Nitty Gritty of Homeschooling High Schoolers

A Peek into Our Homeschool

The beauty and purpose of motherhood is discovering who our children were created to be and shepherding them into adulthood where they use their unique personalities, gifts, and talents to serve mankind and mindfully steward the resources we’re all given. Home education is a wonderful tool to that end. Rather than the mechanical, assembly-line output of humanity from mass public education, it gives us the greatest amount of true freedom to help our children find their calling.

Of course, the world places many demands on parents, including what their children’s education should look like. If we aren’t careful we can find ourselves tossed around between everyone else’s expectations for what our lives should look like. It’s a recipe for disharmonious familial misery and an unstaunched maternal cortisol flow pumping like a severed artery.

This is why we must make it a priority first to create our mission and purpose. It will serve to recenter us, restore clarity, and bring peace to our spirit again and again.

The Nitty Gritty - Lessons

Until now I’ve been laying out the philosophical bones for our high school homeschool. What does that look like in practice? 

Finding Balance

The challenge in homeschooling on the homestead is always about finding balance. There’s the garden to plant, the cows to milk, cheese to make, tomatoes to can, manure to sling, hogs to butcher, Christmas gifts to plan and shop for. We can find a way to fill every season with productive activity.

I think this is why so many of us are quick to embrace the “unschooling” or “wild & free” labels (and, I confess, I resonate a little with the latter). While some children have a natural drive to learn and self-educate, our inherent sinful human nature tends towards laziness, and children are just as subject to that as the rest of us. I wish my children had the inborn curiosity and obsession of John Muir, but, alas, they’d be illiterate fools if I had waited for that spark to burst into flame. And, like it or not, most of us do sign affidavits that we will provide some sort of education to appease the government. We have an obligation. If we don’t find a balance with our time and make their education one of our priorities, we do our children a disservice.

This is where teaching them to be life-long learners when young is of such value. They can begin putting those skills into practice in high school while still under our guidance. Once these habits are instilled, the pressure to learn it all before a certain age is released. Life is just beginning and time is on their side.

---

Happy New Year, friends! If my writings have been a blessing to you in the past year, please consider upgrading to a supporting subscriber. Supporters will get complimentary access to my 165+ page Complete Digital Homestead Planner. The value of the planner is the same cost as an annual Substack subscription! It’s like a two-fer-one deal! If you already are a supporting subscriber and want a copy of the files, send me an email! Still want the planner without the Substack subscription? Check them out on my Etsy shop, The Well-Ordered Homestead.

The rest of this piece has a more personal breakdown of our days, including the Daily Schedule & Weekly Planner worksheet from the planner so you can see how I integrate lessons in our busy days across multiple subjects for multiple students as well as the resources we use, integrating subjects and managing state laws. Please consider subscribing to read more and get a more personal glimpse of our homestead in other articles and upgraded content.