Minimalist Homeschooling

Slow. Simple. Less. It is the heart of what I love about how we learn together, in our family, and it has been the best gift to my mother-teacher heart. It is how we do more than survive homeschooling, it is how we thrive, grow, and love to start all over every day.

I'm writing out these simple steps that have transformed our home and our education for the better hoping it might be a gift to another mommy looking for the simple, like I was. I would love to hear more about the ways you are simplifying and multiplying a love for learning, too. 

Define family goals.

Make a list of the most important things.

Ask yourself these questions.

What’s most important to you when you think of education?

What do you value most in life and in learning?

What things do you most want to do as a teacher and as a student?
What do you want your daily rhythm to look like?
What are your goals for educating your child as a whole?

Simplifying education begins with these priorities. Your priorities. Your answers. It is day to day, and it's the finish line. It is being inspired by what is around you as it feeds your life and fuels your future.
It is vision casting and moment embracing.

 Does it add to or take away from your family purpose?
Everything we do to educate must fall together. Every new thing we begin, I have to reevaluate if it is adding to our family purpose and direction or if it is pulling us away from it.
  I need to constantly remember that it is not giving up to stop what is not working, it is empowering my family to learn more.

Cut down on commitment. 

Look at everything extra. Start thinking over how simplifying what you do, and how many commitments you have, can add to the fullness of your true learning.
Ask yourself these questions.

Which of these really gives us true value?

Which of these bring value to my family unit?
Or add to the individual's needs?

Which ones do I find myself dreading or avoiding?

Which of these point to my beliefs?

Which of these are in line with the most important things I listed above?

Spending time really evaluating is the key to making sure your weeks feel like a gift and not like a to-do list. Life is far more valuable than a list of things to check off.

Evaluate your daily rhythm.

Asking myself these simple questions are how I know what to keep doing and what to keep using, and I have to keep asking myself these things over and over and over again. Because our rhythm and our lives are always changing and moving and growing.

How do I spend my day?

What things do I do, from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep?

What do we use for our morning times, school times, adventuring times, rest times, meal times, chore times, and bedtime routines?

Find a gentle routine that works for your family.

It can be a simple, changeable, detour willing plan. And full of all things important to your family at this time. Once you know how you want to move through the day, it will be easier to eliminate what you do not want getting in the way of that.

  

Less is More

Purge. Purge. Purge.

Let go. Pass it on. Gift it to a family that can use it right now. Make room for what actually brings you joy and adds to both your teaching style and your family vision. Move things out of your space that take up space for things that will help you all learn more fully. 

Decompress.

Every life is filled with stress, especially this time in our lives. No matter how much you simplify your life, you’ll still have stress. So when we go through stress, we need to find ways to decompress. Especially as we purge and let go.
Go outside. Take a walk. Collect treasures along your path. Read a good book. Have a good cup of tea with your people. Paint in your nature journal. Smell the flowers.

Define Your Spaces

You will need spaces to learn, spaces to store, and spaces to create. 

When you begin homeschooling, it will be incredibly helpful if you have some ideas in mind of spaces you can learn and spaces you can store items you will need. We use several areas of our home for learning, some for learning all together, some of independent work. We have carts for different supplies we use daily and weekly and we have storage in a closet for items used less frequently. You can see a peek inside our largest homeschooling space here in this blog post. And it is okay if these spaces keep changing as your family does, too. And they might even change daily.

A Place for Everything

Having a place for each item sounds so incredibly daunting. It is hard to create spaces and decide what should reside in those spaces. Thankfully, we have a large closet and several spaces around our home we could devote to learning spaces, each with their own purpose. But even if we did not, it would be important for us to have some clear space to have daily supplies and a place for supplies used less frequently. Even if it were as simple as a bin for one and a basket for another. 

Living with a minimalist mindset means buying less, wanting less. It is being creative with what God has already blessed you with. You can take an inventory of the items you have already for learning and print it to be placed in a notebook with sections for school subjects and exploration. This can save unneeded purchases and more things to store away that you do not need.

Time Freedom, Choosing Our Minutes

The most valuable gift of having less, and doing less, is time. You actually can gift yourself more hours in the day. And more energy.

We aim for quality, not quantity. Less really is more.

 Like the smallest little eggs waiting to hatch, we try live life more deliberately slow. It's so hard to do every task slowly, with ease, paying full attention to what I am doing, but it is so worth the effort.

Single-task. 
Imagine giving yourself permission to allow yourself to one thing at a time. Just one, And give it all of your intention before moving on to the next. This can be life changing, peace giving. Multi-tasking is more complicated, more stressful, and generally less productive.

Fill your days with simple pleasures.
A cup of tea. A walk on the beach. A cuddle on the couch. We need simple, lovely things to find a joyful, complete life. 

Be present.
 Living here and now, in the moment, keeps us aware of life, of what is going on around us and inside us. It keeps us filled with thankful hearts and makes everything else so much more clear and defined.  I'm forever striving to be present in the moment, and for each person in this home who needs a share of my time, attention and presence. 

School slowly becomes as a lifestyle not a textbook.

When you start living for learning, every part of your journey is an opportunity for education. It is an adventure life. A knowledgeable life. One that is found in simple ingredients and not heavy textbooks. Book are amazing tools and I have a few baskets filled with ones that bring stories, times, and places to life for us, living books. But we do not keep all the books. We do have a couple of bookcases, but we often trade out books with friends, and use the local library for many of the books to help us study and explore what we are learning about.

Carefully choosing curriculum that gives you more flexibility and freedom, and less stuff to find spaces for is so freeing. You can also find curriculum that can be used as a family unit or for multiple students. This reduces not only what you store, but your time, which is valuable and worth preserving.

But in the end, the world is your classroom. Learning is found on your nature walk, while baking a cake together, while learning to care to that pig you won at the fair in the pig scramble (true story). When you open yourself up to a learning lifestyle, you are never without everything you need to educate.

Curriculum we love that embraces these guidelines are

The Peaceful Press
Five in a Row
The Good and the Beautiful
Beautiful Feet Books
The Homegrown Preschooler

Simple homeschool supplies are often the best. 

Some of our favorite supplies are

a good pencil case for traveling
ticonderoga pencils
scholar colored pencils

watercolors

chalkboards (big, little, and travel ones)

sketch books 

composition notebooks

clipboards

But no matter how you learn, where you study, and what you use to complete it, 

just keep exploring, because the season of learning should never end.

more  pictures on Instagram of our homeschool journey

Homeschool Curriculum, Homeschool Love

I am coming back to this blog. This place of words. And school. And pictures that tell stories of what we have lived and loved in an education journey after a hard year. A year we added a sweet new baby, a year we gained a medically fragile child, a year we pushed through a curriculum we did enjoy and liked enough, but did not love and thrive with. 

And we are healing.

And we are coming into a new year ready for  gentle, intentional, wild and free,

 we cannot stop finding and exploring learning. 

It's a beautiful thing and one I am thankful for. We have been seeking, looking, praying over where we would be heading for our curriculum in the 2017-2018 school year and the more we looked the less I found what my heart was looking for.

Then one day I found The Peaceful Press. I was looking to read the Little House on the Prairie collection, and I was searching for a curriculum to use as a base for our learning, but many things I found did not have the simplicity, gentleness, and exploration I was looking for. They did not direct towards well written, living books that our family enjoys gathering around to read and imagine with.  But The Peaceful Press was offering a newer curriculum called "The Playful Pioneers" that looked like it might fit well. And as I poured over the full curriculum, after purchasing, I knew. It fit. It was everything we needed and wanted. 

And I breathed a sigh of relief. We were ready. And when we are ready to gather, and light fires of learning, traveling into new places and into hearts of people in between the lines of the stories, we are ready to begin.

So, here we are, beginning, learning, over cups of tea and stacks of books, around our worn and wonderful kitchen table. I'll be back with more of our journey this year, with all of things that we study and we take flight in. 

For now, I encourage you to take a peek at The Peaceful Press and consider it for your sweet rhythm, as well, as you gather and build your home nests this year.

You can also following along on Instagram, too, where I will be sharing more words and daily pictures of our journey. 

Curriculum we use and love

Right Start Mathematics

The Homegrown Preschooler

Playful Pioneers

My Father’s World First Grade

My Father’s World Adventures in US History

Beautiful Feet Books Early American History

Exploring Nature with Children
The Good and The Beautiful

Weeks 27 and 28: Abraham Lincoln and Bird Studies

Week 27

Abraham Lincoln

We began our Abraham Lincoln studies with something crafty.

and this cute timeline (you may remember this from our George Washington studies)

We started reading about Abraham Lincoln in The Story of the US  and also in this book, which we adore:

Abraham Lincoln by Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire

We made these fun paper plate masks, too.

serious faces

and sweet smiles


The girls also completed these notebook pages.

State Studies

(Minnesota and Oregon)

We read about Minnesota and added that page to our completed pages pile, which is really a nice stack of completed leaning now. We may have had some technical difficulties with the capital, but I did not have them change it. We just talked about. I like to keep these fun and less stressful, especially since they will complete 50 by the end of the school year.
That is a lot of learning, and coloring, and labeling.

and we studied a little about Oregon, as well, and spent a little extra time learning about their state bird, the meadowlark.

You can create simple silly meadowlark hand prints like these with just a little brown and yellow paint... and some willing hands, of course.

The Western Meadowlark is actually the state bird of six states: Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wyoming. Only the Northern Cardinal is a more popular civic symbol, edging out the meadowlark by one state.

Here are our postcards for Minnesota and Oregon. We have been so blessed by our family, friends, and even friends of friends, who have sent us so many postcards from almost all of the fifty states. My girls have really enjoyed each one. Many have pretty pictures, facts and even little messages for the girls. I have seen them reading these, spreading them all over the schoolroom floor, many times throughout the day.

Thank you, friends, for taking the time to help us learn and making these girls feel so loved.

Jesus is the Shepherd

“I am the good shepherd. I know my sheep, and my sheep know me."

John 10:14

On this post you can read about how we had learned that Jesus is the Lamb of God, but Jesus is not only the Lamb, He is a good Shepherd, too.  When we believe in Jesus, we become God's lambs, who are forgiven. We deserve to die because of the sins we do, but Jesus took our place on the cross. He died for us, taking our punishment, fully.
We have been gifted more than we could ever really understand.
 Now we are His.
His. Just like that.
We are His little lambs, and He is our great protector, provider, our Shepherd. And that gift is one that changed my life. Redeemed it.  I want my children to know that.

This week during our Bible lesson time, as we read the verses and studied, we created this shepherd with his sheep craft.

I provided the supplies, but I did not give any rules for how to complete this activity. I love how the paper towel rolls are just a little too big and the sheep have little polka dots.
The best projects are the ones I let go of and let them grab onto.

The girls completed their verse notebook pages, as well. I am so thankful for all the verses the girls are hiding in their hearts this year.

to give you a little more detail on where and what we are studying

you can check out our classroom reveal HERE

and our curriculum  for 2014-2015 HERE

 and Week One here

Week 22: Wagon Trains and the Human Body

Week 22

State Studies 

(Illinois and Alabama)

Illinois

The girls completed their state pages for Illinois. They came out so nicely this week.

The girls really enjoyed the Growing Seasons book (by Elsie Lee Splear) we read this week. It is full of beautiful photos and information on American history and seasons that sparked more questions and studying. We loved that it was a story about sisters, too. I cannot recommend this book enough.

We also pulled out our cardinal projects and resources from Week 15.

and two more postcards were added to our portfolio

Alabama

We added these Alabama pages to our completed pages, also this very special post card.

We made sweet potato pie and learned about George Washington Carver. 

Did you know he created 118 products from sweet potatoes? 

We also read about Rosa Parks this week, taking some extra time, really brainstorming what her life, and her decisions would have been like. We discussed making bold, right decisions, and also living a life of humility, which Rosa Parks did beautifully!

We completed this Rosa Parks bus and writing activity.

On the inside they wrote some of what they had learned, in their own words.

Oh, those little windows are just so full of sweet. I love their little colorings at this stage of life.

We watched all the versions of the Helen Keller movie we could find on youtube and learned so many things about her life and were reminded how blessed we are! 

We also sent away for this Braille Alphabet card.

You can send away for one  here, It is free and a great addition to this week's learning. 

Wagon Trains

We read "West by Wagon Train" in our American Pioneer and Patriots book. 

And we looked through this book, as well.

We also created wagon crafts this week.

These crafts just use things we already had around our home.. And they are definitely imperfect. I love that about them, though.

Abraham Lincoln

(on money)

We talked about Abraham Lincoln a little bit and what US currency his face can be found on.

This girl completed this penny worksheet.

Here she is observing a five dollar bill.

Human Body Unit

We really enjoyed spending time in the afternoons learning and exploring more about the human body this week. 

Some of our favorite resources for this unit were

The Human Body Flip Book

The Human Anatomy Felt Set

The Usborne First Encyclopedia of the Human Body

Usborne's "See Inside Your Body" 

The Squishy Human Body by SmartLab Toys

On a different note, we were supposed to make a quilt this week and my heart is so torn over it. I have fabric, even a US map panel, and we just cannot do it. I do not have the time without a baby or a toddler to sew. It hurts a little to just set the fabric aside, but it is what it is. That is life. Sometimes things get done, but sometimes they just do not. It is such a delicate balance in our homeschooling. My girls are always so gracious about these things, too. I really appreciate their tender, thoughtful hearts in these times of needed mommy grace. Really.

and if you have extra time and talent and want to help them make a quilt, the fabric is still sitting in a basket, just waiting to be a quilt someday, any day.

Week 21: Robert Fulton, Sink and Float, Fruit of the Spirit

Week 21

Robert Fulton

We learned about Robert Fulton in The Story of the U.S book this week.
He invented the steamboat, which the girls enjoyed coloring on their notebooking page and also crafting a little paper example to play with, as well.

these origami style steamboats were very fun (and easy) to create

You may notice that I am correcting a bit more of the handwriting and punctuation these days. I think they are ready for that correction and handling it well, while still having fun learning about our history as a country. I also noted how wonderful their coloring was this week. I was proud of them for taking their time and doing their best work Coloring can be something they rush to get done but I can always tell when they take time to slow down and try to create something special.

State Studies

We completed two more state sheets

Indiana

and Mississippi

and adding them to the growing stack of states we have completed.

Sink or Float

We had fun with our experiments this week. I found a simple sink and float printout online for free. We used one sheet to cut up (and laminate) to label our result jars on our tray and one to write out both our predictions and our results. We gathered objects in our schoolroom for our experiment and took turns placing them in our jar of water, one by one, jotting down the results as we went. 

Here is what our tray looked like when we had finished. My girls did really well predicting most of these objects, which was really surprising to me, since we have not talked a lot about this topic.

In the end, whether or not an object will float or sink depends on its own density, and the density of the liquid it is placed in.

Making Juice

We read some of our Science in the Kitchen book, experimenting with fruit. We learned about plant cells and how much water they hold. 

In plant cells, the vacuoles are much larger than in animal cells. When a plant cell has stopped growing, there is usually one very large vacuole. Sometimes that vacuole can take up more than half of the cell's volume. The vacuole holds large amounts of water.

The girls squeezed some orange segments to see how much juice those segments held. We also observed  how the orange pieces looked after the juice was removed. 

Next, we gathered several different fruit to see how much juice each would have
 and how hard it would be to extract it. 

There was a lot of squeezing, mashing and banging going on in my kitchen, all while a happy baby and toddler enjoyed snacks of leftovers.... and pulp.

and here is what we ended up with in the end.

The best part is my girls (and littles) ate or drank all of our experiment so nothing was wasted.

Jesus the Vine

We learned about Jesus as the Vine this week. On Sunday, we were fighting a virus and needed to stay home from worshiping with our church family, so I thought it would give us a perfect opportunity to create a few special crafts and reread what we had learned this week in our Bible lessons.

We created two crafts to review the story of 

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego 
(you can read about their story in Daniel 3)

these sweet crafts can be found here 

They were really easy to put together. It was simply coloring, cutting, piecing together, and gluing.

I found the idea for this cute puppet theater here.
The girls really enjoyed these! My preschooler also really liked this craft. 

Fruit of the Spirit

We also created these watercolor paintings with punched out "grapes", each with a fruit of the spirit written on them.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 

Galatians 5:22-23

I always love how unique my girls' pictures are, just like how God created them, unique and beautiful.

This week was not how I planned, but it was a very fruitful week.

to give you a little more detail on where and what we are studying

you can check out our classroom reveal HERE

and our curriculum  for 2014-2015 HERE

 and Week One here