Schooling at Home

Schooling at Home by Sally Thomas

Wow, so many great articles about the homeschooling lifestyle lately!

A sampling:

At home we can do what’s nearly impossible in a school setting: We can weave learning into the fabric of our family life, so that the lines between “learning” and “everything else” have largely ceased to exist. The older children do a daily schedule of what I call sit-down work: math lessons, English and foreign-language exercises, and readings for history and science. The nine-year-old does roughly two hours of sit-down work a day, while the twelve-year-old spends three to four hours. But those hours hardly constitute the sum total of their education.

The homeschooling life often feels like life on a pillar: isolated but visible, removed yet immersed in essential undertakings. We have not so far, in our own “mainly uneventful” life, done single combat with sword-wielding phantoms or been shown off as a “wonder of the empire.” And yet, what looks like not that much on the daily surface of things proves in the living to be something greater than the schedule on the page suggests, a life in which English and math and science and history, contemplation and discussion and action, faith and learning, are not compartmentalized entities but elements in an integrated whole from which, we hope and pray, our children will emerge one day so firmly formed that nothing in this world can unbend them.

Our homeschool looks a lot like Sally’s family’s homeschool, with a few variations here and there — she could have been describing a day at our house! Real learning interwoven into real life. And oh, what fun this life could be and is!!