Managing 5 Homeschool Students

Monday was our first day of school for the 2019-20 school year. Although I did relaxed preschool with E5 last year, this is my first year officially homeschooling all 5 children, and you may be tempted to ask, “How do you do it?” Here’s a general overview of the flow of a “typical” school day.

My alarm rings at 6am. However, children (boys, in particular) are required to be inaudible and invisible until 7am, because I need that hour. If I don’t start out the day in Bible reading and prayer, I am apt to lose focus on who and whose I am. I go for a run on Monday and Thursday mornings, returning home around 7:30, and on other days I read or work on various projects. (My current project is coming up with songs for all the memory verses our Community Bible Study class will be learning this year).

I try to serve breakfast at 8am. By this time everyone is usually awake, and if they aren’t, there are plenty of volunteers available to poke the sleepyheads. When it comes to meal planning, being boring is a key strategy: each day has its own breakfast so predictably that if I ever serve eggs fried instead of scrambled on Wednesday, protests erupt. While we eat, we listen to a 6-minute “Classics for Kids” music podcast. I haul out the books for Circle Time once I’ve finished eating.

Circle Time serves the same purpose for the children that my early morning quiet time serves for me. I have consolidated the Bible, prayer, and poetry sections of all 3 Sonlight programs we use into a reasonable selection with broad appeal. In general, when we’ve finished reading, we sing a different hymn each week, though it slipped my mind this week.

After Circle Time, it’s time for jurisdictions. One of the huge challenges of homeschooling is that your home is your classroom and the students never leave. No paid janitor, either. Each child has a daily jurisdiction: kitchen, living room/hallway, children’s bathroom, bedroom, and outside. Some are easier than others – you can count on groans from the child whose turn it is to help in the kitchen each day! I have checklists for each area inside sheet protectors handed out at the end of Circle Time, which everyone except E5 is able to complete independently, so I divide my time between redirecting E5 and helping whoever is cleaning the kitchen. When the house is reasonably tidy, I am able to think a lot better.

Without checklists, I don’t know how I would manage. Once each child has completed the jurisdiction checklist, it’s time for the school assignment checklist. I have divided up all the tasks each child needs to do each day into “dependent” and “independent” (or mostly so) categories. Children work from their “independent” category while I am busy elsewhere. For my part, I have my own checklist and work my way up from youngest to oldest. E5 has no “independent” category – being in kindergarten, he needs my undivided attention as he learns to print, read, do basic arithmetic, and practice his instruments. (He hasn’t decided between piano and violin yet, so he alternates days practicing). Once E5 is done, H7 has generally exhausted the few tasks for which he is independent (cursive handwriting practice, print copywork, violin practice) and is ready for me to work with him on math, reading, and spelling. Meanwhile, B9 is reading, preparing his dictation assignment, practicing piano, and sometimes starting on his math. I tend to bounce back and forth between B9 and H7’s math assignments. Given how advanced B9 is, it can be a bit of mental whiplash between explaining patterns on a 100 chart for H7 and deriving fractional exponents for B9, but it works pretty well.

At some point, either both E5 and H7 or B9 finish all their tasks except listening to me read to them, so we settle down on the futon and enjoy our Sonlight books. E5 and H7 are sharing Core and Science A this year. B9 is using Core and Science D on a 4-day schedule, with Holling Clancy Holling’s beautifully illustrated classics as a bouncing off point for writing assignments and further enrichment in geography, history, and science for the 5^th day. Sonlight is everyone’s favorite part of the school day, including mine. That finishes up all 3 younger boys’ school work for the day.

Around lunch time, P15 and E13 are winding up their independent work. They are sharing Sonlight American History 120 and American Historical Literature 130. On Monday I had them take turns reading the books, and after some bitter complaints about the logistics, they came up with an ideal solution: they go into P15’s room and take turns reading aloud to each other. The basic history spine is aimed at approximately a middle school reading level and the literature and history supplements tend to be high school to adult level, so E13 reads the history spine to P15 and she reads the other books to him.

E13 is using an online math program this year, CTC Math, so he doesn’t require my input except for a few minutes at a time when he’s stuck on a problem. He and I have had so much conflict over math, I’m relieved to have an impersonal, neutral program to take my place at the receiving end of most of the angst. His current program is called “Algebra I” and B9’s program is called “Prealgebra”, which is a blessing – even though B9’s program is covering more complicated material, E13’s lifelong math inferiority complex is no longer being stoked by the labels on his math class.

After lunch, we all watch CNN 10, a ten-minute daily news program aimed at students. This is another component that the children ask for and refuse to miss – if we do skip a day, we always make it up. Then it’s on to Sonlight reading and discussion for the older 2. Last year, when ordering Core H, I saw in the catalog the words, “And for the final Sonlight Read-Aloud in all our programs…” and started crying. Then I turned my brain on, washed my face, and decided to pull out some books from each high school program to read aloud to my teens. No one can make me quit reading aloud to them! I love it too much! So, I read their poetry and Bible/apologetics books to them after CNN 10 (except the ones we do during Circle Time), and then we discuss their answers to the questions about the history and literature reading they do without me.

Two years of trying to use Novare science with E13 made him say, “I hate science,” which is absurd. I love Novare because it’s fascinating and well done and I wish it had been available when I was in middle and high school. It works well for P15, who specifically asked for it this year – E13's problem is it’s hard and requires math and writing. I finally realized I needed to try something different with him, so I purchased What If? by Randall Munroe (author of the xkcd comic strip) instead of a formal science program for E13. The subtitle is Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions – questions like, “What if I took a swim in a spent nuclear fuel pool?” or “Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?” Okay, young man, just try to hate science when I read you this book. To supplement, I subscribed to Curiosity Stream, a super inexpensive documentary streaming service. This week, we read “What would happen if the Earth and all terrestrial objects suddenly stopped spinning, but the atmosphere retained its velocity?” and then watched a documentary series on wind, water, and heat and how they affect weather.

Once we’re done with reading, the school day is almost over. I spend 30 minutes giving P15 her Core-Plus math lesson, 10-15 more minutes working on spelling with E13 (I suspect him of being mildly dyslexic; in any case his spelling needs extra attention), and then I discuss E13’s writing assignment and P15’s writing, chemistry, and Arabic assignments with them to make sure everything has made sense. (I don’t know how long my Arabic will be equal to the task of helping P15 clarify any points of confusion, but I’ll cross that wadi when I come to it).

So far, we’ve finished the school day around 3pm each day. And there is no homework – all school was homework anyway – so the children are free to pursue their own interests. Soon we’ll be starting up more extracurriculars. P15 and E13 will be joining a speech & debate club on Monday afternoons, I’ll be spending Tuesday mornings at leader/teacher training for Community Bible Study which starts in September, and in a few weeks the Honolulu Parks & Rec free archery program will begin. I’m also looking into doing a problem-solving math club with our homeschool group and the small private school my church runs, though there are still logistics that need to be worked out. At this point I feel relaxed and confident about how I’m teaching all 5 children, and Lord willing that will continue even as our schedules fill up a bit.

If you homeschool multiple children, what sorts of logistical decisions have you made to streamline your teaching?