The Homeschool How To

What does homeschooling look like when you have four boys under 10, a two-bedroom apartment with no yard, and a son who melts down every time it’s time to stop doing something he loves?

This week, Josh and Jess Tirado from Ventura, California, get honest about homeschooling a child with ADHD. Their oldest wasn’t struggling with focus. He was doing great academically. The hard part was transitions, big feelings and impulsive moments that affected his little brothers. They tried parenting classes and every strategy they knew from working in mental health. Then they made a decision a lot of families wrestle with quietly, and they share why, and what changed for the whole house.

We also get into:

• Why they never planned to homeschool, and how COVID, a kindergarten lottery and one book changed everything
• How they teach a third grader with toddlers around (hint: get out of the house half the day)
• Why they only do one to two hours of actual school a day, and why the curriculum that looks boring works
• The dad question: will homeschooled kids have friends? Josh shares an idea about teens and secrets that will make you rethink what’s “normal”
• How grandparents can be a homeschool “cheat code”

And stay until the end, because a broken-down chicken coop at a retired farmer’s ranch turned into something none of us saw coming.

Books mentioned: Family Revision by Jeremy Pryor and Hold On to Your Kids.

Follow Josh & Jess on IG: @anotherwayfamily 

Ready to homeschool but wondering where to start?

📘 Grab my book, So You Want to Homeschool? Everything You Need to Know Before You Start

🎓 Need a step-by-step plan? Check out Cheryl's mini-course, How to Work and Homeschool 

📚 Still wondering, "What do I actually teach?" My guide walks you through exactly what homeschool families focus on by age and subject.

If this episode helped you, follow the show and leave a quick review. It helps another parent on the fence find us.

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What makes someone with a doctorate in education decide to homeschool her own children? And why would an education researcher who understands the concerns around screen time choose online curriculum for her kids?

Those are just two of the questions I get into with Dr. Kelly Cagle, former high school teacher, education researcher, homeschooling mom of three boys, and host of the Parenting IQ podcast.

Kelly didn't originally set out to homeschool. Four years ago, her oldest son's soccer training schedule made their previous school arrangement impossible. What started as a practical decision turned into something their family has continued to choose, year after year.

We talk about what Kelly learned from her professional background in education, why she believes children need room to develop their individual strengths, and how homeschooling has allowed her oldest son to pursue soccer while continuing his education.

But one of the most interesting parts of our conversation is her current curriculum choice. Kelly's boys are using an online program they've enjoyed more than the alternatives they've tried. They're getting started without the usual battles, and she's seeing benefits. At the same time, she's wrestling with her concerns about screen time and trying to find the right balance for her family.

We also talk about navigating ADHD and dyslexia, why her son can learn while moving around, what happened when she spent $1,200 on curriculum before understanding how her children learned, and how she approaches resistance to schoolwork.

And when it comes to preparing kids for adulthood, Kelly has two priorities that go beyond textbooks: knowing how to make money and knowing how to communicate.

This is an honest conversation about the decisions behind one family's homeschool—not a claim that there's one right way to educate every child.

Connect with Dr. Kelly Cagle:

The IQ Network

Mom IQ Resources & Parenting IQ Podcast
Helping parents find their rhythm and raise confident ADHDers.

10 Simple ADHD Strategies for Tired Moms

Acellus

Deschooling Society

Ready to homeschool but wondering where to start?

📘 Grab my book, So You Want to Homeschool? Everything You Need to Know Before You Start

🎓 Need a step-by-step plan? Check out Cheryl's mini-course, How to Work and Homeschool 

📚 Still wondering, "What do I actually teach?" My guide walks you through exactly what homeschool families focus on by age and subject.

If you're trying to figure out what homeschooling could look like for your family, follow The Homeschool How To Podcast for more real conversations with homeschooling parents.

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What if the reason your homeschool days feel chaotic isn’t your curriculum, your kids, or you, but the belief that because you’re home, you should be able to do it all?

This week I sat down with Luke and Liss Hammond, parents of four who homeschool on a farm in rural southeast Missouri. Liss was homeschooled in the ’90s, one of eight kids, and she’ll be the first to tell you she resented her parents for it as a teenager. Then she went to college on a volleyball scholarship, earned a master’s degree, worked as an investigator with the Department of Child Safety, and quit the day she looked at her newborn son and thought, “with everything I know about children, there is no way I can do this.”

Now she runs one of the most structured homeschool days I’ve heard on this show, and she explains exactly why.

We talk about:

• Why it takes about three years to settle into homeschooling (and why switching methods every five weeks is the worst thing you can do)
• Her real block schedule: self-start block, play block for the preschooler, protected teaching time, and garden block
• Why kids actually want structure, from her years in psychology
• Saying no to co-op events during school hours, and why “every no I say is a successful yes somewhere else”
• What homeschool kids bring to college that others often don’t
• Luke’s take as a public-school kid: “I’m not anti-public school. I’m pro-intentional parents.”
• Dirt Academy Kids, their 30-lesson gardening curriculum

And if you’re the parent who knows you want to homeschool but is scared to walk away from the income, stay for the end. Liss’s answer is one I needed to hear when I left my job, too.

Check out https://www.dirtacademykids.com/ to teach your kiddos HOW to garden and grow their own food!

Ready to homeschool but wondering where to start?

📘 Grab my book, So You Want to Homeschool? Everything You Need to Know Before You Start

🎓 Need a step-by-step plan? Check out Cheryl's mini-course, How to Work and Homeschool 

📚 Still wondering, "What do I actually teach?" My guide walks you through exactly what homeschool families focus on by age and subject.

If this episode helped you, follow The Homeschool How To and leave a quick review. It really does help other parents find the show.

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What if your kid's math class was the stock market?

Robert Grego pulled his 15-year-old son out of public school three days before 9th grade. He had no plan. So he asked his son what he actually liked, and built the year around it: Latin because he loves the Roman Empire, American and military history because he's obsessed with World War I, and no Shakespeare.

This year, his son's math is a YouTube channel the two of them run together called The Hostile Takeover. They break down stocks, read charts and solve for X with real dollar signs in front of it. His son makes the thumbnails, does the research, and they just got monetized.

Robert is a lawyer, hotel owner and dad of three. In this conversation we get into:

• Why schools teach Shakespeare (his answer: "Because they do")
• How much math a kid actually needs to make a living
• Why school teaches kids to memorize instead of think, and what that means with AI in their pocket
• The email he sent his school district about AI, and the reply he got
• How a professor making $300 during office hours got him into the stock market
• Whether 8 is too young to start learning about investing
• Paying your kids through your business and putting it in a Roth IRA (which, it turns out, I already did)

If you've ever worried that skipping the "normal" curriculum will leave your kid behind, listen to this one. Robert's son is learning digital marketing, business and algebra at the same time, and none of it came from a textbook.

Links:

• The Hostile Takeover on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheHostileTakeoverTV
• Market From Scratch playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNqyGrAdjjQE
• Robert's hotels on Lake George- the Sundowner, the Lake Haven, the Montreal and the Lake George Inn

Ready to homeschool but wondering where to start?

📘 Grab my book, So You Want to Homeschool? Everything You Need to Know Before You Start

🎓 Need a step-by-step plan? Check out Cheryl's mini-course, How to Work and Homeschool 

📚 Still wondering, "What do I actually teach?" My guide walks you through exactly what homeschool families focus on by age and subject.

If this episode got you thinking, follow The Homeschool How To and leave a review. It helps another parent find it.

Support the show

Instagram: TheHomeschoolHowToPodcast
Facebook: The Homeschool How To Podcast

Her son could recite Goodnight Moon word for word at two years old, but he couldn't learn his letter names. He couldn't rhyme. He could read "redeemer" in scripture but not "an."

Liz from Idaho never planned to homeschool. Her husband wasn't sold on it either, so they made a deal: try kindergarten at home for a year, and if it didn't work, he'd go to school. After that year, her husband became the biggest homeschool advocate in the house.

Then came the reading. Five reading curriculums. Every Orton-Gillingham program she could find. Speech therapy, OT, an endless line for the neuropsychologist. When nothing worked, Liz figured, "it must be me," so she got trained herself. Today she's a dyslexia therapist, certified in EBLI, and in grad school for speech-language pathology.

In this episode, Liz explains the 3 D's in plain language:

• Dyslexia: reading
• Dysgraphia: handwriting and getting thoughts onto paper
• Dyscalculia: understanding quantity, time and counting

She also covers:

• The early signs she wishes more parents knew
• Why speech to print finally clicked for her son, who came up three grade levels in spelling in nine hours of instruction
• How audiobooks gave him a college-level vocabulary while he was still decoding at a 2nd-grade level
• Where to start with a kindergartner, and when to stop pushing
• Three-cueing, the "Reading Wars," and why she calls teaching kids to read her "civil disobedience"

Then the honest part. This year her son started school in 6th grade, and Liz gets emotional talking about it. If you've ever felt like putting your child in school means you failed, this conversation is for you. It isn't failure. It's paying attention to what your kid needs right now.

If your child is fighting you on reading, remember Liz's line: there's a difference between not being interested in reading and not being able to do it.

Resources mentioned:

For Speech to Print and Structured Linguistic Literacy, check out this page

Reading Simplified

Truth About Reading

EBLI

Sold a Story

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons

Epic App

Ready to homeschool but wondering where to start?

📘 Grab my book, So You Want to Homeschool? Everything You Need to Know Before You Start

🎓 Need a step-by-step plan? Check out Cheryl's mini-course, How to Work and Homeschool 

📚 Still wondering, "What do I actually teach?" My guide walks you through exactly what homeschool families focus on by age and subject.

If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave a review. It helps more homeschooling families find us!

Support the show

Instagram: TheHomeschoolHowToPodcast
Facebook: The Homeschool How To Podcast

What if you're homeschooling your child and you're constantly wondering, Am I doing enough?

What if they're not reading yet? What if you didn't get through all five subjects this week? What if your child spent most of the day playing, helping around the house, going outside, asking questions—and you still feel like you didn't “do school”?

That's exactly the kind of pressure we talk about in this episode.

My guest, Kiely Modiri, spent 10 years working in public education. She earned a master's in educational leadership, was on the path toward becoming a principal, and then became a mom and started questioning almost everything she had been taught about education.

Eventually, she created Alpine Village School and began working with parents to rethink what children actually need.

And one of the things that really stopped me was hearing that her daughter didn't really begin reading until around 8½ or 9—and Kiely wasn't worried about it.

Instead, she was paying attention to what her daughter actually needed at that point in her life.

We talk about homeschooling without recreating public school at home, why parents become so anxious about reading and academic benchmarks, what children can learn through free play and everyday life, and why Kiely believes connection should come before correction.

We also get into something I think a lot of homeschool moms will recognize: how much of our children's behavior can bring up our own childhood experiences, insecurities and fears.

If you've ever looked at your homeschool day and thought, We didn't get enough done, I think you're going to want to hear this conversation.

Ready to homeschool but wondering where to start?

📘 Grab my book, So You Want to Homeschool? Everything You Need to Know Before You Start

🎓 Need a step-by-step plan? Check out Cheryl's mini-course, How to Work and Homeschool 

📚 Still wondering, "What do I actually teach?" My guide walks you through exactly what homeschool families focus on by age and subject.

If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave a review. It helps more homeschooling families find us!

Connect with Kiely:

Website & Online Store: alpinevillageidaho.com

Instagram: instagram.com/alpinevillageschool

School website: www.alpinevillageschool.com

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What if your child isn't reading when you thought they would? What if they're not keeping up with the curriculum? What if you're starting to wonder whether you're actually doing enough?

That's exactly where this conversation goes.

Becky from Homeschooling Olympians homeschooled her five sons for more than 25 years. And one of those sons didn't learn to read until he was 10.

Instead of giving up on homeschooling, Becky learned to look at education very differently.

In this episode, we talk about the pressure homeschool parents feel to follow grade levels, check every box, finish every curriculum, and make sure their kids are “on track.” Becky shares how an incredibly overwhelming season — pregnancy, a child needing major surgeries, multiple grades, and too much curriculum — forced her and her husband to step back and ask a much better question:

What do we actually want our kids to know by the time they graduate?

That question became the foundation for their homeschool.

We talk about delayed readers, reading aloud, picture books, curriculum pressure, raising five boys, homeschooling through difficult seasons, and what Becky learned after looking back at 25 years of homeschooling.

And then there's the part I think every homeschool parent needs to hear: what happened to those five boys.

Their paths ended up looking completely different — from history and machining to filmmaking, music, science, business, and rowing — despite the fact that Becky says there were years when they did very little curriculum.

If you've ever wondered “Am I doing enough?”, “Is my child behind?”, or “What are my kids actually supposed to know?”, this conversation will give you a very different way to think about those questions.

Listen to the full episode of The Homeschool How To Podcast, and if it helps you rethink something in your homeschool, share it with another parent who needs to hear it.

From the episode:

Connect with Bekki: https://www.instagram.com/abetterwaytohomeschool/

13 Teeny Tiny Truth Bombs About Homeschooling

Honey for a Child's Heart

Sonlight Booklists

Ready to homeschool but wondering where to start?

📘 Grab my book, So You Want to Homeschool? Everything You Need to Know Before You Start

🎓 Need a step-by-step plan? Check out Cheryl's mini-course, How to Work and Homeschool 

📚 Still wondering, "What do I actually teach?" My guide walks you through exactly what homeschool families focus on by age and subject.

If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave a review. It helps more homeschooling families find us!

Support the show

Instagram: TheHomeschoolHowToPodcast
Facebook: The Homeschool How To Podcast

My guests this week, Owen and Christina, have five kids—and their family's answer to that question took them much farther than they ever expected.

It started with something surprisingly simple: their son wanted another thing.. "to be happy."

Around the same time, Christina watched a video about families who didn't have access to clean water.

So Owen and Christina did something most of us would probably never consider.

They shut off the water in their house.

For 10 days, their family walked to collect water, carried it home, washed clothes in buckets, and experienced firsthand how much of life we take for granted.

And then something unexpected happened.

When it was time to turn the water back on, they didn't want to.

That experience eventually led them to leave Canada and move their family to rural Guatemala, where their children have learned Spanish through immersion, worked alongside their parents, taken risks, made mistakes, participated in real community life, and learned skills you probably won't find on a traditional report card.

We talk about homeschooling, worldschooling, entitlement, purpose, community, raising capable kids, letting children fail, and why Owen and Christina don't see education as something that only happens in a classroom.

If you've ever looked at your homeschool and wondered, "Is this enough?"

This episode might make you rethink what education actually means.

Connect with Owen & Christina:

website: https://www.culturechalk.org/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/culture_chalk_travel/

Ready to homeschool but wondering where to start?

📘 Grab my book, So You Want to Homeschool? Everything You Need to Know Before You Start

🎓 Need a step-by-step plan? Check out Cheryl's mini-course, How to Work and Homeschool 

📚 Still wondering, "What do I actually teach?" My guide walks you through exactly what homeschool families focus on by age and subject.

If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave a review. It helps more homeschooling families find us!

Follow The Homeschool How To Podcast for weekly conversations with families who are doing things differently—and figuring out what actually works.

Support the show

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What does your child actually need to learn—and how much formal homeschooling do they really need?

When I started The Homeschool How To Podcast, I wasn't even sure I was going to homeschool my own kids. I had a lot of the same fears so many parents have: Would my kids miss out? Would they have friends? Would they fall behind? Would I actually be capable of educating them?

More than 200 homeschool family interviews later, I've changed my mind about a LOT.

In this episode, I'm sharing what I've learned about homeschooling, socialization, curriculum, learning readiness, and what children actually need from us.

I'm talking about the fears I had when I started, why I no longer worry nearly as much about whether my kids are “on track,” and why I don't believe homeschooling has to mean sitting at the kitchen table with textbooks every morning.

I also share what homeschooling actually looks like in our house—including my son's completely unexpected opportunity to learn about horses several times a week because he wanted to. That experience has become one of the clearest examples of what I hoped homeschooling could be.

If you're considering homeschooling, you're a new homeschool parent, or you're constantly wondering “Am I doing enough?”, I hope this episode gives you a little more peace and confidence.

And remember: there is no one right way to homeschool.

Ready to homeschool but wondering where to start?

📘 Grab my book, So You Want to Homeschool? Everything You Need to Know Before You Start

🎓 Need a step-by-step plan? Check out Cheryl's mini-course, How to Work and Homeschool 

📚 Still wondering, "What do I actually teach?" My guide walks you through exactly what homeschool families focus on by age and subject.

If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave a review. It helps more homeschooling families find us!

Support the show

Instagram: TheHomeschoolHowToPodcast
Facebook: The Homeschool How To Podcast

Her son was all set to graduate from her homeschool and become a master mechanic — and then he enlisted in the Marines a month before he turned 18.

Christina Franco from Rooted Home Life joins Cheryl this week. She's a former public and private school teacher turned homeschool mom of five, and she gets real about the moment she realized it wasn't public school she had a problem with — it was school itself. They talk about her oldest son's surprise decision to join the Marines, the "mother's intuition" story from speaker Amber O'Neill Johnston that changed how Christina parents, why she doesn't believe in college for college's sake, and how family-style unit studies shape her very relaxed homeschool days.

You'll hear about:

• How a public school teacher ended up distrusting the entire system, not just one school
• The real story behind her son enlisting in the Marines right after graduating homeschool
• How being a blended family can affect homeschooling
• A mother's intuition story about a medical procedure gone wrong
• Why she doesn't believe in going to college "for the experience"
• How family-style unit studies work across five kids at different ages
• Her honest answer on putting her kids' faces online

Connect with Christina:

Instagram

YouTube

Podcast

Ready to homeschool but wondering where to start?

📘 Grab my book, So You Want to Homeschool? Everything You Need to Know Before You Start

🎓 Need a step-by-step plan? Check out Cheryl's mini-course, How to Work and Homeschool 

📚 Still wondering, "What do I actually teach?" My guide walks you through exactly what homeschool families focus on by age and subject.

Support the show

Instagram: TheHomeschoolHowToPodcast
Facebook: The Homeschool How To Podcast