Elizabeth’s

What You Need to Know About Homeschooling High School

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

There’s a lot of guidance out there for young homeschool moms. It’s an adventure a lot of families try in the early years. But sometimes homeschooling is only for a season. Not every family keeps homeschooling all the way through high school, and that’s fine. It’s actually part of the beauty and adaptability of homeschooling. But having fewer moms to turn to for advice can make the teen years a little harder to navigate. 

So when I speak with moms who are nervous about homeschooling high school — whether their kids are in middle school or even in upper elementary school — I tell them two things. [For context, my two oldest have graduated already, my third child is in the middle of her senior year, and my fourth child just started her freshman year in high school.]

First of all, your student should be working at their level in every subject. Academically speaking, where are they right now? Figure that out, and then build from there. They can’t write a five-paragraph theme if they can’t write a good paragraph, and there’s no use wishing they’re in algebra when they’re actually in pre-algebra. 

I credit this wisdom to Lee Binz in her booklet How to Homeschool 9th and 10th Grade. The concept seems so simple, but when I first came across it, it was revolutionary.

So don’t freak out if your child is “behind” or needs to catch up on something. The truth is, they are where they are, just as you are where you are. In your housework. In your finances. In your relationships. In your faith walk. And your child is where he or she is. In math, in history, in reading, in writing, in science. There’s no changing what is.

But our job isn’t merely to assess. It’s to sketch out a workable plan for improving their skills and growing on their educational journey. We had a homemade poster in our schoolroom in Cambodia that read, “All learning happens one step at a time.” It had the image of a staircase on it, and we pasted a single puzzle piece at the bottom to represent the step-wise nature of learning.

We can’t rush our students to the next level, but we can encourage incremental change in each area. We want them to become lifelong learners, just as we want to be lifelong learners alongside them.

[I feel a grammar school song coming on here — “Inch by inch, row by row, I’m gonna make this garden.” But I digress.]

The second thing I tell moms is that a student’s daily time investment increases significantly in high school. They need to be working much of the day. This may come as a surprise to students (and moms) who’ve been accustomed to completing all their work in the morning, so you may have to require more of them than before. 

Ideally their work load was stepped up slowly during middle school so that by the time they get to high school, they’re ready. But if the time commitment still comes as a surprise, you can use 9th grade as a stepping stone to all-day studying.

There’s a yay and a yuck to these guiding principles. It’s a relief to simply accept where a student is in each subject and to know that you can and should continue tailoring their education to their needs and abilities. It can also feel like a challenge when they start studying more hours in the day — for both them and for you.

We need the grace to make slow, steady progress starting where we are and also to accept that high school is going to take longer than homeschool used to. But you absolutely can homeschool in high school if that’s still what your family wants to do. It just looks different from the little years.

* * *

SEE ALSO:

Two Challenges That Homeschooling Families Face on the Field (article at A Life Overseas)

The Hats We Wear: Reflections on Life as a Woman of Faith (my new book, with sections on marriage, motherhood, and homeschooling)

BONUS: Transcript Tips

I find that moms are usually pretty nervous about the dreaded transcript, but it doesn’t have to be too intimidating. The important thing is to start keeping records early. That way when it’s time to apply to college or university, you don’t have to scramble to create a transcript.

You can find different resources online to help you plan your student’s four years of high school, but whatever you do, remember to record it each year. For me this took the form of some Excel spreadsheets (I’m still an engineer at heart!) and a single Word doc.

The Word doc kept all the course descriptions, including the name of each class, what curriculum I used, and how I assigned grades for each class. (Deciding how to assign grades and which grading scale to use is an article of its own.) You may or may not need these course descriptions for college applications, but it helps keep you organized and on track during high school.

Each year I used an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of my student’s assignments in each class, with a separate tab for each subject (math, science, language arts, history, etc). This meant that by 12th grade, each child had four spreadsheets, one for each year of high school, each with their own subjects tabs. (Did I mention that each child also had their own folder on my desktop?) 

In addition, I dedicated a separate spreadsheet to their transcript, this one with four tabs to record the final grades for each subject in each year (which had been calculated in the other spreadsheet) and a fifth tab for the actual transcript (you can find templates online for how to structure those). I used those grade-level tabs (9th, 10th, 11th, 12th) to calculate their GPA and cumulative GPA, which — I won’t lie — can be a pain in the neck sometimes.

I updated the transcript at the end of every school year (or sometimes, if I’m being honest, right before the next school year began) so that by the time we were ready to apply to colleges, I just had to make a few cosmetic adjustments, print to PDF, and sign the thing.

The moral of the story here is: If you start early on the transcript, you will greatly reduce your stress in the long run.

What Subjects Should Busy Homeschool Moms Prioritize?

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

Homeschool moms often tell me how difficult it is to squeeze every subject into every day. This is especially true when it comes to families with multiple children or families on the field, where ministry can take up a chunk of each day.

And I tell their worried hearts that it’s ok not to do every subject every day. But I also tell them that there are certain subjects they do need to do every day — namely math and language arts. These are skills subjects, which means that every successive lesson builds on the lesson before it. You can’t skip anything in an attempt to make forward progress.

In contrast, lessons for content subjects like science and history can be switched around or spaced out (within reason), and children can still grasp the lesson. With science and history, a child also has the assurance of studying that particular area again. They’ll be introduced to different eras in history and different sectors of science in elementary school, then again in middle school, and once more in high school. If they miss something the first time around, they have plenty of time to return to the subject and learn it later.

But if you only do math three or four times a week, that will eventually catch up with you, and your child won’t be ready for upper level math when the time comes. That’s because you can’t really “double up” on math. A child’s brain needs enough time to understand and digest new concepts, and a single lesson a day is pretty much their max.

But if you study history only three or four days a week and science only two or three, your children will still be exposed to new ideas, and those ideas don’t build on one another in earnest till high school. 

[Word to the wise: You can teach history, science, and art to your children as a group for a long time. Each child does not need an individual history or science curriculum until at least middle school.]

So five days every week, your children need to do math. Even if the lesson is too long and too hard to finish in one day, they still need to practice math every day. Consistency is key here. And since review days are great for helping concepts stick, be sure to schedule in a few of those too.

While young kids might be able to stop after twenty or thirty minutes of mathematics study, by the time they enter junior high and high school, they’ll probably be studying math about an hour every day. The good news here is that in junior high and high school you don’t have to sit next to them for that entire hour.

In addition to math, your children need to study language arts every day. When they’re just learning to read, they need consistency in instruction and the daily reminder of phonics rules. After they’ve learned to read, they still need to read every day — for practice and for fun! They continue to build fluency and comprehension for a long time.

But reading is only one strand of language arts, and it can feel overwhelming to add spelling, vocabulary, grammar, phonics, copywork, dictation, and handwriting every day. In the early years I really stressed myself out trying to choose the best version of each of those subjects, and honestly I didn’t need to worry that much — or waste that much time.

So take a deep breath. You don’t have to teach all strands of language arts to each child in a single day. One option is to loop those subjects, an approach I learned from Sarah MacKenzie of Read-Aloud Revival. Another option is to group them into units, which is what we tended to do — once I settled into a more realistic approach, that is.

When a child was younger, I would assign a phonics lesson every day in addition to their reading practice. When they finished the series of phonics books, I would begin spelling lessons. Then we might do a spelling lesson on most days for the next few years. 

After that, when they had a better handle on the spelling rules, I would introduce grammar lessons. I might sprinkle in a vocabulary workbook here and there once they were pretty solid in their reading skills, but vocabulary workbooks are usually optional, so you don’t have to assign them.

[A note regarding grammar: I tended not to introduce grammar too early, as the various rules can be quite complex and overwhelming for a young child. I did, however, tend to keep assigning daily grammar lessons all the way through 10th or 11th grade in preparation for standardized tests.]

With my “unit approach” to language arts, you don’t have to chase five or six different language arts workbooks for every child every day. You only need a reading lesson plus one additional language skill. 

It’s also important to note here that your children should practice some form of writing every day. That could be handwriting practice or some copy work in the younger grades (we used hymn lyrics a lot) or a written narration in the older grades (usually drawn from a history or science lesson). Thankfully, none of these tasks requires much time investment from Mom, and the written narration is a two-for-one deal, covering both the writing requirement and a content subject.

So when time is tight, what subjects should a busy homeschool mom prioritize? In the end it comes down to the proverbial 3 R’s: reading, writing, and arithmetic. 

And since those subjects all do best with a fresh brain, if at all possible, try to get them done in the morning. This might require some creativity on your part if you’re a ministry family or if you have a lot of young children. 

But whether you finish them in the morning or the afternoon, math and language arts are your daily non-negotiables, skills your children need to be making steady progress in. Even when there are disruptions and you can’t get to everything, I advise moms to try and at least finish these subjects.

There’s one more thing I always recommend, and that’s to read aloud as much as possible. Reading aloud with your kids becomes this beautiful pillar of family life. It creates your own unique family culture — a shared language, shared memories, shared inside jokes. You’re building something fun together, and Mom isn’t just a homeschool taskmaster. She’s also participating in the joy of life, experiencing epic, suspenseful, and even silly stories with her children. 

[Whenever possible, try to do the accents. This adds greatly to the fun.]

My kids are nearly grown now, and we still talk about the days when we read aloud together almost every day after lunch, and we still talk about specific stories we read together that were particularly funny, sad, or impactful. But you don’t have to read aloud every day to be a read-aloud family. You just have to read aloud regularly. Maybe you do it after lunch like us, or maybe you read in the evenings, or after breakfast. 

And maybe you don’t have time to read for thirty minutes to an hour. That’s ok too. Fifteen minutes still counts. Fifteen minutes here and fifteen minutes there still add up to a finished book in the end — probably lots of finished books.

The beauty of read-aloud time is that you get to choose what kinds of stories to encounter with your kids. You don’t have to read what the other moms are reading. You don’t have to burn yourself out by following a predetermined list. You can use books to create your own family culture, one that reflects your loves, desires, and dreams.

So teach a math lesson. Have your kids read and write something on their own. Then read aloud with them. These are the foundations of a successful homeschool, and even if you’re busy with ministry or a gaggle of young children, my guess is that you can probably still make them happen every day. 

When you get a chance, sure, add history or science or art. You could even put them on a loop. But you don’t need to stress if they’re not getting done every day in those early years. As long as they’re getting done some of the days, you’re still building a sturdy education. And that’s good news for an anxious homeschool mom.

* * *

MY NEW BOOK IS NOW AVAILABLE!

The Hats We Wear: Reflections on Life as a Woman of Faith addresses six different aspects of being a woman of faith, with sections on theology, emotions, and embodied living, as well as marriage, motherhood, and homeschooling. Available in ebook, paperback, and audiobook forms.

Also stay tuned for some homeschool high school help, coming soon!

The Hats We Wear (introducing Elizabeth’s new book!)

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

Now available in print, Kindle, and on Audible! Check it out on Amazon here.

I’m so excited about this book. For the last few years, I’ve been dreaming of publishing an updated version of my original Hats: Reflections on Life as a Wife, Homeschool Teacher, Missionary, and More, and it’s finally happening!

There’s tons of new material in this book. It’s nearly twice as long as Hats, but I also took out about half the original material, as it was reprinted in Serving Well. I reorganized the sections and fully edited each chapter, so this is very much a brand-new book.

Matthew Stock designed this beautiful cover, coordinating it to Jonathan’s Digging in the Dirt while also reflecting the original Hats cover that Jonathan created for me.

So that you can get a better idea for what this book is all about, I’m going to share the back cover material for The Hats We Wear, along with the new preface and the original preface from 2018. Enjoy!

Back Cover

Little girls don’t know they’re going to grow up to be women who wear so many hats. Daughter, sister, friend. Professional, mother, wife. Our hats can weigh us down, and our vocations can exhaust us. The roles we inhabit stretch us in so many directions that we sometimes fear we will break.

Sometimes we even forget who we are.

In The Hats We Wear, Elizabeth Trotter takes us back to the beginning, to the foundation of our faith and who we are as children of God and daughters of the King. She explores our intense emotional worlds and the work of embodied living, then leans into the three specific hats of marriage, motherhood, and homeschooling.

Join Elizabeth on this journey of reflection. Walk with her as she seeks God amidst the hats of female life. Sit with her in the mundane and the sacred. Wrestle with the practical and philosophical implications of living life as a woman of faith.

As you read, you’ll meet someone who frequently does things the hard way first, flailing around worrying and wasting time on unnecessary details. But in seeking the Lord and listening to the wise people in her life, she eventually finds a path forward. 

She invites you to do the same.

Preface to The Hats We Wear (2025)

In the spring of 2018, my husband Jonathan decided to surprise me with a sweet Mother’s Day gift: a book of my writings about womanhood. He gathered articles I’d written on theology, marriage, motherhood, and homeschooling and published the collection on Amazon. He called it Hats: Reflections on Life as a Wife, Mother, Homeschool Teacher, Missionary, and More. I loved the cover he designed and was grateful to have a lot of my writing in one place.

The next year, however, Jonathan and I published Serving Well: Help for the Wannabe, Newbie, or Weary Cross-cultural Christian Worker, and much of the material in Hats was republished there. Over the years, I kept writing, and eventually I realized I wanted to update Hats, adding some newer content and removing duplicate material, much of which related more to my life as a missionary in Southeast Asia than to the broader conversation of Christian womanhood.

So for this version of the book, I removed a dozen chapters and added over twenty-five more, keeping only sixteen from the original twenty-nine. I wanted to distinguish this book from Serving Well, which focuses on ministry life, though I did keep a few chapters which are too foundational to my life and faith to remove. I’ve thoroughly edited and rewritten each chapter, so this is basically a new book.

The first three sections are hats that all women wear, regardless of whether they are married or have children: the practical theologian, emotional human, and embodied woman hats. Then in the second section I dig into the more specific hats of wife, mom, and homeschool teacher. I hope that the words contained in these pages will resonate with your lived experience and that we will forge a bond across space and time.

In preparing this book for publication, I was struck by how similar my struggles have been throughout my life. How wise my past self seemed, fresh from the fires of learning a lesson I find myself re-learning in the present. We are forgetful creatures, and so the Lord must teach us again and again. Is it any wonder He tells us so often to remember?

And so I offer these stories to you, trusting that they will speak to your heart and mind through the goodness of the God who calls us to Himself. May we seek Him first, above all others.

Preface to Hats (2018)

No matter your background or experiences, being a woman is hard. That’s partly because being a human is hard. It’s also due to the many roles we women tend to carry in life. Daughter, sister, friend. Professional, mother, wife. Marriage and motherhood are indeed holy vocations, and they require much of a woman. Whether we work outside the home or from within it, our vocations sometimes stretch us so much that we fear we will break.

The truth is, there’s not a lot of preparation for marriage or motherhood. Certainly, we can read books. We can read books on how to have a great sex life or how to build a godly marriage or how to live out biblical submission, but when it really comes down to it, we marry a human person, not a book, and our husbands also marry a human person—us. A lot of marriage is simply trying new ways of doing things and seeing if they work (including, at times, seeking professional or pastoral help).

It’s the same with motherhood. We can read books on natural childbirth, healthy homemade baby food, and the most godly parenting—or the most logical. But nothing can really prepare us for meeting our child, some mysterious arrangement of our own DNA, or someone else’s. No one can prepare us for their likes or their dislikes, their strengths or their weaknesses. We have to discover these things for ourselves, over time.

What follows in this book is precisely that: the things I’ve discovered over time. There are articles and essays on marriage, motherhood, homeschooling, and the Christian life. In case you don’t know me, here’s a bit of background: As of this writing I’ve been married for nearly eighteen years, having gotten married at the age of eighteen. I’ve been a ministry wife almost that entire time and have been living overseas as a missionary wife for the past six years. I’ve been a mom for fourteen years and have been homeschooling for nine. This book is my lived experience wearing all those hats.

Find The Hats We Wear on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and audio book versions.

I Wrote Letters and Never Sent Them

/ Elizabeth Trotter / 5 Comments

I wrote letters and never sent them. I’d heard it would heal me. But no matter how many letters I wrote and didn’t send, I never felt healed.

Maybe it’s because I have an obsessive personality. Maybe it’s because in my waking life, I already ruminate and rehearse. All I know is that this classic mental health tool did nothing for me. What I really needed was Paul’s instruction in Philippians 3:12-14 to press on, forgetting what is behind and reaching for what is ahead.

In the very next chapter, Paul shows us how to press on:

“And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.” (Phil. 4:8-9)

As a person whose brain tends to get stuck on loops, I need to make sure my loops are positive ones, not negative ones. Otherwise I will just spiral downward and fall into the black hole of despair. If I get stuck on sad, angry, or fearful thoughts, I may never find my way back out again. [Cue spaghettification.]

Our thoughts influence our emotions, which influence our spirits, which feed back into our thoughts. This cycle occurs regardless of the quality of our inputs, but the Holy Spirit through Paul directs us to fix our thoughts on true and beautiful things, not frightening or resentful things. 

I must put this principle into practice every single day from the moment I wake up. Some days I wake up in a dark cloud. I have to set my eyes on lovely things, or they will sink into a storm. Other days my brain wakes up blank, but as soon as my thoughts kick into gear, they swirl into a dark, depressed, and anxious cloud. My natural thoughts are not always happy ones.

Just a few verses earlier Paul says something else, something I never noticed before this year. I had of course tried to abide by Philippians 4:6: “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything.” 

But this verse is only part of a multi-step command, which continues with: “Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done” (v. 6).

And the promise of peace comes after both parts: “Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:7).

How exceedingly abundantly has God blessed me? And yet how often do I — like one of the nine lepers — forget to turn around and thank God for a gift? If I so repeatedly forget the source of our peace, is it any wonder when I don’t experience it?

For me, healing comes from putting into practice the words of Paul, not the remembrance of hurtful scenes or conversations. Not the rehashing of all my dark, depressed, angry, or fearful thoughts every morning. I still write those things out, of course, but it’s no longer the only thing I do. 

Because simply vomiting the rotten stuff onto the paper isn’t enough to cleanse us. We must also look to the past for reminders of God’s faithfulness. We must smile and thank Him for the good things in our lives, no matter how small. The way to reset the brain is to focus on the good, not the bad — even as we make our requests known to a Father who longs to hear from us.

There’s a reason the author of Hebrews tells us to fix our eyes on Jesus Christ (12:2). Gazing on Jesus is the only way to endure the difficulties of this life. It is the only way to find our way out of the dark maze of our minds. 

So my task each morning is to write myself back to the truth. I present my requests to God. I thank Him for the things He has done. And I declare my trust in Him. I speak honestly to the Lord, but I also allow His truths, hidden in my heart, to speak honestly to me. 

Then I put the blue pen down. I set the journal on the shelf for tomorrow, when the peace of God will come to me again through words scribbled on a page. Not words of hurt and pain but words of hope and healing. For His faithfulness never ends — and His mercies are new every morning.

Reflections on a Quarter Century of Marriage {A Life Overseas}

/ Elizabeth Trotter / Leave a comment

Earlier this week I wrote about our twenty-five years of marriage at A Life Overseas:

“We hit a significant marital milestone this year, though the actual day of our anniversary came and went without much fanfare. We were at a missions conference and were only able to escape for a couple hours, skipping an afternoon session to take a walk together in the July heat. It didn’t feel special or remarkable, and I didn’t know how I felt about that. I had expected to feel something.

“It was only after I returned home that I was able to reflect on twenty-five years of holy matrimony. There are ups and downs in every marriage, but for the first eighteen years, I would have said we had more ups than downs. I didn’t really have a construct for anything different.

“The last several years have challenged my assumptions about wedded bliss. I thought we would always be as happy as we had been, and without much extra effort. Because those first eighteen years or so felt relatively effortless. We got along well, and we spent a lot of time together, and we enjoyed each other. We’d been friends since we were fifteen. We thought we knew each other, and we thought we knew how to do this marriage thing.

“Until midlife.”

Read the rest of the article here.