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 a totally different person than when I started homeschooling over 12 years ago! It has taken us lots of 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!

I have learned so much through the years, implementing ideas as I find them, and the biggest difference in how we do things has been The Well-Educated Heart. One of my goals in sharing our day with you, is to show some of the ways we implement WEH in our family.

We currently have four children at home who are homeschooling; ages 15, 13, 8, and 5 (three of our children have already graduated high school). 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 the little kids.  We do things like read picture books, or make art while listening to classical music, or go outside and hunt for insects, or have a mini-dance party, or sometimes we just play, etc. This really helps the day go more smoothly because the little kids feel loved and seen. After that, I gather and prep anything I need for circle time or our family style lesson.

Circle Time

Then I call all the kids together into our library (living room) for morning time (we call it circle time). This lasts about an hour to an hour and a half. We sit together on the couches and soft chairs in the front room, 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 color, build legos, crochet, or anything else they can quietly do while listening and participating.

For the devotional part of our morning time, we sing a hymn, pray, recite the scripture we are learning together, and do other memory work.

Then we do our poetry time where each of us quietly works on memorizing the poem of our choice for about 5 minutes and then we each take turns reciting it to each other. 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 (check out the free printable of poetry for children).

Next is our story time. We read scripture stories, fairy tales, myths, fables, or Shakespeare. (If you want to learn more about the importance of stories, listen to this Literary Life Podcast by Angelina Stanford, it’s SO good!) We don’t read all of those kinds of stories everyday, we rotate through them as time allows. Stories, poetry, and devotional are the things we do every day.

After that, 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.  (click here for our recommendations of resources we enjoy for circle time)

• Composer Study: read stories from Spiritual Lives of Great Composers, stories of Great Lives from Libraries of Hope at Well-Educated Heart, listen to classical music

• Artist Study: Enrichment Studies artist study, stories of Great Lives from Libraries of Hope at Well-Educated Heart, or look at beautiful art (we cast it up to our TV to get it into a large format for all to see)

• 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. (I’m doing a specific post about geography soon) 

• Mindset: Big Life Journal, Character Education Heroes, or stories of Great Lives and Values from Libraries of Hope at Well-Educated Heart

• Word Fun: either vocabulary, word origins, Mad Libs app, or idioms

• Math Fun: Bedtime Math problem, solve a 24 game card, a Family Math activity, or read part of The Thinking Toolbox.

Circle time is the best thing we have done, 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 and Read-Aloud

Then we do our “family style” lesson for the day.  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 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 we teach our children to learn, and 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.

We finish out our morning time together with our family read-aloud (most days).  Sometimes we don’t get to this if science goes long, or if I start monologuing about history (I LOVE history!) so my back up plan is to read to the kids at night before bed.  Or my husband reads to them, his favorite is Winnie the Pooh 🙂  Read-Aloud Revival, Well-Educated Heart and Ambleside Online are my favorite places to find good book ideas. Read-aloud makes such a difference! Enjoying well-written stories together really helps us connect as a family and brings joy to our days.

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 20-30 min with each ability group (1-2 kids at a time) to work on things like phonics, listen to their narrations of what they are reading, read a book 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, playing near me on the floor, or playing outside, 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 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). Choice is so important to our success, 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.

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, they have taken online college or high school classes. We are also active in homeschool co-ops.

From the Well-Educated Heart rotation schedule, each month we choose a country or two, and an American history topic. I pull books from our main bookshelves and put them on ledge shelves (Mosslanda from IKEA), with the covers facing out and the kids choose which books they want to read, and I choose a family read aloud (see photo at the top of this article). Then at the end of the month we can have either a family book club night where we talk and share about the books we read, or a family showcase where they make something to represent what they learned and share that with the family.

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.

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 someone gave us free tickets to the zoo, or 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 we get into a big discussion, 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 reading aloud, 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. The goal is life-long learners, capable and compassionate, able to make a difference in the world. We focus on that goal and keep moving forward.

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. The Well-Educated Heart provides this and I am so grateful for the difference it has made in our homeschool and our family life!