[Updated July 2024]

What does a typical homeschooling day look like? This is such a common question, but it’s hard to answer because each family is different, and even within the same family each year is unlike the ones before. Children grow and their needs and interests change. I change too. I am totally different now, than when I started homeschooling over 16 years ago! It has taken much trial and error to find a good groove. There is an ebb and flow and just when I think I have figured it out, things change and I need to adapt and roll with it. Our homeschool day is a constant work in progress!

We currently have three children at home who are homeschooling; ages 17, 12, and 9 (four of our children have already finished high school and are on to other things). We have a regular school routine Monday-Thursday, and then Fridays are for either co-op, or field trips, or nature study and journaling, or poetry teatime and art.  I am going to describe below our regular Monday-Thursdays. 

Little Ones First

In the morning after breakfast, the middle and high school kids get to work on their individual reading, online math, notebooking, etc.  Meanwhile, I like to spend about 30 min first thing in the day with youngest children.  We do things like read picture books, or color, or go outside and hunt for insects, or sometimes we just play, etc. This really helps the day go more smoothly because the little kids feel loved and seen. This is especially true with toddlers! After that, I gather and prep anything I need for circle time or our family style lesson.

Circle Time

Morning time (we call it circle time) is the core, the absolute anchor, of our homeschool!! Through the last 16 years of homeschooling, I have learned that it is the BEST use of my time and energy. We have such sweet memories of reading stories together and reciting poetry, listening to music, and filling our minds and hearts with beautiful things. This one practice has made more of a difference in our lives than anything else I have done in homeschool, except teaching my children to read. (In the post on our favorite resources, I highly recommend Cindy Rollins’ book on Morning Time, and all her other resources for supporting moms. I have learned so much from her!)

All of my older kids who have already graduated remember it fondly, and even though some of them went through some less-than-enthusiastic time as teens, they see the value of it and have thanked me for being persistent and continuing with circle time through the years.

When I’m ready to call all the kids together, I give them a 10 minute or heads-up that we are going to do circle time. We gather in our library (living room), sitting together on the couches and soft chairs. This works so much better for us than sitting at the table, it’s cozier 🙂

As long as they are paying attention the kids are free to draw, color, crochet, or anything else they can quietly do while listening. Several of my children have ADHD so keeping their hands busy actually helps them listen. Currently, circle time lasts about an hour to an hour and a half, but when I first started and my kids were all nine and younger, it was only about 20 minutes long. Be aware of what your kids are able to do and then work up slowly from there. It’s meant to be a pleasant time (which means sometimes I waited until the toddler was asleep and we did circle time during nap time).

For the devotional part of our morning time, we sing a hymn, pray, recite the scripture we are learning together, and read a Bible story. Next we do our poetry time where each of us quietly works on memorizing the poem of our choice for about 5 minutes, while listening to classical music. Then we each take turns reciting what we have memorized, and reading the rest of the poem.

This has really been a lot of fun, especially to see the teens’ excitement to pick their own poems.  They like that much better than when I was picking the poem for all of us to learn and recite together when they were all young (check out the free printable of poetry for children). I have listed some of our favorite poems and poetry books in those posts. For fun, sometimes we listen to The Well-Read Poem, where Thomas Banks shares a poem, explains a bit about it or the poet. They are short and easy to add to morning time, and Mr Banks reads the poems so beautifully!

Next is our story time. We read fairy tales, folk tales, myths, fables, legends, or Shakespeare. (If you want to learn more about the importance of stories, listen to this Literary Life Podcast episode on fairy tales and this episode on myths, also this New Mason Jar podcast with Angelina Stanford, they are SO good! And I wrote about this in the post, Why Read Literature?) We don’t read all of those kinds of stories everyday, we rotate (loop) through them as time allows. Here are some of our favorite resources for story time:

• Fairy Tales: Grimms’ fairy tales (especially The Frog King, Bearskin, Briar Rose, Snow White and Rose Red, Cinderella, King Thrushbeard, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Rumplestiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and The Golden Bird), and stories from the free Forgotten Classics collection at Libraries of Hope

• Myths: D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths and also Norse Myths, The Heroes by Kingsley, Heroes of Asgard by Keary, Myths of the Norsemen by Green, Myths Atlas by Moraes, and stories from the free Forgotten Classics collection at Libraries of Hope

• Folktales: Chinese Fairy Tales and Legends by Wilhelm and Martens, Arabian Nights by Tenggren or One Thousand and One Arabian Nights by Macaughrean (make sure it’s a children’s version), Favorite Fairy Tales Told Around the World by Virginia Haviland, Star Stories by Ganeri and Wilx, and stories around the world from the free Forgotten Classics collection at Libraries of Hope

• Fables: Aesop’s Fables illustrated by Milo Winter (note that the morals are not original and were added centuries later, so we skip them)

• Legends: King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Green, Stories from the Faerie Queene by Macleod, The Adventures of Robin Hood by Green, The Wanderings of Odysseus by Sutcliff, and stories from the free Forgotten Classics collection at Libraries of Hope such as Charlemagne, El Cid, The Song of Roland, etc

• Shakespeare: Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Beautiful Stories From Shakespeare by Nesbit, Stories from Shakespeare by Chute, or Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories, also picture books like The Tempest by Mayer. Just within the last couple years we have been reading through the original Shakespeare plays together, and that has been a lot of fun! We started with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then continued with Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and The Tempest. The Literary Life Podcast episodes on A Midsummer Night’s Dream gave me the courage to attempt Shakespeare with my children and I am so grateful. It was my 8 year old’s favorite thing to read through these together and that is astounding to me!

Stories, poetry, and devotional (along with read-aloud, as mentioned below) are the things we do every day. When I first started morning time it was very simple, short and sweet, and we have added things slowly through the years. Please don’t think you have to do it ALL right now! If you are just starting out, do the daily things till you get in a good grove and then add in other things to loop through. Some days, the daily things are all we get to, and that’s okay. Consistency over the years adds up to a reservoir of beautiful things in their minds and hearts.

After the daily things, we loop through the other things that I want to share with my children.  That means I don’t do all of these every day, we do a couple things that will fit in about 20 min of time.  Then tomorrow we just do the next thing and keep looping back around. We may need to do a brain break here, where we take a few minutes to do some jumping jacks, cross crawls, squats, or even have the kids run around the yard three times, get a drink, and regroup. I definitely have to read the room and do what’s necessary to keep a good flow going.

• Composer Study: read stories from Spiritual Lives of Great Composers, or stories of Great Lives of Musicians from Libraries of Hope at Well-Educated Heart, and listen to classical music. Ambleside Online has a great rotation set up for composers and some of their best pieces of music.

• Artist Study: Enrichment Studies or Simply Charlotte Mason artist study, or stories of Great Lives of Artists from Libraries of Hope at Well-Educated Heart, and look at beautiful art (we cast it up to our TV to get it into a large format for all to see). Ambleside Online has a great rotation set up for artists and some of their best pieces of art, with explanations of how to do picture study, and has links to A Humble Place which has gathered PDFs of all the art.

• Geography: focus on countries around the world; the people, culture, food, language, climate and landforms, stories from Libraries of Hope at Well-Educated Heart, etc.

• Word Fun: either simple grammar study such as Michael Clay Thompson’s books, word origins, Mad Libs app, or idioms.

• Math Fun: a Family Math activity, a game from Denise Gaskin’s Let’s Play Math, a Bedtime Math problem, solve a 24 game card, or read part of The Thinking Toolbox.

Then we end circle time with a fun read-aloud. Some of our favorites are: The Chronicles of Narnia by Lewis (please start with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe!!), The Secret Garden by Burnett, The Hobbit by Tolkien, Wee Free Men by Pratchett (the audiobook is fantastic because of the Scottish accents), Howl’s Moving Castle by Jones, The Graveyard Book by Gaiman, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by Rowling, The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place by Wood, Over Sea Under Stone by Cooper, Carry On Mr. Bowditch by Latham, King Arthur and His Knights by Green, and The Adventures of Robin Hood by Green.

Circle time is, hands-down, the best thing we have done and I cannot imagine homeschool without it! I LOVE this time together every school day to sing, pray, learn poetry and scripture, read stories, and fill our hearts with good and beautiful things.

Family Style Lesson

After circle time, we do our “family style” lesson for the day.  If the high school kids have their own online (or part-time at the local school) classes for science and history, they don’t participate in this lesson. We alternate history/geography and science, or sometimes if we are in the middle of something exciting, we do history for the entire week and then do science for the next week (here are our recommendations for history/geography and science, such as My World Story Book or Mystery Science). The younger ones are often coloring our WEH coloring pages while we learn together.

Remember you don’t have to do everything every day, you can loop your subjects or do a block schedule. The older middle school kids will build on this lesson by: reading and studying books they choose, watching videos or documentaries, writing down what they want to remember, and sharing with me what they have learned. The younger kids have a learning journal too. If they so desire, they can draw a picture and dictate to me what they want to say about it. If they are able, they write/draw on their own.

I used to plan out every topic in a year-long schedule, because I was terrified of gaps in their learning and felt the pressure to cover everything! Since then, I have figured out that I don’t have to fear gaps, everyone has them. When we model life-long learning, they will be able to fill their own gaps.

I no longer dictate to them what they are learning for science, history, or geography each month. I ask them if there is something they are excited to learn (I have multiple children, so we have to take turns choosing or we vote on it) and gather resources for that topic, so we can dive into it together. If the kids don’t know what they want to learn, we look at ideas from the rotation schedule from Well-Educated Heart and choose something. I keep a record of what we study, some people call this planning from behind. Even the young kids can help choose topics. They are so much more engaged when they are involved in making these choices.

Individual Schoolwork

After we are done with our morning time together, the children spread out and do their own schoolwork; at a computer, at the table, on a couch, on their bed, wherever they want. (this is why I don’t think a homeschool room is necessary).  I rotate around to spend about 20 min with each ability group (1-2 kids at a time) to work on things like phonics when I am teaching them to read, or listen to their narrations of what they are reading, read a book one-on-one with them, etc.

While I am meeting personally with different kids, the others are working on their online math, reading or listening to audio books, doing online courses, writing in their learning journal/notebooks, practicing piano, exercising, taking turns playing with the baby/toddler (homeschool is much simpler now that there are no toddlers and babies in the house, but we all miss having those little ones!!), or playing outside in the backyard, etc.

The kids (who are old enough to read) have a routine so they know what is expected while I am rotating around helping others. Obviously, the younger kids have a much lighter routine than the older kids, and will finish earlier. Each child/teen works with me to plan their routine, so they can choose as much of it as possible. If they are really into a topic, or have specific goals, we plan more time for those and less time for other things. They don’t have to cover every subject every day, and we lean toward planning 10-20 min (up to 30-45 min for high schoolers) for a subject, instead of a certain number of pages or chapters. We decide together on a loop schedule of subjects and they work through it, doing just the things they want to do that day (but they can’t start the loop over till they finish everything on it).

The upper middle school and high school kids are mostly self-sufficient. I check in with them throughout the day to see if they need me and they return and report at the end of the day to tell me what they accomplished.  A couple times a week I like to sit with each teen and we read-aloud a book together to have some fun one-on-one time.  The high school teens take a daily church seminary class, in the past they have taken part-time classes at the local charter school, and they have taken online high school or college classes. We are also active in homeschool co-ops. We use Trello to organize their schedule so they know what they are doing every day (such as math, foreign language, instrument practice) and what they can loop through (such as history and science, readings for online classes, etc).

One of the things I want to do, but haven’t implemented yet, is an afternoon table time where we have a snack and share some of the things we learned that day. Since I have such a wide spread in ages, and they are all finishing their schoolwork at different times, this hasn’t become a reality yet. But we are always seeking to improve and grow, so hopefully we can make this happen this year.

They are much more engaged in their learning when they help direct and plan their days to meet their own goals and study the topics they are interested in. If they don’t have anything in particular that they are excited to learn at the moment, we brainstorm ideas and look through websites like Ambleside Online or Well-Educated Heart to flesh out a plan. Recently I decided to jump in with Ambleside Online for the younger two kids (ages 12 and 9) so I will share how that goes once we have more experience with it.

When all the kids were all younger, I used the Well-Educated Heart rotation schedule, so each month we choose a country or two, and an American history topic. I pulled books from our main bookshelves and put them on ledge shelves (Mosslanda from IKEA), with the covers facing out and the kids chose which books they want to read (see photo below). When I was really on top of things, at the end of the month we could have a family book club night where we’d talk and share about the books we read, or a family showcase where they’d make something to represent what they learned and share that with the family. I wish I had been more consistent with this because it is delightful! It’s even more fun to do it with another family or two, or at homeschool co-op.

How Long Does This Take?

Homeschool does NOT need to take as long as public school, I promise.  The following estimates are totally ballpark figures because every day is a little different, and they are based on how we homeschool.  Other methods and curriculums, or online schools, will obviously look very different!

With young children, ages 5-8, you could easily be done in less than 1.5 hours.  Most of that will be with you, since they are learning to read and need more direction.  For upper elementary and early middle school, about 3 hours is typical, about 1.5-2 hours with you (one hour of that is morning time which all ages participate in).  As they get older they are much more self-sufficient and you take on more and more of a purely mentor role.

For upper middle school and high school, my teens spend about 4-5 hours, sometimes less, and about 1.5- 2 hours of that is with me (about one hour of that is morning time which all ages participate in).  They are mostly self-guided and are pursuing their chosen goals.

The above estimates are just talking about the concentrated time on typical subjects that most states require homeschoolers to teach.  If your state requires logging more hours than that, remember that much of life at home qualifies. Piano practice is music, cooking with a recipe is math, drawing and coloring is art, watching a nature documentary is science, a family dance party is physical education, reading a book is language arts or could “count” as any subject the book covers.  Remember life is full of learning.

Grace

Understand that this is the framework of our routine, but the reality does NOT always look like this.  And that’s totally okay! A routine, rhythm or schedule is not our master and it’s okay to go with the flow and ditch the plan sometimes. If the kids get sick, or everyone is grumpy and we need to spend most of the day outside in the backyard for sanity sake, or the baby is teething and I can hardly get anything done, it’s okay. We pick up where we left off. Consistency and diligence are the goal, not the perfect schedule. And “life is the messy bits” anyway.

Some seasons of life are especially hectic, like a new baby, moving to a new home, having grandparents move in with us, prolonged health issues, etc. We all have to give ourselves some grace and know that there are life lessons (even more important that school lessons) to be learned. In those times, we pare down to the basic schoolwork and circle time, and focus more on character, relationships, and nurturing our hearts. These times will pass and if we are diligent and keep working as hard as we can, our efforts will be enough.

It took me a long time to get here, I used to plan everything out to the minute, but I have mended my ways! There is more peace and joy available in our days when I let go of the illusion of control and stopped trying to force everything. I have found that learning happens organically when given the right environment. My children are happier when they feel free to discover and choose what they want to learn within a bit of a framework.

I continue to refine things as I learn and grow, and it’s exciting! Resources such as The Literary Life Podcast, The New Mason Jar podcast, Well-Educated Heart, and Ambleside Online have taught me SO much!! Though sometimes I wish I could go back to the beginning of our homeschool years with all the knowledge I now possess (so I could do things “right” from the beginning), I have been learning to be at peace because every step of the journey has taught me something and none of it is wasted. God knows that I was doing the best I knew how and He makes up for any lack. I give my loaves and fishes, whatever they are that day, and He makes the miracle.