Another Homeschool Year Begins

 

We've started another homeschool year. 

Avril is in 11th grade. 

Adele is in 8th. 

The girls started online classes last week. They both take art with Delightful Art Co. and Literature with House of Humane Letters, and Avril takes Speech and Debate with Kepler/ Colorado Christian College. 

This week is what I'm calling the "Pre-Week." We've started reading some of the texts we will be reading together aloud everyday like the Bible (chronologically) and Land of Hope (for American History) and The Roar on the Other Side (for Poetry), and the girls are doing some of the their independent work.  

Adele is reading The Phantom Tollbooth. Avril's started Chemistry, etc.  

Next week, we'll begin the complete schedule. We'll start reading everything we plan to read together every morning (including Shakespeare/ Plutarch), and the girls will start all their independent work like math, etc. 

It's been lovely having the freedom to ease into the school year adding a little more each week until we adjust to the full schedule. 

 

Homeschool Planning is Difficult and Time-Consuming But Invaluable

Arcus and I are spending a lot of time together in my homeschool classroom where his cage is, because I'm at the table, surrounded by books, working on a detailed plan for our next year of homeschooling. 

It's a lot of work to make my own plan! 

This will be our second year homeschooling without CC, but this is the first year I am making my plans with little to no reference to my old CC guides. 

I know many homeschool moms have been making their own plans from the beginning of their homeschool journey, so the work involved is no surprise to them. 

But for more than a decade, we got our homeschool plans from CC, and we were very happy do whatever we needed to do to follow their plans (as far as was humanly possible) to be a part of our beloved CC community.  

That worked for us and blessed us for many years, in fact. 

But even as a diligent CC parent and Challenge director, and I was very diligent, I often felt off balance and back on my heels, because I was always discovering what someone else had planned for me and my children.

As often as I read my guides and as carefully as I ever studied them, I was simply in the position of accommodating myself always to someone else's purpose and vision for every single assignment all year long. 

This was, in fact, exhausting and often exasperating. 

Now, even though it is difficult to make my own plans at the start, there are already some true advantages occurring to me as I work it all out for myself. 

First of all, I am moving forward into this homeschool year knowing exactly what I am doing and why and how.

I know the plan "like the back of my hand," down to the details and purpose of each assignment, and I am entering this year with a peace and a confidence that I didn't experience when I was getting my plans, as good as they were, premade.

Second, I would still consider our homeschool plans very challenging, even rigorous, but the amount of work will never venture into the impossible or the absurd.   

As a business, CC probably has no incentive to cut anything from their curriculum that may add to the value and appeal to their product, and they want to provide more than enough work for anyone/everyone in their programs, so one solution to the constant dilemma of too much work for many CC families was/is to "scale" or "taylor" and simply do less than what is assigned in the guides week to week. 

Now I can simply scale as I plan! 

My plans for this coming year are challenging. We'll have to be as disciplined and diligent as ever, and we will still need to stretch to accomplish it all. But my plans are much more humane to begin with, so we won't be demoralized by the amount of work, and we'll likely have the satisfaction of finishing our school work every week. 

The final and major positive to making my own plan is that we will finally be doing a lot of work together. 

When we were in CC and I was directing a Challenge level and the girls were in their age-assigned Challenge levels, we'd all be working in the same room, but we were each doing very separate work. 

I became more and more conscious of this fact and less and less comfortable with the reality of what CC was doing to our lives and even our homeschool. 

Much of the time, my daughters, who are best friends, were too busy doing their separate Challenge work to engage with each other over the ideas they were encountering during the school days for long. 

In fact, much of the time, I was too busy working for CC as a director or an SR to engage in my own homeschool for long before I had to get back to my CC work.  

So this year, we will read Scripture and Shakespeare together, study poetry together, and read American History together. 

The girls are in different levels of math and Latin, of course, so they will still have some independent work to do. 

But whatever we can do together, we will. 

I am certainly living with the consequences the choice to leave CC. 

Now I am forced into making plans to accommodate my own vision for our homeschool. 

So it is taking hours and hours of planning up front. 

But for once, I am actually giving myself entirely to the work of making a plan, and I will continue to be free to give myself entirely to our homeschool this year.      

In many ways, all this planning is proving an invaluable blessing. 

I have taken ownership of my homeschool, and I earnestly believe I will be leading my precious daughters in learning together better than ever before. 

Homeschool Update- Learning Continues Without CC and Through Summer

We are still doing some homeschool work through the early summer. 

In the photo above, both girls are doing their Latin. Adele is following my old Challenge A guide from Classical Conversations, but she's going much slower through all the same content. Avril is following my old Challenge 2 schedule, but we are also tailoring the work so that she does less Latin everyday. 

The girls are not in the same Henle book, but they enjoy working together, fellowshiping or commiserating as they work. Their attitude towards Latin depends on their mood and/or how hard the new material is at any given moment. I come in and help as needed, but Avril is often Adele's go-to helper. They work fairly independently, but I check their work at least a few times a week to make sure it's progressing and correct. 

This was the first year in twelve that we did not join a Classical Conversations group for support, so we did not have to follow their timing. For this year, we followed my old CC guides, but we made changes as often as we wanted to, and we usually took longer to finish everything. 

Sometimes, I feared we were not making good time, but as the year went on, I realized that those CC schedules for the schoolwork are, in fact, arbitrary, imposed on members because of the need to help community function. 

One of the real positives of homeschooling without Classical Conversations has been that we have the freedom to finally do what is absolutely best for us as far as timing goes. Who says you have to be done with your science fair project in one-two months? One real benefit of taking months to complete the project is that the science research, experiments, and conversations have gone on and on, and they became a more natural part of our everyday lives. How is that a negative? 

So taking it all slower was decidedly positive for everyone even though, yes, we are still working into June. But no one cried this year (including me) because they had too much CC stuff to do in one week along with all the other things our family was trying to do. 

Now, as we finish with math books, geography plans, or biology texts, the girls just stop that subject altogether until fall, so their school days get lighter and lighter as we go further into summer. By July, the girls should be done with everything, and we should enjoy a nice break through a few weeks of July and early August until we start again with next year's work. 

Next year will look very different. I don't plan to use my old Challenge guides as a base like I did this year. I'll be venturing into making my own plans, combining my favorite CC resources with many other excellent resources to make my own plan.  

One Room Homeschool

Adele will often go to Avril for help with Latin. She doesn't have to go to her sister. She could come to me. But she likes going to her sister. And it's fun for me to watch them together discussing, laughing, commiserating. This picture represents what I love about homeschooling. There's no competition or compulsion. Learning is something we do together as a way of life, and those of us who are further along are constantly helping those still coming along the way and gaining even more mastery as we help them. 

Let Them Bake Cake!

Adele's reading "A Gathering of Days" for our homeschool right now. She came across a cake recipe in the book that she wanted to try, so I let her.  We're able to do more of that sort of thing since we aren't working on a homeschool community schedule that demands we finish a certain amount of material in a given week. Now that we're homeschooling solo, we can set our own limits on the week doing more or less, depending on what we want. 

In general, I'm letting the girls do more cooking and baking now, but not only that, I'm also asking/ assigning them to cook or bake something consistently as part of of their chores or schoolwork, depending on how the recipe fits into our day.

Looking back on the years homeschooling their older sister, I wish I had allowed her to cook and bake more, but she had so much homeschool work to do in a certain amount of time to be ready for our homeschool community meeting once a week that I couldn't imagine adding cooking or baking to her schedule. It would have been cruel to add more. 

But she might have been more prepared for adult life with more consistent practice. Though she is cooking and baking well anyway. She made black bean soup and tomatillo salsa for the family just a few days ago. So, as it goes, one can always learn things later, of course. 

But I would have had more help with the cooking and baking once she had learned to cook. That's the thing about Mom insisting on doing it herself. Mom ends up being the only who can do stuff, and that's no good for Mom or anyone else. 

So that's been one of the greatest blessings of letting go and letting the younger girls get in there and cook and bake (and make messes) in the kitchen more- there are simply more cooks and more baked goods in the house! And the more often they do the same thing, the better they get at it, and the easier it is on me, because the messes usually get smaller and smaller as they become more experienced. 

Paint Your Way Through Biology

Avril's taking another semester of Paint Your Way through Biology with Delightful Art Co. 

She makes a beautiful page like this weekly, incorporating art with the biology she's studying this year. 

Biology is full of facts, but it's all so beautiful! 

It would wrong not to take time to notice that. 

So I'm glad her ability to see the beauty in Biology is being nurtured right along with learning all the content and facts. 

Note: She's working through Apologia's Biology, doing some labs, keeping a lab journal, writing a few, formal lab reports, and she's also reading the text/ watching the videos of Devotional Biology as well.

 

Grandma's Autoharp

Dwayne's mom (Grandma Karen) gave the kids her old (but like-new) autoharp. Avril's piano/ guitar teacher taught her how to tune it, and gave her a quick lesson on how to play it. She's been playing and singing with it consistently this week. Our house is filling up with instruments! But the Bible says a wise woman's house is filled with "rare and beautiful treasures" and musical instruments qualify as treasures in my book. 

Collected images of our homeschool this week:

 

Paint Your Way Through Art History

Pictures of two of Avril's recent projects in Paint Your Way Through Art History at Delightful Art Co. 

The first project is a copy of Durer's "Saint Jerome in His Study." 

The second is a copy of "The Oxbow" by Thomas Cole. 

She'll be getting college credit for this class through Bryant College. 

Paint Your Way Through Latin

Adele is in Paint Your Way Through Latin, an online art class hosted by Delightful Art. Co. In her most recent class, they painted a mural found in Pompeii. 

Homeschool Science Fair (without the fair)

Adele is doing a science fair project without the fair, since we are no longer a part of a homeschool co-op that does a science fair. 

We still aren't sure what Adele's specific science fair question will be or what her experiment will look like. 

That will come later. 

For now, Adele is interested in preserving cut flowers, so that's the topic we are researching everyday more and more in depth. 

As we sit together and search for sources and read through information, we naturally ask more and more questions about the specifics involved with the topic, and we write those questions down, too. 

So, after only a few days of research, we already have several questions to answer. 

So at this point, we aren't afraid we won't know what to do next; We have enough questions already to keep us busy for days, and I'm sure more questions will arise.

This research portion of the project may take weeks. 

Adele has started keeping handwritten research notes (and she also records all the new research questions that come up) in a composition book. 

After a Google search using a few key words or phrases about the topic or questions, we click on articles or sites that seem promising and legitimate. 

After a brief scan of the website or article, I can usually tell if a source has valuable information that answers all or even part of one or more of our questions about her topic. 

At that point, we read the content together and we discuss it and I explain complicated things (if I can.) 

Note: If I can't explain difficult content, I just tell her I can't explain it or I don't understand it (yet), and then I have the opportunity to model to her how to keep going in the face of uncertainty. 

Once we have read a source and we know what content applies to her research topic directly, I will either print the article and highlight the content that needs to go into her notebook, or I will copy and paste words and phrases from an article or website into a word.doc that I print for her. 

Then she hand copies all the important notes and info into her notebook. 

She's also keeping track of the specific sources and the relevant website addresses, so she can make a bibliography. 

It's a very time consuming process! 

And, as you can see, I help her a lot. 

Part of what I am doing is showing her how to research, and that is something that needs to be modeled elbow to elbow. 

After the first day of research, after more than an hour of taking notes by hand, Adele still said, "This is fun!" 

I agreed with her that it is fun, indeed!

It's fun to learn about the specific content she wants to research- flower preservation. 

But it's also fun to learn that you can learn about anything that you are curious about by simply being willing to ask and answer questions about the topic. 

One of the main things I want her to take away from this project is the knowledge that she can learn anything if she's willing to do the work. 

Visit to The Met

We met up with our friends at The Met. 

The Met is one of the only field trips we ever take, and we like to take it a few times a year. 

We like to find works of art that are our old favorites. 

And we always something new that strikes us. 

I recognized this head across the room, because I'm reading Aristotle for grad school right now! He is taking up all the extra space in my head, and I couldn't be happier about it! 

And I'll be reading Socrates soon! 

Illuminated manuscripts are always some of my favorite things to see. The vibrancy of the colors is astounding. Even the best printers can't match these colors after hundreds of years. 

Taking a break after walking around for hours

Avril recently painted her own imitation of this painting in her Art History class through Delightful Art Co. 

We met this lovely artist named Dwight and purchased one of his prints, which he signed and dedicated to our family.

This is a photo we've been taking and retaking for years now- the three girls in front of the three graces. 

This field trip of all field trips never is a waste and never grows old to us. 

Gather and Display Homeschool Work

I like to display my daughters' homeschool work on our mantle. 

I purchased a few display stands, and I use them to display the most recently finished essays, visuals, artwork, etc. 

All the artwork from a certain class goes in the same folder with the newest art on top. 

All the history essays and their visuals go in another folder. 

All the literature essays go in another. 

All the science research reports and visuals go in another. 

This way, by the end of the year, in almost every subject or class, there's a "book" worth keeping and rereading, and as you turn the pages, you step your way back to beginning of the school year. 

Gathering their work into "books" and displaying their work is a wholesome way to encourage healthy pride in their work.  

It also provides a means of accountability.

If your homeschool students know their work will go into a book that they will keep and look at again and again, and if they know others will see their work and engage with them about it, they tend to care more and do a better job. 

This is also a practical way for the whole family to share in what they are doing and continue enjoying their work long after it is complete. 

One of my daughters' favorite things is to go find and read through the book that their older sister has made back when she went through a subject. 

Their dad is usually at work all day, but this way, he can take down their essays at his leisure and read them and discuss the ideas with them when it is convenient or interesting for him to do so. 

Displaying their work, too, is a way to fill our home with "rare and beautiful treasures" like Scripture says. 

Artifacts made by our own hands make some of the rarest and most beautiful treasures in my opinion. 

The mantle works best in our home, but you could choose another location that works better for you if you like this idea and want to implement it, too. 

How to Do Science Fair At Home

We are no longer a part of our Classical Conversations group, but I still want Adele to complete a Science Fair project for the sake of all the great things she will learn from the process. 

We often buy the cheap bouquets of flowers at the grocery store and have them around the house, usually in the center of our kitchen or classroom tables, sometimes in the hallway like the photo shows above.  

Fresh flowers don't need to be fancy to add an exponential amount of beauty and joy to your home (and homeschool.)

Adele expressed curiosity about the powder we add to the water to keep flowers fresh. 

She wondered what it is made of? 

Could we make our own with stuff around the house? 

Could we make something that works even better than what comes with the bouquets we buy at the store? 

So that's where our research will begin. 

I'm not sure what her research question, hypothesis, or experiment will be yet, but maybe after enough research and information, those things will come forth naturally. 

This is how my older daughter, Avril, went about doing Science Fair. 

She researched something she was interested in at the time (invisible ink) until she had enough information and made enough connections to form a hypothesis and design a custom experiment to test it. 

 

Les Mis

We coordinated with our dear friends to see Les Mis together yesterday. The parents took up four seats in one row. Our kids took up the four seats right in front of us on the next row. Afterwards, we all went out to dinner. We left our little kids out of this event, since we knew that the content of this musical was too grown-up for them. 

Some of the songs were very familiar, and I had a basic story line in my mind, but it has been years since hearing the songs or seeing the film, and I had never seen the whole story played out on Broadway. Therefore, I was totally blown away by the spiritual elements and all the redemptive messages. 

From the first note of the orchestra, I was captured and transported. Les Mis is going to be competing with Hadestown as a favorite musical. 

And having just read about justice and equity and forgiveness in Aristotle's Rhetoric this week and then rereading it all yesterday morning before leaving for the play, the timing of the story could not have been more perfect. 

Obviously, I believe in mercy and forgiveness in my mind, because of what Christ has done for my soul and all the Scripture I have read through the years. But interestingly, after reading Aristotle this week, something huge and monumental shifted in my heart. Aristotle actually demonstrates through argument how mercy is quite reasonable given all the reasons why people do what they do, and the fact that we all commit injustices. No one is without sin, which leads back to Jesus and the Scriptures and all I know, because of God's forgiveness to me and His goodness in my own life. So this musical contrasting justice and mercy really landed for me yesterday in a way that only God could orchestrate. 

The wonder of God's perfect justice and mercy astounds me!  

Sort Your To-Do List

How do you manage all the housework and homeschool at the same time?! 

Here's a tip that's been working well for me. 

Keep a to-do list. 

When something comes to your attention and it needs to be done, write it down! 

Don't necessarily do the thing right then. 

Just write it down. 

I write everything down all day long! 

It all goes on the same list on my phone.  

That way, I don't have the burden of remembering anything/ everything that I have to do, because it's all written out. 

I can move on with my regular routine and refer to my list later when I have more time. 

Next, as I go through my day and refer to my list, I naturally sort the list, moving the things I really want or really need to do next to the top of my list, and letting the other stuff that can wait fall to the bottom. 

The sorting happens as I delete, add, and refer to my list a few times everyday. 

I can refer to this list when there's free time throughout the day and the decision about what to do next has already been sorted out. 

Today, the main goals that had risen to the top of my list included: 

Call the lab back and pay my bill

Read the next debate chapter with Avril 

Make bone broth 

Refill the soap container in the downstairs bath 

Clean the bird cage and bird perch

Now, I've done about one million other things today in addition to these half-dozen things. I'm constantly doing all the usual stuff like dishes and laundry and all the usual homeschool... 

but these were the things that came to mind, that weighed me down, that I really needed to remember to do and needed some help to deliberately focus on getting done and/ or fitting into all the in-between moments. 

As I complete an item on the list, it gets deleted, and that's an awesome feeling, watching the top of the list disappear. 

Now that I'm done with the extra stuff I decided to do today, I'm putting my feet up and enjoying the feeling of accomplishment. 

The things I decided to do today are all done! 

Obviously, there's more regular work to do today like dinner prep and clean-up and more laundry, but that's all the regular stuff. 

More items are being added to the list all the time...

But I've decided that all those items can wait until tomorrow or even the next day. 

Note: Another major benefit of keeping and constantly sorting your to-do list is that over time with more and more experience, you learn what you actually can and can't reasonably do in one day. 

I've learned to give myself a break for all the stuff that amounts to "too much" and can't be helped until tomorrow. 

So sort your to-do list. 

It's a mental and emotional game-changer. 

Worship

Music has been an essential part of our homeschool curriculum for many years. I make it a priority to ensure that girls have time to practice piano and/or guitar every single homeschool day. They may not be doing Latin their whole life, but they'll probably be playing music and singing forever.  At this point, they are both on the church worship teams. Sometimes they are even assigned together on the same week. They often practice together, and this always brings me joy.  

How We Do Debate Without a Homeschool Community

We decided not to be a part of our beloved CC community this year, but I still wanted my teen to learn debate. So how would we do debate without a homeschool community? After all, one of the major benefits of CC community was that it kept us accountable to do all the things that we weren't naturally bent to do like debate, and Latin, and logic... This had been true for years, so would we find a way to do debate on our own?

I did some research on debate curriculums, then previewed, and finally purchased the NCFCA handbook for Value Debate and my tenth grader and are working through it together. We have chosen our own issue to debate and work through both sides of it, learning as we go. 

We definitely need to practice self-discipline and do this ourselves without the support (and compulsion) that community provided. But it's working. We work through the lessons together, reading aloud, and taking time to talk everything through. We research and discuss ideas and research some more... 

It's nice not to be rushed. In previous years, we were working on a community schedule rather than our own. Debate was always a hectic pain. So it's nice not to have my teen stressed out about debate. She used to consider my questions and advice an imposition, delay, or hinderance to getting all her work done in time for community, etc. Now that I'm my daughter's only debate partner and teacher, and now that her work doesn't have to be done by a certain day next week, we are both relaxing, embracing and even enjoying the time spent wrestling through the issue mind to mind and heart to heart. 

The NCFCA handbooks are amazing resources, and I wish I had found them years ago instead of struggling through debates in previous years with the resources we had then. I thought we all just hated debate for years, but I think we just hated being asked to do something without enough information. 

Obviously, without a community to join in debate, my daughter may never have the opportunity to debate another student live. But I'm not sure I consider that I huge loss. My major goals for doing debate are to practice seeking truth, thinking through both sides of an issue, researching, organizing thoughts, and applying what we find out to our own hearts and minds first, and all that is happening on a deeper level now. 

I trust that this authentic practice in debate will bear fruit, and when my daughter finds it necessary to stand up and speak up, she'll have what it takes.  

Now, we practice debate simply for its own sake, and we are finding it truly worthwhile. 

 

How to Manage Housework While Homeschooling (with some advice on life in general)

Lately, I've been killing it as far as my housekeeping goes. I'm just saying... 

I'm on top of things like I've never been before and my husband keeps saying things like, "I love our home," at the same time I'm thinking that I love our home, too. 

Or he says, "You have made this home so beautiful. You know that?" at the same time I'm sipping coffee with my feet up contently enjoying the work of my hands. 

This post has been two decades in the making. So here are some hard-earned tips to take your housekeeping to the next level. 

But don't keep reading if you already have no idea how someone with a brain might want to talk about cleaning or hear about cleaning. Go watch a make-up tutorial video or something. This post is not for you. 

But if you've moved to the edge of your seat and maybe even leaned in closer to your screen to hear what I have to say about housekeeping, this post is for you. 

First, you have to establish a routine for basic housework morning and evening-

I have had a morning and evening cleaning routine that I've kept for almost two decades. The basis of my morning and evening routines came from Fly Lady.  She offers suggestions for what housekeeping jobs to do and when to do them. If you don't have any cleaning routines established at all, I suggest that you begin with Fly Lady's morning and evening routines (and a few other jobs she suggests) until you establish your own morning and evening cleaning habits. 

Next, try to create a plan for ALL the other housework that needs to get done so you can do it before it gets totally out of hand-

I do not suggest following someone else's schedule for the big housework jobs-not even Fly Lady's. I have never had success trying to follow someone else's schedule, because I always found I was cleaning something that was already clean while something else that was dirty had to wait till next week if I was working according to someone else's schedule. I just couldn't do that. Also, I do not suggest making a list of everything you aspire to get done and trying to meet your own ideal goals. The list you make will probably be too big and unreasonable. Instead, simply start paying attention to when things really need to be done and then do them, but then, right then, make a note of what you did and when you did that job. I use my phone to make these notes. Do you notice the toilet is looking gross and it's time to clean it? Pull out your phone and make a note. Write something like "Clean the toilet." And if it's been at least a month since you did that, write "Once a month." Then clean the toilet. (And maybe wipe off your phone, if needed.) By taking these notes of what needs to be done and when you do it, you will eventually create a routine for ALL the housework that needs to be done at a time that really works for you. 

Give yourself lots of grace-

For almost twenty years, just the basic housework was getting done everyday with my morning and evening cleaning routines. But those other, bigger cleaning jobs, like scrubbing tubs, washing sheets and blankets and curtains, and mopping floors, etc. were getting done at random times throughout the weeks and months when something was so dirty or dusty that it could no longer be ignored and simply cried out for attention (or we were having company and we were panicking to get things presentable.) This was because I was nursing babies, working a part-time here or there, or I just really needed to start our homeschool day, so I just couldn't do as much cleaning as was actually needed. 

Consider what else might be taking time, attention, and energy-

Are you actually wasting lots of time? I used to be spend an inordinate amount of time on Facebook. I never planned to spend a lot of time on there, but without fail, I'd usually ended up staying longer than I sat down to stay. "Just five minutes..." was usually more like twenty minutes before I realized it. I justified this use of time, because I was "seeing" friends and "connecting" there. But, when I finally gave it up, I found that I actually answered the phone and talked when people called instead of letting it go to voicemail, or I called people and talked live and in real time. In my experience, those have been more meaningful connections, and I have felt much less isolated and lonely, more loved and loving towards others. Now, I usually call someone daily and text several, specific friends or relatives throughout the day. I even have more time to actually plan to go to lunch with people. So consider how something like Facebook (or something else that you might be dong to "relax") is actually stealing precious time, energy, and attention that you really desire to give to yourself, or your family, or your friends in other ways. 

Are you trying to do too much?

Are you doing too much to still manage to have the time, energy, and attention to simply clean your house? If you are type-A like me, you probably want to do it all. For many years, I was leading and teaching at our beloved co-op. I liked the job. It was way more interesting than a million other things I could or maybe should have been doing, so I didn't mind the hours it took from me away from other things (like housework). At some point, after one million small and a few really big internal shifts, I perceived that the job had become far too costly to me. Of course, I should have known that every "yes" is a "no" to something else, and I think knew that, but I wasn't really conscious of what the job was doing to my life. I realized I had been saying "no" to some of the most basic things like friendship and housework to say "yes" to something more appealing. I suppose the appealing choice could be the right thing for you, but if you can't manage your home or homeschool well, I suggest things might be way out of order. they were for me. I know that I stayed home from a career, so I could actually work in my home and homeschool my children. When I couldn't even do that (and finally realized I really wanted to), I killed the job that gave me meaning for the job that is more meaningful.  I just did not have any margin for these good, simple, human things when I was spending my time, energy, and attention on other (arguably good) things instead. 

So after all those tips, here's my recipe for housework: 

Sundays- 

I have found that Sunday afternoons are for perfect for mopping and speciality laundry. 

I only make one meal after church. It's either lunch or dinner, and it's usually on the simple side. Today, it was grilled cheese and made-from-scratch tomato soup for lunch. After that meal, we all clean up the kitchen from lunch, empty and load the dishes, and then we start picking up the chairs and (most of) the stuff on the floors. Then I set the Roomba to clean all the floors, because Dwayne bought me one as a gift. (We call our Roomba "Alice" like the housekeeper from Brady Bunch.) At that point, I also gather the bath mats, or pull some curtains down, or gather up all the dirty towels from all the bathrooms, or gather the blankets from the girls' beds and the couches, and I wash a load of something "special" that isn't in the dirty clothes baskets that we wash throughout the regular week. Then I go put my feet up or take a nap or read and enjoy the rest as I listen to the hum of the machines as they do the work. I try to limit the housework I do on Sundays to the basic morning and evening chores and these two jobs, so that I can observe a day of rest and deliberately cease the usual amount of striving that I do during the week. 

Daily in the morning and in some cases, again in the evening-

Feed and give fresh water to Arcus (our parrot)

Sweep kitchen 

Unload and load the dishwasher

Recycling/ Trash

Rotate the laundry- fold or hang what's in the dryer, put anything that's in the washer in the dryer (or hang it to dry), start a new load of dirty cloths, and put away all the clothes 

Make master bed

Every other day- (In addition to morning chores, every other day, we add some of these and so, these chores generally get done every other day)

Sweep living room, hall, downstairs bathroom, and/ or classroom

Change Arcus's (our parrot's) cage liners

Empty little trashes and replace their little trash bags

Gather hangers from the closets and bring them to laundry room so they are ready for more laundry

Once a week- (We add one or more of these chores to our morning routine and so, we get them all done at least once a week)

Empty stuff baskets (little foldable, cube-shaped containers on every floor where I throw all the stuff the girls leave laying around the house)

Wash cage or bird perch

Sweep upstairs hall and stairs

Sweep stairs going to basement and the basement living room

Water plants/ Weed garden path and/ or beds (if needed)

Deep clean one bathroom 

Vacuum all the rugs

Once a week as I cook dinner- 

While I am cooking dinner one night a week, I'll cook other foods like boiled eggs or quinoa salad or chicken salad, etc. (These are foods that are nice to have on hand for snacks and for healthy food on-the- go. Since I am already cooking, I just cook these things once a week while making dinner.) 

On Friday-

Inventory the fridge, freezers, and cabinets (So that I know what I already have and need to use up)

Plan meals for the week and make a shopping list for groceries (I usually plan at least four meals, sometimes five, knowing that some night, I'll choose to breakfast for dinner or cook egg sandwiches or something simple in place of a more formal meal.)

On Saturday- 

Clean out the fridge (as needed)

Organize the groceries into the fridge, freezer, or cabinets

Do any special loads of laundry that need to get done

Clean a special room that isn't normally cleaned 

Every two weeks on Saturday-

Wash everyone's sheets

Once a month-

Wash comforters and quilts on everyone's beds (Usually this happens on Saturday/ Sundays)

Wipe off all screens in the house

Dust everywhere

Every three months-

Wash curtains

Twice a year-

Clean out each closet or cabinet or drawer and purge old and unused stuff and reorganize 

Notice that I don't have every job here yet. So this is still a work in progress. But I am enjoying unparalleled success in my housekeeping and peace and joy in my housework, so this plan of action is really working for me. 

It has honestly been a delightful relief to work out this schedule for myself. 

This is what is working for me, but I hope sharing it will bless you. 

Images and Notes on Our Homeschool Days

Here is a random sampling of some real-to-life images of our typical homeschool days in this season. 

Note: I didn't rearrange anything to make these pictures prettier. I wanted to capture images of what our days actually look like right now. 

And I did not manage to capture images of every single part of our curriculum, but here is sampling taken as I moved through the house this week. 

In this picture, my 10th grader is reading a portion of "Classical Music for Dummies" for a short paper on a composer while she's eating her lunch. She and I had both been working on various other things at different chairs at the table, so you can see that it gets quite messy. We clean up in time for dinner. 

Since the girls are old enough to work independently and make their own lunches, we don't always eat lunch together. But when we do, we usually listen to a podcast or an audio book. We started listening to Adorning the Dark by Andrew Peterson the other day.

The girls are in a few art classes through Delightful Art Co., and I find that adding so much art to their lives is breathing life and meaning into all the more academic work they do. So they are constantly making new art, and naturally, it usually always applies directly or indirectly to something they are learning in another subject. I've put these floating shelves in the classroom. They serve a dual purpose- their art has a place to rest and dry, but it can also be displayed and enjoyed for a few days at a time. 

The oldest is watching a Devotional Biology video in this pic. She's actually working through two biology texts this year- Apologia with labs and Devotional Biology- reading the text and watching the lectures. 

The youngest is reading The Secret Garden and eating her lunch of choice. She'll end of practicing rhetoric with the content in this book and writing an essay using The Lost Tools of Writing. 

Here she is drawing a map step by step with the help of "How to Draw -" by Kristin Draeger on the iPad. She's learning to draw all the countries of the world by memory. 

One of the my oldest daughter's art classes is "Paint Your Way Through Biology," so this is a beautiful painting of an animal cell and its parts sitting up to dry. 

The girls practice piano and/or guitar daily. They are helping on worship teams at church, so that often means they have a lot of practice to get prepared. Music is another thing I am very consciously letting them make the time for. Interestingly, they always manage to get the more academic work done, too, eventually, no matter how long they practice music. 

More painting, following a live teacher on the laptop. Here's that painting of autumn leaves finished and on display. The mosaic is my younger daughter's art project in her online art class for this week- a mosaic of an autumn scene, too. 

 More reading

These images certainly don't represent everything they do. 

There aren't any pictures of the girls doing their Latin, Math, Logic, Writing...  but that happens almost daily, too. 

I hope these images demonstrate that school doesn't have to look anything like traditional school. 

And learning can be done anywhere for its own sake and as a way of life. 

Arcus, our sun conure, supervises all from one perch or another throughout the house. He likes to add elements of chaos to keep the girls from getting too bored, too focused, or too comfortable at any given time.