A Day in the Life: Homeschooling a 12th Grader and a 6th Grader with a Full-Time Job
There’s no “typical homeschool day” in our house, but here’s a representative day from 2019, when my oldest was a senior in high school, my youngest was a 6th grader, and I was juggling homeschooling with a full-time job outside the home.
There’s no “typical homeschool day” in our house, but here’s a representative day from 2019, when my oldest was a senior in high school, my youngest was a 6th grader, and I was juggling homeschooling with a full-time job outside the home.
(I wrote this for the magazine last fall when we were in the middle of my daughter’s senior year.)
Over the years, I’ve published a few different “day in the life” glimpses into our homeschool, and the thing they have in common is that they’re all completely different. Our homeschool shifts all the time — with the season, with my workload, with the kids’ interests. It’s never been a fixed and static thing, and I love that about it, but it also makes it hard to say “look, here’s what a typical homeschool day is like for us.” The “typical day” is probably a myth — but I thought I might share with you a representative day from this fall.
I wake up before 6 A.M. and start coffee while I check my messages. I work on a few short pieces for the magazine and double-check my lessons for the day — it’s Monday, so I’m teaching middle school chemistry and creative writing — while everyone else is waking up and having breakfast.
Around 9:25 A.M., my daughter logs into her online college class and the rest of us load up to head to the hybrid school we started a few years ago. My son is a 6th grader in the junior high, and he loves learning with other people so much I wonder what we would have done if we hadn’t started a twice-a-week school for him to go to.
Students arrive by 10 A.M., and Suzanne and I grab a few minutes to plan while Jason starts a lively Spanish lesson. I’ve got a scavenger hunt review lined up for chemistry, and Suzanne turns out to be a genius at figuring out good hiding locations.
Then we head off to do our things: I’m reading my daughter’s essay on Cry the Beloved Country, which she has declared “a mess.” It’s not a mess, though I can see why she thinks so — she’s got lots of ideas, but she needs to go back to her thesis to figure out how to hold them together. By now it’s 11:30 and she’s done with her class, so I FaceTime her, and we go through it together. At first technology felt like a weird addition to our homeschool, but it’s made it possible for us to keep homeschooling while I work full-time outside of our home, so we’ve adjusted.
Suzanne and I have lunch together, working through a book list for the high school’s spring semester. As usual, Suzanne has almost too many good ideas, and I am going to have to winnow my now-gigantic list down.
After lunch, I get the kids started on the chemistry review scavenger hunt, sending them racing around the school in search of hidden envelopes. They almost don’t realize they’re reviewing the periodic table. They find the last clue and crack the code, so we move onto creative writing. I’ve been trying to help them understand the plot arc, so we’re playing a variation of Dixit to practice the different parts of the arc.
When I get home, it’s around 4:30 P.M, and my dog is very, very excited to see me. I start dinner and take him for a speedy walk around the block. My daughter joins me, and we catch up about her day — she was working on some math as well as her computer class and essay writing.
We keep chatting while she helps me with dinner, and my son joins in, too, telling her about a new version of the Preamble to the Constitution that he and his classmates made for TikTok. They’re both giggling while they set the table, and we sit down to eat around 5:30.
After dinner, Jason heads off to teach math down the road, the kids settle in for video game time, and I sit back at my computer to work on the winter issue of home/school/life. I’ll work until about 11 or so, listening to a lecture series on the Hittites in the background. I end up chatting on Slack with a student about roller derby for about 20 minutes, too.
Around 10, the kids come clattering down with our current readaloud — Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, which I loved and am excited they’re getting into — and we read together for about 30 minutes. I’m thankful every night that we’ve managed to hold onto this piece of homeschooling that I love so much — snuggling up on the couch, reading together, and talking about what we’re reading. Because while lots of things about our homeschool have changed — and more will probably change in the future — this core piece has been part of our homeschool from the beginning.
Keeping a Record of Our Homeschool Life with Commonplace Books
I hope that someday, these commonplace books will be a reminder for my kids of our homeschool days together. For me, they're already a celebration of "the good stuff," and one that I love has become a holiday tradition for our family.
These little books have become an essential part of our family’s holiday tradition.
The holidays are always a little weird when you don’t really celebrate Christmas but it feels like everybody else in the world does. We do some Christmasy stuff: We bake cookies (black bottom cookies are my favorite), we drive around and look at lights, we hang stockings because stockings are fun and can hold a lot of chocolate. But we really celebrate Hanukkah, which is often over before the winter break even starts. Which means winter break is kind of a weird time for us.
So to make these last weeks of the year special, we’ve invented all kinds of little traditions: We pick out a new game together and play it marathon-style over the week between Christmas and New Year’s. (I’m so excited that my parents got us Gloomhaven this year, which I have been wanting like crazy but which is just crazy expensive.) I knit everyone a new sweater-ish thing over the year and present them with much fanfare on the Solstice. (In case you’re curious, this year I made my — eighth? — Fisherman’s Pullover, my second Teddywidder, and my first The Dude, of which I am particularly proud. I wish I could take better knitting pictures. Do you have tips for how to take better knitting pictures?) On the same day, I also present each of my kids with a commonplace book that I’ve made for them over the course of the year.
I started this tradition when my daughter was born. She had to have heart surgery right after she was born — she’s fine! — and so I spent the first six weeks of her life in uncomfortable hospital rooms. I read her Finnegans Wake (which seemed like the perfect confusing thing to read in a confusing time) and The Rattle-Bag, and I kept a little notebook, where I wrote down all the things she did (which, frankly, wasn't much, but everything seemed miraculous to me at the time), and all the things I thought, and the lines from what I read that I thought she liked best or that reminded me of her. I got to bring her home eventually, and I entered that sleep-deprived, what-am-I-doing fog of new motherhood, but I made notes occasionally in that little notebook, and at the end of the year, I put it in a box, thinking that someday, she might enjoy reading those memories of her first year. And I kept doing it — and when my son was born, six years later and perfectly healthy, thank goodness, I started a book for him, too. I didn’t do anything special with them — just tossed them in a memories box with their home-from-the-hospital outfits and tiny plastic hospital bracelets.
It wasn’t until my daughter was 7, and we started homeschooling, that our commonplace books assumed a real purpose. We started homeschooling in the middle of the year, and I’d done tons of research and preparation, but, you guys, I had no idea what I was doing. I worried so much. All the time. It’s funny now to think about how much time I spent worrying about what a 2nd grader was learning and whether it was enough or too much or the right stuff. Now when people worry about that kind of thing to me, I remind them that it’s 2nd grade! You have all the time in the world! Kids learn at their own speed — and they learn in spite of your best efforts and your most egregious mistakes. They are made to learn!
Because I keep little notebooks for everything (see also: 20 years of dinner menus, knitting projects, historical markers I have visited, 35 years — gulp— of reading lists), I started a little homeschooling notebook that would become our first commonplace book.
Commonplace books are one of the things I learned about in all my frantic homeschool research — they’re basically learning scrapbooks, and everyone seems to have their own way of using them. I jot down all the things that make an impression on me over the course of the year: interesting things the kids say, stories from history or science or philosophy that we love, cool projects or papers they kids work on, poems or short passages or quotes that inspire conversations. I keep a running booklist for each kid in my planner as part of our homeschool record-keeping, and in December, I transfer that list (in tidy handwriting!) to each commonplace book. I write little notes to each kid a couple of times a year, just when I’m inspired, to tell them how I’m proud of them for sticking to a hard project or impressed with their hard work or appreciative of their willingness to try something after failing. (I try to focus on celebrating the work pieces and not the success pieces of their learning life, but that’s a me-thing.) I’ll include a few things from my own reading life that make me think of them — a poem or a quote or a piece of art.
These books aren’t fancy. I keep one for each kid, and I’m busy, and if I tried to make them “perfect,” I would never do them. I do my best to write neatly, but if I make a mistake, I just draw a line through it and carry on — that’s what I would want my kids to do if they made a mistake. Sometimes I type things up or cut things out of books or magazines and tape them into the books. I’ve included recipes, directions for card games, museum stickers, and photographs. Flipping back through the books, you can see the rhythm of each year emerge and the personalities and interests of my children developing, changing, and deepening. I use smallish books, and I slice out empty pages at the end so they don’t make me feel guilty if I haven’t managed to fill up Every Single Page one year. (I have also made extra pages when I need them by folding them in and taping them in place.)
The kids enjoy paging through them, remembering the year — there’s always a lot of laughing, and “oh, I almost forgot about that!” as they flip through. And they’re careful about keeping them — my daughter keeps hers in her fancy locked bookcase (she loves that she has a bookcase with a door and a key), and my son keeps his on the top shelf of his closet bookcase with his Minecraft guides. I don’t think they revisit them often during the rest of the year, but I hope that someday, they’ll be a reminder of our homeschool days together. For me, they're already a celebration of "the good stuff," and one that I love has become a holiday tradition for our family.
This is republished from a 2019 post on the HSL Patreon.
What’s the point of a secular homeschool magazine?
What’s the point of a secular homeschool magazine? Maybe it’s okay that I don’t know — maybe it’s enough to believe that is has a point, to believe that the work we do at home/school/life matters
What’s the point of a secular homeschool magazine? Maybe it’s okay that I don’t know — maybe it’s enough to believe that is has a point, to believe that the work we do at home/school/life matters.
This is the question I spent most of last summer asking myself.
The truth is: Publishing a quarterly magazine is hard work. It takes a lot of time — the time you’d expect coming up with story ideas and conducting interviews (so many interviews) and finessing stories, but also time you don’t expect: hunting for the right photos, tweaking layouts, adjusting the page count, uploading everything. It’s never been a lucrative business, which is fine with me, but this summer, I spent a lot of time wondering if it’s even a project that anyone who isn’t me cares about.
After all, the publishing world has changed. Magazines are closing down left and right, everyone’s going digital, and there is so much free information online — in Facebook groups, on blogs, in forums. Does anybody actually want a magazine about secular homeschooling?
Even the platform we used for our subscriptions started second-guessing me: We’re no longer going to support subscriptions for publications that fall in your profit bracket, they said. Maybe you should think about charging more? Or publishing less? Or getting into another kind of writing game?
This summer, I conducted a little experiment — I moved the summer issue entirely online. Instead of publishing a magazine, I published a webpage — and I’m not going to lie: It was SO MUCH EASIER on my end. I knocked the whole thing out in six weeks, which is a record for me. All those little details that take so much time — should I add an extra sidebar here? Is it better to add something or cut something to deal with this overflow? What could I do make this page more visually interesting? — vanished.
And people had been pushing for an all-digital version of the magazine for a while — I’d envisioned HSL as a print magazine from the beginning, even though most people opt for the more affordable digital version, and it reads like a print magazine. Magazines, you know, have a flow — they have a beginning and an end, a rich meaty middle full of features. I’ve always loved that — they feel like theatrical productions when they’re done well — but you don’t get the same thing online, where you can instead click to whatever interests you. Lots of people have complained that our digital version should be more, well, digital, and that doesn’t seem crazy or unreasonable to me.
Only, as it turns out, no one really loved the digital edition. They missed the magazine. And frankly, I did, too.
What’s the point of a secular homeschool magazine? Maybe it’s okay that I don’t know — maybe it’s enough to believe that is has a point, to believe that the work we do at home/school/life matters. I feel like our mission statement might seem a little out-of-step with the world today, but in many ways, that’s how our entire homeschooling life has felt: out-of-step. And I’ve loved that out-of-step-ness, I’ve loved finding the beats of our own drums and dancing to them outside the lines. Maybe, more than anything else, that decision to homeschool has felt like The Right Thing for our family. And this magazine, I realize, still feels like The Right Thing for me.
Which is a very long-winded way of saying that you won’t see more digital editions of home/school/life magazine, but you will see more issues — which you can definitely download but which are going to be old-fashioned print magazines, built on original reporting and good writing, and created with the idea that a magazine is a delightful indulgence, a luxurious and encouraging companion that inspires you both practically and philosophically.
I’m glad I took the time to think through whether home/school/life is a project I want to keep doing. I always try to sit down with my kids every summer and make sure we’re homeschooling because we want to — because it’s the best thing, not because it’s the default thing. It would be kind of silly of me if I didn’t give my work life the same kind of respect. We’ve had to make a few changes — our subscriptions run through Patreon now (you can support the magazine and subscribe to the digital edition for as little as $2/month) — but these changes feel like they make sense for our mission. It sounds hokey, but this is work I believe in. It’s work I want to do. And I am so, so thankful that you are a part of it.
At Home with the Editors: What We Believe
We believe that homeschooling is a grand adventure that we get to take together as a family.
I wrote this for one of my early editor’s letters, and when I reread it recently, I was struck by how true it still rings for me and for the work we do here at home/school/life. It’s scary to stand up and say, “This is what I believe.” There’s a vulnerability and a risk of rejection in it. But this is what we believe, and I’m okay standing up and saying it.
One of the things you have to do when you have a magazine is to get the word out that your magazine exists. So in between deciding on what topics we should cover in the magazine, reading columns, and editing pages, we’ve been reaching out to homeschool groups, going to conferences, and generally trying to tap fellow homeschoolers on the shoulder to say, “Pardon me, I think you might be interested in this cool homeschooling magazine.”
People have a lot of questions about the magazine — how much does it cost? What do we cover? Why don’t we have a print edition? But one question we seem to run into over and over again is “What’s your magazine’s mission? What do you believe?” That’s a big question, but here are some of our answers.
We believe that homeschooling is a grand adventure that we get to take together as a family.
We believe that you know your kid better than anybody and that you should trust your gut, no matter how many people are offering helpful advice to steer you in a different direction.
We believe that kids are naturally curious and the key to successful homeschooling is helping them discover the things that they are curious about.
We believe that homeschoolers can change the world.
We believe that, sure, scientific knowledge can always change, but that accepted current scientific theories — like the theory of evolution or the big bang theory — reflect our most accurate understanding of the world around us.
We believe that homeschoolers can go to Ivy League colleges or start their own businesses or design Minecraft mods all day—and all those things are equally cool.
We believe that trying to shove your beliefs and ideas down other people’s throats is never okay. Judge-y pants are itchy pants.
We believe that it’s totally normal to feel like you have no idea what you’re doing.
We believe that there’s a real need for a homeschool magazine that focuses on, well, actual homeschooling.
We believe that at the end of the day — and at the end of the year and at the end of high school — most of us just want to feel like we’ve given our kids the tools they need to do what they feel passionate about pursuing.
We believe it’s never too late to learn something new.
We believe you can homeschool just fine with or without a curriculum. (But isn’t it great that there are so many terrific options for secular homeschool curricula now?)
We believe that some days are better than others, and you should never make any drastic changes on a bad day.
We believe that asking good questions can be just as important as finding answers.
We believe that Joss Whedon is a genius and that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical is probably the single greatest episode of television ever produced. (OK, that last one may be just me.)
A Day in the Life: Flashback to Amy's 4th Grade and Preschool
Here’s what a typical day looked like in our homeschool when the kids were in 4th grade and preschool.
As we round the corner into my daughter's junior year of high school, I've been feeling very nostalgic about our homeschool life. I found this old post chronicling a day in the life of our early homeschool—when my daughter was in 4th grade and her brother was a tag-along preschooler—for the summer issue.
We didn’t set out planning to homeschool, but traditional school stopped working for us by the time our daughter was in second grade. So we pulled her out and dove into homeschooling with no idea what we were doing. We’re still figuring things out, and our typical homeschool day definitely reflects that work-in-progress feeling. Still, if we’re going to stalk other people’s homeschool days, it seems only fair to share our own.
8:45 A.M.
I’m scouring my favorite websites for a good story to post on the Atlanta Homeschool Facebook page before the day starts in earnest. I’ve been up for a while, responding to email, updating the calendar on the website, and trying to find a photo for a story in our winter issue, but finding a good morning post is proving elusive.
The kids are still asleep. When we first started homeschooling, I worried about them getting up at a regular time, but their natural rhythm seems to be waking up later and staying up later, and since there’s no real reason to push them in another direction, I’ve tried to just go with that. Honestly, I enjoy having the morning to myself.
9:15 A.M.
Jason and I are having coffee on the couch and trying to make sense of his schedule for the day when T comes running downstairs. He stops off in the schoolroom first and then races the rest of the way downstairs.
“We do have Hogwarts letters!” he says.
This year, we’re doing a Hogwarts correspondence program (I spent way too much time planning this around their favorite readaloud series!), so most of the kids’ assignments get delivered (by owl post, of course) to their designated Hogwarts mailboxes while they are sleeping. There is a lot of prep work involved in this, but the kids love it.
T wants cereal and milk for his first breakfast (the kid eats like a hobbit), so I pour his Cheerios while Jason gets ready to teach his math lab at a nearby group that offers homeschool classes.
9:45 A.M.
O’s still sleeping, but T can’t wait any longer to open his Hogwarts mail, so I tell him he can wake her up. I gulp the end of my coffee and run to check my email one last time before school starts.
10 A.M.
We always start the day with a readaloud, so T and I snuggle up on the couch while O grabs a strawberry smoothie from the fridge. (She won’t eat breakfast these days, but she loves fruit smoothies.) We’re reading Dealing with Dragons as part of our Care of Magical Creatures class for Hogwarts and comparing literary depictions of dragons.
Sometimes T kind of drifts off and colors or builds with his math manipulatives while I read, but today he’s very interested in how the princess in the story is going to do a spell to make herself fireproof. O reminds him of the time we had a Girl Scout science class here, and the instructor taught us how to soak a dollar bill in alcohol and set it on fire. (The bill stays intact and unharmed, which made a big impression.) I jump in, too, and it takes us a while to get back to the story.
10:45 A.M.
The kids tear into their Hogwarts mail, which turns out to be a letter from Professor Sprout telling them that it’s time to learn about chamomile, an herb that has the power to calm people down. O starts to make a page for it in her Herbology notebook, then flips open the Rodale Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs to find a picture to copy. The picture in the book isn’t very good, so I grab the laptop and google “chamomile.” O finds a picture she likes, and we print out a copy for her so she can use it while she’s working. While she carefully draws and labels her chamomile, T is drawing dragons in his notebook. He wants me to write down their names and a story about them, so I do. I suggest that he could use his alphabet stamps to write the dragons’ names, and he says okay — but he’s actually more interested in just randomly stamping letters, which is fine with me. For now, anyway.
11:30 A.M.
O tells me all about chamomile, and we decide to have chamomile tea with lunch. She asks if we can grow our own chamomile, and I suggest she see how she likes the tea before we start growing anything. (I’ve learned that automatically agreeing to every project means we start a lot of things that we don’t follow through on — which is okay sometimes, but I want to also introduce the idea that we can be thoughtful about what we choose to do.)
12:20 P.M.
Jason isn’t home for lunch, so I make grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for lunch. We eat at the table — O is reading her American Girl magazine, and I’m flipping through an old issue of Smithsonian.
The chamomile tea isn’t a big hit, so we pour it out and have orange juice instead.
1 P.M.
O and T remind me that I promised I would watch an episode of Beakman’s World with them after lunch, so I remind O that she still has some Latin from her Monday Hogwarts Ancient Runes assignment hanging around to finish. Does she want to finish that before we watch Beakman?
“Maybe not all of it,” she says, but she sits down and works on her translation. (We use Ecce Romani for Latin, so each chapter has a short story to translate.)
1:35 P.M.
We watch an episode of Beakman’s World, a show about a wacky scientist and his curious sidekicks that my daughter loves. We’re doing Herbology, of course, and a little chemistry in our Potions classes, but I feel like we’re a little light on general science this year, so I am happy to let the kids squeeze in a little Beakman science.
After the show, O decides she wants to work on her Littlest Pet Shop village, a project she started a week or so ago with her friends J and C, so she heads up to her room. At first T goes with her, but he comes back down to me complaining that O is too boring, so I offer to paint with him. I tell him to put on an old T-shirt while I check my email. (I check my email a lot.) While I’m at the computer, I see a tweet about a homeschooling article that looks interesting, so I post it on the Atlanta Homeschool page. I’m also thrilled to see that an expert I’ve been waiting to hear from about a story has gotten back to me with a great answer, so I send off a quick “Thanks.”
3:00 P.M.
T and I are painting peg people at the school room table when Jason gets home from class with a few bags of groceries. I take advantage of the fact that he’s home for a few hours and wrap up our painting project so I can work on a few articles. O asks if she and T can play Fossil Fighters for a little while, and I give them the go-ahead while I’m cleaning up the paint and wiping down the tables. I realize that I meant to work on the letter of the week (It’s H) with T and didn’t get around to it, but I figure I can let it go for today.
5:00 P.M.
I’ve put in a couple of hours of work. The kids have been in and out of the house a few times, but now they’re back inside since it’s O’s night to cook dinner, and we have to serve it before Jason heads out for his evening tutoring classes. (He’ll leave around 6 p.m. and be back home a little after 9 p.m., which makes today a fairly light day for him.) O makes scrambled eggs with cheese and broccoli, and I help her out by making toast and keeping it warm in the oven while she’s cooking. Most days of the week, we manage to squeeze in a family dinner, though there are days — like Thursdays, when Jason’s only home between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. — when we eat at weird times and end up having a dinner-snack later in the evening. When I finish the article I’m writing, I’ll knit on the couch while the kids watch a movie.
This article was in the summer 2018 issue of HSL. (We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.)
Editor's Note: How This Magazine Got Started
When we started homeschooling, the secular homeschool magazine I wanted didn't exist. So like any good homeschooler, we decided to make our own.
When we decided to homeschool, I did what I always do when confronted with some brave new phase of life: I went out and bought a ton of magazines and a tub of Java Chip ice cream. This method has usually served me well. In my 20s, in my first tiny New York City apartment, I learned to cook spaghetti alla carbonara and omelets from the spattered pages of food magazines. I dog-eared wedding magazines, fretting over flower arrangements and invitation suites, until my husband took them away from me and planned the whole thing himself. (He did a lovely job.) Then came pregnancy magazines, then parenting magazines—you get the idea. Something about flipping through those glossy pages made me feel not just prepared but eager to take on the challenges ahead. But when it came to homeschooling, my go-to method failed me. Not only were magazines about homeschooling hard to find back in 2010, but when I did manage to track them down, they were ... well, disappointing. Some of them were just dull. Others felt like they were in the middle of a conversation that didn't include me. At least one of them was, frankly, kind of judge-y. None of them was what I was looking for.
Well, we managed without my traditional magazine binge-fest. (I ate another tub of ice cream to compensate.) We pulled our daughter out of school in the middle of second grade, and we have been happily homeschooling ever since. Our days are happy and messy, full of books and cuddles, nature walks and endless conversations. It's good stuff. But I couldn't shake the idea that there should be a really good homeschool magazine—for people, like me, who wanted a little inspiration to get them started, and for people, also like me, who wanted a little inspiration along the way. I wanted a magazine that was fun to read, one that was pretty enough to keep on the coffee table, one that was smart and assumed that I was smart, too. I wanted a magazine that let me sneak a vicarious peek into the lives of other homeschoolers doing cool things (like the Tougas family hiking the Appalachian Trail—see page 47), helped me figure out things like whether I should homeschool through high school (some of the worries that plagued me get a pretty thorough busting on page 44), and gave me great ideas for things like celebrating National Poetry Month (page 15), buying new pencils (72), and which new books should end up on my endless reading list (page 24). After four and a half years of homeschooling, I had the confidence to do the thing that all of us homeschoolers do so often: I saw that the thing I wanted wasn't out there, and I made it.
I had a lot of help. My husband suggested story ideas ("What's up with all the references to homeschool moms, Amy? Dads homeschool, too, remember?"), pored over final edits, and brought me sandwiches when my "just five more minutes" stretched past dinnertime. My daughter helped check for spelling errors. My son said "please" before he asked me to look up some new Pokemon fact for him. I was blown away when Shelli Pabis (who I have always had a total blogger-crush on from her awesome Mama of Letters blog) said that she would love to be the magazine's senior editor. (You'll see her byline throughout the magazine, but be sure to spend some time with her storytelling feature on page 60.) And Amy Hood and Suzanne Rezelman jumped on board with columns about art at home (page 36) and the reading life (page 32) that are so fun to read I forget I am supposed to be editing them.
I guess it's no surprise that I love this magazine. I hope you do, too.
Cheers,
Amy
Meet the Team: Amy
Amy is the editor-in-chief of home/ school/ life magazine. While her mission in life is to stop people from pluralizing with apostrophes, she finds that writing and editing are easier ways to keep the family supplied with fishing lures, yarn, and chocolate. She homeschools her two children with lots of help from her fabulous husband (and magazine co-publisher), and the whole family pitches in for magazine deadlines. She is also the founder of the Academy hybrid high school and middle school (in Atlanta), the cohost of the secular homeschool podcast The Podcast with Suzanne and Amy, the creator of Deep Thought secular high school curriculum for homeschoolers, and the author of several books about homeschooling.
How I started homeschooling: School wasn't a good fit for our daughter, who was in second grade at the time. We kept trying to help her change her learning style so that it would fit the school's teaching style, and one day it occurred to us that changing the way she was taught would be a whole lot easier than changing the way she learned. Boy, were we right. She has bloomed, and homeschooling has worked so well for our family that when our son hit kindergarten age, we didn't even consider putting him in a traditional school.
My homeschool style: We call it classical, Dude-style, because we do build around Latin, history, and literature, but we also are easily distracted by rabbit trails and take lots of snack breaks. (We also sometimes go to the grocery store in our pajamas.)
What a typical day looks like in my homeschool life: We always start with morning time, including some music practice, knitting, and readalouds. (Lots of readalouds.) After that, it can really go anywhere. My twelve-year-old O is studying Latin, medieval history and literature, chemistry, creative writing, and U.S. geography this year (all her picks), so she'll usually do some work in those subjects during the day. I hang out with her in case she needs a hand. My six-year-old T is obsessed with mazes and math manipulatives, so many days, we just let him go to town with whatever he's interested in. We try to learn a new poem every week or so because I am kind of a poetry geek, and the kids love to get all dressed up and do recitations, so some days I am the audience. O is very into learning how to make her own clothes, so she spends a lot of time sewing and knitting in her "studio" (that's the corner of her bedroom with her dress form and her sewing machine). T and my husband usually play some chess or build a marble run—or, on very messy occasions, combine the two. There are days when the kids just want to paint or make a movie with their stuffed animals or read a new book, so that's what they do.
Favorite readaloud: Anything by Eva Ibbotson, Mo Willems' Pigeon books, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the Melendy Quartet, The Wee Free Men
Favorite driving music: If we are not listening to audiobooks, we like to sing—loudly. Some of our favorites: The Beatles' Hard Day's Night, Dead Milkmen's Punk Rock Girl, Trout Fishing in America's Eighteen Wheels on a Big Rig, Mason Jennings' Lemon Grove Avenue, the Jackson Five's Rockin' Robin
Things I like: Knitting, road trips, the smell of new books, the smell of old books, good cheese, star-gazing, waterfalls, playing bridge, clean sheets that I didn't have to wash
Guilty pleasure: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and salted caramel ice cream
What I love about homeschool life: I get to hang out with my favorite people all day long. And seeing my favorite people genuinely engaged with their lives and directing their own educations is pretty awesome. No one ever complains about being bored around here.
What I love about home/school/life magazine: I'm a lover of magazines, and since we started homeschooling five years ago, I've been sad that there isn't a truly smart, fun, readable homeschool magazine out there. Homeschoolers are some of the most diverse, interesting, thoughtful people I know—I think it's time for a magazine that reflects that.
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What do we mean when we say we’re a secular magazine?
We don't feature, review, accept advertisements from, or otherwise promote non-secular curriculum or materials.
We think this is pretty simple: Your religion (or non-religion) is none of our business. We think you’ve got that covered — and if you don’t, we suspect that you can find people and resources that can help you find your way much better than we can. What we’re interested in is education. Learning. Discovering. Engaging with the world of knowledge and ideas. And that’s what we’re going to explore in home/school/life — in the pages of the magazine and here on the website.
We are a secular magazine. That means that this is a non-religious space. We hope that people from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences will find resources and inspiration here. But we won’t be giving you ideas for creating a religious homeschool or finding religious-focused materials here—not in the magazine nor in the advertisements that run in it. Our goal isn’t to bash or criticize religious homeschooling, but it is to connect people with the best secular resources and inspiration out there.
We hope you’ll always feel like home/school/life is a space where your beliefs are respected. But the conversation here is focused on learning, and we like it that way.
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