182 - University Model School & Why We Chose It

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Show Notes:

Now that two of my four kids are school age, I get asked a lot about their education. Where do they go to school? Do you homeschool? And the answer is that they go to school and they homeschool. They do both. We have chosen the route of a University Model Christian School, which means they attend school two days a week in person, and then I homeschool them three days a week.

It's a bit of a different take on education, and there aren't a ton of schools out there with this model, although it is growing a lot more throughout the US. But today I'm just gonna share our philosophy on educating our kids why we chose this route, and a little peak into what a typical day in the life looks like for us on one of those homeschool days.

For the full episode, hit play above or read through below.

So most of my time every week goes into teaching my second grader Milly and my kindergartner Lyndon. And in last week's episode, I give you a glimpse into a day in the life of Nancy Ray on a day that was not a homeschooling day, a day when my girls go to school and the boys are at home and kind of what that looks like.

But being that the bulk of my week is spent preparing for homeschool and homeschooling my two oldest kids, it's only a fair that I give you a glimpse into one of those days as well. But before that, I wanna chat about education for our kids because it's a topic I think moms really need to discuss and like to discuss and want to discuss. It's always interesting to hear, “Okay, what's your philosophy on education? Why are you choosing that for your family?”

And it's okay to have different philosophies. It's okay to have different choices about education, but I just thought I would share it here because I get asked about it so much.

So first of all, I just wanna say this is not an easy decision. I feel like the time and effort we put into deciding where our kids go to school is a lot, but there's a couple things that Will and I always say to each other—it's okay to change our minds. It's okay to change schools. Also, there's not one perfect answer for every family. Every family has different dynamics, different things that they struggle with or support that they need, different number of kids, different challenges. There's just not a perfect answer for every family.

So I wanna acknowledge that first. And while I love our school and will happily share about all the reasons why we chose it, I won't say it's the answer for exactly what you need in this season of your life. Nor will I say that it's gonna be something that we do forever and ever. I'm not sure. Our philosophy on educating our kids is to take it a year at a time and a kid at a time, based on the dynamics of our family, our children, and just to choose what's best for the spiritual, mental, and physical health of our kids as well as us, the parents, because we have to have that too, to lead them and educate them well, because we believe that education starts in the home.

And to choose a curriculum in a school environment, this is most important for us. We want to choose a curriculum and school environment that aligns with our faith, our values that teaches facts and truth and critical thinking. But yeah, that also just kindles like a desire for learning in our children, a personal responsibility, and I really want our kids to leave school with, I don't know, just this calm respect for learning and education and teachers and authority.

And to also feel like this power rise within them, that they have the power to gain information and then debate that and reason with other people and be able to stand firmly planted in their faith, in their values and our values as a family, and really just be able to calmly like debate someone and defend what they believe and why, even if that changes from looking exactly like what Will and I believe, I wanna give them the tools to decipher and discern the things that they're taught and debate and and stand firm in what they believe.

So, okay, that was kind of a deep dive, huh? Deep breath. Just wanted to share that first because that's kind of my heart behind all of this, but now I wanna kinda answer some practical questions.

I get asked a lot like, what is a University Model School? How did you hear about this? So, a University Model School combines the best attributes of traditional schooling with the best attributes of homeschooling and integrates them into one model. So the result, and this is coming straight from the university model school website, the result is quality, cost effective, college preparatory education that gives parents more time for imparting their own faith and values to their children, and in that partnership with me as a parent in the school and the teachers there, parents and the school work together towards a mutual goal, which is to produce wholesome, competent, virtuous followers of Christ who will change the world in their generation.

Okay? So that's the university model aspect, they go to school two days a week and they're home with me three days a week. Now I wanna address the Classical Christian education piece of it because there's a lot of homeschooling curriculums and there's several five day a week traditional private Christian schools that adapt to this Classical Christian education model, which I have really grown to love.

So basically the Classical Christian education gives the tools of learning paired with natural child development, so they're giving your student or your child the tools of reasoning and debate and memorization and all these things that come when you are learning in a classroom, but it pairs it with their natural development. For instance, in their younger years, kids are very focused on memorization.

And I mean, you remember when you were a kid, you could memorize stuff so easy and you can still remember the lyrics of songs that you learned when you're a child. It's like memory just comes easy. So that's the focus in grammar school, which is elementary school, but in this model they call it grammar school. And then in middle school, you wanna know it all, you wanna argue, you wanna understand everything, you want to really kind of take it as your own. And so that's really a focus in middle school. And then in high school you wanna be well respected and you wanna know why you believe what you believe.

And so that's what the Classical Christian education model does—it pairs the tools of learning with just the natural development of a child and what they want most when they're learning. So this is what the school that our kids go to implements, they implement this Classical Christian education model, which is followed through on their lesson plans that they give me every week. But there's also the UM school element to it where they are only in the classroom two days a week and then they're at home with me three days a week.

And I love this because this helps me understand kind of my role in my kids' education. As long as we're at this school, they say that kindergarten through fourth grade, I'm a co-teacher, which basically means I have to sit down and teach them everything. I'm very involved in the lesson plans. I mean kindergarten and first grade, they may or may not be able to read yet, but they certainly couldn't decipher lesson plans and the things that they're supposed to do from those lesson plans.

So I am very hands on right now and let me just be honest and say it is very challenging on some days with two girls who really just wanna play all the time, and then two little boys who definitely just wanna play all the time and are getting into everything, and I have to be all in with each student.

The homeschool days can be long and very challenging and I'll get to that when I kind of walk through one of my homeschool days, but I know that it won't be this way forever, and also it has been more of a joy than I ever anticipated to have a front row seat at helping them learn to read and then seeing them get those wins and actually read and write and write in cursive and get these things like it's been a lot of work, but a lot of joy.

So K-4 you're co-teacher, and then fifth and sixth grade you switch to a transitional co-teacher, which basically means, okay, you're still their teacher, but they can get all of their work and kind of go through it on their own. You'll still have to teach them some of the harder concepts that maybe they're struggling to get, but you're transitioning out of that co-teacher.

For sventh through ninth grade, you are just a guide. You're a guide for dependent study, which means they still depend on their teachers in school and their teacher at home, me, to get the information that need to be studying to know what their plans are. But once you kind of show them what it is, you're just kind of there as a guide.

Then grades 10-12, you're a guide for independent study. So it switches from that dependent to independent. And the idea at that point is, is basically they're on their own.

Also, I should add, at our school, once they're done with grammar school with I think it, which I think is K-5, K-6 maybe, once they're done with that, they actually go into school three days a week and I only homeschool two days a week. So all of grammar school, they're in school two days a week, I homeschool three days a week and then it switches and they go to school Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I just homeschool Tuesday, Thursday when they get a little bit older.

So you can see as they get older, it's more and more hands-off for me. All I've ever known though is a very, very hands-on approach to these homeschool days because that's what they need right now. They need a co-teacher.

Okay, so now that you know all of what it is, the University Model, Classical Christian, all of that, I just wanna answer why we chose this for our kids right now because it was not the easy choice.

I'm gonna be honest, it was not the easy choice. We were looking at traditional like private Christian schools five days a week. Loved some schools in the area for that and we were looking at homeschooling full-time and there's a lot more flexibility with that, which is really nice. But I think for me the #1 short answer is values alignment, like their values at this school and the values they teach in their curriculum and yeah, just overall it was like, this is what was important to me.

For instance, when we went to tour the school, they opened a door and I walked in and it was one of the upper levels, upper grades, and all of them stood to their feet out of respect for the adult that walked in the room and the teachers just said, we really believe in respecting grownups. We really believe in respecting authority here. We wanna teach that to our kids. And that just like made a really big impression on me. They also wear uniforms at this school, which I kind of love because it just takes a lot of the decision making, and some of them, as you get older, some of the like comparison out of it, like you're there to be educated and that's it, and you know what you're gonna wear, you don't have to think about it. I kind of love that. And they focus, the school focuses on cursive handwriting, reading some of the classics, focusing on beauty and there is a de-emphasis on technology and some of the other Christian schools in the area that we really like had just a major emphasis on technology.

I don't think there's anything wrong with technology and our kids might end up at one of those schools one day, but I think in these formative years when they're little, I wanna de-emphasize that as much as possible, personally because I have just seen what it does to my own brain. And I see what it does to my kids' brains when there's just so much screen interaction.

They're gonna get that they're gonna get plenty of technology. They'll know how to interact with screens and iPads and all the things one day they'll totally learn typing, they'll learn how to do PowerPoints, they're gonna learn all that. Even in this school, they teach it, but they wait until they're a little bit older. And the focus more is on the hands-on learning, reading books and playing a lot, and I just love that. I just felt like, for us, that was more of a values alignment for kind of what we believe and what we've learned about technology and kind of my own personal journey with technology, too.

As I was trying to decide, this school or that school, what am I gonna do? Someone asked me, “Okay, what values are aligned?” And I think that's just a clarifying question. Like if values are the most important thing, which they are for us, then what school aligns with your values the most? And, I chose this school, like I said, not because it was easy, it was actually the harder choice and it was a very difficult decision for me. I do not feel like a natural teacher. Several of my friends who are moms at this school used to be teachers or used to homeschool their kids or they are teachers at the school and that is their gifting gifts.

I do not believe that is my gift set.

I struggle on homeschool days if I can be transparent. It's really hard. I don't think making learning really fun comes very naturally to me. I feel like I'm more business-minded than I am teaching-minded. I don't know if that makes sense. But here's the thing—I chose the school with the values that I believed in the most right now, and I just decided to like fit myself into that.

Like I signed myself up to do this so that I would have to follow through with it because I knew this was the most important thing. I don't know if that's like the wisest or best, but that is just what I decided to do because I thought, you know what? With this accountability, knowing that the lesson plans are given to me, but also they're due at the school, like the other teachers check over them, I needed that accountability, personally. Also, lesson plans kind of overwhelm me to do them myself. And so I just thought, well great, it's done for me at the school. They've already gone through a bunch of different curriculum and I have the support of a teacher who loves teaching is super gifted in teaching. If I ever get stuck, I know that I have that support in that relationship. And the teachers have been so wonderful.

So yeah, I think choosing a school that's like based on your values and then trying to just fit your family into that is awesome. I can transparently, I can see us homeschooling full-time one day too, to give us that flexibility. But I do feel like I would maybe get a little bit relaxed with the homeschool plan and kind of get off course, and I do really value just staying on track and making sure that my kids are getting the education they need. And I feel like I just might be a little bit relaxed. I would, I would need some extra support there, too.

Okay, wanted to share a couple of other thoughts and then I'll share what a typical homeschool day looks like. One thing that I heard recently is that facts are useful and helpful things, but if they're all that you have, they will deaden your soul because life is more than just facts. And that came from a video on YouTube all about Classical Christian education. If you're interested in learning more about that, it's a great place to start. But they talk about how Jesus was a teacher, he was a rabbi, he was a teacher. He said every disciple, when he's finished, will be like his master in Luke 6:40.

And Proverbs 1320 also says, “when you walk with wise men, you will be wise.” And so for us, for our family, it's really important for our kids to not just be taught facts, to not just be given an education, but to be given a whole person education, including faith, including beliefs, including “look at how I live, look at how I do life” and emulate that. And that is first our responsibility as their parents, 100% our responsibility. But putting them in this school also gives me the confidence and joy of knowing that they're also seeing that modeled in other teachers and in other like-minded families there at that school, which is just so encouraging. And like it bolsters me as a parent, which I'm very, very grateful for.

I don't feel alone. I feel very like we are part of a community that is linking arms and we are moving in the same direction. Every child spends about 12,000 hours in school. I mean, that's a lot of time as they're being formed, as their beliefs are being formed. And so, simply put, we just feel really strongly about who is mentoring our children then it should first come from us, but it should also come from like-minded men and women of God who believe in the same values and faith that we do.

So the bottom line is that we want to build up lovers of learning. We wanna build their education on God's word. We want our kids to grow up in an environment dominated by the word of God and people who believe it and will teach them the word of God.

We don't want them to be so concerned with grades or scores, but more concerned with their souls. And we wanna know, we wanna teach them why we're studying the things that we're studying. Why are they learning these things? It's not just about get getting good grades and going to college. It is what life is supposed to look like when we live out Christianity and what it looks like to be able to defend our faith, which is so incredibly important right now in our culture and in the time that we live in.

Is it easier? No.

Is it harder day to day? Yes.

Do I wish I had more time to myself during the week? If I'm honest, yes, I do.

But someone put it to me this way: Would I ever regret spending more time with my kids helping to shape and nurture their hearts? And I think the answer is always gonna be, no, I'll never regret that. But again, as long as I know that I can be the best mom for them in this scenario, then I'll choose the harder path. So I chose what's aligned with our values first and then molded my schedule to it, and what I've learned is my heart has followed that decision. It has, even though I don't feel like it doesn't come naturally, my heart has followed it and I've really learned to enjoy it even on the hard days.

Okay, so a lot of that was deep. It was heavy. I get it. Discipling, mentoring, raising up our children in this culture is a giant task that is given to us as the parents of our children, and I'm so grateful and also that comes with a lot. And so I just wanna take a second and speak to the mom listening who might be, I don't know, feeling discouraged after this because you're like, “Hey, my kid is in public school, or I don't even have a school like this near me, or I don't know what I'm doing and this picture looks different for me and looks like this other situation is gonna be better for the education of my child.”

Listen, I bless you. There is zero judgment. I am just sharing from my heart what is working for us. Again, it is all about your circumstances in your family. Wherever you send your kids to school, you as the mom, as the dad, you can impart faith to your child at home. And that is what is gonna sink in the deepest in their hearts is the way that you model your faith in your life.

All right, let's get a little lighthearted now. Let's move on from all of that deep talk, and I'm just gonna tell you what it looks like for me because after listening to this, you might be like, “Yeah, I'll never homeschool my kids.” I'm just kidding. I don't know. We'll see. But truly, it can be hard. It can be hard on days.

Okay, so this is what a day in the life looks like for me on a homeschool day—

The night before.

I print out the lesson plans, I try to remove things from their backpacks, look over what I need. Sometimes I do that the night before, sometimes I do that the morning of. I will re-type the lesson plans in a checklist format for Milly. Not so much for Lyndon yet because she's not quite there to like bring herself through the checklist, but Milly absolutely can.

The morning of.

And so that morning, what does it look like for me? I wake up at 5:30, I get my scripture time and prayer, I pray over my day. I do my workout. If I'm lucky, I get dressed. If not, I'll just stay in my sweaty workout clothes all day. And then the kids get dressed either before or after breakfast. I'm very lax on homeschool days about whether they get dressed before or after breakfast. And half the time, Beaufort just stays in his pajamas all day because he likes wearing his pajamas and he's not even getting homeschooled. It's great.

So we begin with prayer and catechism. Our school does a catechism, which is just a scripture memory or memorizing a truth where they kind of speak something back to you and it's a really great way to start the day. Usually we do that while they're eating breakfast and then I immediately send Beaufort and Lyndon to play if he's not in preschool. If he's in preschool, we'll just start to kinda gather up stuff and load up to go to preschool.

But either way, honestly, I send Lyndon and Beaufort to go play because I can get in a subject or two with Milly, usually logic of English or math, like right first thing, cuz that's when her brain is the freshest and she's tuned in. Benji usually eats and just stays in his high chair kind of while I'm knocking this out with Milly, and the other two are going to play.

And then I try to grab some easy car activities for homeschool, for Milly and Lyndon. So typically, let's just take like a Tuesday for example. This is what our Tuesday looks like.

They'll go play. I'll knock out a session with MillY and then I'll load everyone up in the car. That's like just a whole situation—it takes like 30 minutes getting everybody's shoes, getting everybody's snacks and drinks, making sure Beaufort has his backpack, making sure each girl has their clipboard with their activities. I have to print the lesson plans, put them in the front seat with me. Well, they've already been printed, but I put them in the front seat with me and I load everybody up.

At about 8:45, we leave and I will start kind of quizzing them for homeschool stuff on the way. Maybe I'll ask them to do their timeline cards. Maybe I'll give them my phone and let them watch a YouTube video that they have to watch. Maybe they'll practice cursive on their whiteboards in the backseat, but whatever it is, they know on the checklist kind of what they can do.

And at 9:15 we drop Beaufort off and then we'll do more homeschool in the car on the way home.

When we get home, probably around 9:45 or 10, I let Benji run around a little bit in the playroom or outside, I'll check over the checklist and then kind of sit down with one of the students, Milly or Lyndon.

Usually Milly gets a break at that point. She’ll go play with Benji and I'll sit down with Lyndon and do some math with her or logic of English. And then we'll have snack time. I'll usually go ahead and feed Benji lunch at this time. That's usually like around 10:30 or 11, and then I put Benji down for a nap around 11-11:30.

And the girls kind of work independently, or maybe they'll have a brain break and we'll play a little bit while I'm putting Benji down for a nap.

I come back downstairs and I start making lunch for the girls and myself. And so I'll make lunch for them and then maybe we'll watch one of their videos or something while they're eating lunch. I usually try to save the videos for snack or lunchtime because that's easy, and then we can discuss it afterwards.

And around 12:00, I would say we're probably like 75% of the way through homeschool. And my house is just a disaster. Like breakfast is everywhere still, lunch is everywhere, still lesson plans and food and everything. It just feels like it's scattered altar for the place. But we just press on, we continue. I try to clean up as I go. It doesn't always work, but the baby's sleeping, so this is our time to do schoolwork. I usually just ignore the house. We'll focus on finishing Latin, science, cursive and reading.

We just do our best to finish our lesson plans by 12:30 or we'll grab a few other things to do in the car. But 12:30 is our cutoff because that's when we get in the car to go get Beaufort from preschool.

At 1:00 we'll pick up Beaufort, head to a park, or we might just head straight home. On Thursdays we come straight home and they take their piano lesson and by 2:30 we're pretty much finished with homeschool and piano lessons and whatever is left kind of undone with school, I'll just check over it. I'll make sure that they finish up whatever is left undone. We pack up our book bags, tidy the homeschool room. I clean the whole kitchen. I just say “kids, go play” when Beaufort gets home. He just wants to play anyway. Benji's running around like a crazy baby. And it's crazy. So I sometimes I'll just have them do Popsicle baths in the afternoon, which makes bedtime a lot easier.

Or I'll say, “Okay, everybody quiet time for an hour.” And the whole time, you know, Benji's just kind of tattling around at my feet. And sometimes he'll play with them in the playroom. We've got like a baby gate and we kind of close them in up there. But around the afternoon time, once I'm done cleaning up the house, it's time to start prepping dinner.

So I will prep dinner, definitely get started around 4:00, if not earlier. And then Will's usually home sometime between 5-5:30, and that's when we'll eat dinner. After that we have our kids clear the table. We usually play a song, try to make it fun. I'll go ahead and make coffee for the next morning.

If the kids have not had baths yet, they'll go straight up to bath time. And then we do our whole bedtime routine. Right now we're reading Narnia aloud as a family. We'll have prayer songs, kisses, hugs, all the things. And then, you know, you know the girls will call out, “Mom, we need water.” You know, all the things around bedtime where we think we're done with bedtime and then it's not done and we think we're done with the kitchen, then we have to clean up some more. And by the time everything really is done and everyone's like asleep, it's probably 8:30. And that's usually when Will and I start getting ready for bed too, because I wake up so early and he wakes up early to work out, too.

So we start kind of winding down, I'll take a bath every night. It just winds me down the best. And we are aiming to be in the bed around 9:30. We'll also try to fold some laundry, maybe watch a show while we fold. That's kind of our folding time because for the life of me, I cannot fold laundry during the day, on homeschool days especially. There's just no time. And we just go through a lot of laundry in a day. So it's just a lot to manage now.

Is it crazy? Yeah. Do I lose my mind some days when the kids are not staying on task and we only have a certain amount of time to get everything done? Yeah. I get very frustrated and that is a very refining thing for me. Do I question my decision sometime about sending them to this kind of school? Yeah, because it's hard. It's a little bit chaotic with four kids that are small at home. It's hard.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm setting a worse example by homeschooling them because I just, I get so frustrated. Kids wanna play, kids don't wanna work. And so when mom has to be the teacher too, I can get a lot of pushback. They're still learning like what does that look like at home? But I also have to pause and say, have we improved? Yeah, we have improved a lot. And my favorite thing, and what I'm learning too, is that it doesn't have to go perfectly every day for them to still get the most important things in their heart.

And one of my favorite quotes from, again, the video that I'm linking in this episode is, am I preparing them for a job or am I preparing them to meet their maker? And my prayer is that is I get the privilege of having such a hands-on aspect of their education that I can always bring them back to their maker and talk about God in every aspect of their education, which is just such a privilege and a joy.

So the work and play of this kind of school, there's a lot of different elements—there's hard work, and there's a lot of play involved. And I'm grateful that I get the ability to incorporate work and play in our own days for our own family, kind of as I see fit, according to the needs of my kids, according to the needs of our family. And always bring them back to preparing them to meet their maker.

Okay, that's a wrap. Thank you so much for listening! G.K. Chesterton said,