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?

First Year of Homeschooling High School

A year ago, I was inordinately intimidated by the idea of homeschooling high school. I’m a lot more relaxed now that we’ve successfully completed P15’s 9^th grade year. (Note: P has just turned 15, she was 14 during her 9^th grade year). It actually wasn’t all that different from what we had done up to this point: the main difference was that I did more recordkeeping.

In Hawaii, a lot of people who have homeschooled their children for many years stop when high school starts. The public school system here won’t accept work done at home as being at a high school level, so if your homeschooled 11^th grader decides she wants to start attending public school, she has to enter as a 9^th grader. Our local Waianae Coast homeschool group is small, and P15 is the oldest child who regularly attends events (which are few and far between). I have one local close friend who homeschools her high schooler, but she lives over 45 minutes away and I only see her once a month or so. Contemplating high school, I felt very much on my own.

I attended the CHOH (Christian Homeschoolers of Hawaii) conference in March 2018, and dog-eared every page in the program containing the words “high school”. My biggest concerns were how to assign grades, how to create a transcript, and how to ensure P15 would look attractive to whatever college she might choose to attend. For me, the most helpful event at the conference was a panel discussion with moms who either were currently homeschooling high schoolers or had already graduated one or more students. Because our homeschool style doesn’t look much like my public school experience, I was feeling at a loss how to assign grades to subjects like history and literature. One of the moms on the panel had also used Sonlight, the literature-based curriculum we’ve used since preschool for history, Bible, and English literature. She explained how she started the school year with a booklist and assigned a certain number of books to be read in order to earn an A, B, etc. Completion of map and timeline assignments, intelligent discussion of the comprehension questions, and a few papers each made up a portion of the history grade. The papers could do double duty for English credit, with reading and discussion of literature counting for a portion as well. This sounded doable!

Armed with a plan for how I would take the work I knew P15 would do and translate it into a single number on a fancy piece of paper, I was ready to plan out the subjects she would study. P15 is in love with history, and she studied two Sonlight history programs: the second year of World History (having completed the first year in 8^th grade) and History of the Christian Church. Literature came along with World History: over 30 works which she read on her own as well as hearing me read some of them aloud to both her and E13. This was actually the first school year since she learned to read where P15 didn’t read all the literature before the beginning of the school year, because she spent the summer between 8^th and 9^th grade working with Child Evangelism Fellowship and didn’t have much free time. But that’s okay, she finished them well before they were scheduled… For math we’ve been using Core-Plus Mathematics, which is teacher-intensive but uses a discovery based approach to introduce topics in algebra, geometry, statistics, and discrete math through a three-year course that replaces the traditional Algebra I – Geometry – Algebra II sequence. We completed Course 1 in 8^th grade, and I optimistically hoped to complete all of Course 2 in 9^th. For science we used Novare Introductory Physics, an algebra-based program that was more rigorous than the conceptual physics I got in high school. (I kept thinking how much easier Caltech would have been for me if I’d had this kind of preparation!) Novare recommends a physics-first approach, since physics is foundational to understanding chemistry, and chemistry is foundational to understanding biology. For Bible, there were 9 books about apologetics and Christian faith and practice included in the 2 history programs from Sonlight, which alone would have been enough for me to assign her a year of credit, but we also studied the book of Acts with Community Bible Study. I added in a light (year-long, but semester credit) study of logical fallacies using TheAmazing Dr. Ransom’s Bestiary of Adorable Fallacies, which personifies each fallacy as a mystical creature, like the Ad Hominem as a raccoon-like beast which sneakily sprays armpit scent on its opponent, making the bystanders think the opponent was the source of the stench. P15 had also started studying Greek in 8^th grade, so I planned to continue with that for a language credit. Well, it's good to have a plan, anyway!

As is always the case, my plans didn’t all work out exactly as I intended. The main reason was the wonderful blessing of a lot of travel. Our family spent 2 weeks of September on Kauai with Ari’s parents, and another 2 weeks of April on the Big Island, also with Ari’s parents. One can’t complain about a free vacation on another island – it is certainly worth skipping or doubling up on some school in order to make it happen. Even with this, we may have been able to come nearer finishing the math book than we did, except for another once-in-a-lifetime travel opportunity exclusive to P15. Ari’s parents, who have been blessed financially, wanted to travel to Israel on a tour with their church. It was designed for couples, and they wanted to bring Ari’s grandmother, who is in her nineties and was widowed 5 years ago, so they asked if we could spare P15 to make up the couple with Grandma. P15 ended up spending a week and a half with her grandparents in Texas before the tour. Having partially overcome the 12-hour time difference between Hawaii and Israel, she then flew to Israel with her grandparents and great-Grandma, spending a week before the tour getting over jet lag and doing their own exploring. They then spent another week on tour, with a few days afterward to spend time with my brother, sister-in-law, and nieces who live in Tel Aviv. So an entire month in February/March was taken up with this marvelous opportunity. P15 found herself much more motivated to study modern Hebrew than ancient Greek given her upcoming travel, so she used the magical world of free language apps to learn the alphabet and some common words and phrases. This came in handy when she was entertaining her 3-year-old cousin who attends Hebrew nursery school: little S announced an animal in Hebrew, and P15 was able to act it out with her. I decided this was worth at least a semester’s foreign language credit.

Even with all that travel, we actually finished all the subjects I intended except math and church history. We did 6 of the 8 units in the math book, and 27 of the 36 weeks of church history, bringing us up to the early 20^th century. P15 plans to read the remainder of the books in the church history program on her own time because she is interested, and Sonlight is dense enough I felt no qualms about giving her a year’s credit for church history even though it was incomplete. As for math, we’ll just start the new school year in Unit 7 of Core-Plus Course 2, and work diligently. Since she covered a fair bit of algebra and geometry in 8^th grade, I again felt justified in giving her a year’s math credit.

It was an intense year, and I am planning a lighter load for 10^th grade. Math will be Core-Plus, finishing Course 2 and doing as much of Course 3 as we can manage (I’ll skip some of the discrete math). For science she’ll study Novare Chemistry, because completing the unit on logarithms in Core-Plus Course 2 leaves her mathematically prepared to understand pH. For history and literature, she and E13 will study US History and US Historical Literature from Sonlight. Bible is again covered by Sonlight, and we will be studying Romans in Community Bible Study. For foreign language, P15 wants to learn Arabic (which will be a little easier for her than if she hadn't studied Hebrew, as they are both Semitic languages). She has been learning the alphabet, and our library offers free Mango language courses online. Of course, my plan might not bear close resemblance to what happens, but I'll assign credit for whatever actually gets done.

On the whole, homeschooling high school has not been a significant uptick in difficulty. The actual course work is harder, but as P15 becomes more independent, the demands on me are not greater in teaching her than in teaching the younger ones. They’re just different in style – more discussion and record keeping, less direct instruction. If you’re considering homeschooling high school, take courage: you can do this!

Fire

The Big Island of Hawaii is much more fiery than Oahu. This past April, Ari’s parents flew us there for a joint vacation with them. The last time I had been on the Big Island was to celebrate P15’s twelfth birthday. At that time, the Kilauea caldera was releasing volcanic fumes, with a crater full of lava that made the sky glow at night and sent chills down my spine – that lava lake hadn’t been there 13 years earlier when I visited with my graduating Caltech Geological and Planetary Sciences class.

 (Kilauea caldera, July 2016)

In the almost 3 years that had passed since P turned 12, a massive volcanic eruption further caved in the caldera in addition to filling in some of the most beautiful reef snorkeling I have seen in my life with brand-new rock. I trembled with awe as we watched the “What Changed” video at the visitor’s center, and my jaw hung open as I stared at the difference in the caldera.

(Kilauea caldera, April 2019)

The bulk of our vacation was a wealth of beautiful, interesting experiences. Ari’s parents watched the children while the 2 of us spent 6 days on our own, boating, hiking, and relaxing, and we had some delightful adventures all together as well. On the afternoon before the day we were to leave, we received a reminder that this was a geologically active island in the form of a 5.3 magnitude earthquake that rocked the house for several seconds. It did no obvious damage, and I had experienced a similar earthquake when I was a student at Caltech, so I didn’t think much more about it. We spent the evening enjoying the luxuries of our rental house.

The rental house was certainly luxurious! It was far larger than our own house, with a swimming pool, a garage with ping pong table, and a stunning view of the ocean. We saw occasional whale spouts and phenomenal sunsets that included my first unequivocal view of the fabled “green flash.” We sat outside on the porch for dinner, enjoying creature comforts like battery operated salt and pepper grinders that illuminated our food as they ground spice onto it. After dinner that last night we gathered on the many couches to watch a movie on the colossal flat screen, and then went to bed with plans to do our packing in the morning.

Morning came much sooner than expected in the form of a piercing series of shrieks from the smoke detector around 3 a.m. Instantly, I jerked awake – ever since experiencing a hotel fire 3 days before my 14^th birthday, I have taken those things seriously. A single whiff confirmed that this was no nuisance alarm, and I started shouting “FIRE!” repeatedly as I collected my glasses and opened the flashlight function on my phone. I started trying to hunt down the source of the smoke while continuing to yell, and found a black column gushing from the vent in the bathroom floor across the hall from our room. P15 (still 14 then) entered the hall and I told her to get out of the house, then I woke and gathered the boys and escorted them into the driveway. By this time the other adults in the house were awake and outside as well, so we had a complete head count (which I repeated a few times, to be certain!) We agreed that since I was already using my phone, I would call 911.

While we were waiting for the fire department to arrive, we moved the children down to the end of the driveway to be farther from the noxious fumes coming from the house. Ari offered to go back into the house to rescue my violin, but I didn’t want him to risk his lungs and ordered him not to. (I love my violin, which has been in the family since shortly after World War II, but I love Ari more – my experience of smoke inhalation tells me it isn’t worth the risk!) The tropical night air was comfortably cool, and I kept the children calm with speculations of what the firemen might do and what their trucks might look like. Once they did arrive, the children watched with interest as men and women in protective gear went up and down the driveway and attached the hose to the fire hydrant on the curb, used an enormous wrench to open the hydrant, and disappeared to the house to direct the water that now filled the previously flat hose. Once they were done, I took the children and sat in the minivan so they could try to get a bit more sleep. By this time a small amount of light was starting to turn the sky from black to dark blue.

As soon as it was light enough to see, the adults left the children with strict orders to stay outside while we brought all our possessions, now reeking of smoke, into the driveway to pack them. The firemen had confirmed that the house was still structurally sound but had to officially recommend that we stay outside due to the lingering chemicals from the fire. The house was a dingy grey hue, and picking up the shampoo from the bathtub revealed a white shadow beneath it that allowed me to grasp just how coated everything was with smoke residue. The floor of our bedroom was barely cool enough to walk on with bare feet, and my violin case was warmer than I liked when I lifted it (it wound up being more out of tune than it’s been since we moved to Hawaii’s complete lack of temperature variations, but otherwise fine). All our possessions were intact, though smoky, with the exception of a pair of boxers that was too near the floor vent in our bedroom. By the time we had moved our possessions out of the house, all our feet were soot black.

(The only total loss among our possessions)

Finally, with the practical side taken care of, I heard the men’s perspective on the fire. They, particularly my father-in-law, had been at the house directing the firemen and women to the source of the fire and asking questions. It turns out that among the features of this fancy rental house were not only a rooftop solar installation, but a rack of lithium-ion batteries in the crawl space under the house to store the excess energy. The assembly was several batteries thick and high and several feet long, all crowded together.

There is a LOT of energy in a lithium-ion battery.

There is a reason the post office asks you not to mail lithium-ion batteries except under certain restricted circumstances. Compartments inside these batteries can break down and cause a short circuit, making them spontaneously ignite, releasing all their energy. And if an entirely okay lithium-ion battery is sitting next to a burning one, guess what might happen to all its little internal compartments? The word “meltdown” seems appropriate. And what might make these little compartments break down? Being subjected to sudden forces might do it. Like being shifted around in a box in the mail. Or like in a 5.3 magnitude earthquake. It only takes one faulty battery in the rack to start a chain reaction, and all of a sudden, at 3 in the morning, you’re gathering up your children while yelling, “FIRE!”

In fact, the fire in the crawl space had caught the structural beams. The one directly under our bed, which had been a sturdy 4 x 6, was burned through with only nails remaining. Although the bedroom floor was still okay to walk on, if we had waited another 5 or 10 minutes to call 911 it might have caved in.  

We returned to Oahu that afternoon, still smelling smoky. I spent the next week washing every stitch of clothing we had taken on vacation with a cup each of baking soda and vinegar, which did a decent job of removing the scent. And these days, when I am awakened in the middle of the night (for example, by a robot call from the mainland programmed by someone who didn’t account for the existence of the 50^th state with its 6-hour time difference from the East Coast), it takes a little while for my heart rate to go down and for me to return to sleep. The owners of the fancy rental house have it worse, since smoke pervaded everything and they’ll have an immensely expensive and time-consuming repair job to do, including restoring the structural integrity of the crawl space.

There is much to be thankful for in the timing of the fire. If it had happened any earlier, we would have needed to find another place to sleep and to deal with the mountains of laundry. If it had happened a day later, when no one else was scheduled to stay in the house, it could well have burned to the ground before anyone called the fire department. We all got out quickly enough to avoid inhaling many toxic fumes and none of us suffered lingering physical effects, not even my father-in-law who went back in to search for his keys once everyone else was out. Almost all our possessions were relatively easy to return to their previous condition. After such a sumptuous vacation rental, our own home might have seemed unattractive, but it was a comforting haven – where it was easy to breathe – which was a relief after working in the noxious house after the fire. And, after all, we achieved one of those time-honored vacation goals: family memories!