelling programs
and then, they each have baskets so they can take out
the basket and they have all their stuff right there.
Right here I have a variety of school supplies
like White-Out and tape.
I love this.
This is a basket full of just drawings
and a variety of papers for me to clean up easily
and get it off the table so we can eat lunch and stuff.
I know this doesn't look gorgeous,
but this is the easiest way of doing it for us.
We just dump all the pens and pencils and everything
into one container and we can pull it all out easily.
And then, here's another smaller basket of scissors
and tape and things like that.
And then, these are books that they're not necessarily
using right now, but I might pull out at some point
in the day or add to their basket later in the year.
Those are the basic elements to our homeschooling day,
then the kids just pick up the work
and I help as they need it.
It was more the first week because I was establishing
how a lot of things are done,
but now that Parker knows how to do his drawing curriculum,
for instance, he can just pick it up and, look,
he's on the ground right now doing it.
So, he's on the ground doing his work,
Jacob is all set up to work with me right here,
and Bailey can just sit here doing her math on her own
'cuz she's able to do most of that by herself.
Jacob's asking to do two lessons today.
We'll see if we get there.
And, I should not that Duncan is taking his nap right now.
He usually takes a 9:30 nap.
Most babies do that for, like, the first year
once you've figured out their nap time.
They usually take a morning nap
and that's a really good chunk of our day to get
this sort of stuff done.
Once we finish all of these core school requirements,
we go on and do lots of other things,
playing outside, going on adventures.
This homeschool routine that you're seeing today
is when we're at home.
We have a lot of outside activity days
and adventure days and lesson days.
So, I think there's a misconception about homeschooling
that it has to just be people at home all the time
doing their schoolwork,
but a lot of what we do is actually outside of the house.
We enroll our kids in various extracurricular programs.
We travel a lot and that's just our family.
A lot of homeschoolers do a good amount of school
outside of the home.
(upbeat jazz music)
This is so yummy.
This is the first yummy thing
that I've ever had in my whole life
that you've ever gave me.
That's so good.
Thank you.
The kids just ate their lunch
and now they're having their outside playtime.
I'm taking this time to feed the baby.
Jacob is completely done with his schoolwork.
He wants to do a second reading lesson,
so I think we're going to do that.
Bailey is, like, halfway.
She has a lot of work and she actually adds work
onto her work.
Bailey usually gets about a half hour to an hour in the day
to write on the computer,
but it sort of depends on how much she can complete first.
So, she has that other schoolwork that she has to do
and that's almost done,
but I know that she'll want to spend a while writing.
So, I'd say she's, like, halfway done with her school day.
So, I'm getting Duncan all settled.
He had some playtime while the kids were eating lunch
and then, he'll probably be sleepy again
within the next hour.
So, the kids finished all of their schoolwork
and now, they're having some downtime
and watching a movie and Duncan fell asleep
in his little chair.
Cutie.
Cuties.
What book are you guys reading?
JoJo's!
- [Jessica] Yeah?
You wanna keep reading that for a little bit
or do you want to watch the Jungle Book?
Movie time.
All right.
Now, they're gonna watch a movie,
I'm gonna get dinner ready,
and we'll do bath time, bedtime,
and that's our day.
Pretty good view.
(upbeat jazz music)
So, we have drum lessons tomorrow.
Jacob's actually drawing a really cool
drum set right now.
Look at this.
Whoa!
Great job, buddy.
Thanks.
So, today was a small glimpse at kinda of a calm home day.
Tomorrow we have drum lessons
and then, we have voice lessons later in the week,
and some days of the week we go and we play baseball
with a bunch of friends and we have another day
where we go in and do a simulated in-class
with a bunch of kids too.
So, we do experience--
Look at this guy.
Are you eating my hair, buddy?
So, there are a lot of misconceptions about homeschooling.
I think people think that we don't have social lives
and we don't see kids,
but we actually see them pretty often
and we have similar classroom settings for some things
and we also have tutors.
I'm not the only person who teaches everything,
though I am very involved with the kids
and they're involved with each other.
They hang out with each other a lot
and spend a lot of time with each other
and they get to learn about what--
They get to learn about babies and how they eat your hair.
Aw, buddy.
We basically just have a lot of fun together
as a family and we get to spend more time with each other
and we really, really love it.
It's worked well for us.
I hope you liked learning a little bit more
about our family and how we do our schooling.
Please, remember to subscribe and hit the little bell
for notifications and we hope to see more of you.
(laughing)
Donkey.