I am in my office today, and this is where so much of The Good and the Beautiful Language
Arts is actually created! And this desk is right now also where I do language arts with
my nine-year-old. We have a homeschool room and you've seen it in other videos,
but right now he needs a quiet room with no distractions when I do language arts with him.
So, I don't know about you guys, but this summer just flew by for my family, and we actually ended
up homeschooling this summer. We did take off some time here and there, but I'm gonna
be totally honest with you and tell you that we probably had one of the hardest homeschool years
ever this past year. And I'll talk about that in a little bit in this video, and I'll also talk about
what changes I'm going to make this year to help our homeschool go better. Right now, we are taking
a week break completely off from schooling, and then we are starting our new homeschool year. So,
I thought I would share my plans for this new year. And I'm really excited for a fresh start,
and I hope you are too. I have five children and two of them are no longer homeschooled because
they are adults. They are 23 and 21. So right now, I'm homeschooling a 16-year-old, a 13-year-old,
and a nine-year-old, and it is one of the greatest joys of my life. But in all honesty,
even though I have been homeschooling for quite a long time, it can still be really hard,
and I still have to figure things out and make adjustments to meet the needs of my children and
the changes in our lives. But that really is one of the greatest blessings of homeschool as well.
I'm so close to my children and their hearts, and I feel enabled to be able to influence their lives
and to help them gain the character, the faith, and the type of knowledge that I know will bring
them joy and fullness in their lives. Over the years we've done a lot of different things for
homeschooling. I released a video this summer on how we used to homeschool with another family.
We did that quite a bit, but at times we have also homeschooled with just our family and no
other groups. But we've spent the most time in our homeschooling journey doing what we did this past
year, and what we're doing this upcoming year. And that is combining homeschooling with just our
family on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and going to a homeschool group that we run on Mondays
and Wednesdays. So I'll dig into the specifics of our schedule for this coming year. Our homeschool
group has 35 families and I love it, but this last year I taught too much at the homeschool
group and ran too much of it myself. And also, at home, we didn't stick to a schedule and I didn't
intentionally plan my homeschool like I have in years past. And because of that, we didn't get
as much accomplished and we didn't plan outings or adventures like we had in other school years.
And I have found that, for me, I am so busy that I really need to have a homeschool schedule and
stick to it. It makes me feel better and it just didn't work very well to just fit in homeschool
here and there. In our really successful years, I would actually set alarms on my phone for my
homeschool, and no matter what, I would just jump up and put everything else aside and homeschool.
And my children could feel the difference knowing that I was devoted to them during that time.
So again during this coming school year, I'm excited because I have seen that consistency
can really make things go more smoothly and my children thrive on routine. My plan is to
follow this schedule. In our homeschool group, my kids do music appreciation, life skills, science,
history, and drama. They also have a study hall where they work on math and language arts. You
can see that we start with a morning meeting. This is something we didn't do this past year very much
and I wish we had. Morning meeting is where we all get together as a family and pray, sing, work on
Bible verse memorization or a specific quote, and then I read aloud to the kids and we discuss the
book we're reading. I'm so excited to jump into reading books with my kids again in the morning
to start off our school. My kids love to cuddle up on the sheepskin in front of our fireplace while I
read. Even though our homeschool was not the best this past year, I don't let guilt get me down. I
try to let it humble me and move me to ask God for forgiveness and help. And I let it motivate
me and actually excite me to do better. And there were some really good things that happened in our
home school this past year as well. We still had so much fun diving into good books correlated
with our curriculum, and we learned so much with The Good and the Beautiful curriculum. We also
continued many of the routines that have made our home school so special every year. Many nights my
husband reads to our two younger boys in the hallway between their rooms, and then he goes
downstairs and reads to our 16-year-old daughter. He has been doing this for years and years, and he
actually told me recently that this reading to my children at night has been one of the highlights
of his life. After my husband reads to our kids, the kids read good literature in bed for a long
time, even an hour or an hour and a half, and that is when they get in their personal reading time.
So bedtime is actually part of our homeschool. Also, homeschool has given us the blessings of
time for my kids to explore their interests. For example, my nine-year-old son is amazingly good at
painting and sculpting, and homeschool has allowed us the opportunity to have private lessons during
the day. We have this amazing professional artist in our area. And then my son is able to spend
all day sometimes on his art—hours at a time—which is definitely not something that he could do if he
was in school all day and had to come home and do homework into the evening hours. So, great
things really did happen this past year, but it was far from perfect. Many days homeschool didn't
even happen when it should have, and thus we've been homeschooling all summer to make up for it.
I think that most homeschoolers find that they are continually needing to adjust,
refine, and improve how they're doing homeschool. And just when I have things going really well,
things change, and I have to get creative again and pray for inspiration. In the description,
I'm going to link a video on how to organize a homeschool day if you're looking for ideas on
sample schedules. I just want to leave you with some encouragement. I had some specific struggles
with one of my children while homeschooling this past year, and I would pray and get inspiration,
and things would go better for a bit, but then I would have to figure out a different approach.
And it was quite exhausting and overwhelming sometimes. But I persisted, and I turned to
God for help, and I gained so much creativity and received these little bits of inspiration
on how to work through these problems. And I have these moments when I suddenly realize that it is
all worth it. Moments when I see my children progressing and I feel myself progressing. I
realize that I am being refined, my patience is being deepened, and, through God's help,
I am connecting with my children and building beautiful relationships with them. It doesn't
happen in a day, or a month, or a year, and the progress is slow and often feels pretty messy. And
I don't always see this progress until I step back and realize that all the efforts are bearing fruit
and will bear fruit throughout my children's lives. As hard as some days are, especially
when homeschooling children that have challenging needs, I don't want to hand off that challenge to
someone else. No one loves my children like I do. No one is as committed to my children and their
growth. And even though it brings me to my knees, I am so grateful for the opportunity to work with
these precious souls every day and to figure out how to best help and build our relationships.
The work we do in our families is precious, irreplaceable, and simply beautiful.