I think it’s safe to assume that a lot of people wonder just what we do all day every day. How do we possibly fill our days with educational things?
I suppose that depends on your definition of “educational things”.
To be honest, every day looks a little different. We do have a basic routine every day: wake up, watch some shows, and get breakfast are parts of our morning routine; snack, bathroom, and stories are parts of our nighttime routine.
Our “stay home days” days aren’t really very common, believe it or not, but I thought I’d take you through a typical winter stay home day. I specify winter because our typical summer days involved a lot more outside time… Okay, we are pretty much outside 90% of our other season days.
And we love spending most of the summer *back home* in Nova Scotia.
Winter Stay Home Days
Our days usually start around 7:30am, about the time that most kids are getting rushed out the door for school or arriving/waiting at their before school program for school to start.
The kids slowly wake up and lay quietly, look at books or get dressed until the siblings are all awake. Then they each choose one show on Netflix to watch while I wake up slowly (because Momma is not a morning person). That takes us to about 9am or shortly after, during which they head downstairs to get their breakfasts, and First Born (8) lets our 11 year old Puggle out, heads out to clean up doggy poop from the day before and then brings him back in to feed him breakfast too.
After breakfast they tidy up their breakfast dishes and put them on the counter or in the sink before they start playing. If the dishwasher was run the night before, First Born empties it and puts the dishes away (the ones he can reach, anyway). The dishwasher and dog care are his specific extra chores because he has begun asking for special toys (mostly Lego) and so we offered an allowance/paycheck of $5 a week for doing these chores every day as a way for him to learn about work ethic, budgeting, and responsibility. Middle Child saw this and has been asking to do some extra work for money as well so she gets jobs now and then above her regular responsibilities too, such as $5 to fold and put away all of the clean towels (it’s a pretty big overflowing basket).
Next First Born will do some book work. This is fairly new because I do believe in life learning, but I also believe that there are things in our lives that we, as adults, don’t really want to do, but we still need to do and do well. They’re not difficult workbooks and I’m not militant about it, but we try to do a little bit every day that we are home.
While he does book work, the girls usually color or play or do their own workbooks. Sometimes I give them some sensory things to do like playdough or colored rice or even just some snow and some scoops. Sometimes they play games on the tablet instead. We have an Amazon Fire Tablet for the kids because it has a great parental control option and I can block the browser and purchases. Between that and parental controls on Netflix, I’m pretty comfortable with allowing them to have unsupervised access to it, although we do regulate screen time a bit.
Middle and Last playing with some homemade silly putty (1/2 cup dish detergent + 1 cup cornstarch)
Then we have lunch and often tidy up for a movie by the woodstove. This is usually when I get my writing done. Luckily for me, I have a husband who not only likes to cook but is better at it than I am, so he comes home from work and cooks supper for us all. Between the movie and mealtime, the kids are usually full of energy and just run around the house playing in rowdy ways.
If that’s too rambunctious, we will play games, practice dance with YouTube videos, or work on some speech therapy stuff (we don’t have professional speech therapy but we do work on a few specific things at home).
The kids then tidy up, wash up and set the table for supper. After supper, they put their dishes back on the counter or in the sink, clear the table and then tend to burn off energy and end up just chasing each other around the house being silly while I clean up after supper. Sometimes, if it drives me crazy, I’ll have them sit and look at books, or put on music for them to dance to, but usually I’m cool with them being active and burning off energy.
Next is snack, bathroom and bed. We have a pretty good bedtime routine of bathroom, undressing, flossing, brushing, face washing and pjs. First Born reads a short story and then Daddy reads a story if he’s home, or else I do, then they crawl in bed and listen to a “sleep story” on a bedtime app on my phone. All three kids share a room, because they still want to. First Born sleeps on the top bunk and the girls sleep on either end of the double bottom bunk. By morning, they’re all in our room on little blanket “floor beds” on our bedroom floor. It’s something that drives some parents crazy but we really don’t mind. They tell us they feel safer with us after they wake through the night, who are we to tell them that’s not okay?
That’s our basic stay-home-day in the winter. The spring summer and fall look similar but after (and sometimes before) breakfast, we (or they) head outside. We bought our house primarily for the giant backyard and we use it as much as well can.
Most Days
It’s a common misconception that homeschooling means you just stay home with your kids all the time.
Most of our days are not stay-home-days. We do have more of them in the winter because we only have one vehicle, so when my husband takes it to work, we are home a bit more.
Even with sharing a vehicle, we still do lots of things. We go to the library with other homeschooling friends, we go skating and to gymnastics, grocery shopping and sometimes we have special days where we go to a museum or a special event.
In the warmer months when my husband bikes to work, we go explore local trails and playgrounds. But we do love our backyard so we spend a lot of time back there building, climbing, gardening, or reading in the hammocks.
Field trip to the Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa
Regular Responsibilities
Part of life learning for us is teaching them how to care for their belongings and living space.
Our children are responsible for putting away all of the things they use. Books need to go onto the bookshelves, toys go in the playroom, markers and coloring books have a place, dirty clothes get put in the laundry baskets and clean clothes (that somehow often get strewn all over the bedroom floor) get folded and put back on their closet shelves.
Sometimes that sounds like a lot but our goal is to have our children become self sufficient, responsible big humans so we give them age appropriate small human things to be responsible for. Now, I will admit that I do not enforce tidying things at every moment of the day. I don’t keep things tidy every day, how could I expect them to? There are days that we leave the house and there are breakfast dishes left on the table and toys and clothes on the floor, or bedtimes that I will go into their bedroom to find their pajamas from the night before all over the floor. Books and markers and coloring pages get left out (a lot) and other play things like blankets and pillows are often found all over the living room too. We try to get them to tidy up every night before bed or as soon as they’re finished with something but sometimes (lots of times) life happens.
That said, when it’s time to tidy up, they all work together (sometimes with direction, sometimes on their own) to tidy up the house and put everything where it should be.
Which means that if you drop in to say hello, some days you’ll find everything it it’s place and some days you’ll find everything on the floor. It’s a gamble…. good luck!
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