This is one of the things that scared me the most about homeschooling. How was I going to teach multiple grades at the same time?! It seemed like a daunting task when I first started looking into homeschooling, however it doesn't seem that tricky now.
Today i'll share how I homeschool multiple grades at the same time...
For those of you who are new here, I currently have an 8th grader, 5th grader, 2nd grader, preschooler, and a 2 year old*
(*not pictured below).
When we first started homeschooling I had a 3rd grader, kindergartner, and a 2 year old. My days then would be filled with teaching my 3rd grader all day long, while my kindergartner would work next to us on; cutting practice, writing practice, puzzles, etc. Then while my 3rd grader had some independent reading time, I would be teaching my kindergartner to read, or doing any other work with him that needed to be done.
Now that I have 4 students things have gotten harder and easier all at the same time. Harder in the sense that sometimes they all need my help at the same time. Which can be very chaotic. Easier in the sense that my 2 oldest children are pretty much independent workers, so they need very little instruction from me.
The one thing that I have found helps me to teach multiple grades at the same time, is to have all the kids working on the same subject at the same time. For example; all my kids do math at the same time, then they all move on to English, then vocabulary, and so on and so on.
This makes it easier for my brain, in the fact that I don't have to switch between graphing equations to diagramming sentences in a matter of seconds. My brain can fully focus on math, then on English, and so on and so on.
Another thing, like I just talked about, is my 2 oldest are pretty much independent workers. This helps a lot when you have multiple grades. But let's say you have a 1st grader and a 2nd grader, both of which need a lot of instruction from you. How do you do it?! My advice would be to teach them the same thing, for example; last year we did My Father's World curriculum for my oldest 2 and i was teaching them the same things for history, science, and Bible. Of course my oldest child would then have a little bit of extra assignments in those areas because of this grade level.
My best advice I can give you, is to find what works best for you and your kids. That could be teaching one grade level in the morning, and a different grade level in the afternoon. Or teaching different grade levels on different days. Just do whatever works best for your family, and don't be afraid to switch things up if it's not working for you. That's one of the perks of homeschooling, the flexibility to change things up as needed!!
