Help! I am surrounded by children!!!
Some people only have one child to raise and to homeschool. When I first started homeschooling, I was only teaching one child, my eldest. At the time, I didn’t realize how ideal the situation was. It would have been much harder if I started homeschooling multiple children at once! Eventually, as my other children grew older, I had to learn to deal with multiple ages, grade levels, and personalities simultaneously. So what do you do when you are trying to homeschool one or more children and watch younger ones at the same time? The younger children are not old enough for school, but they are definitely old enough to get into mischief if left unsupervised!

When You Are Outnumbered
My husband and I have a childrearing saying that comes from my basketball days: “When you go from two to three children, you go from man-to-man defense to zone defense.” For those of you who don’t know basketball strategy, in man-to-man defense each person has one person on the other team that he is guarding, and, in a simplified version, that one person is the only one he has to worry about. In zone defense, everyone has an area on the court that he is guarding. He is in charge of anyone and everyone who runs into his area. Once the number of children in your family exceeds the number of parents, you have to change strategies and resort to watching whoever is in your “area” at the time. After all, you are outnumbered!
Homeschooling multiple children can be very frustrating, even for parents who are excellent at multi-tasking. In fact, without some strategy, I contend it is impossible to do successfully! In this article I will talk about different ideas for how to teach and parent all of your children and make your homeschool a success.
What To Do With The Baby
Once I got over the initial speed bumps of homeschooling, I decided in my experience that the hardest part about homeschooling is keeping an eye on the youngest ones who are not actually in school yet. You can’t exactly leave them to their own devices while you focus on teaching your older children! One strategy that I have employed with my youngest one is to use the baby/toddler’s naptime to do the schooling and subjects in which my children need the most attention and teaching from me. Naptime is such a peaceful time in which you don’t have to worry about what your “busy bee” is destroying! That is a wonderful time to give your homeschooling students your full time and attention.

Another idea that I have tried in the past is to assign the older kids a half hour or hour to watch and play with the youngest while I focused on teaching the others. One year I had a rotating schedule so that the baby was supervised at all times, but no one was taken away from his studies too long. This works pretty well. The drawback is that your older students may not have enough time to get all of their schoolwork done.
Learning As A Group
What about trying to teach multiple grade levels at the same time? After all, there is only one mom and only so many hours in the day! One option that many moms practice is to pick a curriculum that is geared for multiple age groups. This can be done with a full curriculum or with individual subjects. Or you can modify a curriculum to make it useful for that same application. I have been able to successfully do this with high school math (Saxon), science (Abeka and Apologia), and history curricula. For younger students I have used TruthQuest History in this way. In my experience, language arts subjects would not be conducive to this method, since children of different ages have different capabilities in learning reading, spelling, and grammar. When teaching multiple students at the same time, the difficult part is to make sure it isn’t too hard for the younger students or too easy for the older students. You also have to keep track of which students have already had certain subjects if you want to eventually teach them again on a rotating basis.
Tricks Of The Trade
Beyond this approach, there are classroom management issues that can really help. It is a good character lesson for a child to realize that he is not the only student in the classroom! It teaches him to be less selfish and more considerate of others if he sometimes cannot have his question answered immediately. Some years I have set up a schedule in which most of the students are working independently, while I focus my attention on one student for thirty minutes or an hour. During that time, I might allow a quick question from one of the others, but, if it gets too involved or multiple interruptions, then I will tell them that their question has to wait. It is ideal if they can learn to then move on to something else until it is their “turn” with mom.
I try to get the youngest ones done with their schoolwork first, because they have less to do and they also have less that they are able to do independently. Once they are finished with their work, they can go play with the younger ones. This allows me to move on to the older ones and their questions. Another idea that I heard somewhere but have never actually tried is to have a cup with numbered popsicle sticks on your desk. When a child has a question and the parent is already helping someone else, the child takes a stick and returns to his desk, displaying the stick at his desk. This shows his “place” in line. Other children can come and get the next numbered stick, etc. That way the children can continue on with other work or simply read a book, knowing that they are not losing their place. Then when the parent finishes up with the first child she can see whose “turn” it is next and work her way down the line.

There Is Hope!
In conclusion, it can be very frustrating trying to homeschool while feeling outnumbered and inadequate. Whether keeping an eye on youngsters not in school or managing the teaching for several children at different levels, there are tried and true ways of dealing with these issues. It may help to simply try out one of these ideas and see what works for you. Eventually, as your family grows, it may be necessary to change the approach to provide the best learning environment for all involved. Remember, God never calls us to do more that we can handle! If you believe He has called you to homeschool, take your concerns to Him in prayer and ask Him to help you get past this hurdle in your day.
Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.
1 Thessalonians 5:24