Are you ready to begin living a homeschool lifestyle? Some people start homeschooling by doing school at home, but find it doesn’t work. Home is a bad place for school, but a great place for learning.
Learning at home happens in the whole lifestyle, and not only during school hours.
Find out how to set up your home, your day, your schedule, and your whole life to begin the journey of learning. Yes, it’s not only the kids who are learning, but mom, too.
Homeschool Lifestyle: The Big Picture
Homeschooling is more than a project, it is a lifestyle. Before you undertake it, you should not only count the cost, but also know where you’re headed.
These articles will help you think through why you’re making the choices you are so you can be confident as you live them out in your own unique homeschool lifestyle.
Homeschool Life: Mom Is the Atmosphere
One of the most important pieces of the home environment is mom herself. Our mood, our words, our actions make or break our homes and our homeschools.
Let’s take ownership of that responsibility and remember to use it as a spring board for our own sanctification as we repent, rejoice, repeat.
- What every homeschool mom needs to know
- Being a better homeschool teacher
- The scary homeschool mom
- The humility to homeschool
- The surprising truth about successful homeschooling
- What’s your homeschool personality?
- The secret to sanity at home: a sense of humor
- Homeschool Mom: you’re not a teacher
- How to focus on truth in a homeschool day
- Homeschooling for sanctification
- Our job is to feed people
- My secret weapon for beating my own homeschool bad attitude
- The Importance of a Sense of Humor
Making a Homeschool Lifestyle Work
Living a homeschool lifestyle is different from doing school at home.
- The secret of year-round homeschooling
- Year-round homeschooling FAQ: Break Weeks
- The how and why of our classical morning time
- On driving your curriculum
- How to start morning time (circle time)
- Teaching a child to walk, use the bathroom, and read
- Assigned reading, free reading, and raising readers
- 3 tips for handling interruptions
- The importance of Monday meetings
- How truth, goodness, and beauty fit into the homeschool day
- Education in life: Why kids need chums, chores, and church
- Ordo amoris in real life: Making kids care
The Lifestyle of Homeschooling: Character
Character building is really just another way of saying sanctification – and we need to remember to start with ourselves, not our kids. Then, even with our kids, we need to approach it as sanctification and not as a checkbox to mark complete.
- What is character and how to build character
- Why homeschooling is hard
- Life is character building
- Habits: the secret to smooth and easy days?
- The best character program is at your fingertips
- What do I do when my kid complains?
- When your kid says, “I hate math!”
Homeschooling Teens
Without a doubt, the family culture and homeschool atmosphere changes with teens, but that doesn’t have to be regrettable.
- Homeschooling high school: align your expectations
- Homeschool high school: curriculum hits & misses
- Homeschooling middle school boys: what worked and what didn’t
- Middle schoolers are persons, too
Expectations in the Homeschool Lifestyle
Don’t expect what you don’t inspect. If you aren’t checking it, it probably isn’t happen. This is the hard-won wisdom of older homeschool moms and we do well to heed it.
- Our homeschool checklist routine
- Homeschool Advice: Don’t Expect What You Don’t Inspect.
- A close-up view of my homeschool checklist
- 5 tips for teaching kids to use checklists
- 3 kinds of dawdlers (and what to do with them)
- Dear mom who wants to give her five-year-old a classical education
- What I learned from being homeschooled myself
- Keeping track in a busy homeschool day
Homeschool Lifestyle: Be Consistent
Living a homeschool lifestyle does not mean that we don’t do lessons or think that cooking counts as math.
We do want informed, knowledgable, thinking students. That takes effort and consistency – both of which need to be a part of our lifestyle.
- 3 tools for a sane homeschool day
- How to lesson plan so you’re never behind
- The key to homeschooling consistently
- How not to motivate: extrinsic v intrinsic rewards
- 3 tips for the first day of school
Homeschool Lifestyle: Juggling Housework
The house doesn’t clean itself. Rather the opposite. With so many people living and working in one space, the house quickly goes from tidy to disaster area. Here are some strategies for handling the house as you homeschool.
- Cleaning house while homeschooling
- Charlotte-Mason-style housecleaning
- 3 ways to deal with entropy
- How to juggle housekeeping and homeschooling
Homeschool Lifestyle: Teaching from Rest
Teaching from Rest by my friend Sarah Mackenzie should be mandatory reading for all homeschool moms. Whenever you feel like you are inadequate and not enough, remember that it’s a true feeling, but God is the one at work. He is enough.
- 5 Myths about Teaching from Rest
- Teaching from faithfulness, not fear
- The surprising truth about successful homeschooling
- It takes work to rest
- The best encouragement for homeschool moms
- Living from a state of rest
Homeschool Lifestyle: Teaching Multiple Ages
One thing that makes homeschool days difficult is managing many ages and stages of children.