I didn’t even have a decent box to mail them in. When I sent our materials back to California, I wrapped grocery bags around our reading and math books, hoping they would survive the rough trip across country. (It actually did fall apart! My charter school was very gracious about it.) As I sent that book bundle ground shipping rate, from the post office, larger questions loomed in my mind. How could I continue homeschooling these kids without any resources?
In California, we had a charter school. Our materials and extra classes were covered. Only my loss of income challenged our finances. Staying home to teach my own kids provided great value to our lives, but not the financial sort! Now, in Florida, nothing similar existed. People looked at me like I was crazy for asking.
“Why would anyone give a family money to homeschool? That would mean higher taxes.” A friend at church declared. Today, homeschool families in Florida have more resources, but those were different times.
Teaching four young students, ages 7, 5, 3 and 2, on a shoestring budget felt close to impossible for me. Now, I look back at those years and see how God provided a rich learning experience through our leanest years. I discovered more than how to teach without a curriculum. In the process, I found out that multiage learning is a great component of homeschooling midsize to large families. With the psalmist, I could confess,
“It was good for me to be afflicted…” (Psalm 119:71, NIV) as it taught me to trust God for wisdom and move away from prepackaged learning.
Some of our learning came from the library in those days.
“What do you want to learn about?” I asked my older two. The children’s science section became a familiar friend to me. I knew where the space books, the insect identifiers and the “Fun Experiments You Can Try at Home” volumes lived on the shelves. These books gave us a springboard for activities and journalling that made learning meaningful and fun.
Our classroom was, at best, a kitchen table. But sometimes we had no room at all and found ourselves park-schooling, car-schooling, even sitting on a porch, trying to balance work with play. Our journals filled up with pictures and descriptions of our outdoor adventures. It sometimes felt hard-pressed to focus my young kids enough for progress in the basics, but we were not crushed! Today, I have four strong and stable adults!
Maybe your family size or shrinking budget are making the homeschool adventure feel unrealistic. Remember that,
“Nothing is impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). If you want to homeschool your kids, pray about it! If God confirms His plan, He will also provide new tools and ideas to help you succeed.
If you want to learn more about how to creatively teach multiage homeschoolers in your home, come join my Zoom meeting. I will share a few strategies that worked well in our family over the years. If you want to join us to share your own successes, you are invited! When we come together as homeschool teachers we can inspire and equip one another for success in this wonderful, humbling and noble calling. We can teach our families successfully with the resources the Lord provides.
