Homeschooling Multiple Ages Together

Emma Bee  from Peaceful Homeschool

If you have kids of various ages, you may wonder how in the world you could homeschool all of them at once without using up every minute of your day. Trust me when I say it is completely doable! 

Whether your multiple kids include a baby on your shoulder, a toddler running around, elementary kids learning the basics, high schoolers working on complex subjects, or a combination of these, family-style is an engaging way to homeschool multiple ages at once. 

Family-Style Learning 

Family-style learning has been a great fit for our family. We have always homeschooled and have an eight year age span with our kids including our oldest (who often worked above grade level), our middle (who is two years younger and has autism), and our youngest (who was born eight years after our oldest). 

With our varied ages and abilities, I found that unit studies have been an excellent way for everyone in our family to learn together at their own ability level, especially for history, literature, and science. Instead of three kids of different ages and abilities working on different topics, I worked to keep everyone on the same topic as often as possible. 

Single Subject Curriculum

If you're using a single subject curriculum, you can choose something that works well for use with multiple ages. For example, when my kids were younger we used Story of the World altogether by:

• Gathering in the living room to read the book together. 
• Listening to the CD's in the car while doing errands. 
• Finding locations on the globe and did mapwork. 
• Trying new recipes and making musical instruments with instructions from the activity book.

When using a curriculum in this way, I could then have the oldest do more in-depth written work, the middle complete a worksheet or answer questions aloud, and the youngest color a coloring page out of the activity book.

Unit Studies

Using a specific curriculum like Story of the World is just one way to adapt your learning plans to fit multiple ages. I've also had great success in using unit studies with my kids of various ages throughout our homeschooling journey. 

One unit study example was when we were learning about the Olympics. Some of the activities included:

• Reading aloud to the kids as we learned about the history of the Olympics, including all about Ancient Greece. 
• Reading library books at their reading level during downtime.
• Picking an athlete to study and share information about (either through an oral report, or lapbook, or puppet show, or whatever worked best for them, as long as they had a way to communicate the knowledge they'd learned). 
• Cooking foods together to eat while we watched the Olympics. 
• Doing crafts related to the Olympics. 
• Talking about the Olympics over meals and in the car.
• Having an Olympics day with our homeschool group including a running of the torch, competing in various events, and a medal ceremony. 
• Learning High School Subjects Together 

I found that when my oldest got into high school, I could still have the other kids learn with him. When he was taking Biology, we joined with another family to do labs together. We had a gaggle of kids of all ages having fun while making DNA strands out of licorice and looking at leaves under a microscope. When my oldest was taking Physics, my kids all did physics experiments together and we discussed why they did, or didn't, work according to the laws of physics. 

Layered Learning for Younger Siblings 

Obviously, when learning more complex concepts, the older kids glean the most information, while the younger ones are just being exposed to things they might not have heard of yet because it's considered above their grade level. 

I have seen first-hand how family-style learning can be a system of adding layers of learning the same knowledge throughout the years, and how this has given my youngest an advantage in some ways because she already had a base knowledge for many of the topics she would otherwise have been learning for the first time later in a specific grade. 

Hearing about a historical event in fifth grade for the first time might be a lot to take in, but if you've been hearing about it since before Kindergarten, you definitely have a leg up in your knowledge and can dive even deeper. Same with a topic like Shakespeare. If you've been reading an illustrated Shakespeare book since you were little because your family was doing a Shakespeare study, your grasp will be much greater than someone who is encountering Shakespeare for the first time in high school. 

You're the Boss!

It's important to note that whatever style you use, you are in charge of your homeschooling (assuming, of course, that you're following your local homeschool laws). You are not a slave to your curriculum nor to a specific grade-level topic. The curriculum is there to work for your family and your family dynamics, so feel free to adapt it in whatever ways work best - including doing whole family studies instead of keeping each child stuck within their own individual box. 

Homeschooling can truly be whatever you make of it. It can be rigid and staunch and feel like a strict public school at home, with every kid working on separate subjects, at their own desks, with regimented start and end times. Or it can feel like a family gathered around a book, learning together while snuggled on the couch, or on an adventure learning about a topic they're all studying.

Put the "Home" Back in "Homeschooling"

So, what is your family's style? How can you manage to homeschool kids of various ages at once? What works best for your family dynamics? If you're new to homeschooling or just stuck in a rut, I encourage you to try family-style learning and put some of the "home" back in "homeschooling."