Homeschooling Day in the Life : Rachael, homeschooling mom of four and creator of simple formats to make your day easier
A homeschool day in the life looks different almost every day, right? Over on our Instagram page, we love to give you a peek into lots of homeschool days regardless of how they change day to day.
Today, we’re going to give you a peek into the homeschool day in the life of Rachael, homeschooling mom to four children and creator of simple formats to help your day run smoother.
We can all learn and be inspired by one another, regardless of our homeschool approach. It’s not about looking good for social media, it’s about the connection going on inside our homeschool walls and sharing with others what works for us.
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We might all homeschool a little 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 Rachael
Rachael @rachael.alsbury is a writer, photographer, avid reader, and mother to four children ages 10, 9, 6 and 2. She and her family are from Northern California, but are currently living in Kansas City on a two-year trial adventure to be near family. Rachael said she would never homeschool, yet they find themselves as the homeschool-iest of them all. Their sweet spot is unschooling with a bit of Charlotte Mason. She is all about rich learning from simple formats!
When Rachael is not reading to her kids or digging balled up socks out of the couch cushions, she loves to help other homeschool mamas with practical tips, meal planning ideas, and routines.
Good Morning!
Good morning friends! It’s Rachael–I’m so excited to share our day with you in words and pictures.
Pretty pictures can be inspiring, but when you’re in the thick of dirty diapers and bickering siblings they can also feel discouraging.
Beauty is real, but it happens in split-second moments. You’re going to see some of those split-second moments today as I share. But I want you to know that 99% of the time that’s not what my house really looks like. It’s a living, breathing place littered with life: empty cups, balled-up socks, charger cords, pans crusted with oatmeal, and broken crayons…just like yours. That’s why I add lots of the real life images that exist behind the scenes. (Have fun with those!)
Today I’ll also talk about some special routines and learning formats that we use.
Early Morning
I love to be up in the early morning quiet by myself, but my kids have bionic ears and can hear me brushing my teeth three rooms away with industrial sound machines on. Regardless of how early I wake up I’m almost always joined by a little someone (or two!)
Because of this “dynamic,” my kids know that I am emotionally unavailable every day from 7-8 am. I built this into my day during the years I was up with nursing infants in the night. That way I could sleep until at least 7:00am and still have a slice of time for coffee and organizing my insides!
During this time I read the @thebiblerecap and pray or meditate on scripture (with earbuds in). Yes, solitude is wonderful, but it’s not the metric by which I evaluate the quality of my spiritual life anymore!
My kids play and entertain themselves until 8:00am. Around 8:00am (or perhaps also on the literal dot) my kids benevolently remind me MOM, MOM, MOM, MOM….IT’S BREAKFAST TIME. Today is whole wheat pancakes…and a second cup of coffee for me.
A Homeschool Day Four Ways
We don’t have a set rhythm or schedule for our homeschool day. Instead we have four different go-to formats that we use depending on the needs of the people in our house. I gauge what’s happening that morning and decide which format is realistic. I call it my Four Way School Day.
Today is warm and sunny, a rarity March in Kansas City! After looking at the beautiful forecast I’ve already decided to send everyone outside and do school in an Afternoon Block when Levi is in his nap. (We log our outdoor time with @1000hoursoutside.)
It was 60 degrees at 9:30am and my kids asked if they could put on shorts and play with the hose on the trampoline. Yes and yes.👍🏻 (As you can see we value rigorous academics.)
After breakfast I mixed up a batch of bread (regular yeast bread with home milled flour), opened the windows, and turned on the diffuser. I left breakfast dishes just as they were, rewarmed my coffee and headed outside to sit in the sun to watch the kids play.
It’s been a looooong winter. My heart needed this!
Lunch Time
The girls requested an outdoor lunch, so I made a snack tray which they ate on breaks between building a dam in the creek behind our house.
At 1:00pm I read to Levi, put him down for a nap, and call the girls in for a short formal learning time. (We use radios to communicate when they’re in the creek!) Lunch and nap time are two anchors in our day—a concept you can read more about on my blog.
We use two simple formats for our formal learning: Table Time and Read Aloud.
Today we do Read Aloud first. (Easier transition!) We loosely follow The Playful Pioneers curriculum from @thepeacefulpress. Reading aloud covers history, science, literature and geography for us. I add in any books that my kids request from their own interests.
I don’t really plan aside from putting books on hold at the library! We simply read from wherever we left off. Sometimes we add in some timeline cards or an activity from our Peaceful Press curriculum. The important thing is not a perfect plan, but small, sustainable habits.
Table Time
After Read Aloud we move to Table Time. This is the skill-building portion of our homeschool. I really don’t write any of this in a planner—it’s just not necessary for how we work! We simply just pick up where we left off the time before. (This is really freeing…may I highly recommend it?)
With my six-year-old I do these subjects one-on-one. We use Explode the Code and Math U See. I limit each subject to 15 minutes (The 15 Minute Rule) to keep it sustainable and fun for us. We allow learning to read to be a slow, unfolding process.
My nine and ten-year old girls can work independently now for the first time really ever! 😀🙏🏻They alternate between writing in their journals and doing spelling workbooks.
For two years I had both of my older girls in the same math level to simplify the instruction. Lately one of my daughters was frustrated that she couldn’t do multiple lessons in a day. That was my cue to switch things up. It was time to get The Computers involved. (I know my limits, and it ends at multiple math lessons in a day!)
We stopped Math U See in the middle of the book and started her on Teaching Textbooks. Now she can go as fast as she wants and get all the stickers and A pluses her heart desires. Her sister thought it looked fun and wanted to join in.
So this is where we are now: my children beg me to do math and then a computer sends me automated emails about their progress. I could cry.😭 (OF JOY…to clarify.) If you wonder how you’ll homeschool multiple children at once, the answer is that the older ones become independent and take a lot of it off your plate.
Another hack is to combine skill-based subjects like math, as we have done for the past few years. (No one really knew the difference, and it took a huge load off my shoulders!)
Interest-Led Learning
We are usually done with table time in about an hour or less. Right now everyone is outside, but through the winter my girls have been working on projects in our basement while they listen to audio books. Libby sews and K.K. has been sculpting and painting.
I say that we are unschoolers because of the amount of time we spend on interest-led learning versus formal learning. Seeing my kids thrive in their God-given interests is really what I love most about homeschooling.
I track the skills and concepts my girls are gaining through interest-led learning with some book logs and graphic organizers that I designed. This kind of reverse planning really helps me see how much learning is being done through play. It’s a lot more than most people think!
Quick Chore Time
I have learned never to judge the quality of a day by the way my house looks at the end of it. In fact, the better the day, the more it’s going to look like a bomb went off!
At around 4:00pm I harness the chaos and start dinner. I learned to batch my housework when I had my fourth baby. This means I ignore my house throughout the day and let it get messy. Then I reset everything in the late afternoon. Around this time I call everyone in to do a quick chore time. My kids have six essential chores that they do together everyday to keep our home functional. It’s an extremely simple but super efficient system. Within a short time it’s all tidy again!
Wednesday is typically Mexican night, but tonight we are having steak and pasta with pesto. I had to switch it up due to poor planning (I forgot to thaw the steak last night)! My propensity for forgetting to thaw meat is one of the reasons why I have my Dinner Matrix. This is flexible weekly dinner plan made up of homeschool-friendly dinner ideas.
After we eat dinner, David and I divide and conquer. One of us will take Levi and June upstairs for a bath while the other puts away food and tidies the kitchen. If we have time in the evenings we’ll play a game together like cards or charades.
Reading Hour
8pm is Reading Hour where the three girls go up to their bedroom with a book (or audio book.)
They always have a choice to go to bed or stay up and read for one hour. (Guess which one they pick?) Their relationship dynamics are way better when the three of them share a room! I read books to Levi in my room before putting him down for the night.
When the house finally powers down I go straight up to an epsom salt bath. After this David and I typically work until at least 10:30. It’s the most productive time of day for both of us since we are in creative lines of work. I will read, write or edit photos. David is working on designing an online management system for a sheep farm in California (as you can see he does the easy things). We also connect and hang out together–we love to talk about deep things, read articles, and ponder big questions!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this candid look into our day! If I could leave you with one thing today, it would be to encourage you to build your homeschool backwards.
Instead of focusing on curriculum, start with the needs of the people in your family. Warm and nurturing attachment to a primary caregiver is the number one predictor of academic success. Education is not a complex mystery reserved for experts; it is simply another form of caregiving–a nourishment of the heart and mind. And that is why you’re the perfect person for this job!
Thank you for taking a tour of my day! I hope you’ll join me at @rachael.alsbury where I share tips, ideas and things I’m learning on this wild and wondrous journey of homeschooling!
Thank you so much to Rachael for sharing your family’s day with us!
