Sarah Mackenzie (00:05):
Hey, hey, Sarah Mackenzie here. And this is the Read-Aloud Revival, the podcast that helps your kids fall in love with books and helps you fall in love with homeschooling. In the last episode, I shared a session that I did at Great Homeschool Conventions in 2023 about helping your differently wired kids fall in love with reading. That’s a session I did with my friend Colleen Kessler.
(00:30):
So, listen to that one in Episode 230 if you haven’t. Today, I want to share another session from that same great homeschool conference. This one is all about homeschooling with babies and toddlers. So, if you’re homeschooling and you have babies and toddlers underfoot, this episode is for you.
(00:50):
If you have a friend who is homeschooling with babies or toddlers underfoot, this one’s for her. So, would you share it with her? I hope she’ll find some encouragement, maybe a few laughs, and a lot of tips in this episode. Now, full disclosure, my favorite part about going to the Great Homeschool Conventions is because I get to hold all of your babies. So, what I did this year is I created a session that would ensure I would get the maximum number of baby holds.
(01:18):
I created a session called Homeschooling with Babies and Toddlers, and it was so much fun because the room was positively packed with babies and toddlers. And I don’t know, there’s just something next-level awesome about being in a room with so much life. I loved it. I hope you enjoyed this session as much as I did.
(01:38):
There were some photos I mentioned during this session, and I put these photos up on slides during the conference, but I’m going to put those photos in the show notes of this episode. So, in case you’re inclined to see a little of my real-life chaos, you can head to the show notes, readaloudrevival.com/231 because this is episode 231, and you can see those for yourself.
(02:03):
All right, here’s that session. Enjoy. I am Sarah McKenzie, the host of the Read-Aloud Revival podcast and author of a couple of books, the Read-Aloud Family and Teaching from Rest, and some picture books, one that just came out a little more beautiful and more on the way. And today, we’re going to talk about homeschooling with babies and toddlers, and why it’s so stinking hard, and what we can do about it.
(02:34):
Before we get started, because I will forget to mention this later, I’m going to be recommending some books and resources, podcasts, and all kinds of stuff. And I have some good free book lists for you. If you text GHC to the number 33777, I’ll send it to you. Actually, you’ll get everything from all of my sessions.
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So, whether you’re just here today or you heard me yesterday and you wanted something or tomorrow, Colleen Kessler and I are doing a session on reading, Struggles with Reading, so you’ll get all the resources if you text GHC to 33777.
(03:07):
My husband and I have been married for 21 years. We’ve homeschooled since the beginning of time, it feels like. Our oldest is Audrey. She’s a junior at Franciscan University in Steubenville here in Ohio. We live in Washington State, so she’s a long way from home. And she’s been homeschooled since we started, since she was old enough to go to school.
(03:27):
Allison is 19. She is studying illustration and sequential arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Drew, he picked that picture. Can you tell? He saw me when I was preparing my slides for this, and I had a different picture of him. He’s like, “Could we switch that out for the…” I’m like, “Yes. Yes, we can.” He’s a senior in our homeschool this year. He will also be going to Franciscan University in Steubenville next year, hopefully to study marketing.
(03:59):
And then, there are those three little joyful blessings at the bottom. Clara is 11. And they’re identical twin boys. They’re nine. Emerson and Beckett are nine years old. So, Clara was nine months old when I found out I was pregnant again. Just give you a second for that because my husband says that I started giggling and then sobbing, which to me seems very rational way to respond to, right?
(04:29):
He didn’t see it that way, but I did go to the doctor, of course. And when I went to my first appointment, he said, “Well, let’s do an ultrasound, and we’ll get a real due date, like a proper due date for you.” And so, he does. And I’m still in the days like, “I cannot believe I’m pregnant again.”
(04:45):
And he says, “Oh, Sarah, there are two.” I was like, “Two what? Two arms, two legs? What are we talking about? It can’t be two humans because I have a baby at home that doesn’t walk yet.” So, at the time, we were homeschooling a 12-year-old, 10-year-old, eight-year-old, and then we had a one-year-old and twin newborns. That was nuts, right? And everybody in my life made sure I knew how crazy I was to think I could homeschool my kids.
(05:14):
And I put off like a, “Oh, we got this. It’ll be fine.” While inside I was like, “I don’t think I’m going to…” I’m pretty sure I’m going to ruin these children, right? This is not going to work. But I worried about so many things. I worried about whether I was ignoring my big kids because I was taking care of all these babies.
(05:31):
I worried about where I was neglecting some big part of their education, something that they needed that I was completely not, and I was. We’re going to talk about it in a second. I worried about the babies that I was so distracted that I would not as patient of a mother as I wanted to be. This was not the ideal vision that I had when I first imagined homeschooling.
(05:52):
And I thought I’d be sitting on the hearth reading, I don’t know, Charlotte’s Web while my children were like whittling or something. This is not what it looked like, and it still isn’t what it looks like. So, a big part of my frustration in those years was just reconciling what I thought my homeschool should look like and actually what it did. And I would bet that every single person in this room feels, on many days, like, “I wonder if I’m making a mistake.”
(06:25):
Because we worry about the balls we’re probably dropping by homeschooling our older kids with a bunch of babies and toddlers, right? But here’s something I want to remind you right at the very beginning before we get into some practical stuff, and that is that you are a professional problem solver. You have been problem-solving since before first baby was born, right? So, baby doesn’t sleep through the night, and your problem solving.
(06:52):
Well, they don’t sleep for the night for years, and you’re still problem-solving, right? You go to church, and the baby has a blowout, and you forgot to pack an extra onesie. What do you do? You’re problem-solving. You have nothing for dinner except two cans of green beans and a box of macaroni and cheese. What? So, that sounds like a decent dinner, doesn’t it? Let’s come with other.
(07:11):
You don’t know what to make for dinner and you’ve got nothing in the pantry. What are you doing? You’re problem-solving. You have been problem-solving every single day. It’s what you do. And I think sometimes we think, “I don’t think I’m cut out for this,” because we forget this is what we do. There is no one on the planet who’s better problem solver than a mother.
(07:30):
And you take a mother who’s got kids she’s trying to educate and babies and toddlers that she’s also trying to nurture at the same time, and her problem-solving abilities go way up because they have to. So, I just want to remind you that right now you may be feeling like, “I’m not…” This is another thing that I felt.
(07:49):
If it’s this hard for me to do right now, how am I going to handle X? So, I remember, we had just had our third baby. So, I have like a three-year-old and a one-year-old and this new baby, and I went to Bible study at church. Unless you think I was just trying to become holy, I really just wanted the free childcare.
(08:07):
That’s really what was going on there. But I packed everybody up, and I brought them to church so I could sit with this newborn baby and drink coffee somebody else made and eat brownie somebody else brought, right? And a lady who had two teen boys was just ogling over this newborn baby of mine that would not sleep. Just this beautiful little gift of God. I was so tired.
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And I remember her looking at him and saying, “Oh. I remember those days and I wish I had them back because you think this is hard, just wait until they become teenagers.” Who says that? First of all, I was like, “Oh, no.” Because I feel like this is pretty hard. And the thing that I didn’t realize at the time is that you get grace the moment you need it, and not a moment before but never a moment late.
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And so, so many of the things we worry about, we’re worrying about how am I going to fill in the blank? We don’t have grace for what happens in our imagination. We just get the grace for what happens right now. So, right now, you are in a very hard part of homeschooling.
(09:13):
How many of you have all kids who are 10 and under? Oh, my gosh. Okay. So, let’s just sit here for a second. It is easily the hardest part of homeschooling when all of your kids are 10 and under. Everybody needs you for everything. They can’t do anything without you, right? And once your kids… I mean, I’ve been homeschooling now high schoolers, middle school.
(09:39):
We had high school, middle school, elementary school, babies and toddlers all at the same time, and that was still easier. I promise you it was still easier than when all of mine were 10 and under. Just take a second and know that. What you’re doing right now, the reason it feels hard is because it really, really is hard. We’re going to talk about some strategies to not just survive it, but to really enjoy it as much as you can and to know that you’re doing enough.
(10:06):
But the fact that it feels hard doesn’t mean you’re not cut out for it. It just means that what you’re doing is pretty difficult stuff. Okay. Here’s what I hope to do today. I’m hoping that the next 40 minutes or so we will come up with some practical strategies. I’ll share some practical tips for how I homeschooled with so many babies and toddlers, underfoot, what might work for you.
(10:31):
What worked for me might not work for you, so just listen with an ear for like, “That could work,” or “For sure, it won’t work.” And know that we all have different circumstances, right? God gave you a different husband and different children and different circumstances than he gave me, and so what works for me may or may not work for you. We’re going to throw out some ideas about what could possibly work. And my goal is for you to have a really clear idea for how you can turn on your problem-solving brain.
(10:58):
And remember, because the hardest thing I think is in those moments when you’re overwhelmed, remembering that you are actually a really good problem solver. I want to make sure that what we’re talking about today is helpful to the struggles this collection of us is having in our homeschools right now. So, call out to me, what’s your biggest worry, struggle?
(11:20):
What’s getting in your way with homeschooling? What are you most worried about when it comes to homeschooling and you’ve got babies and toddlers? Consistency. Okay. So, consistency for the older kids because, like in teaching? Yes. Okay, great. Yeah?
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Keeping toddlers busy while you’re trying to homeschool the olders.
Sarah Mackenzie (11:36):
Yes, keeping toddlers busy while you’re trying to homeschool the olders. Okay.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
When the baby screams anytime I teach.
Sarah Mackenzie (11:43):
The baby screams every time… Okay. Okay. She said the baby screams anytime she teaches. My friend Sunny sent me the funniest video. I thought it was funny because it wasn’t happening in my house. She had told me, “No, Sarah, every time I read aloud, the baby just goes, ‘Ma.'” And I was like, “Oh, that’s funny.” And she’s like, “No, it’s really not funny.” So, thus far, in like a week, and she sends me the funniest video I’ve ever seen in my life.
(12:09):
She’s got all these boys and this one little angelic girl baby who literally every time Sunny gets to about the third word in the sentence, “Ma.” Louder than that, but I don’t want to blast your ears. Could I steal your water after all? Thank you. What else? Yes.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
Every time my kids are-
Sarah Mackenzie (12:29):
There’s no dog ate my homework at your house. It’s the baby. The baby is eating the schoolwork. Okay. Yup? Crawling kids getting into things on the floor. Oh, I’m going to show you some evidence of that here in a minute. Yeah?
Speaker 5 (12:41):
Feeling like I’m ignoring my youngest.
Sarah Mackenzie (12:43):
Okay. Feeling guilty like that you’re ignoring the youngers ones when you’re teaching the older ones. I actually think most of our stress comes from feeling guilty. Feeling guilty that we’re either neglecting the little ones while we teach the older ones, or neglecting the older one’s education while we’re taking care of the little ones. Or feeling guilty that we’re asking older ones to help us with younger ones. And, “Oh, my goodness, am I going to raise children that never want to have children of their own?” Right?
(13:04):
Anyone else have this worry? Yeah. Okay. I think we’re going to tackle most of those. And hopefully, if I can, if I can keep myself on track here, we’ll have some time at the end. So, if anything we don’t tackle, we can problem solve together. We can do a little Q&A.
(13:20):
The couple of the things that worried me when I was homeschooling babies and toddlers were the subjects that we didn’t have time for, like whole entire subjects that we didn’t have time for, books that we didn’t read. I’d hear about other homeschoolers taking these great field trips and my babies and toddlers were not invited with me to Target.
(13:38):
So, there was definitely no reason way in the world that we were going to go to the caverns or some historic guided tour. That was not going to happen, right? I worried also that I was tired and burned out and frustrated and constantly doubting myself. And so, I was showing up in a way that maybe might send a message to my older kids that it wasn’t really that fun to be homeschooling them, into my babies that I would batch parents the babies.
(14:12):
They were all so close together. So, I mean, when the twins were born, my husband would get up in the middle of the night to help me while I was feeding them, and so he would call it processing the babies. And what he meant was like he would change the diaper of this one, and then hand me that one, and then this one. Right?
(14:31):
I mean, that is what we were doing, right? Only a man would talk about… that way, processing the babies. But actually, batch parenting is something that happens I think a lot too, whether it’s with your older kids or your younger kids because there’s only one of us and there’s so many of them sometimes, right? And so, you just feel stretched in so many different directions.
(14:52):
The other thing that really frustrated me is this thing that you hear. We’ve all heard experienced moms say, “Oh, treasure these years because you’ll miss them.” Right? Did all of your like nerve endings just go up. You’re like, “Okay, thanks. Bye. Bet I will.” But I also hated it’s just a season.
(15:15):
Because I don’t know, that’s not one season, right? Babies are just a season, so it’s okay if you’re in survival season for a little bit, but I had season after season, after season after season, pretty sure, pretty soon that just feels like a life, right? It doesn’t feel so much like a season. And so, the question I had was not like, “Okay, can we… I knew we could do less for a season. But what if you have six seasons stacked on top of each other, then what?” Right?
(15:42):
Then, how does this pan out? So, we’re going to keep that in mind too as we talk about these practical strategies. Because I said this yesterday, but I’m going to repeat it today because I think it’s worth remembering. This is the day the Lord has made. This one. Not when the baby sleeps through the night, not when you’re finally able to get to that curriculum that you really wanted to do.
(16:04):
Not when your husband doesn’t have to work two jobs, or you can move to a house with a yard, or you move to a house with a homeschool room, or you can afford X, Y, Z curriculum, or you can finally take the kids to that co-op you’ve been wanting to join because you’re not having a baby every year.
(16:18):
Anybody else? So, not then, but this is the day the Lord has made. So, how do we right now in this moment with these babies and toddlers who are, it feels like upending our entire day and maybe not saving you through the night and we’re exhausted. How do we thrive and help our kids thrive today in this day, in this homeschooling season? I want to play for you… Oh, no, I want to show you another picture. Just to be completely transparent, that is not children or a heritage and a blessing from the Lord’s smile on my face.
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No. What was happening, I remember very clearly, is that my husband was home late from work, and so I gave my phone to my daughter and said, “Take a picture.” And I sent it to him with a message that was like, “You know that providing for the family thing you’re doing? If you could just wrap that up and get on home, that’d be great.” I like both of these pictures though because they feel to me very much like, “And now, we know this is going to happen.”
(17:38):
You know this is going to happen. I can look back at these pictures, my kids are so much older than this now, and go, “Oh, my gosh.” Now, my husband looks at these pictures and he’s like, “They’re so precious.” And I’m like, “Oh, my goodness, they’re so precious. I was so tired.” That’s all I think of when I see it is, “Oh, they were so precious and I was so tired.”
(17:56):
One of the things I would’ve loved, would have loved to know back then is how things would pan out in the future. So, my oldest daughter… That’s her, Audrey. She’s 21, almost 22. She’s a junior in university. When she was 12, I really worried about her. I worried about how much I was asking her to do with the older kids. I worried about the fact that we weren’t doing hardly any school at all for years. It was not just the year the twins were born.
(18:23):
It was before that because I was sick, sick, sick when I was pregnant with them. It was the year after that because then we all think, “Oh, my goodness, we’re going to have a new baby.” And then, we forget the baby turns two, and it just gets so much harder, right? And then, three, and you’re like, “When does it get easier?” When does that happen? So, anyway, recently, Audrey sometimes comes to conferences with me, and people will ask her questions.
(18:46):
So, finally, she said, “Hey mom, you should just have me on the podcast and ask me the questions everybody asks me and then I’ll tell them.” So, I asked a question of my own. And I wanted to play this clip for you. You’re going to hear my voice first, and then her respond.
(18:58):
So, I’m curious. I’m curious what you remember about school, those years. And I’m also curious about the impact of those very light years. We all in homeschooling have a year or two or five where we’re like, “That was a struggle bus. That was a survival year.” And so, I’m curious about the impact of those struggle bus years on your education.
Audrey (19:21):
To be totally honest, I do not remember what school looked like during these days. I really have no particular memories of school or what we did at this time. But what I do remember is how much I loved having baby siblings and how much fun it was to take naps with them, asleep on my chest.
(19:40):
To read books to Clara, who was one at the time. To help you feed the twins and put them to bed. It was my favorite thing. To come downstairs and to help you rock the twins to sleep. And while yes, this was a couple of years, I really think I grew closer in relationship with my siblings and with you than I did educationally. And I found this to be just as valuable, if not more so in the end.
Sarah Mackenzie (20:03):
I should have told you to take out tissues ahead of time. Just as valuable, if not more so. Are you kidding? I can’t tell you how many times we had to stop the podcast so I could like, “Just a minute.” Having a minute. Also, I want to be really clear, Audrey did not send this message at the time that she really enjoyed helping me with all of these things.
(20:24):
Which reminds me a lot of something, Sally Clarkson. Are there any Sally Clarkson fans in here? Me too. And Sally told me once that dinnertime at her house was fraught. There was like the kids were bickering and whining at each other. One always got sent to his room every night at dinner. And now, when her adult children talk about dinner, they remember it very differently than she does. So, they’ll talk about the wonderful conversations they had and the wonderful meals and how close they all felt, and Sally’s like, “Really?”
(20:54):
So, how it’s happening for you right now is not necessarily how they’ll remember it. If you had asked me when Audrey was 12, if she loved reading to Clara and helping me get the twins to bed and being completely ignored by her mother for hours a day, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have been like, “This is going to help me so much more than school in the end.”
(21:14):
So, it doesn’t feel like it now. That’s not how it works, right? I said yesterday that a lot of times we are planting seeds in our home schools, right? We’re like, we plant a seed. We want to teach our kids to love reading, let’s say. So, we plant that seed and we’re reading to them, and we water and nurture that seed, and we’re so tempted to dig it up and make sure it’s growing.
(21:33):
And you can’t do that, right? You don’t get to see the fruit of your labor when you’re in the process. But really what I think this points out is that your life is not a distraction to your homeschool. And this is really important for us to remember. Because it is really hard to remember when the toddler is upending your school day, that the toddler is not a distraction, that your kids and you are learning so much more.
(21:59):
I mean, there is really truthfully no better way to die to yourself than to spend an afternoon with a toddler who won’t nap, right? So, learning just to… your kids even watching you lay down your life for the babies and toddlers. They’re learning more there than they could get in any book.
(22:15):
And God does things on purpose. So, there’s this funny thing. I noticed this when… because our twins… our youngest are twins, and they’re the fifth and sixth, and they’re nine now. And there are times when my husband will be like, “Oh, I feel so bad for them that they don’t have baby siblings.”
(22:36):
And I’m like, “Do you now?” So, I got a couple puppies. But actually, I understand what he means because there are some things that our older kids have… but you know what? God does that on purpose too. And God has the ability to meet all of our kids right where they are and give them exactly what they need.
(22:54):
Not only does He have the ability, but it’s all His design. And I think it’s really helpful for us to remember that your homeschool would not be better without your toddler in it. It just would look closer to your cover of a sunlight catalog, right? It might just look a little bit closer to what your view thought you were going to be doing when you’re homeschool, when actually the homeschool you have is the one that he wants you to thrive in, the one where he’s going to meet your kids and educate them in. But your kids are not a distraction.
(23:22):
And even the things that you think may be holding them back. Two things I want to mention about that. One is that my second daughter, Alison, who’s in art school right now. She’s a freshman at Savannah College of Art and Design. She told me within a couple of weeks of classes starting that one thing… She calls me up and she’s like, “So, I’ve just noticed something that I think homeschooling gave me that I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.”
(23:46):
And I’m like, “Do go on.” Right? “Just a second, let me get the tape recorder.” And she said, “I just think I’m better at managing my time, like my workload. Then, I’m just surprised at how many other students don’t have any idea if there’s like a big project due on week eight, how to back that up.”
(24:05):
And I thought, “That’s interesting, because I’m pretty sure I didn’t get her on to teaching that to you during all this chaos.” Right? But I do realize that she actually did have to self-manage more because I wasn’t available, right? I had to take care of the baby so she had to self-manage a little more.
(24:22):
And I wouldn’t have said she was doing an awesome job at it for a long time. But apparently, it’s again, they’re seeds that are planted that we don’t even know how they’re going to grow. Another example of this is that when our oldest learned how to drive, she had passed her drivers class and test and everything.
(24:39):
And except for that last driving test, I don’t know what your rules are here in Ohio, but we have a certain number of hours you have to take. And then, they have to do a written test, and then they have to drive for a certain number of hours, and then they have to pass the driving test.
(24:53):
And she had done everything but pass the last driving test. My husband and I didn’t want her to do it because we just didn’t think she was strong enough of a driver. So, we would be in the car with her. And every time she had to… like we were constantly like, “Wait, wait, wait. No, you can’t step in the middle of an intersection. Go.” Like it was just constant. “You’re going to go into the ditch. I’m about to go in the ditch, Audrey. To the left.”
(25:16):
And so, I’m like, “She can’t drive. This girl cannot get her driver’s license.” Well, at some point, I needed somebody to do the grocery shopping. So, we let her get her driver’s license. And something really interesting happened. Almost immediately, her driving got so much better. I was in the car with her about two weeks after she got her driver’s license, and I’m texting my husband, like, “I almost just feel like she’s a brand-new driver. What happened?”
(25:41):
And I realized what happened is I got out of the car. So, if I got out of the car, she had to be the final buck. If she’s in the intersection and I’m in the car, I’m like, “Go.” or “Stop.” And so, she’s waiting for me to tell her what to do. But as soon as I got out of the car, she had to be the one making those decisions.
(26:00):
So, I think a lot of times in our homeschool we’re like, “This kid is not ready to fill in the blank.” But of course, they’re not. Just like we’re not getting the grace we need until we need it, they’re not getting the grace for their future challenges until they meet them either. And so, we don’t have to get everything ready in the moment, and it doesn’t always look perfectly tidy in the moment.
(26:18):
But let’s talk about some practical stuff. So, first of all, someone said homeschooling when you’ve got crawlers, they get into everything. So, I just want to leave this picture up for a minute. I think on that couch in the top picture, I think the baby is holding a Keurig cup.
(26:33):
I’m pretty sure that’s what that is. The twins would climb on everything, absolutely everything, and also empty my bookshelves every day to the point where I would start shoving books in really, really tight so that I didn’t think their little hands, and they’d stand over there and they’d try to get it out. And I’m like, “Huh.” Like all a kind mother would, right?
(26:55):
But let’s talk about the toddlers driving me nuts. Anybody have a day like that this week? Yes. Okay. So, that’s true. That’s what happens. The toddler does actually drive us nuts in our homeschool. So, let’s talk about a few very practical tips first, and then we’ll get into some other stuff. One is that one thing that really helped my toddlers is filling up their loves buckets first.
(27:17):
So, I found that if I tried… I’d hear about other people homeschooling who started their school day at like 8:30 or some impossible hour with math or morning time, and I would think that’s what I should do. But then, what would happen is my toddlers would fuss at me for the whole time. And I found that if I just took about 15 minutes and sat on the floor. And man, I had to set a timer because I don’t know about you, but like little vroom, vroom cars and the Legos and you’re like, “Pretty sure my brain is melting right now.” Right?
(27:51):
Fifteen minutes. I can do 15 minutes, and I can break it up with some good board book reading in there. Fifteen minutes I could get down on the floor with them and fill up their love bucket first, and it would really drastically change how needy they felt. Because I think they didn’t feel completely ignored. Like, “When’s mom going to pay attention to me?” Because they already got a little bit of that attention. That made a huge difference for us.
(28:14):
Another thing we did is we put together… and this takes a little planning. So, if this is too much right now and you’re like, “I cannot do this.” Then ignore this, bad advice. But if you can, something that might help is if you can create a couple of little Tupperware bins or plastic bins that are just activities for the toddler that you only pull out during certain times of your school day.
(28:33):
So, I had a read-aloud bin and a math bin. I don’t mean the bins were full of math stuff or anything nearly that organized. I mean that when the older kids were doing math, I could pull down the same bin every day, but it had things that weren’t available at other times for the toddlers to do.
(28:49):
It’s just like when you go to a friend’s house or the church nursery and all those toys are super exciting to your kids because they don’t have them every day. So, it’s just adding a little novelty. Get a few things that they can play with that only come out during this special time. You can even do like, “Okay, it’s math time,” and pull out a big blanket that you only pull out during this time of day and you put out the bin that only comes out this time of day.
(29:11):
And they’re like, “Oh, it’s my…” whatever, toy you’ve put in there that time, right? That can really help. I would do it for whatever parts of day you are finding the most stressful. So, right now, you probably are already thinking of the time of day that feels the most stressful to you. To me, it was always read-alouds and math. Mostly read-alouds because I felt like my toddlers were ruining my read-alouds. And math because I felt like math was ruining all of our lives, actually.
(29:34):
So, the kids needed a lot of help with math, right? And so, I felt like… but I’m trying to take care of the toddlers and the whiny toddlers while you’re trying to teach a kid long division is like, “There’s not enough chocolate for that in this world.” So, trying to go, “What is the most stressful part of my day and then problem solving for that.” So, fill in love buckets bins. And then, this is not super popular advice to give it a homeschooling conference, so I’ll say it really quietly.
(30:01):
But sometimes, we used screens. I know, right? Let me tell you about this a little bit. First of all, if you have a passel of kids and you’re trying to homeschool the older ones, you may indeed need to use a little bit of screens to help you. But there are ways to do it and feel better about yourself when you’re doing it. And that is what I’m here for.
(30:25):
So, I found that if I waited until the toddlers were driving me bananas until I’d shovel them in front of the TV and turn on Wildcats. And then, now, I’m sweaty and frustrated and going into the other room, and I’m like, “Okay, you guys, seriously, we have 15 minutes to read aloud, get in here,” to my big kids, right? Bad. Then I’m frustrated and stressed. The toddlers are probably crying in front of the TV.
(30:48):
It just feels yucky, and then it might just stay on for a lot longer. But if I had a time of day, it’s similar to the bin idea where I knew… I did this a lot with read-alouds. When I wanted to read aloud with my older kids for maybe 22 minutes… That’s how long a Little Bear episode is by the way. I would say it’s Little Bear time. It went on my calendar.
(31:06):
It was like, “Little Bear time for the littles. Read-aloud time to the bigs.” Because I could not read aloud to my older kids at bedtime when I had toddlers. I was asleep if I sat down at 7:30 PM, right? That didn’t work. So, what I needed to do was read aloud to my older kids earlier in the day. But if I knew it was Little Bear time, I could turn something on for a finite amount of time.
(31:31):
You could also tell a two-year-old, “It’s not Little Bear time yet. Now, it’s Little Bear time.” And they start to understand that there’s a time for it and there is not. I found I used screens a lot less, and I felt a lot better about using them when I scheduled them. So, just be more mindful about your trade-offs, realizing you’re probably making them anyway.
(31:49):
You’re probably shoveling your little kids in front of a screen anyway, so you might as well do it in a way that feels better and works better for you than doing it out of frustration and feeling like you’re completely failing. You are going to have to do less. And I know that sounds like bad news for a lot of us who are really excited about homeschooling our older kids.
(32:09):
For me, doing a curriculum with my older kids sounded way more fun than anything with the toddlers. So, it’s frustrating when I hear like, “Oh, you’re going to have to just do less.” Also, that’s not that helpful of advice unless someone tells you how to do less, right? Because you’re like, “Great. So, which one am I not feeding today?” Right? What thing am I not going to actually do that’s important to keep all of these humans alive?
(32:32):
So, the bad news is you are probably going to need to do less. And you’re probably going to have to do less than your friends that don’t have babies and toddlers at home. That’s just how that works. The good news is that’s exactly what God has intended for you. That’s exactly the plan he has for your homeschool, and it’s exactly the homeschool that your kids will thrive in because He knows what he’s doing. So, a few key ways to do less.
(32:58):
I’ll just tell you, practically speaking, what I did with my kids and because I think sometimes people go, “I just don’t know how you did all of these homeschool things,” and don’t realize that most of the homeschoolers who’ve been homeschooling for a long time aren’t doing nearly as much as you think they are.
(33:15):
We have tried probably most of the shiny curricula. And we’ve also been like, “Oh, I guess it’s not. We don’t need to do it all.” And then, you graduate a couple and you realize you can forget entire subjects and they’re actually okay. They can fill in those gaps. I’ll tell you, my oldest daughter is an English major at university.
(33:34):
And when she told me she wanted to be an editor, I was like, “Maybe we should have gotten to grammar.” But I had 100 babies, so I don’t know how that was going to work. Although she did graduate, and she’d write these beautiful papers because we read aloud all the time. She was reading all the time. So, she’d write a beautiful essay. She could not use a comma to save her life.
(33:58):
So, I think she would write this essay and be like, “There should probably be some commas in here.” And sprinkle them on. I’d be like, “Really?” So, after she graduated, I got her one of those $10 workbooks called Commas from Amazon. It’s not a fancy book. And I gave it to her. I was like, “If you want to be an editor, you probably want to figure out commas.” And she’s like, “Okay, thanks.”
(34:20):
And two weeks later, she was done because she was now motivated because this is something she wanted for herself, right? And so, we bypassed 12 years of grammar by doing a comma book. That’s my advice. Thank you for coming.
(34:34):
She’s now the editor of the school paper, actually, the senior editor of the school paper, and has a little part-time gig where she edits her classmates’ papers. So, it really does work if your child… We can’t actually predict everything our kids are going to need because we don’t know when they’re five or eight or 14, what they’re going to need when they’re 30.
(34:52):
So, instead, we give them the skills to be able to learn whatever they need to learn and the ability to know that you can go from not knowing to figuring it out somehow, right? There’s a way to figure things out. But let’s talk about the things that we do that are less. So, when my first to sixth graders, and I’ll tell you, there were times with my older kids I did more than this.
(35:12):
But I’ll tell you, this is what I’m doing with my younger kids now, just with the perspective I have of what mattered and what I could have gotten away with. So, with my fifth and third graders right now, so I would do this all the way up through sixth grade, we really focus on the three Rs. We really focus on reading, writing, and math. And when I say really focus, I don’t mean with a ton of time, I just mean that’s pretty much all we do.
(35:35):
So, I read aloud to them every day. And they have phonics practice, like I’ll do a phonics lesson with my kids who are learning to read for about 15 minutes a day, never more than 15 minutes, sometimes 10, but never more than 15. You have to survive this homeschooling thing too, right?
(35:52):
So, 15 minutes a day of phonics. I’ll read aloud to them. Once they’re reading basic… once they can read it about a Ramona Quimby level or so, then I just switch from phonics to just having them read every day, like free reading. They can just pick any book from our shelf and sit and read it. Talk with me about it later. We’re going to talk more about that tomorrow in my reading session.
(36:11):
And then, math, which we would only do for about 15, 20 minutes max a day, and we would never finish a lesson in that amount of time. So, I didn’t sit down and try and do lesson 14, I just set a timer, and it was… we got as far as we could get, and then we stopped. Which works great because if something really clicks with your child, you can just cruise on through. Like, “Oh, we actually don’t need all this practice. You know this, let’s move on.
(36:32):
And if they don’t know something, you can stay there for a while. And then, writing. And for first to sixth grade, I don’t actually do any writing with my kids who are all… all the older ones anyway are very good writers now. We didn’t do anything except copy work.
(36:45):
So, we just copied. Is everyone familiar with what copy work is? The short version of what we did anyway was just, I’d have them pick a book that they really liked from the shelf. So, let’s say they picked Charlotte’s Web, and they would copy the first sentence out of it into a notebook. And then, the next day, they would add the next sentence. And the next day, they would add. And they’re just copying the words.
(37:05):
And the reason this works so well is because they’re really seeing how good language is laid out with proper punctuation and usage and all of these things while they’re practicing their handwriting. And before we did copy work, actually now that I think of it, we did a workbook to learn good handwriting. That was it.
(37:23):
Reading, writing, math. We covered a lot of history and science through our read-alouds. So, I was reading aloud every day. I wasn’t trying to cover this period of history through read-aloud, but you can’t help it if you’re reading aloud to your kids, covering times in history and topics in science because it’s just how books and life work. There is history and science all around us all the time. So, those things pop up.
(37:52):
So, school for my kids under sixth grade takes two hours or less a day. And I don’t mean two hours, like we start at 9:00 and ended 11:00. I’m going to be clear about that. Okay. So, when my older kids were 12, 10 and eight and my babies, my one goal was to get, by lunchtime, I wanted to get 20 minutes of one-on-one with each of my big kids.
(38:15):
And I would just work in that 20-minute time on whatever it was I was most worried about, whether that was writing or math. What did they need me the most? Or phonics, that’s probably what it was most of the time actually. That was it. So, what I would do is I would take one kid. I’d take Audrey stay, and Alison and Drew would be in charge of the babies in the next room for 20 minutes.
(38:37):
And then, it’d be time to switch, which would take five hours, actually make the transition. And then, I do Allison. And now, Audrey and Drew are with the little ones. And then, I come out and I change the diaper, and I get a snack, and I kiss someone’s head that they just fell. And then, I do the third one. And now it’s lunchtime. And that is all we did in the mornings.
(38:56):
And then, in the afternoons, we would do nap time. We did not school while the babies napped. I’ll tell you about that more in a minute. And then, in the afternoons, the kids would do their independent work, which I’ll also show you in a minute.
(39:09):
And I was around, but they would just come to me if they had a question. So, they might be doing an explode the code workbook. Or they would be doing their own reading time, so they would come and ask me what a word was. Or I might say, “You can pick any one of these books about all of these different science topics from all these picture books.”
(39:27):
Maybe I got 10 picture books or something that were about science topics. “You can read one and tell us about it at dinnertime.” So, they might go find it and then need me to read them every page because they couldn’t read a word from themselves, right? But they’d have to come to me basically. And that was how we structured our day. That is really how little we did and still do actually in our homeschool to this day, except that we also do some memory work, but very basic like poetry and scripture memory.
(39:53):
Okay. When we get to middle school and on my homeschool, it looks very similar to what they did before. We’re really still valuing reading, writing and math. And the reason for this is really practical, and that’s because the skills of learning, reading, writing and computing, they’re really how you learn everything else.
(40:13):
So, all those content subjects like history and science and art appreciation and all the different things that you can learn about, you need to be able to read to learn it and then write to think about it.
(40:25):
Because that’s really what writing is, it’s thinking. And so, if you teach your kids, if we focus on the reading and writing and basic math, we’re giving them the skills so that as they get older that now we still don’t have to add a whole bunch of curriculum but the whole world breaks open because they’ve got these skills where they can get all of these different subject areas.
(40:45):
I also usually was a part of a co-op, a very not… dependent on the year. We’ve never been in a really organized co-op, but a really structured academic co-op necessarily. But mostly, I wanted to be there because I wanted adult interaction during the week. And it was also helpful to have a little bit of accountability.
(41:07):
I like to have my kids to have a different teacher than me, and they would learn something like Ancient Greece, because we sure as heck weren’t getting into it at home with all of our 100 babies, right? So, it was nice to have that going on. So, that also we were usually in middle school, I think we were in a co-op for all of our older kids these years there. And in high school, I mean high school is the sweet spot of homeschooling. Just wait. It’s so fun. It gets so good.
(41:27):
Your kids are able to read and make connections and write and discuss things, and homeschooled teenagers are the actual best. So, you have such good things to look forward to. They’re my favorite years of homeschooling because they’re all those things that you want right now when you’re thinking of, maybe you hear about project-based homeschooling, right?
(41:47):
And you think about your kids following a passion or an interest in learning all about it. And then, you’re like, ask your seven-year-old, like, “What do you want to learn about?” And they’re like, “Minecraft.” You’re like, “That’s not what I was thinking.” And also, you have to do all the work, right?
(42:04):
You have to be the one to look up the books and make all the connections for them because they can’t do that yet. When they’re in high school, that changes so much. And now, you’ve had all these years where you have a warm connection that you probably wouldn’t have had to that same degree if you weren’t homeschooling.
(42:20):
So, you get all the benefits of all these years that you’re pouring in right now. I wanted to give you this tip right now because… so interesting, what I see on my screen does not match, but that’s what I wanted you to see. These spiral notebooks. Anyone seen my spiral notebooks post? I’m going to give you a quick rundown. Okay, a few of you have. So, here’s the deal. I went to church when the twins were maybe one, and so Claire would’ve been two, and then the other kids were older. Whatever ages they were at that time.
(42:52):
We’re at church. And my friend Sheila, who homeschooled three kids all the way through, says, “Sarah, how’s your homeschool year going?” And I just started sobbing. Poor things. She was like, “Okay, wow.” So, she’s trying to help me. And she’s like, “Well, how much work are they doing independently?” I’m like, “Independently? Like nothing. My kids can’t change their underwear independently, right? Nothing is happening independently.”
(43:16):
She said, “Okay, I’m going to come over tomorrow. I’m going to bring some spiral notebooks. I’m going to teach you something.” And I’m like, “Okay.” She comes over. I clear away to the door, right? “Come on in.” And she just takes one of these cheapy spiral notebooks, and she teaches me to just write down everything you want your kids to do that day.
(43:34):
So, you can’t read this. It’s a terrible picture because it’s from the dark ages, but I’ll tell you what it says. I did update now so I can see it. So, this must have been Allison’s because they’re not check marks, they’re faces. So, this is my art… my child who’s at art school now, checked things off by drawing faces.
(43:50):
So, I can see like Wednesday 12:10 math, do lesson 14E and 14G. I have no idea what math program we were using at this time. I think we’ve used them all. And then, extra math, which must’ve been a thing we were doing. I don’t know what that is anymore. Typing, do a lesson. Piano, practice 20 minutes. Writing, find and copy a Christmas poem. That sounds fun. I must’ve taken this picture honestly because it was like, “I’m doing a good job right now.”
(44:21):
Because I don’t think that we did a lot of that. It would’ve been like a page in your cursive workbook or copy a line for your copy work, that was probably more difficult. Reading, choose any saint biography and read the first chapter. Okay. And then, I had to write down which one she picked. That was it. That’s all for the whole day. Now, a couple of things happened when I started doing this.
(44:39):
Number one, my older kids did not have to wait on me. And you know how it is when you have toddlers and babies. If your older kid is like, “Come on,” especially if you’ve made a rule like we did that you couldn’t have any screens until two things, your schoolwork was done and it was at least 2:00.
(44:55):
By the way, just as a side note, if you have an older kid who you feel like they’re just like sloppily flying through their schoolwork because they want to get to screens, so is every other 10-year-old boy on the face of the planet. So, here’s how I did it. What I did, what really helped was making that second rule.
(45:12):
Yes, your schoolwork has to be done, and it has to be at least 2:00. Because it removed the desire to, “If I get done by 11:00, then I can play Minecraft.” And you’re like, “But you did a horrible job on all of this.” It removed that.
(45:26):
And also, then, “You do not ask me before 2:00. Because if you ask me before 2:00, you get no screens for the rest of the day,” because that drove me more nuts than anything. He was like, “Can I have?” I’m like, “Oh, wow, we do this every day. This is a pattern.” So, they know exactly what’s required of them, and they don’t have to wait on you for it.
(45:45):
It helped me get more used to creating things that they needed to do on their own, like two pages of explode the code. And then, a lot of times, they might say, “Two pages of explode the code or one page of explode the code and bring it.” And then, another check mark would say, “Bring it to mom to be checked.” So, now, it’s on them. It’s their responsibility to bring it to me. And so, now, I can look it over. It’s not my responsibility to remember to go find them and what they were supposed to do and check it off.
(46:11):
Because if any of you have that with your older kids where you realize it’s December and you haven’t looked at a single math lesson, right? You’re like, “Oh no, I hope you’ve been doing teaching textbooks, actually.” Right? Or I hope you’ve been doing that workbook I’ve been telling you to do. Or you go back and look and you’re like, “We’ve done all of this wrong. Great. Now what?”
(46:27):
So, these spiral notebooks helped us a ton. But there is… I guess the next day it’s very similar. This is also an easy place to be a cheerful mom. If you feel like you’re really having a hard time being the cheerful mom you want to be, under typing on the second day, you can see where I put, “Do a lesson and a happy dance.” Because it doesn’t take much to write something like that.
(46:52):
It doesn’t take as much as it takes to smile at your children when you didn’t sleep all night, right? So, it gives you another easy way to connect with them. But that was too much for my older son, Drew. And for my younger kids, they respond better to this system. So, I wanted to show this to you. With Drew, it was just that he couldn’t see a whole list of things.
(47:10):
He’s the 17-year-old now. He couldn’t see a whole list of things that needed to be done in a day. It just did not work for his brain. That was way overwhelming. So, instead, my husband was like, “Why don’t you create a grid?” So, this is like a nine-square grid. And you write one thing in each box, and he can lift up one post-it note. And under that post-it note, it has one thing. And he does that one thing before he sees the next. That really worked for him.
(47:35):
So, if you’ve got any kids that are struggling with a whole list of school things, this works great. Now, my husband had the fabulous idea of adding numbers to the post-it. Those numbers are worth points. So, every time they get done… My younger kids do this every day now. Every time they get done with something, they stick a post-it up on the cupboard. And at the end of the day, last thing I do before I go to bed is I go tally up everyone’s points.
(47:58):
And when they get to 150 points, we do something fun. We went bowling last week. A few weeks before that, we went to the cupcake shop and got a cupcake. You can pick that. If you want a cupcake, that works. They thought it was their reward, and I’m like, “It’s teacher cupcake day.” Right?
(48:15):
So, pick something that you like. I usually try and make it something we do together, so it’s not like bribing your kids with more screen time, for example, but just encouraging them to look forward to something we get to do together. So, we do this. And I do this with chores because I don’t know about your children, but my children do not so much as brush their teeth without being told.
(48:33):
And so, on here, you can see the… I don’t know, can you see my mouse? I don’t know if you can. On this pink one, there’s like, get dressed is one. That will be worth a point. Make bed. The bottom one says cursive one page and explode the code, two pages. Other things underneath here would be math with dad, because they do math with dad.
(48:56):
I just put morning time with mom, and that’s where we do our read-alouds and we recite some poetry. They would have piano practice in here. They would have read for 30 minutes in here. What else? That might be mostly it. I think at least four of those are chores, and then five of them are school things. That’s probably it. And this can work really well too.
(49:19):
What you want to do, especially if you’re really tired and you’re not sleeping through the night, is you want to reduce the amount of decisions you have to make every day. So, something like this helps you reduce the amount of decisions and helps your kids know what to expect. So, it’s a win-win there.
(49:34):
This is my least favorite homeschooling advice ever. Homeschool while the baby is napping. How often do you hear this? Do you hear this? Yeah. You’re like, “Thank you. I’ve never once thought of homeschooling while the baby is napping.” I’m not trying to make dinner, clean my entire house and do everything else in my day while the baby is napping already, right?
(49:53):
I just hated this advice. And I still do when I hear it because I just think anybody who says it does not remember how tired you are, and you are going to be in your homeschool longer than anyone else. This really came home for me when Audrey went to college. Because like I’m like, “Woo, we did it.” First of all, you apply to colleges and you’re like, “I really hope this thing works out.” Right?
(50:17):
And then, it does. And it totally does, by the way. And you’re like, “This is amazing.” And then, they graduate, and you’re like, “Oh, my gosh. I’m still here for a long time.” Right? So, you are going to be the person in your homeschool longer than everybody else, and so you at least need to take care of yourself.
(50:37):
And this doesn’t need to be some woo-woo self-care thing, but you actually do need to take care of the teacher so that she’s nice to be around. The single most important part of a successful homeschool is a peaceful content homeschooling mom or dad, if you’re a homeschooling dad.
(50:54):
That is it. You could use every curriculum in that exhibit hall will get the job done. Every math curriculum is pretty darn good. Every writing curriculum is pretty darn good. The resources we have at our fingertips right now are great. So, we can overthink which curriculum are we using, which method are we using.
(51:13):
And none of that is going to make nearly the same difference as it is you being a peaceful content mom who can smile at your children. So, it’s worth taking a second to go, “How can I make it more likely that I’ll smile at my children today?” Right? And homeschooling while the baby is napping is… not it.
(51:33):
Because I know that I would wake up in the morning and sometimes I would feel an overwhelming sense of dread. And it is really hard to be a loving, cheerful, homeschooling mom who’s sending the message of, “I like being with you,” to her children if you wake up feeling overwhelmed with dread.
(51:52):
But if I knew, “Okay. Woo, it’s going to be a day today, isn’t it?” But like, “Let’s just do the morning. And at nap time, I get my break.” So, at nap time, if I could get the three babies to nap at the same time, which was not a guarantee or even a likelihood much of the time, all of my older kids, this is the time where they would go to their rooms and do quiet reading time.
(52:15):
And my pre-readers would listen to audiobooks. So, I would put Redwall on an iPad, and I would stick it on guided access. Do you all know about this? So, you can turn on if you have an… I’m sure there’s something on Android too. But we have an iPad, so I would… I do this with my twins still.
(52:31):
I’ll turn on Redwall or whatever the audiobook they’re listening to. You can just look up guided access. You can set guided access on your iPad. It’s built into it. And it means that your kids can’t get out of the app and start playing Minecraft, for example, when they’re supposed to be reading their book.
(52:45):
So, then, I could say, “Okay, go into your room.” They could do whatever. They could lay on their bed. They could go to sleep. They never did that. They could play with Legos or draw or whatever they wanted, but they had to stay in their room, and they had to either read or be listening to an audiobook or napping.
(52:59):
And that time was when I got a break. And I just think it’s really important that right now when you are in this season, we don’t burden ourselves with this nonsense advice that makes us feel like we’re failing every day because we can’t manage to homeschool our children all day, even while the baby is napping, get dinner on the table and educate all the children well.
(53:22):
That’s a really heavy burden to carry. So, if we can just stop and think, “How can I take care of myself in such a way that I can be a good enough teacher, a good teacher, not good enough, that I can show up as best as I can for my kids?” And that’s just something I wanted to end with today. I wanted to tell you… I mean, this is hard, right? It’s just really stinking hard. There’s a lot going on.
(53:47):
But what you’re doing every day in your homeschool is really, really worth it. And those babies and toddlers in your homeschool are giving your older kids more than you can possibly imagine. This is Drew. He was the one of the muscle picture, right? He’s my track star. And he actually… I’ll brag for a minute.
(54:07):
Because yesterday, he ran his varsity track meet and busted all of his PRs, and I think he might be on his way to states. So, that’s very exciting. And it makes sense because he spent his entire toddlerhood running away from me.
(54:21):
So, I’m glad it’s being put to good use now. This is him at six. So, you see it, right? You can see the connection. This is how old he was when I was pregnant with Clara. And he was so excited about this sister that he said, “Maybe if we name the baby nothing, she won’t be born.” And I was like, “Oh, this is going to go well.” Right? He was actually obsessed with this idea of baby slobber.
(54:51):
We didn’t have any babies. He was the youngest at this point, right? And he was like, he would just be sitting there playing with his Legos or eating dinner. And all of a sudden, put his fork down and be like, “Is the baby going to slobber on my Legos?” I’m like, “I mean, that’s the nicest thing the baby’s going to do to the Legos.” Right? Things are going to get a lot worse than slobber.
(55:15):
So, I was super worried about this. And interestingly enough, there was nothing I could say or do to prepare him or there was nothing I could say or do to help him fall in love with this baby who he clearly detested. But I didn’t need to, because I mean slobber, right? Just maybe two months ago or three months ago, I told this story last night actually, now that think about it.
(55:46):
This now 17 was like wanting to make cookies because the oldest sister is gone, and she’s the one who bakes anything worth eating. And Clara, who’s now 11, was teaching him how to bake chocolate chip cookies. I got all these pictures. As I was taking these pictures of them in the kitchen, I was thinking about this picture and about him thinking this baby was going to come in and ruin his life and slobber on his Legos, right?
(56:13):
These are the kinds of gifts that babies and toddlers bring to our homeschools. They are not a distraction. They are not in the way. This is exactly the homeschool God wants your kids to thrive in, and it’s exactly the homeschool He wants them to thrive in. That He’s giving you the skills so that you can help them thrive in. It might not look the way you think that it should, but it looks the way He does. It looks the way He thinks it should.
(56:40):
You have absolutely everything you need to teach your children well right now, in this day, this day that the Lord has made. You can find more of that podcast with Audrey if you want to hear some other funny things she said. Like for example, I asked her during that podcast, “What is one thing you wish we had done more of?” And you guys, she said, “Latin.”
(57:06):
And I just want to be clear, I heard she cried every day over Latin. And so, I did Latin because at the time, I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. And I don’t do Latin anymore, just for the record. Nobody gets Latin. And now, I’m stressed about it again, right? Because she was like… I know. But there’s all kinds of surprising things that she has the perspective on now. It was very interesting.
(57:34):
So, you’ll get that podcast and all kinds of good things if you text GHC to 33777. Thank you so much for joining me. I love being with you, and I love seeing all of your beautiful babies in this room. So, thank you.
(57:54):
Oh, man, I hope there is some takeaway from this session for you, something you don’t want to forget, some small thing that can serve you in your homeschool this year, this week, this month, right now. Remember, your life is not a distraction. The baby is not in the way. You were made for such a time as this and for such a task as the one before you. Now, let’s hear from the kids about the books they’ve been loving lately.
Parker (58:29):
My name is Parker. I am 11 years old. I live in Frankfurt, Kentucky, and a book I’m enjoying right now is the Green Ember because I like fantasy fiction.
Sawyer Wilkes (58:40):
My name is Sawyer Wilkes, and I am eight years old, and I live in Kentucky. And my favorite book is Harry Potter because I like fiction books about wizards.
Riley (58:53):
My name is Riley. I’m six years old, and I’m from Kentucky. My favorite book is Angelina Ballerina because it’s about ballerina queens and ballerina dresses.
Gigi (59:09):
Hi, my name is Gigi. I’m eight years old, and I live in Miami. And my favorite book is Amanda Baker series because they’re funny, and they make a lot of mistakes, which are also funny.
Sarah Mackenzie (59:25):
Thank you, kids. If your kids would like to tell us about a book they love, head to readaloudrevival.com/message to leave a voicemail, and we’ll air it on an upcoming episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I’ll be back in two weeks with an extra special episode. I cannot wait to share it with you. In the meantime, you know what to do. Go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.
