And Just Like That

We started our school year earlier than I had intended this year. All the local schools went back at the beginning of August, and my girls were growing bored and restless. Ballet, which runs on a school year schedule, resumed before our official “start date,” which also prompted our days to fall into that school year rhythm. I asked the girls if they’d like to just jump in rather than wait, and they were all ready for it. So we did. We took a step into what will be my last year homeschooling all five of my daughters.

The first week was kind of a roller coaster. We had some wrinkles to iron out in the realms of math and foreign language, and with a particularly persnickety child who falls smack in the middle of the lineup, this took up a great deal of my parenting bandwidth. We took park breaks. We worked through read alouds. We drank a lot of tea and tried hard to give ourselves grace. The week ended nicely, though I didn’t achieve all I had hoped to.

Our second week has been admittedly better. The aforementioned persnickety middle child has swapped out projectiles from math workbooks to mechanical pencils, which is what I consider A Progression Toward Calm. I got more done in some areas of study, less in others. We continued to drink a lot of tea.

In my Instagram Stories one day I put up one of those little question boxes inviting curious minds to inquire about our homeschooling life. I got a lot of interesting questions, and more than a few asks to write more about our schooling culture here at home.

I don’t know why I struggle so much with this. Is it my lack of confidence? Is it this idea that I must be doing it wrong if I enjoy it so much? Do I believe that I’m not doing enough to give my children the education they deserve, and I don’t want to publicly admit that, for fear of harsh criticism? The answer is D) All of the Above. I am severely lacking in confidence, I am haunted by the idea that something has to be hard to be an accomplishment, and I feel like a phony to be educating my children while never having put in my own last semester of schooling and therefore not even having a college degree.

Nevertheless, here I am, answering emails and filling out forms about 2026 homeschool graduation, checking boxes, talking to my mom friends who have already been down this road and are full of advice, encouragement, and wisdom, gathering old lists and transcripts, visiting colleges, waiting for SAT results, and praying A LOT. Also feeling a little… sad? That isn’t quite the right word. It feels so happy and exciting, but also, kind of like… what will our home look like next year without Anja? She has a steadiness that the rest of us lack. We are going to be a mess, and not just emotionally. It’s a little scary! Also, we’re just plain going to miss her!

But enough of that. That is conversation is for April. Right now, in the crystal morning light of our new school year (just kidding, it’s more like one of those dreary, foggy mornings where there’s no sunrise to speak of and you can’t quite think straight)* we are setting off with a hodgepodge of curriculum for five different girls in five different grades. And because some have asked, I will tell about it.

A little backstory: I did not intend to homeschool at all, but Anja, our oldest, had a pretty severe speech impediment that warranted some special attention. Even with preschool speech therapy, when Martin and I went to the Kindergarten Roundup at our local Catholic school, my heart was screaming, “don’t do it!” We love our Catholic schools very much, but all I could think of was that I was throwing her to the wolves. She was unable to be understood by even her grandparents—there was absolutely no way she would thrive socially in a school setting. And knowing her personality, I could see that this would be a very bad beginning for her.

So we did kindergarten at home that year, and she continued her speech therapy, and then the next year Greta joined in, and that was about the time I realized that homeschooling was an amazing, gentle, peaceful way to learn, and I was hooked. I leaned toward a blend of Waldorf and Montessori early childhood and a Charlotte Mason style for elementary years. I am not good at staying in boxes, so I wibbled in and out from these philosophies, which caused me to be somewhat of an outlier (in other words, I wasn’t doing it right) in the philosophy-specific communities. But whatever crooked road I have taken in the education of my daughters, it seems to have worked out okay.

Okay, now on to the kids.

Homeschooling highschoolers is largely boring. I have found many lecture series for them on the internet. Sometimes they take classes at the community college. They do a lot of private writing work that I sometimes help with. They do a lot of reading of good literature, which we talk about. They are in a literature group with some other families, where the moms take turns hosting/presenting a book and discussion, twice a month. This has been a great experience! They do math via Khan Academy, which sounds ridiculous because it’s free, but I’m telling you, Sal Khan is better than many (not all! I had some beloved math teachers!) of the math teachers I had throughout my K-12 years. He explains things so warmly and well! They also do Science online, but it’s a mix. They do Khan Academy science, but they also watch science lectures, and read science books, and I teach them a bit of things, like when we learn about specific scientists, or review the Periodic Table of Elements, which we are doing again this year. In the middle grades they use a Masterbooks series that I’ll mention later. History and some literature are the only things we really still do all together. This semester they will be viewing a Theology course online from Hillsdale College, and we also are still chugging through Catechism in a Year with everybody’s favorite famous priest, Fr. Mike Schmidt. Government: online, but with some help from Martin on the side.

The most boring part of homeschooling highschoolers is that they just do their work all day. It takes them a full school day to get through their daily load, and my girls are hard workers. There’s not much complaining (okay, a little complaining from Greta about math…) and they just… do their work. Snooze. Also, Anja has a job that she works two days a week, and she has ballet 5 days a week, so she’s kept pretty busy. Greta refuses to have a job until she finds the ideal work environment, which includes large windows for lots of natural light and plenty of people to talk to. She spends most of her non-schooling time filling Five-Star Notebooks with stories and song lyrics, and playing music.

So those girls, though wonderful humans, are not super exciting to talk about when it comes to their schooling. I have found their lectures via Hillsdale College and a resource called Modern States, which CAN be used to earn college credits, but we don’t use it that way, we just count them as high school credits. For awhile I was all about the knocking out college courses during high school, the dual-enrollment route, but at some point I realized that was just my pride being on board, and that what would really be best for my girls is for their high school experience to be a high school experience, and their college experience to be college. No need to be “ahead” or to look like they are so advanced. They’re doing everything at a perfectly reasonable and average pace, and I don’t see the need to be charging ahead in anxiety for the sake of getting things done, or looking good, for something that could be very enjoyable if taken more slowly.

Okay, let’s step down the ladder. Next! Elka. Middle child. Filled with emotion. My most difficult child to school, but (ssshhh, you didn’t hear this from me) maybe my most intelligent. She’s one of THOSE people. The ones who won’t answer a simple question but would be glad to do your taxes. The one who can look at something and just understand it, and then explain it like you’re an idiot for not understanding it at a glance like she did. She has a learning style that is difficult to harness… difficult to even identify… she is an obsession learner. If a subject doesn’t check some kind of box by which she can categorize and move methodically through it, then it’s no good to her. This year one of the parts of our rough start was that she had intended to do some schooling—math and foreign language—through the summer, but ended up just not doing it. This was no big deal to me; the summer schooling was completely optional! But when the new semester began she realized she didn’t remember where she had left off in those subjects, and that alone—it really had nothing to do with the subjects themselves—was too much. We went through multiple days of her crying and throwing things, refusing our offers to help, rejecting our ideas for backtracking or finding her place by assessing her skills, before she was able to figure out and settle into a routine. It was tough. But that part is over now. She’s been working diligently for the past few days now.

Elka loves math and science, and those are the things she does begrudgingly with a curriculum (Masterbooks and Khan for Science, as well as some supplemental stuff; Khan for math, which she just began this year after hating every previous thing we’ve tried. But don’t worry, she hates Khan, too. The girl is consistent!) I should note that she actually finished the Masterbooks series last year.

One issue with Elka and learning is that she doesn’t forgive. Forgiveness is just not a part of her soul. (Unfortunate, I know.) So if anything about a curriculum choice bothers her in any way, she will flat out refuse to keep doing it, and refuse to try it ever again. This means we’ve gone through a lot, and I can’t recommend any of them, except to say that my other girls have had success with Khan Academy. And so far this year Elka is at least tolerating it somewhat.

Elka doesn’t love poetry, writing, or the arts the way the other girls do, though she IS a bookworm, so it’s pretty easy to get her to read whatever I want her to read, as long as I just leave it around her frequented places. But second to reading, she mostly enjoys science and working with her hands. She has been spinning fiber for about a year and a half now, and has been getting more invested in the science of dyeing as well. This is an art that makes zero sense to me, outside of being able to identify the plants she uses, but it’s a lot of hands-on chemistry, measurements, formulas, all that stuff that she finds fascinating and fun, but which sends my mind into Fuzzyland when she talks about it to me. I let her do as much dyeing as she wants, because it’s good science, and then she sells her yarns in our yarn truck. (She has an aptitude for money and business as well.) Previously, she got this chemistry fix from baking, but she hasn’t been doing that as much lately, which is fine because the dyeing is harder, and I can’t afford to grow out of my wardrobe right now.

History, social studies, geography, religion, and literature are all done together, aloud. For History we have VERY MUCH ENJOYED the Story of the World series, supplementing with all kinds of historical fiction read alouds, all sorts of rabbit holes, etc., etc., you know how it goes. For Literature we use textbooks that I buy from our used bookstore, which has a vast and random assortment of textbooks. I pick up literature anthologies like it’s my job (this is an unhealthy habit… one does not need dozes of literature anthologies) and we work through them chronologically, skipping ahead, or lingering as we feel necessary. We have been taking our time through the years and faces of Victorian literature, and it is VERY ENJOYABLE. Sadly, we’re almost through that era. Wah.

Ingrid is lumped into the above paragraph, and she does (I bet you’ll be shocked by this) Khan math! She is still on our Masterbooks science series, which we have all enjoyed. It’s called “Exploring the World of” and we use Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. They are middle school age books, so when those are finished (7th grade by our schedule) they move on to Khan high school science. It has worked well for us! Ingrid also is still in middle/elementary grade subjects like spelling and Language Arts. Spelling has been totally random, with me printing free spelling lists for various grades and quizzing them, then working on the words they struggle with. This is fun because my kids are pretty good spellers. However, her handwriting is terrible so we’re still working on that this year.

AND OH MY GOSH HOW COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN CANDY MATH!?? This is our favorite review exercise that involves the whole family!!!!

I have at my lap a jar of numbers and a jar of candy. At random I choose some numbers, and craft an equation for a certain person at their own level of math. If they get the correct answer, I throw a piece of candy at them! This is a great game for addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square roots, powers, percentages—basically anything but decimals, but you could put decimals and fractions into the jar too! This is a very fun, and very effective way to do math review.

Ingrid is learning German on DuoLingo.

Sylvi, age five and a half, is an official “Kindergartener” which feels like too big of a title to be set upon my baby, but, this is motherhood I suppose. I do almost no formal schooling for kindergarten and preschool, just a lot of pretend play, a lot of games, a lot of drawing and painting. We are learning to read, which she is resisting, so I try not to push it too much. She’s getting it, slowly. She likes math, so we do some adding and subtracting. She does not love handicrafts the way her sisters do, she seems to find them frustrating and boring, though in the days between beginning and finishing this post, I have taught her to fingerknit, and she thinks it’s kind of fun. Maybe her fondness for crafting will grow with time, or maybe not! We shall see. In any case, she does have a little “school book” that is just a thing I got from the Target Back to School dollar section, which Ingrid likes to do with her. It has animal stickers, lol. But mostly her days are play, being read to, drinking tea, and being outside.

That’s pretty much it on the individual formal subjects. Now I’ll tell you the other things we do as a family that are friendly and fun.

We have a chalkboard painted on the refrigerator and another on the wall above the play kitchen. On these I write the “of the day”s or “of the week”s. Now, let’s be clear, I have not begun this for our new school year, and I’m not entirely sure how it’s going to look this year, BUT, in the past they have included such things as elements of the periodic table, composers, artists, poems, psalms, Bible verses, important quotes, important people, and vocabulary. This has been a great side addition to our school days for everyone, including myself. It’s fun and educational!

Like most homeschooling families, we have adopted the philosophy that learning happens all the time, not just at the table, not just with our books, not just between the hours of 8-3. We don’t have a television or video games, we are all really into handicrafts and reading. The kids and Martin like board games. We do A LOT of observing nature as a family. So far, it seems my girls all really enjoy learning new things—educating them is not a struggle. They just zip along, filling their brains.

I have a niece who has always been really good at asking questions, specifically, “what does that mean?” Inspired by her, I’ve tried to encourage my kids to be always willing to ask, not pretend to already know. Asking questions is so important. Curiosity and engagement—I myself have tried go against my pride, and if people are talking to me about something is new to me, even if it makes me feel like a dum-dum, I ask questions and dig deeper. Gosh, it’s so much easier to just smile and nod and pretend. Think of all I’ve missed out on learning in my past just because I was too embarrassed to have not already known! That’s just silly. I do better now.

So, that’s everything I can think of about our schooling rhythm. Of course there is more that I’m forgetting. But this is the general map of our year.

I’m excited for this school year, despite the somewhat rocky start. I’m determined to feel as much joy as I can in this final year of schooling all five of my children. Joy grows good things. And even through all my second-guessing, my negative self-talk, my general lack of belief in myself, my heart knows that this is the exact right track for my girls, and that’s the best reason anyone could ask for.