The Sensible Homeschool – Practical Help & Encouragement for Your Homeschool

How to Survive School at Home During the Coronavirus Pandemic – Tips From a Homeschool Mom

March 16, 2020April 9, 2020

How to Survive School at Home - Tips from a Homeschool Mom

You never imagined yourself doing school at home. Or maybe you did, but not yet… and definitely not because schools closed suddenly during a pandemic! You don’t have the luxury of researching and planning over the summer months – this is happening NOW!

But for now – right now – you want to make the most of this. For the next three weeks or three months or however long it lasts, you want to take the lemons and make lemonade.

A Tour of Our Homeschool: History (& More) Shelves

May 22, 2020May 25, 2020

The final stop on this Tour of Our Homeschool is the history shelf.

Early in this shelf’s career here in my home, it had the misfortune of being partly empty. And, since no empty space remains empty for long around here, it’s now become the “History-and-Geography-and-Health-and-Art-and-Bible-and-Character-and-Whatever-Else-I-Can-Cram-In-There” shelf.

We’ve got a lot of ground to cover today so I’ll get right to it. If you missed the beginning posts in this series, click here to catch up.

A Tour of Our Homeschool: Language Arts Shelves

May 8, 2020May 19, 2020

Early in my homeschool mom career, language arts caused a lot of confusion for me. There are so many subcategories within the subject – I just didn’t know where to begin.

Handwriting, reading (including phonics and sight words), spelling, grammar, composition, poetry, literature, public speaking…. What do I teach when? And how? Ahhh! 🤯

Over the years, I’ve been able to make better sense of it all. My curriculum shelves, however, still reveal the winding journey of trial and error I’ve gone through in the search for language arts resources for my kids.

A Tour of Our Homeschool: Science Shelves

April 24, 2020April 25, 2020

Our tour continues!

(If you missed the first posts in this series, start here to get caught up.)

First, though, a quick note…

I’m not sharing the contents of our homeschool room and shelves because I found the BEST or MOST PERFECT stuff that all homeschool families need to own.

I’m doing this tour because I remember how much it helped me to see how others homeschool. It helped me decide how home education could work for our family. I loved seeing how people organize their spaces, what kinds of school things they had on their shelves, and what worked and didn’t work for them.

A Tour of Our Homeschool: Math Shelves

April 10, 2020April 11, 2020

$A Tour of Our Homeschool Math Shelves$

In the previous post in this series, I introduced you to the curriculum shelves in our homeschool area. Now let’s zoom in and see what’s filling up those shelves.

Note: If you missed the first couple posts in this Tour of Our Homeschool series, start here to get caught up.

Right now, it seems to work for us to have a shelf (or two) for each main subject area and a coordinating bin for the non-book materials for that subject. So, for example, here are the math shelves and the storage cube drawer where I keep the curricula and math supplements we aren’t using this year.

A Tour of Our Homeschool: School Room

March 27, 2020March 28, 2020

Asking what a homeschool room should look like is like asking what someone’s backyard should look like. That is, there’s no one right answer. It totally depends on the needs, desires, resources and situation of each unique family.

So far, in this Tour of Our Homeschool series, I’ve shared about the desks and tables we use for homeschooling all over our house. Now I’d like to focus in on the corner of our lower level that we call our “school room”.

A Tour of Our Homeschool: Desks and Tables

March 13, 2020March 17, 2020

A Tour of Our Homeschool - Desks & Tables

Over the years, I’ve spoken to many people who are considering homeschooling or just starting out. At some point, almost all of them have asked some variation of the following question:

What does homeschooling actually look like?

And they don’t mean it in some vague, theoretical way. They mean: What does it literally look like?

They want to know things like… How is my school-room setup? Do I even have a dedicated school space? What shelves do I use? How and where do I store my homeschool curricula? Do my kids have binders or cubbies or how do they keep their work organized? Do they each have their own desk?

So, in this series of posts, I’ll be giving you a detailed look into the physical set-up of our homeschool.

Why Homeschooling Works – A 5th Grade Example

February 28, 2020March 23, 2020

In this series we’ve taken a look at reasons homeschooling works for preschoolers and for early elementary students.

But when kids get older and their academic work becomes more “serious” can homeschooling really work for them?

Definitely YES!

Why Homeschooling Works – A 2nd Grade Example

February 14, 2020March 2, 2020

In this series, I’m hoping to give you a glimpse into why homeschooling is so effective for kids of all ages.

In the previous post, I showed just how much preschoolers are learning all the time. Homeschooling is incredibly effective for young kids since there’s time to answer more of their bazillion daily questions and let life and learning flow together naturally.

As kids get into their early elementary years, their brains are still like sponges. They’re constantly soaking in information and now they’re old enough to make more sense of it.