You’ve probably heard rumblings about homeschooling for a while. Your best friend’s sister homeschools her children; your husband’s work colleague homeschools his children. The idea sounds intriguing but you are asking yourself...How does homeschooling work?
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Having a daily quiet time has become an essential part of our busy homeschool day. I love being with my kids, which is one of the reasons we started homeschooling, but we have all benefited from a daily quiet time in our house.
We first started a daily quiet time years ago when my oldest transitioned out of naps. Even though he didn’t need a nap, I found that he still needed to rest in order to make it happily to the end of our day. I found that I needed some peace and quiet in my day, too. So when his younger brother went down for a nap, I would start quiet time with my oldest by reading a few stories and then allowing him to play by himself while I recharged.
Quiet time is a daily scheduled length of time where everybody in the house takes a break and does their own thing quietly.
This pause in the day is a chance to hit the refresh button.
Whether you have young children or high schoolers, it is the perfect time of day for everyone in the house to take a break from stimuli and rest.
If you’ve never had quiet time in your house, you may wonder how to get started. Here are a few things to consider when adding quiet time to your daily homeschool routine.
Quiet time is important for everyone. For parents, it is a time for slowing down and quieting your mind. It creates a space for nurturing your soul.
Your presence is a source of stability for your children, and your heart and open arms are their haven, so take the time to pause in your day to nourish and rejuvenate yourself.
When you take the time to rest, you will be recharged and ready to pour into your children again.
For children, creating time for quietness gives them a mental break from their schoolwork, and helps establish a habit of rest and creativity. It gives them space and time to explore and discover their own passions and interests.
Margaret Wise Brown of Goodnight Moon said it well,
“In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child’s need for quietness is the same today as it has always been—it may even be greater—for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.”
If you need time to rest, create space in your schedule for it. Quiet time is not misspent time. The magic of homeschooling does not lie in the hustle and bustle of constant activity, but in our intentional decisions made throughout the day.
One of the beautiful aspects of homeschooling is how you can tailor the education to your child’s needs (and yours as the teacher). If a child struggles with reading, you can do more read-alouds. If a child hates math, you can find math games to play! Likewise, if you the teacher don’t excel at history, math, or grammar, just find the right curriculum that lays it all out for you so you don’t have to wonder if you are covering everything.
But what happens when you’ve done all the research and found what should be the exact right fit for you and your child … and it just isn’t clicking?
Though my own kids are still in early elementary, I’ve been immersed in the homeschool world my whole life. I thought I knew what curricula I liked and didn’t. My husband was also homeschooled, so we joke that we wouldn’t have known how to send our kids to school. Between the two of us, our curriculum choices were laid out before our oldest turned five.
And then our oldest decided to have opinions of his own. Of course he has no idea the wealth of curriculum options that exist, but he absolutely knew what he didn’t like. The baffling part was that the curriculum he disliked were for areas he excelled in: language arts and math.
I’ve spent two years now on this question:
How do I know if this aversion to particular subjects is just a defiance issue (totally possible with my kids), or an indication that we have it wrong in our much-loved curriculum choice?
Obviously, this is a personal decision; you know your child best. But here are some things that I looked for that helped me say goodbye to my original homeschool curriculum choice and begin researching a better fit for my kids:
Is it an issue of learning style, presentation, expectations, or concepts? We were able to narrow down the real issue to the worksheets. He hates worksheets. This revelation fit perfectly with what we already knew about his learning style, learning struggles, and personality.
Can you modify the curriculum rather than go for a whole overhaul? When it came to our math curriculum, I thought yes. My child would answer orally and I’d mark the sheet. We’d play more math games, do more hands-on activities, etc. But at a certain point, I realized I was doing too much extra planning to call this curriculum a good fit.
Not all children learn alike or have the same struggles. My second-born loves worksheets! He’s flown through more workbooks before kindergarten than my oldest has yet to finish. He also has an aptitude for math and language arts, like his brother. When he started showing an aversion to the curriculum in question (independent from his brother), I realized this wasn’t only a personality or learning preference issue, and a switch might be in everyone’s best interest.
This point, of course, is what it all comes down to. Near the end of the year I realized that, despite all my compensations and his natural aptitude for the material, my child was making up tricks to remember his subtraction facts. He would mix up when to add and which numbers to subtract and had no idea why he was wrong. I saw that he wasn’t fundamentally understanding the material, which meant something needed to change.
When it came to the language arts curriculum, I realized the real problem was it didn’t click with me. Not that I couldn’t understand the concepts (this was first grade), but the teaching style was just not me. On the face of it, it seemed a good fit, but I had started to dread picking up the teacher’s manual. I was finding excuses to skip it or abbreviate it. So when my children would groan and bury their heads in the sofa when the book came out, the motivation to continue was dim.
For a little while, I pushed this subject onto my husband to cover during his lunch breaks since he was working from home. This had been one of his curriculum favorites, after all. But that only heightened the kids’ resentment of the subject as it replaced wrestling and read-alouds with phonic rules.
Finally I gave myself permission to research a better curriculum fit for all of us. It helped that I saw a friend rave about her language arts curriculum choice on social media, so I had a ready option to investigate. We switched half-way through the year, and the difference has been amazing. No more groans, eye-rolls, or attempts to distract from the material… and the kids’ phonetic awareness has taken off too!
It can be discouraging to invest time, money, and effort into a curriculum only to have it fall flat. Sometimes pushing through a rough patch can yield great results. But sometimes it’s okay to let go of your curriculum choice and find the right fit for both you and your learner. When you see your child grow to love a subject he previously didn’t, or see his natural abilities be supported and take off, the investment seems small in comparison.
One of the fantastic benefits of homeschooling with Sonlight is having year-long access to a team of Sonlight Advisors. These experienced homeschool moms have walked the road before you and can offer support, encouragement, and wisdom.
If you’re new to Sonlight, the Advisors can help with:
When I decided to homeschool a few years ago, I really struggled to wrap my mind around how to teach my third and fifth grader together. In my mind they needed completely separate curriculums just like their private school experience for the past few years. I called a Sonlight Advisor, and she explained in detail how exactly I could combine both girls in one HBL. She was patient, thorough, and understanding, and I gained so much more confidence after our conversation.
Maybe you’re in the middle of your school year, and a homeschooling question comes up. Sonlight Advisors can also offer advice on:
Whether you want to walk through your child’s long-term educational goals or just need a like-minded friend to pray with, the Sonlight Advisors are an invaluable resource.
There are several Facebook groups geared directly toward moms homeschooling with Sonlight that can be great for general discussion and fellowship. However, when it comes to choosing curriculum or other specific Sonlight-related questions, these Facebook groups aren’t the best place to find answers.
For example, maybe instead of asking a Sonlight Advisor, I asked a Sonlight Facebook group which HBL I should choose when I decided to homeschool my third and fifth grader. Chances are that I would have received lots of different responses that may have confused me even more! While it can be helpful to hear what others are doing, their suggestions won’t always translate well to your own context.
However, when you talk with a Sonlight Advisor, she can help you narrow your options based on your own family, the learning styles of your kids, and your overall lifestyle. She will take the time to get to know you, and that will make all the difference in choosing the right curriculum for your family.
The reality is that strangers in Facebook groups may enjoy having a platform to share their own experiences more than really having the answers you’re looking for. They also aren’t always up to date on all of the latest changes at Sonlight, and most are still learning themselves since they’re in the middle of their homeschool journeys.
On the other hand, Sonlight Advisors have the advantage of being veteran homeschool moms who are trained to be thoroughly versed in the ever-evolving curriculum. They are also unbiased, and their primary goal is to simply help you come to a resolution.
Homeschooling can be lonely at times, and it’s easy to stress over curriculum choices. I have personally spent way too much time reading message boards and social media posts trying to find answers to my questions. This is the exact reason that the Sonlight Advisors exist. In just minutes, they will answer your questions, help you feel connected with a larger Sonlight community, and encourage you as you forge ahead.
Best of all, it’s easy and convenient to get in touch with the Sonlight Advisors. You can choose your preferred avenue:
Don’t homeschool alone. Contact the Advisors today, and let them cheer you on as you forge ahead on your homeschool journey.
One of the things that we love about our catalog is that we get to feature real photos—and stories—of our customers. Thank you to all of the families who shared #sonlightstories for the 2021 photo contest! And congratulations to the three winners featured below!
This is our first year of homeschooling and my children have really fallen in love with reading because of the wonderful literature we have received through Sonlight. When the weather is nice, we tie our hammocks to the trees in our backyard and do our reading time outside. We all love it!
We have grown so much as a family through our time in God's word using Sonlight and all of the amazing literature we have been exposed to. Our favorite time of the day is when we all sit together for History / Bible / Literature and learn about the past together through a Christian worldview. My boys have been inspired by the stories of the missionaries we have read about and we have prayed daily for countries we learned about in Window on the World. My boys have also devoured all of the great Readers this year and asked for more. They have truly developed a love of reading on their own that they did not have before homeschooling with Sonlight. We are so lucky to have picked this homeschool curriculum!
The C Family, Sonlighters from Orland Park, IL
Zeke is the fourth, and last, of my kids to be homeschooled so it's nice he can go and work quietly on something while I'm helping one of his siblings! I actually did a mix of History / Bible / Literature A and History / Bible / Literature B with him this year because he's really excelled at reading! I love that about homeschooling... that I can have the freedom and capability to school my kids at their individual level!
The H Family, Sonlighters from Las Vegas, NV
With all the COVID-19 restrictions, we decided to homeschool for the first time this year. Many homeschooling friends strongly recommended Sonlight and they were so right!
There are many things to love about this homeschool curriculum. First and foremost, Sonlight centers on the Bible as the source of all truth and approaches teaching with this worldview.
The detailed organization of weekly lesson plans and notes for each book in the Instructor's Guide was so helpful and a time saver. The quality and content of the books are phenomenal! We loved the Read-Alouds as much as our children did. Lastly, the ability to incorporate many age levels into the same subject matter made it a perfect choice for our family.
We were apprehensive starting out this year, having never homeschooled before, but Sonlight curriculum was a fantastic choice and we give it five out of five stars!
The D Family, Sonlighters from Roseau, MN
Thanks again for making this year's photo contest a success. Keep sharing your #sonlightstories year-round! We love your Box Day photos, your day-to-day experiences, and the end-of-the-year #sonlightstack shots of all you've accomplished.
Use the #sonlightstories hashtag when you share on social media.
You can also log into your account on sonlight.com anytime to upload both images and testimonials. You never know when something you submitted may appear in a catalog, on our homepage, or on the Sonlight blog
When this family started homeschooling overseas, they never imagined how switching to a literature-based curriculum would not only solve their worksheet burnout but also build a portable library, strengthen family bonds, and help their Third Culture Kids develop a biblical worldview and heart for the world.
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My youngest child was born right after I turned 41. I was ecstatic but a little scared—“I’m going to get old when he’s growing up,” I fretted. But with three other kids (12, 10, 5 then) to homeschool, I was busy and couldn’t stop to ponder. Baby just got dragged along to all the kids’ activities. “I’ll deal with that old age thing when I get there,” I thought.
Well, I’m there, and apparently it is time to think about it.
My oldest son has his college degree, is married, and lives nearby. Child #2 graduated from college last year. Child #3 is headed off to college in another state in August. That leaves me looking at the caboose, who turned 13 this week. Back when he was about five years old, he suddenly seemed to realize that I was older than other moms with kids his age. He asked me, quite reasonably, “Mom, when I grow up, will you be dead?” I assured him that I wasn’t that old, and that I would most likely still be alive.
Fall of 2021 will be the first time since 1998 that my husband and I will have just one child living at home. Much to my son’s relief, I am still alive at 54, and this will be the first time since 2001 that I will be homeschooling just one child. This should be a piece of cake, right?
But this menopausal mom is no longer sure. So much has changed in the past 20 years. I work part-time. Covid-19 has changed the landscape for all of us in the past year. The internet has changed, the Sonlight History / Bible / Literature selections have changed. I am weary.
So here are five things I am pondering for the duration of this homeschool journey.
Because of the cost of homeschooling curriculum, we bought and used one HBL at each level and used it again with every child, sometimes bringing in additional books Sonlight added. We did the same with Saxon math. But now with just one child left, I plan to peruse Sonlight’s newer offerings and see about swapping to some new things. The new-to-me History of Science J History / Bible / Literature might be a good fit, for example.
Now that we have done three different routes to post-homeschooling success for the older kids, we can see which of those options, or something else, best fits the youngest.
I will staunchly hold on to our HBL routine as this has been the central piece of our homeschooling, with science, language arts, math, and everything else orbiting around. But we have time to read even more now!
Math is not my forte, so this is an area where I feel I dropped the ball with my older kids because I just didn’t do the one-on-one with them required including algebra and higher. Because of this, they all struggled at some time or another feeling inadequate mathematically. The three older kids have all passed the required math to get their college degrees, so God is good, but I am doing better with the youngest by doing more daily checking and working out issues together.
Although we have done lots of great field trips and travel over the years, we will be able to do much more with just one child in tow. I just couldn’t always afford entry for four kids and an adult or two to some activity, so we had to ration our experiences.
Child #4 will get to a lot of these undone things—more museums, concerts, travel, and experiences. He and I are forming a bucket list of everything from National Parks, more science experiments, experiences (like rock climbing lessons), and more Sonlight books that have been added in recent years.
A lot of my past homeschool years are a wonderful blur of Sonlight, AWANA, church, music lessons, youth groups, 4-H, group classes, science fairs, and such for all the kids, but much of that time felt chaotic. I remember once during my morning read-aloud to the kids and I suddenly realized I had “lost” the baby, who had just learned to crawl. I panicked and almost shouted at the kids, “Where is the baby?” They wryly responded, “Mom, you’re nursing him.” Lo and behold, baby was on my lap nursing while I was reading aloud. I was an exhausted mom.
We are much less busy now, I haven’t lost a child in a long time, and Child #4 has a much less stressed-out-about-the-kids teacher. There were so many times I worried over whether my children would
Yet it all turned out well.
These days #4 is the only child who needs much of my time, so we talk a lot about what we read, hear, see, do, and think about. We aren’t in a hurry much, and we like to go for walks or visit our local botanical gardens and nurseries. He tags along on errands and we listen to music and talk about Star Wars, or literary tropes like the tragic hero, or the number of Teslas he counts as we drive. We were working on our summer read-aloud wish list tonight, including some James Herriot and The Perilous Gard by the author of our beloved The Sherwood Ring.
A year ago, I was unsure of what was ahead. I wasn’t sure I could continue homeschooling, not feeling up to the task. I have asked God for guidance. While no flashing lights have appeared or any voice from heaven has boomed out, I feel firmly that it is what we are going to do. I trust God will provide the ability, the strength, and the direction.
Twenty years down. Just six to go. At this point in my life, I realize that we don’t have to homeschool. We get to homeschool.
