A Day in the Life of a Home Schooler

We stared home school again this week. My younger son Ty still attends public school, but is home with us this week due to the chickenpox. It's been kind of challenging staring Korbin's first week of home school with his brother here. I asked Ty's teacher to send home missed work so that it would give him something to do for school time as well, it worked out real nicely today. I often wondered if I could school the both of them at the same time, which is why we currently only home school one, but today I was able to divide my time between them and get a good amount accomplished.


With home schooling, especially with multiple children, you have to be a good multi tasker. For anyone who has ever been interested in the possibility of home schooling their child, this might help a little to see how a day in the life of a home schooler goes.

This morning I started Korbin off with his Scantron test ( a test taken online at the beginning and the end of the school year to measure you child's progress and determine their strengths and weaknesses in math and reading.) While Korbin worked on that, I took Ty in the kitchen and tried something new I just learned. We held math class at the kitchen table and used the sliding glass door there as a black board. Using dry erase markers we learned about number families and did a work sheet. After that it was time for a "get to know your teacher" conference online for Korbin to attend. I logged him into a program called Elluminate were his new teacher and about 30 other of her students could all listen as she introduced her self, played games, and told her a little about them selves. Now normally when they log in with a teacher the are in much smaller groups of about 4 kids or less, but today was a big get to know you meeting. So while Korbin was busy with that, Tyler and I did his study words in alphabetical and backwards order on the back door with markers.

After a 15min break, they both attended science class and learned about ecosystems, biomes and climate as I read the lesson from the computer screen, then they watch for about 20 min a series of of kid friendly videos on the subject right from the computer. After their big break for the day, 1 hour, we continued with History and learned the names of the wolds 7 continents and 4 oceans. We also learned about maps, their keys and how to read them. They each had a laminated state and world map that they each doodled on during the lesson. I would ask them to circle Europe or number 1-7 the continents and label a-d the oceans. For fun they started dividing up the world into their conquered territories and drawing their base camps and cities on the parts of the world that they owned. We have this great world map, that I bought from a local fabric outlet for $2, we use it every day. It's made of fabric and is just as accurate as those large expensive school maps you can buy from an educational store. We keep it pinned up on the wall in front of our work table and is great because at any time I can have them find the countries, continents, hemispheres, biomes, etc.

In between all this, mind you I still had to feed the bird every half hour, let our 3 dogs out to go, and keep tabs on our business. On busy school days like this, my sister Stacey mostly runs things downstairs in our shop. She'll let me know if we got any convos, or messages, that require both of us to discuss something and make a decision. For example we are hoping to start advertising our business on several other blogs through the holiday season and so we need to come up with a button design to be posted on their site. Stacey will work up a few button designs, then run them buy me on a break, I'll ask her to tweak them a little and then she'll get back to me, she's so great. If there's an email that needs to go out, but she wants to run by me first, she can send it to me, I'll read it while the kids are working, edit it, then email it out to whomever it was meant for.

I think we have a pretty good system, and we work very well together. I'm looking forward to this year, growing our business and making progress every day with home school until I get it down to a science.
There's always allot going on here in a full house, but some how it always seems to come together.

Thanks for reading,

Nicole