Our first year of homeschooling in a nutshell

I wanted to share about our first year of homeschooling in a nutshell, as we are in the last couple of weeks of the school year. There have been some wonderful things, hard things and unexpected things about our homeschool journey this year. If you are considering homeschooling, then I hope that this encourages you!

We began homeschooling in the hopes that we would continue in the years to come. I am grateful to say that we will be continuing homeschooling next year, with my second daughter starting kindergarten.

I was a trained teacher for five years and worked at two different schools. It amazes me how much I have had to unlearn from my teaching days, because homeschooling your own children is just so different. I will explain more on that later.

Like many families, I’m sure, when you begin homeschooling, you have preconceived ideas and expectations about what your year will look like. Compliant children, homeschool finished by midday, excursions and outings every term, meeting up with other homeschooling families and so on.

While a lot of my expectations were fulfilled, I learnt to take each new day as it came and not to sweat the small stuff if things were not going to plan.

Overall, our homeschooling year has been quite an adventure. I’ll share why below!

What I will cover in this post

• The highs of our homeschool year
• The lows of our homeschool year
• My advice to new homeschool families for 2025

The highs of our homeschool year

There are plenty of highs to mention, but I will only mention five.

1. The family time

I have had a few friends say to me, ‘I don’t know how you handle being with them all the time!’. I know that my friends mean well, but I genuinely love having my children around.

Every day we wake up and get to have slow mornings, not rushed to be anywhere (unless we have an occasional appointment). That was one thing I dreaded when my eldest daughter went to school last year; the morning rush. I got cranky whenever she took her time getting ready and always felt rushed no matter how early I woke up.

Now, our days are blissfully filled with slow moments. Moments to just be together; to read, to have dance parties, to make art, to play outside. I love that they can just be kids and not have to worry about being anywhere. They will have their whole adulthood to rush to places 😉

2. Being a part of their learning experiences

As a teacher, I would get a first-hand perspective on the learning progress of the students I taught. It is even more special having this front row seat to my own children’s learning. I have loved learning about what interests them, what brings them joy and what they need to grow in.

My eldest daughter is naturally gifted in literacy and the arts. I love that she loves to read and loves to be creative. She will even make art out of her spelling list. She also has a beautiful singing voice and has been learning to harmonise this year. I am looking forward to doing more of this, especially as I am also a singer.

I have loved watching my second daughter, while only in preschool, love to engage in what her sister is doing. She is already beginning to read and loves to learn to spell and write words. She is a quick learner and loves to work independently, so it will be interesting to see the difference between her learning style and my eldest daughter’s when she starts kindergarten next year.

My son (who is not even two years old yet) adores books, so we read throughout the day and he absolutely loves to draw (more like scribble). But it’s nice that we can involve him in some way.

3. Learning to let go more

I have written about this in some other posts, but I have truly learnt the art of letting go this year. It really helps being a part of a homeschooling community because you glean from other families who have been doing it longer than you. I found that a lot of what I worried about was not a worry for many other homeschooling parents. For example, following a set curriculum. I thought most families followed a curriculum, however, I learnt that many other families sought free curriculum material from several places. This gave me a little more freedom to explore what other resources I could pick for my children to learn from, as long as I am following the syllabus.

Initially, on the harder days, whether there was sickness or lack of motivation from me or the girls, I would try to push through and follow our normal routine. This just made me more stressed and our household feel more disheveled. I had to remember that it’s okay to have an out of the ordinary kind of day and toss the homeschooling out the window from time to time.

4. The community we have found

My prayer this year was to find a wonderful homeschooling community that we would share similar values with and whose children my children would connect with. God has answered that prayer in more ways than I asked. We have met a beautiful family who we see about once a month and have been on a couple of excursions with this year.

We were also invited into a local homeschool co-op. I have met some beautiful, like-minded women, some of which share our Christian faith and are deeply rooted in God’s Word, which has been an answered prayer for me personally.

We will hopefully be joining an additional co-op next year, aimed at younger children. So I look forward to more friendships formed there.

5. The time we get back

Like I mentioned before, we rarely have to rush to get anywhere in the mornings and our days are mostly filled with learning and playing (and housework for me!). It’s been the slow pace I was longing for all of last year. I think it’s especially important to have these slow days when your children are little. I know as they grow older, our pace will change, but for now, I’m treasuring the time freedom we have now.

The lows of our homeschool year

Now, I can’t mention all the good about our year without mentioning the lows, because that’s just the reality of it and I don’t want to shy away from it.

While there are so many benefits of homeschooling, it’s not all rainbows and roses. This year in particular was hard for unique reasons, but I will share a few lows that were circumstantial for us as a family and in this season of our lives.

1. Homeschooling during my fourth pregnancy

I had a difficult first few months of my pregnancy with my fourth baby this year. I was extremely sick with nausea and had dealt with some antenatal depression, so mustering up the energy to homeschool was hard some days.

Now that I’m in my third trimester, my energy levels have dropped again, so the same lack of motivation to homeschool has resurfaced. Thankfully we only homeschool for a couple of hours in the morning, so I can rest in the afternoon during my son’s nap.

2. Homeschooling with a toddler

When you sign up for homeschooling, you sign up for the chaos that sometimes comes with homeschooling with multiple kids, babies and toddlers included.

There were many days where my son required most of my attention, so we needed to pivot our homeschooling lesson and do something more flexible or take our schooling outside.

It is just something I have had to adapt to and realise that it is just a season. Making sure that all of my children’s physical and emotional needs will always come before their educational needs.

Honestly, there aren’t many other lows I can think of that are worth mentioning, but here are some harder parts of homeschooling that I will simply list: teaching a child who is not motivated to learn, planning lessons on busy weeks, meeting all my children’s needs when they all require my attention, trying to find pockets of time for myself so I don’t burn out. That’s about it!

My advice to new homeschooling families starting in 2025

Given that we are only one year ahead of you, if you are starting next year, this advice is just coming from my own experience so far.

1. Enjoy the journey: it seems obvious, but it’s easy to get too focused on the insignificant things like organisation, stationery, ticking things off your to-do list. However, when you simply take each day as it comes (of course, be organised! But don’t sweat it if you didn’t get time to look over the learning material the day before), you will enjoy each day more.
2. Try to find a local homeschool community. Being a part of a co-op or just connecting with other homeschool families helps tremendously with mid-week connections, learning about how to homeschool outside of your repertoire and giving your children more opportunities to form friendships.
3. Take the pressure off yourself and do what works for your family: you are going to read lots of different ways to homeschool, but at the end of the day, it will only work if you do what works best for your family! Don’t feel the pressure to do things a certain way if it doesn’t suit your lifestyle or values.

I hope this post has inspired you to enjoy your homeschooling journey, the highs, the lows and all the in-betweens!

Feel free to ask a question in the comments below! I am an open book 🙂

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