I was asked recently on another blog about home schooling more than one child. While it has been covered in the home schooling blog before, I thought I’d share some insight on home schooling five, and some practical tips on how we manage.
Although I think most who normally read this blog know this, by way of reintroduction, I have five kids. While I still maintain that preschool is optional, most of my younger children want to at least read every day. So I will say that I’m home schooling three preschoolers, one gifted first grader and one third grader. How do we manage to pull it together?
I think one thing that veteran homeschoolers understand that sometimes eludes newbies, is that there is a difference between schooling at home and home education. Veteran homeschoolers tend to look at the larger picture rather than compartmentalizing. Home education is woven into every fabric of our lives and so even on days like today where I’m catching up with writing and cleaning to prepare for company next week–there is education going on. I won’t get to cross off anything in their lesson plan books, but they’re still learning and that type of learning does pay dividends.
Another part of this ‘education at home’ outlook tends to over look strict curricular guidelines in favor of lots of reading, and thoroughly understanding the material. To borrow the words of Tamy Duby who I heard in a seminar last year, “Is it really awful to finish biology in two years if by the end of those two years they’ve really, really got it?” It’s not and when you release yourself from any super strict curricular guidelines, you’ll often find that teaching your kids together gets a lot easier.
Likewise, there are no hard and fast rules about what one should learn when in certain subjects. While math and reading are incremental, history, science, and geography are not. For example, a typical course of study in elementary science is to cover, on a basic level, all aspects of general science. My kids are doing my newly self-made science curriculum all together. That means everyone is currently working on the parts of an animal cell. In many subjects you can teach your kids all together.
But the real answer to how to teach several different aged kids at once is to just do it. I don’t home school the way my home schooling buddy does it, and yet I would consider her daughter to be just as well educated as mine. You’ll have hard days and home schooling with babies and toddlers in tow is not easy. But you’ll find your niche and you’ll never regret the effort and investment you put into your child’s education.