Newspaper Interview, Part 4

I'm posting the answers I gave to a woman who interviewed me about mine and Darin's Quiverfull lifestyle for a newspaper in the Middle East called The National.  It will take a few days of posting to get it all up. 

4. How does your home school work? Do you have a "classroom?"
We do not have a classroom.  We have a room in the house that we call the “schoolroom” but we don’t actually do much school in there.  It is our dining room, which has three large bookshelves with our small library.  The kids have their own shelves for their schoolbooks, and I have some shelves for teacher manuals and such.  We also have our piano in there. 

We end up doing school all over the house.  The living room, kitchen, office, the back porch, and sometimes the kids go to their bedrooms if they need to really focus on their work without distractions.

Our day goes like this:
6 a.m.: Darin and I wake up.  Darin takes a shower and hopefully I drag myself out of bed to exercise.  Depends on what time I got in bed the night before.
7:00-7:30: wake up the kids.  the older kids get dressed, Darin dresses our 3 year old, and I nurse and dress the 1 year old.
7:30-8:00: Darin reads the Bible to us and we pray. 
Darin leaves for work at 8.
8:00-10:00: breakfast, chores, piano practice
10:00-12:00: seatwork.  that includes math, language arts, handwriting, spelling….
12:00-2:00: lunch, finish chores, go outside
2:00: babies in bed for a nap.
the older kids and I sit down to listen to our favorite pastor, John MacArthur through our iPod that we hook up to our stereo in the living room.
After this, I read 3 chapters of the Bible to them.
2:45-3:30: Science or history
3:30-5:00: finish up unfinished seatwork from the morning
5:00-6:00: outside to play with neighborhood kids
6:00: inside to set the table for dinner, pick-up the downstairs
6:30: Darin is usually home by this time.  We eat dinner, the kids all help clean the kitchen.  Darin leads the kids in this.  I rarely have to clean the kitchen these days.  I spend this time folding laundry, cleaning bathrooms, & etc.
8:00: babies in bed
8:30-9:00: read aloud time with the older three.  Darin will read, or we’ll listen to an audio book.
9:00: bedtime!  The kids can sit in their rooms with their lights on until 9:30, then it’s Lights Out!

What subjects do you teach?
We cover just about everything.  Bible, History, Science (Darin does the experiments!), Math, handwriting, Language Arts, Reading, Writing, Spanish, Art, our oldest is learning Koine Greek, and I teach the kids piano, and Darin is teaching our oldest the guitar. 

In one blog you spoke about the challenges of designing new lessons for the eldest. What is the hardest part and what is the most rewarding?
The hardest part of homeschooling is the time it takes, and the discipline to give the time.  A lot of ladies will tell me that they are not organized enough to homeschool.  I don’t believe that being organized is the make-or-break ingredient.  It’s discipline.  On many days it is very hard to do what it takes to make homeschooling successful.  Just about every night now, I stay up until 11 or 12 o’clock working on lesson plans, printing stuff out for the next day, researching curriculum for future use…for the most part I would rather read a book.  J  I haven’t read a book for pleasure in a really long time.  These days, I spend all my time reading the kid’s books.  At least they’re interesting.  ;-)

With all the time spent in trying to keep things going, it could be easy to forget why we homeschool and get caught up in the workload.  One of my favorite pastors said…(I’m loosely quoting!)….the key to lasting through the hard times is to remember what we knew to begin with.  Darin and I have a reason for homeschooling, and it would be so easy to forget that reason in all the toil and work.  It takes discipline to remember.  So when I can’t exercise like I want to, or keep the house as clean as I would like, or hang out with friends, or go get a job so we can have that leather couch, I have to remember and discipline myself to give up the time for the goal that we agreed on back when we started this in 2000.