Special guest edition: How we homeschooled today by Allyse Hopkins

Pixels hurtling through space, head wounds, and summer in the depths of winter

Allyse sent me the following from New Zealand. How she found the time with four young children I can’t quite fathom, but I loved hearing about their day and hope you will too. She was waiting for a day when she felt they’d ‘achieved some significant schooling’, but I’m so glad that instead she just showed us a plain old normal day, which I know we can all relate to.

If you’d like to share a day in your family’s homeschooling life, get in touch!

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In our family, we have an eight-year old boy, a six-year old girl, a three-year old boy and a baby girl. Although technically I’m only officially schooling my two eldest, it’s impossible to ignore that everybody’s learning all the time so I’ve begun noticing more the learning that’s happening for each child and it feels harder to separate the ‘school’ of the older two from the more general ‘life’ of the family.

It was a bit of a slow start to the morning because the baby is sick and she’d kept me up for a number of hours in the night. By the time I came downstairs just before 9 o’clock, my husband had breakfasted with our six-year old and three-year old before he left for work, while our eight-year old had spent his time emptying a Weet-Bix All Blacks card collector album he’d been given of all the rugby cards, and filling the sleeves with his ‘special’ Pokémon cards in descending order of strength.

He had waited to eat with me, so while I showered, he was ostensibly cooking a pot of porridge but it sounded more as though the three of them were engaged in some kind of high-stakes shrieking competition.

After breakfast, the kids got dressed and I gave the baby a bath. My daughter, in another room, had her younger brother deliver a note she’d written to her older brother, who was with me. It read, ‘coom’. While he puzzled over what this might mean, she began yelling, ‘come, come!’ and all became clear.

We then sat down on the couch for Wonder Time while I fed the baby. This is our version of what some families call ‘Morning Time’ but the wonder better reminds me what it is I’m trying to create. Today, this consisted of me reading aloud:

- a nature poem from the book I Am the Seed That Grew the Tree (this follows the seasons and there’s a poem for every date: my kids are much more concerned that we read the correct poem on the correct date than that the content should corroborate what’s happening out the window, so we are happily reading summer poems in the dead of the New Zealand winter);

- a story from The Jesus Storybook Bible (which we have read through multiple times and I cannot recommend highly enough, especially the audiobook version);

- and a page from the science-y Indescribable devotional book by Louie Giglio (about the famous Pale Blue Dot image captured by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from beyond Pluto – apparently the image combined sixty different pictures, each comprised of 640,000 pixels, and each pixel took five and half hours to reach Earth: my eight-year old understood the calculation, but the magnitude of the distances involved are still pretty incomprehensible to us all).

Carl Sagan said: “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.”

Sometimes we’ll also look at a piece of art and work on memorising either a Bible verse or times tables, but today did not stretch to either of those things.

I then read three or four chapters from the Martha books – we finished the second book and began the third – about the childhood of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s great grandmother in Scotland. We looked at the family tree in the front of the book and discussed how Charlotte (Martha’s daughter) is not in the Martha books, but Martha is in the Charlotte books (as Charlotte’s mother). We looked for Loch Caraid on a map of Scotland and could not find it, but did find a number of the nearby lochs and towns mentioned in the book, so concluded that Loch Caraid itself must be fictionalised, which led to a discussion of how Laura wrote her own books about what she did as a child, but the Martha books were written by Melissa Wiley—who is, in fact, alive today, and homeschools her kids (my kids’ minds were blown)—so she probably has made up a plausible story for Martha based on what life was like in Scotland at the time.

Then it was time for lunch. My eight-year old decided to make himself some salad, so grated a carrot and chopped a stick of celery and… that was it (at least for the salad). My six-year old learned how to cut the last wedge of cake into quarters. The baby licked a taste of garlicky hummus off my finger and loved it (she is just barely starting solids).

While I loaded the dishwasher, the big three kids raced upstairs to get re-dressed ‘to go outside’ on some kind of expedition slated to involve sleeping bags. It has been pouring rain on-and-off all day and is 11°C so I guess they thought they needed outdoor-wear. I put the baby down to nap in the bassinet and she woke up straight away, so I put her in the front-pack to nap instead.

When the kids finally came back downstairs, they were not dressed any differently and seemed to have forgotten they intended to go outside. (When I went upstairs later, I found the contents of their wardrobe emptied onto the floor and it turns out they’d been playing The Floor Is Lava.) At this point, in the midst of some rough-and-tumble game, my three-year old split his head open on the coffee table. Fortunately, my husband had just walked in the door so he held the ice pack while I found the steristrips. Generally a very brave soul, the poor boy was heaving with big silent sobs until I got him a lemonade iceblock from the freezer, at which point all was fixed and forgotten.

I then asked them to please do something quietly, which turned out to be an elaborate imaginary game where their matchbox cars are all members of our extended family, and then hide-and-seek. (I count this maths for my three-year old, who has finally (mostly) mastered counting from 1-10 and is fast improving at 11-20.) I suggested that the two big kids might also like to do a maths lesson (we use The Good and the Beautiful curriculum) but today was not the day and instead they looked at Mac Barnett & Shawn Harris’s graphic novel The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza.

When my husband got home again, he took the baby who refused to be put down, and I made dinner with the three-year old while the two older kids began a game of Pokémon battle cards. The three-year old fell asleep at the dinner table and the big kids went to bed shortly after.

They’re not really meant to read in bed because they’re supposed to be sleeping but I did go in to find the eight-year old looking at a book called What Will I Be? about baby animals growing into big animals, and the six-year old reading Usborne See Inside Houses Long Ago. In the dark.

Maybe tomorrow we’ll do maths or go outside!

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Thank you for reading. If you’re new here you might have missed previous special guest editions:

Susie Wales’ life with her three boys in Florida.

Rachael Ringenberg’s thoughtful glimpse into her life with four girls in Vermont.

Joel Bowman’s ‘away schooling’, travelling around the classical world with an eight year old.

And you could be next! All styles, shapes, and sizes of home education welcome.

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