Homeschool

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.

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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.

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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!

Two Questions I Always Ask Homeschool Moms

/ trotters41 / 2 Comments

by Elizabeth

The early days of homeschooling are intense. You’re afraid of messing up. You haven’t fully settled into your teaching style yet. You’re still getting to know your children’s learning preferences. You’re still uncovering their abilities and their challenges.

And often, you have little ones running underfoot while you attempt to educate your older ones.

Older moms offer advice, and it’s good, but you don’t know how to apply it to your situation. You read books, and they’re good, but sometimes the requirements feel overwhelming. How can anyone do all these things and do them well? 

And sometimes the advice conflicts, and you don’t know which to choose.

Now, after 20 years of motherhood and over 15 years of homeschooling, I’ve become that older mom who has advice to offer and guidance to give. And the first thing I want to say is: let’s all take a deep breath. We make better decisions when we’re calm.

Beyond that, there are all sorts of things I could tell you. Things like figuring out your educational approach and your teaching preferences and your family culture and your students’ learning preferences. And those things are all important, and I talk about them with moms.

But the two questions I always ask young moms are the two questions they sometimes forget to ask themselves. They are:

What are you doing to take care of yourself?

And, if you’re married, what are you doing to take care of your marriage?

These two areas are the bedrock upon which a healthy, happy homeschool is built. If you’re burnt out, you won’t bring your best self to the task of home education. You’ll be tired and worn down, you’ll run out of energy and enthusiasm, and you might let too many things slide that shouldn’t be sliding. (What needs to slide and what needs to stay is a conversation for a future post.)

If you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t have the love you need to pour out on your children. Your relationships with them won’t be as good as they can be because you aren’t as full as you could be. You’ll be snappier than you want to be, and you’ll regret those moments.

Answering these two questions can be really hard when you have young children. You’re almost always short on time, and you’re probably short on sleep, which means you could also be short on brain power. Hopefully you can take some time, either in the early morning before your children get up or in the evening after they go to bed, to get quiet and ask your soul these two questions.

Don’t be afraid to ask your husband for help with the children in order to discern these things. You might even need the help of a friend or coach to talk it out. But don’t discount the power of solitary journaling to help you figure these things out. Write out all your angst until the answers appear on the page. And then go live them.

**NEW BOOK COMING IN SUMMER 2025** 

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 spirituality, emotions, and embodied living, as well as marriage, motherhood, and homeschooling.

The Beloved of God

/ trotters41 / Leave a comment

by Elizabeth

The old conversation about women and work has been circulating again. People are quick to take sides. They’re for women working. They’re for women staying home. (Never mind the fact that this is a false binary, and that women who stay at home work, regardless of whether they work for pay.)

To me this conversation seemed like a lot of wasted cortisol and adrenaline. Why would I torture my body with extra stress hormones just to justify my life choices to strangers? 

But it did make me think about the past 20 years of my mothering. For the first several years I stayed at home full-time and cared for our four children. I loved it. I always wanted to have a lot of kids. I didn’t always want to homeschool them, but I fell in love with that path too.

At the time I knew in my head how hard my husband was working to allow me to stay home and also pay the bills, but I don’t think I fully grasped his sacrifices. Only now, having learned what it’s like to earn income while trying to remain an engaged parent, can I more fully appreciate all that he did during those years. And I am impossibly grateful.

Because amid the exhaustion, I loved those years. I loved playing with my kids and reading aloud to them and being free to just traipse all over whichever city on whichever continent we lived for playdates and errands and homeschool activities. 

I felt a unique sense of purpose in those years, contributing to society by contributing to my family in (obviously) non-monetary ways. Along the way, we created our own family culture. Sometimes I didn’t realize what an incredible gift that really was.

Fast forward to today, when I still stay at home and homeschool my younger children, but I also work from home part-time. Now I understand more fully the financial pressures facing my husband these last 20 years.

Working from home also makes me appreciate the years I had with my kids as my main focus. As fulfilling as my freelance work is, it can be hard to live with a divided psyche, to have my heart in more than one place.

And yet I am impossibly grateful. Grateful that I’ve been given work that is meaningful to both me and the people I serve. Grateful that I’m able to bring in extra income and help pay the bills while still mostly staying home. The economy is different now than when we left America in 2012. It’s even harder to live on one income now than it was then.

And so families sacrifice. ALL families sacrifice. Whether we’re sacrificing one spouse’s income so they can stay at home with the kids, or whether we’re sacrificing one spouse’s time to either leave the house for work or to work from home – whether part-time or full time – everything is a sacrifice. Families are working hard to take care of their kids and their bills, and the last thing any of us needs is to feel judged or to judge others for our choices.

So when I first read about the recent gender roles controversy, I wrote it off. I thought some of the claims people made were silly, but as I said at the beginning, I didn’t have the time or the cortisol to waste on a conversation that is so nuanced and complex and personal and which so many people reduce to maxims and memes.

The longer I heard and saw people talking about it, however, the sadder I got. There are a lot of women walking around without knowing their worth. Without knowing their belovedness. Without understanding their deep value to God apart from what they do.

When we know our belovedness, no one’s opinion of what women should or shouldn’t be doing with their lives can push us off kilter. We know who we are, we know who God made us to be, we know who loves us, and we know the ones we love. We don’t have anything to prove to anyone, because we are secure in Christ’s love. 

I can say, “I am a child of God, and I know my Father loves me.” And I can say to you, “You are a child of God, and your Father loves you – whether you stay home with your children or whether you work from home or whether you work out of the home or do any of it for pay.”

This is what I wish we all knew, truly knew, deep in the viscera of our bodies and the basement of our souls:

The woman who stays at home? Loved.
The woman who works from home? Loved.
The woman who works nights so she can be with her kids during the day? Loved.
The woman who works days because it’s the only way to make ends meet? Loved. 
The woman who stays home when her kids are little and then goes back to work? Loved.
The woman who works because she genuinely enjoys her job? Loved.

You are the beloved of God, and no one can take that away from you. You are hidden in Christ with God, and your real self is found in Him, not in the approval or disapproval of other men and women. You are a child of God, and that is the most important thing about you. 

The God who adopted you as Daughter will lead you in ways that are personal and particular to you. Your life may look different from mine, but we are all the beloved of God. He is ours, and we are His. 

May we cherish each other in the same way the God of the universe cherishes us. May we honor each other’s choices, just as we honor the same God who leads us in different directions. And may we remember that our value comes from Him, not the particular ways we serve our families and communities. For we are the beloved of God, and no power on earth can convince us otherwise.

Thoughts on Teaching Writing from a Writer/Editor Mom

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by Elizabeth

I love to write, and I love to edit, but I was still lost when it came to teaching my own children the craft of writing.

I remember something Susan Wise Bauer said once. It was something to the effect of, “Good writers intuitively know how to construct sentences, paragraphs, and papers that are beautiful and logical, but they’re not sure exactly how they do it.”

That means that if writing comes easy for you, you might not know how to explain the process to someone else. But students who struggle with writing need explicit guidance. And so do their teachers.

That’s where writing curriculum comes in. But which one should we use?? There are so many to choose from! So today I’ll share some principles for writing instruction, along with practical resource ideas. I’d also love to hear about the resources you have used and loved (or loathed).

First, a little primer on the writing process. Susan Wise Bauer, whom I consider to be an expert on the subject, has explained in many places that there are two distinct steps to the writing process. The writer must first put an idea into words; they must have something to say. Then, they must put those words down on paper. These two steps aren’t necessarily related — at least not in the beginning.

The first step is really a thinking step. In fact, Bauer has said that bad writing isn’t a writing problem; it’s a thinking problem. The second step involves our physical bodies: we must hold the pencil or pen properly, we must know how to construct each letter legibly, we must know how to spell words (mostly) correctly, and we must put the words in the correct order on the page. Eventually we must know how to type quickly and accurately.

This is all quite complex work, which is why Bauer recommends developing the skills separately. For the thinking piece, she recommends oral narration, or a re-telling, of the selection. The student isn’t required to write anything down yet; they are just practicing coming up with something to say. The parent can either listen to the narration and write it down or just listen.

For the pencil-and-paper part, she recommends dictation and copywork. Copywork is exactly what it sounds like: copying sentences from another source. In general we try to choose beautiful sentences for copywork so that the child develops an appreciation of what good writing looks like and sounds like. (This is also why we read them living books and develop a read-aloud culture in the home, but that’s a topic for another article.)

Dictation is harder and involves more memory work. The teacher reads a sentence aloud (usually only once, but sometimes twice), and the student listens and records the sentence as they see it in their mind. Here they are remembering and recording at the same time, but they are not formulating original thought.

In the early years these can be combined if a parent writes down the child’s narration and then assigns copywork or dictation from that narration, but the two activities are not yet happening simultaneously.

Eventually the student will connect both parts of the writing process. They consider the thoughts they want to communicate while recording those thoughts on paper (or a screen) and also remembering to implement spelling and grammar rules as they write or type.

Bauer’s elementary writing program, Writing with Ease, is based on these two principles of narrating (thinking) and recording. I used this program in the early years and enjoyed it.

Later on, Bauer teaches that the student will need to come up with their own thoughts rather than retelling ideas through narration. This is a higher-level process and involves learning how to outline nonfiction works and beginning to create their own outlines and compositions. That program, entitled Writing with Skill, took a lot more time and energy from both me and my oldest child, so eventually I gave up on it and simply used the Sonlight writing assignments.

Now, I love Sonlight, but there are some weaknesses in their writing curriculum. The main issue is that it tends to focus too much on creative writing and not enough on expository writing. This weakness seems to work itself out around level 200 or so, when more of the assignments become expository in nature and fewer are creative. This is important because, as Susan Wise Bauer has explained in several places, not everyone needs to know how to do creative writing, but everyone needs to know how to do expository writing.

As I was transitioning my oldest to the Sonlight writing program, I continued requiring copywork from my younger students. Their copywork was usually in the form of poems and hymns. I also assigned daily written narrations based on their science and/or history reading. They would begin with just a sentence or so in 4th grade and move on to short paragraphs from there, gradually lengthening over time to longer and longer paragraphs.

In these years I used the following articles from Mystie Winckler as my “handbooks” for teaching writing. I printed them out and referred to them regularly:

How to Teach Your Kids to Write Well – No Curriculum Needed

5 Tips for Tutoring Writing

The more I read about Charlotte Mason education, however, the more I realized I wasn’t doing narration right. True Charlotte Mason instruction requires narration after a single reading, which focuses the child’s attention and requires more of the mind. And the more I read about Charlotte Mason, the more I became convinced that her style of education is one of the best for children. Which means I could have taught writing better in the middle years.

So if you, like me, are convinced of the efficacy of Charlotte Mason principles but don’t know where to begin with writing, here are a few resources:

Karen Glass has written Know and Tell, an entire book about narration.

Cindy Rollins (one of my favorites!) writes about the magic of narration in her magnificent memoir Mere Motherhood.

If you’re short on time, you could read this article about narration to help you figure out if the approach is right for you.

And if you tend toward more a more classical style of education, you may want to check out the Progym. This particular program looks to be an excellent resource from some trusted voices in the homeschool world. (I love Schole Sisters and have learned a lot from them.)

Here are some practical recommendations in case you skipped narration or paragraph writing with a child who had difficulty with spelling or handwriting or some other skill involved in writing. As a homeschool teacher, I appreciated the step-by-step instructions, because I didn’t feel competent to develop them on my own.

Paragraph Writing for Kids by Ann Roeder is designed for students in 4th through 6th grade and teaches them how to write descriptive, narrative, persuasive, expository, and comparative paragraphs. It breaks down the writing process into very small steps – it takes a couple weeks to learn how to write each type of paragraph! But after the student has truly grasped the process for each type of paragraph, they can write another sample paragraph in one sitting. This workbook is especially good for students who are nervous about the writing process and lack the confidence that they can do it. By the end of this book, my student could confidently write paragraphs and was ready to move on to a more robust composition program.

Jump In: Middle School Composition by Sharon Watson is the next step in that process. In this program, students learn how to write entire compositions. Everything in Jump In is also broken down into small steps, which both my student and I needed. I recommend getting the teacher’s guide along with the student book.

At the same time, I know literary analysis is coming in high school, and I want my students to be prepared. One way to prepare them is to start having them think about story structure for some of their assigned reading in upper elementary or middle school. You can have a conversation about the ideas with your younger students, or if your student is a little older and thus more proficient in writing or typing, you can assign a short paper that covers just one or two of the ideas. Here’s my template for beginning literary conversations.

A discussion of writing instruction wouldn’t be complete without a mention of spelling and grammar. All About Spelling is, hands down, the best and easiest way to learn spelling.

Grammar is much harder to teach. I’ve tried so many programs, trying to fit the program to each child’s needs. What I’ve learned is that there are a lot of not-great ones out there. Two of the better ones are Shurley English and Rod and Staff English. Shurley is more fun, but Rod and Staff is extremely thorough (though at times too thorough – who really needs that many practice problems?!).

In case you didn’t know. . . .

In addition to my editing services, I also provide homeschool consulting. Whether you’re in the early years of home education or are wondering how to approach high school, I’d love to help you with your questions! I’m especially passionate about helping moms who are overseas. You can find the intake form here. I’m offering a discount until August 31, 2023.