Hello, it's Jenny Phillips! It is spring. It is my favorite time of year. I can hardly keep myself
from doing cartwheels everywhere I go because I love the season so much. And this year we had
like the eternal winter here in Utah! So spring is very welcome. Years ago, through this gate in my
backyard, every morning our little neighbors came bursting through with their backpacks,
flattening down a path in our grass. I have to admit, standing here, flooded with memories of
little feet and voices that passed back and forth through this area years ago as we homeschooled
with another family, I am so grateful for the homeschool memories I have. They are precious
to me. I am very passionate about homeschooling, you can probably tell, and one reason is because
I feel that there is an incredible joy in being a mother and a teacher, and in raising children
in light and truth, and sharing the journey of growth and discovery with your children.
I think a lot of women have lost that joy because they have lost their influence over their children
and feel that natural longing to find better connection with their children. This is one
reason that I love to share my knowledge and experience of how to make homeschooling work
for as many families as possible. There are so many options for homeschooling,
and in this video, I will be talking about the option of homeschooling with other families.
I have such wonderful memories of this time when my family homeschooled with one other
family and then another family joined us as well. Throughout the years as we have homeschooled,
we have done many more different things, all beautiful in their season. We've homeschooled
with just one family, we've homeschooled with other families, we've attended a homeschool co-op,
and now we run a homeschool academy where my children take classes twice a week.
And I'm going to share those experiences with you in other videos. Today I will be talking about
homeschooling with one other family or a couple families. And this is different than a co-op that
has multiple families. First, I want to talk about the blessings of homeschooling with others. This
worked really good for us some years, and some years it worked better for us to homeschool alone.
One thing that homeschooling with other families helped me with is keeping on a schedule. We
did more homeschooling and did it better when homeschooling with others than when we just did it
ourselves. But it also meant that our schedule was less free and open, which I didn't always love.
So there are definitely trade-offs. The second blessing I saw of homeschooling with others is
that it gave me a break at times when my kids were at the other families' homes, and I found
that I needed that at certain times in my life. The third blessing of homeschooling my children
with other families is that my kids really loved it. They enjoyed having other children to play
with and to learn with. When choosing a family to partner with to homeschool,
think carefully about your family's goals and reasons for homeschooling and ask yourself,
"Does that family align with your family's goals? Do your families teach and parent in a similar way
or in ways that work well together?" You could consider doing a trial week or two to see how
it goes. It's a lot easier to say it doesn't seem like a match after a short trial period than after
everything is planned out for the entire school year. If you live close to the other family,
you can do half the day at one house and half the day at the other house. This is usually what we
did with the family that lived right behind us. In this scenario, we would each do math on our
own in the morning. Then I would teach language arts and handwriting and also have lunchtime and
playtime in my house. And then the other family did science or history and electives at her house.
She did science on Mondays and Tuesdays and history on Wednesdays and Thursdays. On Fridays,
we each did our own thing, which was usually field trips or electives. I'll go over our homeschool
schedule each day. First, we did math with our own families. My family and the other family were then
at my house. We started with an opening devotional where we sang, prayed, and I read a picture book.
It really helped to set a peaceful, happy tone in the home. I then did language arts which
also included handwriting, typing, and personal reading. After I was done with language arts, the
kids had lunch and playtime. Then the kids went to the other house for history or science. Two days a
week was science and two days a week was history. Let me tell you how I did language arts at my
house. I actually taught five different levels of language arts in a little over an hour and a half.
I had a schedule, and each child had a copy of it. We did 20-minute rotations. We did 19 minutes of
work and then one minute to rotate to the next station. I set up stations at different places
like on the couch, at the table, at a desk, on the floor on blankets. At each rotation station,
the child was either doing personal reading, shared reading, handwriting, or their independent
sections of language arts, or doing language arts with me. When it was their rotation to do language
arts with me, I had one child on each side of me doing a different level of language arts
and I would help them back and forth. Younger children typically take more parent-teacher
time than older children, so I would try not to have two young children at a time.
When I was working with the children, they each had a personal reading book with them at the
table, and if they couldn't move forward without my help they would pick up this personal reading
book and start reading. And this helped them to not waste time, but it also gave me the cue that
they needed my help as soon as I could give it to them. I had a timer set for 19 minutes. When the
timer went off, they had 60 seconds to transfer to their next rotation. These rotations actually
worked really well. Each child had a bin that had everything they needed for each rotation,
and they took this bin around with them to the different rotations. The bin even included the
pencils they needed. This schedule worked well for us. The next year we had another family join us,
and we changed up our schedule. I have found that homeschool can really change from year to year.
Something to keep in mind is that you don't have to do everything with another family,
and you don't have to do it every day. You could do two days a week or simply meet up one half day
a week to do electives or a field trip. Because The Good and the Beautiful Math and Language Arts
is open-and-go, it's easy for another homeschool parent to pick up a language arts or math lesson
exactly where the child is and do it with them on any given day. If you don't currently know of a
homeschool family near you, consider praying for a family to homeschool with. Maybe even approach
a family you love and ask them if they would be interested in homeschooling. You would be
surprised by how many people are actually thinking about the blessings of homeschooling. One of the
things that I love about homeschool is that there are so many options, and many homeschoolers today
are fine to homeschool with just their family for their whole homeschool journey. Others find that
they thrive doing it with others. Many of you will change how you homeschool every year as you adapt
to your opportunities and your children's changing needs. I hope this was helpful! Through these
videos, I am hoping to share ideas and inspiration to help bring more joy and unity back to families,
to heal families, help mothers love being with their children and being around them, and finding
so much joy in this journey. Thank you for letting me talk about a beautiful time of my homeschooling
journey today. I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have a really wonderful day.