Homeschooling Day in the Life: Sasha, Catholic based homeschooling mom of four
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 Sasha, Catholic based homeschooling mom to four children!
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 Sasha
Sasha @themushymommy is a homeschooling mama of four. They live in South Louisiana where it’s a regular thing to eat crawfish and jambalaya. Sasha homeschools with a Catholic academy and loves being able to be together, learning side by side.
Sasha and her family are currently living in a 100 year old Acadian cottage and trying to build a small homestead. In her spare time Sasha enjoys reading, blogging, gardening, dancing and napping. At this season of life she gets woken up a bit from her toddler, so she is often found trying to squeeze in a nap! Their days sometimes feel a bit chaotic but there’s so much joy and beauty in them!
The Beginning of Our Day
Hi friends! I’m Sasha and I’m so happy to share our day with you! Our days are far from perfect and sometimes really messy and crazy, but there’s always so much beauty in it.
Here’s a look at the beginning of our day. We always start with a warm breakfast and eat together. During this time we have a prayer dice that we roll that helps the kids say their prayer intentions as well as recite the prayer from the dice to help with memorization.
We used to do bible stories and read alouds too during breakfast, but we have made adjustments due to a loud and active two year old. So most often we recite our poetry work and our catechism memory work. Then the kids go off to clean rooms, tidy and get dressed. I manage to get dressed after breakfast too.
We have made lots of tweaks this year because of my toddler. To be honest, last year when he was a newborn felt much more “cozy” on the homeschool front. Lately it’s just a mission to complete what we can with him around and then finish what we can’t during his nap time. He’s by far my most active toddler, so it’s been a challenge. But I know I’m not alone and that this too shall pass!
If you’re struggling to homeschool with a toddler too, I’ll share some things we do. But don’t think I’m an expert, because I’m not. 😉
I hope you enjoy our day! ❤️
Homeschooling With Toddlers
Some fun tips for homeschooling with toddlers:
🌿 Let them join in. He loves scribbling with us on some paper. He just wants to sit at the table and feel like the big kids. This works out until he finds markers. As he gets older, more coloring books, dry erase books and simple maze books will be brought in.
🌿Allow them the freedom to go and come. He joins us and then runs to destroy the village 😂. He’ll go play and then come back. I apply this rule to my preschooler as well. He has workbooks but we don’t make it super formal for preschool.
🌿 Have special toys. He loves “cooking” with little Pom Pom balls, pots, bowls and spoons. I save this only for school time. He also likes transferring wooden toys into jars and bowls.
🌿 Save certain puzzles, trucks, and toys for school. This reminds me that I need to organize this better. We used to have school bins of fun toys that only came out during school hours.
🌿 Play dough or kinetic sand if they’re of the age for that.
🌿 Water wow or wonder markers!
🌿 Loads and loads of grace! Seriously, I have to give myself grace multiple times a day. I have to remind myself that it will get better and that there’s beauty in the chaos. We all give ourselves grace and remember that tomorrow is a new day.
🌿 And Jesus! He helps us get through it.
Curriculum
Sharing some of our curriculum here. Our Catholic homeschool program chooses much of our curriculum, but we add to it and also do many fun unit studies seasonally from many of the awesome homeschool mamas I find here in this platform.
📚 Poetry – Harp and the Laurel Wreath/Garden of Verses. We also do bible and fable narrations.
📚Abeka for arithmetic but we will be trying The Good and the Beautiful this summer.
📚Preschool – we LOVE the Kumon books and Learning Without Tears
📚Handwriting and extra phonics work from A Reason For and we love Creative Writing from The Good and Beautiful. We also do cursive too from Learning Without Tears.
📚3rd Grade history is The Story of Civilization, Medieval times. We also read about the saints of that time period and have read the wonderful stories you see pictured. Currently reading “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.” First grade history is a Saints study as well. We have special books for this from our program.
📚First grade phonics is The Little Angel series (this is a Catholic phonics program but it’s lightly woven in there so many believers really could use it). It’s SO cute and we love it!
📚Third grade language arts is a combination of a curriculum from our academy and Primary Language lessons. All classical with a focus on narrations, composition and art study.
📚Science done at center or we do fun experiments at home!
I hope this helps some. Some of our extras are just for Fridays or just for a small section in the morning. Fridays are generally arts and crafts/experiments/handwriting/ one math lesson and then play or a field trip. We keep Fridays light around here.
Our Homeschool Space
We do school in our dining room, which means I’ve slowly transformed it into a school room. I try to keep it simple so that it also feels like a dining room, but we do have a lot of things. One thing I love is my chalkboard. It’s such a practical and useful thing for us. The kids love when they work on it too!
What is your homeschool space like? I have a whole highlight over on @themushymommy of our space and things!
Games + Activities
One thing I love about homeschooling is to watch my children’s bonds grow. Even though they definitely fight sometimes, it’s the little things like this that are unplanned that make these days worth it.
I found them playing memory today with our Saints cards and it made me happy. The girls have been bickering a bit lately and I was happy to see this.
One other thing I do, is buy many random games, manipulatives and learning resources. We may not always utilize them, but I want them to have resources to pull out instead of screens. And books of course! Give us all the books.
The kids are now in bed. After soccer we played and ate at Chick-fil-A then bathed and read a bit before bed.
I snapped this photo at our soccer practice today. It was so sweet! Our kids play soccer and our girls (and I) dance. I teach dancing and typically still hop into classes, but couldn’t fit my own classes in this year. So I just teach a fun tap class!
My littlest will be two tomorrow and I’m off to get things ready for his big day before I head to bed. This has been so much fun and I’m so thankful to have shared my day with you and chatted with you!
I hope you enjoyed it too! It’s so much fun to see what others are doing and how they manage their time. There’s not enough hours in the day, right?! 😆
I hope you’ll join me over at @themushymommy so we can be friends and keep on cheering for each other in these beautiful days.
Thank you so much to Sasha 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.
