A Day in the Life of Homeschool Mama Syeda

Here’s a look at the Day in the Life of Syeda, a creative, project-based homeschooling mama to two girls! At Learning Well, we understand that homeschooling doesn’t look the same for all of us. We understand it doesn’t have to either for us to learn and glean good things from each other. Each Wednesday, on our Instagram feed, we feature a new homeschool mama to take over the feed and show us what her day looks like.

Some of us homeschool for religious reasons and that inspires our homeschool days. Some of us homeschool from the road and never do school in the same place twice. We might have been homeschooling for years and years. Or we may have just begun our journeys. We understand that those details don’t really matter though. The common thread that binds us all together is our desires to educate our children differently.

We might all homeschool differently, but we can always look for ideas from each other that inspire, encourage and equip us in our own homeschool days. So, each week, we create blog posts for you to access later of each of those “days in the life”. We hope you keep coming back for more inspiration. Keep going, mama! These days at home are so worth it!

Meet Syeda

I love creative people. I love scrolling through a feed that makes me want to get up and scour my art closet for supplies and start creating with my kids. I love project-based homeschooling!

If you love the same things, you are going to love this takeover by Syeda @thepreciousyears!

Good Morning!

Good Morning, homeschool squad! I’m Syeda from @thepreciousyears and this is our day in the life. I can’t guarantee that it will be a perfect day but we will share our imperfectly perfect day.

Here is a little background about us! Our girls have always been homeschooled and it was my husband who initiated this journey. I for one was super skeptical and scared. However, it has been the best decision for our family and we never regret it. I won’t lie there are days I feel like I am not doing enough but within minutes I also come to the realization of how varied and well-rounded of an education they are receiving at home. Do you often struggle with this constant feeling of not doing enough?

Our homeschool journey has seen almost all aspects of the different learning methods over the past 5 years. We are currently a mix of eclectic, unschooling, Waldorf inspired and project-based homeschool. So what does that mean? As our confidence in homeschooling grew, we now focus more on quality over quantity. Math, coding, typing, read-aloud are a must for us daily. However, language arts (writing, grammar, handwriting etc), history and science are incorporated into our unit study. Our unit studies have been selected by the girls beginning of this year of topics that they wanted to learn more about.

Each day is a little different for us, especially because I work in and out of the house. So we follow a rhythm and not so much on a timed daily routine. We chunk off our homeschool into “Book time with Mom”, “Independent Learning” and “Lessons with Mom”, so even If I have meetings or go into the office for few hours, we set the day to make sure the 3 chunks of learning happen and we can shift them around depending on the day. 

Independent Work

As much as you plan ahead, some days just do not go as expected. Surely enough I had some additional urgent work to get done so the girls started their independent work first. It’s usually our 2nd block because we like to start first block with read aloud.

We went for a walk because we are recovering from the flu, otherwise it would be a workout. Habit training is very important for us and being healthy is high on our priority to instill in our girls.

After our walk, the girls ate and they started on their independent assignments (Typing, Math, Coding/Design and Handwriting practice by writing our jokes 🤷‍♀️). I was near them to help with math if needed and/or to keep them focused because they are still 9 and 10 so it can be easy to be distracted.

The girls were playing with some math manipulative (they are big on pretend play still and I love that they still have that innocence). I made lunch and they talked to their grandparents who are traveling abroad. I am taking a breather and catching up on IG and then we will start our read-aloud time.

Reading

Let’s talk about assigned reading in our homeschool…there is none 😯. Reading has been a crucial part of our journey since they were wee little so they naturally fell in love with reading. Genetics and personality does play a part because my oldest is a voracious reader and my youngest is just a reader I guess you can say.

Now this was not always the case, there have been times that my girls did not want to read specially as they were learning to read. Instead of getting mad or frustrated, I tried to get them to read books they were interested in, we traded off reading a page each and sometimes just took a break. 
Now years later, I cannot keep up with their reading list and it is beyond 30 minutes a day. They now scan and keep track of their logs thankfully!

Lessons With Mom

My youngest daughter is a creative and is a visual learner. To keep her interest I wrestled through many curriculum and styles until Waldorf inspired main lesson just fit. It’s very much inspired and I am not very artsy but I am learning alongside them.

Everyday I am learning something new either about myself through parenting or actual knowledge that somehow I missed during my public school education.

Everyday I am thankful for the opportunity to homeschool because my youngest would have struggled. She is bright but just learns differently and maybe another teacher wouldn’t have had the time to tweak it for her as I do.

So if any of you are ever doubting, please don’t because every little ounce you pour into them has a tremendous impact. We need to stop overloading information and make sure the kids are retaining the information they are taking in. I believe it’s important to keep it at what they need to know, not what some textbook tells us to check off.

End of the Day Routine

In our household we all contribute and work together just as we do to run our businesses where we all work and help. We all put our dishes away and clean up after ourselves for the most part because it is habit training. Habit training is very important as I talked about it earlier too.

I also always sit down and add pictures and notes from my day to my planner, read a little book or watch Netflix with hubby and drink some tea. My favorite tea right now is Lemon Ginger!

It’s important for us as homeschool parents to take some time out for ourselves to fill our cup. It’s beautiful and amazing work that we are doing and it is stressful. Always take care of you because if you are down or stressed then it trickles down to your kids. Taking time for you is actually helping everyone in the family.

Thank you all for following our journey here and I hope you will follow me at @thepreciousyears so we all can learn from one another. I love getting to know other homeschoolers so please say hello if you do come by our page.

Happy homeschooling!

Thank you so much to Syeda for sharing your family’s day with us!

If you want to see more Day in the Life photos and videos, be sure to check out our Instagram profile.  There are highlights of each takeover at the top.