6 ways I find balance as a homeschooling mom



On a typical Saturday morning, I’m sitting at my kitchen table surrounded by our school books and planning our upcoming week. To an outsider, I might need to seek help for a book addiction. Such is the life of a classical, Charlotte Mason educator. There are a lot of books.

Planning our days, prioritizing what needs to be done and when is something that gives me great joy — now.

I hate being asked about socialization. It assumes that my children live in a cave, 50 miles from any other human besides their immediate family.

It has taken a while to get here, though. Finding a rhythm to the school part of our days, balancing school work with the rest of running a home, and knowing when we all need to take a break and go do something social has taken a few years to systematize. It’s also taken a major adjustment of my own priorities, which was painful but necessary for our success as a homeschooling family.

A wise person once told me that you can’t plant a seed, then go uncover it every day to see how it’s progressing and expect any kind of success. In other words, when you play the long game, it takes a tremendous amount of faith to believe that what you are doing is actually working, even when you aren’t seeing immediate results.

To increase your faith in your abilities as a homeschooler, you need a plan.

Here’s what works for our family and for me as a person.

Prioritize school time

You have to make school time a priority or your kids won’t.

If you want your children to feel a sense of rhythm to their days, you need to set the tone. This is not to say they’ll gleefully go along with everything all the time, but they’ll know that the expectation is firm. When the time for school comes, and you call everyone to order, they’ll know that you mean it.

Some moms do this by playing a certain song that signals school is beginning. I don’t have a special song, but my kids do know that at 8:30 every morning, they can expect me to call them to our kitchen table for school time.

In order for your kids to be ready, you have to be ready yourself and know what the plan is. You need to know what you’re covering that day.

I use a free online planning software called Planboard from chalk.com. I plan one week at a time for my 5th grade and kindergarten students. I have plenty of toddler-friendly activities for my 3-year-old who listens to all the stories but isn’t yet old enough to have her own assigned activities. There are certain toys that only get played with during school time. They are in a specific location in our house, and we rotate through them as the day progresses.

Having set plans for the day lets my children know that I am serious about the expectation that school is happening and that we have goals to accomplish. I keep my lessons short and age appropriate for each child. I push them when they are being lazy, but I also know the signs of them being done for the day. If I’ve overplanned, which does happen sometimes, we can add that to the next day. I leave some wiggle room in the schedule for just such occasions.

Don’t try to do everything at once

We live in a world that glorifies multitasking. For many people, it’s become a way of life to try and do four or five things at once. I think this is a dangerous practice that leads to anxiety and poor outcomes.

As a mom, teacher, and homemaker, I know how overwhelming it can be to have dishes in the sink that need attention, a bill that needs to be paid, and a roast that needs to go in the crockpot, all while you’re trying to read Aesop’s Fables to your kids.

The solution to this is simple. Be present where you are. The dishes in the sink will be fine until school time is finished. If it’s time to fold laundry, then fold the laundry and don’t worry about the math lesson you didn’t finish. Don’t overburden yourself or your children by dividing your attention between multiple activities at once.

If you get out behind and there are home things that really need your attention, then take care of them before you start school. Starting school a few minutes later than the time you set isn’t the end of the world.

Involve your child

It’s tempting to underestimate children. We want to make sure the lessons are really sinking in, and therefore, we end up doing the academic heavy lifting. This is wrong. You can’t actually learn something for your child. You have to let them do that for themselves. Set your expectations accordingly.

One area that I have struggled with in this regard is reading. I suspect my oldest child is dyslexic, so learning to read has been an arduous process.

Until recently, I was doing too many of the readings during school time. As a result, my son was becoming disengaged. He couldn’t remember anything for a narration after reading.

I decided over the summer that for the current school year, we would try something new. I bought two copies of each of our books for the year, one for each of us. He follows along while I read, and then he takes his own turn. There has been an instant turn around in his ability to tell me what he learned after each reading, and he is taking charge by just opening the books and starting to read without me even asking him.

Learning doesn’t just involve books, either. Involve your children in the process of keeping a clean home. Give them chores to do. They need practical life skills, and while they may grumble, they need a sense of purpose and feeling like they are part of the family “team.” This is as educational as any academic subject and one of the greatest benefits to homeschooling.

Balance social time with school time

I hate being asked about socialization. It assumes that my children live in a cave, 50 miles from any other human besides their immediate family.

But there is a small, small kernel of truth to consider in that dreaded conversation: How will your child have opportunities to play with other children?

Homeschool co-ops are groups that meet once or twice a week to provide a variety of activities for homeschool families. Some are academic, while others are mainly enrichment. They come in all sizes and varieties, and more are forming all the time. We live in rural Tennessee, and there are at least five different co-op groups within driving distance of us. I would bet that there are some near you, too. Facebook is the best place to find these groups.

Local libraries often have homeschool meetups as well. The library in our town hosts a weekly game day and a LEGO group.

Our church has an abundance of homeschool families, and there’s a weekly activity at church for those families. If your church has a lot of homeschool families, this is a great opportunity for you to secure play time for your kids.

Don’t sign up for everything

A word of caution, though. I could have my kids in an outside-the-home activity every day if I wanted to do that. This is not what I want for us, though. We are in a period of change this year, having two children officially enrolled in school, and because of this, we have stepped away from the co-op we were involved in for the last five years.

It was not an easy decision, but it was the right thing to do for us. I was feeling stretched too thin because one entire day of the week was taken up by the co-op. If you are finding yourself frayed by the commitments you have outside of your house, do not hesitate to step away. You owe it to yourself and your kids to learn how to recognize when you are doing too much.

Know your long-term goals

The goal of education, for me, is not to make sure my kids know everything by the time they are grown but rather that they know how to learn something, and they don’t hate the process of learning. I want my children to be autonomous, sovereign citizens and lifelong learners. I want them all to know how to run a house, think for themselves, and love God. If I can accomplish that, then I will consider my life well-lived.

Homeschooling: The Charlotte Mason way



NOTE: This is part 2 of my guide to homeschooling. For part 1, see here.

Things I observed in over a decade of teaching in public high school:

  • Kids learning something, taking a test, and promptly forgetting it.
  • Students leaving high school proudly declaring that they’ll never again read a book.
  • Children spending eight hours a day learning in a series of rooms, sitting in rows, surrounded by strangers, whose home lives and influences you have no idea about or control over.

There are structures above teachers they cannot hope to influence or control, and if the government says, 'You will teach underwater basket weaving four hours per day in every grade or we will cut your funding by half,' then guess what everyone will be learning next year?

Sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it? Because it is. It’s also the reality of public schooling today. I fancied myself to be different from other teachers in that I didn’t just open a textbook and start teaching on page one. I tried to tailor my teaching to the abilities of my students as best I could. I incorporated real-world experience as often as possible. I took them outside whenever I could find a reason to go.

But it didn’t matter, because the reality is, it doesn’t matter what a teacher’s personal philosophy of education is. There are structures above teachers they cannot hope to influence or control, and if the government says, “You will teach underwater basket weaving four hours per day in every grade or we will cut your funding by half,” then guess what everyone will be learning next year?

There’s a better way to learn. It’s more natural, and it is what I believe most people would gravitate toward if left to their own devices.

Who is Charlotte Mason?

Charlotte Mason is a name that means a lot to some people and is completely unknown to others. I have taken to calling her the godmother of homeschooling when I talk about her. To say that Charlotte Mason’s ideas changed our family profoundly is a great understatement. So who the heck is she?

Charlotte Mason was a British educator and philosopher who lived at the turn of the 20th century. Her educational philosophy literally spans six volumes of writing, but you don’t have to read all six volumes, because her method comes naturally.

Looking back on the most profound educational moments of my life, I see Charlotte Mason’s reflection in them all. I studied history in college, and most of my classes were round-table discussions of books we had all read ahead of time. We were, in fact, narrating — a core concept in a Charlotte Mason education.

The Charlotte Mason method

Charlotte believed that education is “the science of relations” and “an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.” She also believed that children are “born persons” and are worthy of the respect and responsibility due to them as such. So what does that look like in practical terms?

First, you do not water things down. You do, however, provide age-appropriate-sized “bites” of whatever is being studied. You spread a wide “feast” of knowledge. Art, music, math, foreign language, Shakespeare, Plutarch, history, geography ... all of these are key components of a Charlotte Mason education.

Lessons are, however, kept short and use living books instead of dry, boring textbooks. Learning revolves around experience and narration — written or oral retelling of what one read or observed.

My 9-year-old has read Shakespeare this school year but only three plays, never all in one sitting, and sometimes using puppets to keep the characters straight.

Charlotte emphasized time in nature as integral to a successful education. Children were not expected to understand nature simply by reading about it. Children needed to go out and look at what the world is doing on a day-to-day basis.

In our family, my sons go outside and then they come in and tell me all about their adventures, like how the plants are changing or animals they saw. I try to go with them on longer walks about once a week, but I also encourage them to go out on their own.

Eventually, I will start having the oldest keep a nature journal, either physical or digital, but for now, I am loving his narration of the seasons and the small day-to-day changes he notices.

I know we are fortunate to live in a rural setting with plenty of nature available to us, but I have read many mothers' accounts of doing nature study at a local park, in their tiny back yard with a single plant in a flower pot, or using their apartment building’s rooftop as a place for a garden. It is doable, even though it might be different for your family.

Charlotte Mason encouraged children to be outside in all types of weather, but she also lived in Ambleside, England, where it was never 100 degrees with 100% humidity, either. So no, we don’t implement that part with 100% fidelity in our house, because our family circumstances are different, and I am a huge weenie who cannot tolerate heat.

Habit training is also a key part of a Charlotte Mason education. Charlotte Mason understood that children are not being raised, men and women are. Believing they are born persons, it is important to help children form good habits early because habits are being formed every day, whether for good or bad. This idea makes parenting more proactive, instead of reactive.

I am still very much a student of habit training, but that’s one of the most beautiful parts of a Charlotte Mason education: Mom gets to learn new things, too.

When we began homeschooling, I started looking for ways to bring all of the elements that I felt public school was lacking into our days. I wanted art and music and orderliness and nature to be a part of what my children experienced. At the time, I had no idea who Charlotte Mason was. Through a series of divinely inspired events, I do now.

The changes I have seen in my children, and in our life as a family, have been profound. My boys go outside and re-enact the Battle of Hastings, or they’ll come traipsing through the house pretending to be Robin Hood and Prince John. My baby daughter is so in love with books that we read 20 a day sometimes, and they are mostly all quality stories that inspire the imagination and uplift the spirit. My husband and I have reignited our own passion for reading. We have all discovered classic literature that we likely never would have read had we not chosen the Charlotte Mason path for our family.

You may be thinking this sounds like a lot of fairy-tale nonsense. Like I’m some sort of Snow White, cleaning my house with forest animals and teaching wide-eyed children who are always rapt with wonder. When you’re still thinking in the “public school way,” Charlotte Mason’s ideas will sound completely alien and perhaps unattainable.

But underneath that, I know what you’re thinking. Because every good parent understandably wants a quality education for his or her child, you’re wondering when we actually “learn.” The answer is: all the time. Learning happens every single day.

It happens in ways you will not see coming when you start. And you won’t have to manufacture it. You will present real, quality materials and experiences to your children, and they will tell you how they have put it together for themselves. It will be meaningful in ways that textbook learning just inherently is not. Think about the books you love. Unless you are profoundly weird, I would bet money that the books you love most are not textbooks.

If that doesn’t convince you, then think about what you want the long term to look like. To quote one of my favorite podcasters Tyler Mahan Coe, “There’s a difference between handing someone a $20 bill and handing them a treasure map.”

Charlotte Mason Resources

Charlotte Mason’s way is a treasure map — her methods will give your child the tools and desire for lifelong learning. If this sounds at all like what you want for your family, here are some resources to help you get started.

Curriculum choices

This is not a complete list but enough to give you some ideas:

Podcasts

Books

A version of this essay first appeared on the Unprepared.life.