I would like to know how much preparation time I will need. I met someone who told me that homeschooling was so much preparation that she could not cope with a new baby and a nine year old.
I do have three children (8,6,4). I was looking on the internet and your programme looked stunning! However, I would like to have more children. I don’t leave my children to do schoolwork on their own. I usually sit and work with them.
Is Little Footprints worked out that I may sit with my children and work together or do I have to prepare each afternoon for the next day? We do maths and language until about 10h30, then we have a break. Will 1 – 1h30 be enough for a day with Footprints or do I need more time?
Sorry for all the funny questions, but I need to know before I buy the material if it will work for me. Thank you very much and God bless. ~ Esther
Answer to Little Footprints and Planning
Thanks for your email. We don’t mind all the questions at all. In fact, we welcome them as we want to be sure that you will be happy with your purchase, if you do buy Little Footprints.
Firstly, Wendy has 4 kids and I have 6 (now ages 13, 12, 9, 7, 5, 18 months in 2011), so we understand the busy homeschool mom’s scenario. We understand the challenges of homeschooling with babies and toddlers and there is no easy way to do that. It is always a challenge and you need to find ways to work around that, or else allow yourself to be much more flexible than mothers of say two older kids who can be much more structured, organised and PRODUCTIVE!
I constantly remind myself of the quote “Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire” — because many times I don’t get the bucket as full as I would have liked, but if I have lit a fire, then its OK!
That said, we have designed Little Footprints to require little more than you reading over the lesson ahead for the week. You don’t have to prepare each afternoon for the next day. We’ve tried to make it as easy and stress-free as possible.
Now and then there might be something you need to get if you don’t already have it in your home, but generally, we tried to only include activities, arts, crafts and experiments that would be easy to do at home, using supplies that most families would already have in their home!
Your friend’s description of all her planning and preparing sounds to me like another unit study homeschool curriculum – not ours!
1h30 will be perfect for Little Footprints each day. In fact, some days it will be less time than that…so you can breathe…or catch up if you got ‘behind’…but since there is no one you will be following, you can actually never get behind! You go at your own pace.
Little Footprints was intended for moms like you (and us!), to try and make homeschooling multiple ages less challenging, rather than adding to your burden of responsibilities.
Read more about Little Footprints and download a sample lesson to see here:
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