Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

by Sarah Mackenzie

Read to your children every day (yes, even the older ones!). If you need some inspiration to make this a priority in your home, head to readaloudrevival.com. Set time aside for them to read on their own as well. Have your children write every day. It doesn’t need to be book reports or historical essays. It can be a letter, an e-mail, a grocery list, or a journal entry. Make writing itself a priority. Do some math every day. Don’t belabor it—do it every day and the consistency will do its work without long, drawn-out, arduous lessons.

Don’t begin planning your day by listing all the things you want to pack in. Begin by looking at what God gave you (I’ll give you a hint: twenty-four hours, and not all of them are for work).

Now consider your nonnegotiables: sleep, eat, shower, pray. Plug in meal preparation, rest and church on Sunday, and enough wind-down time at the end of each day to ensure a good night’s sleep.

can’t base your homeschool schedule on your desire to do hands-on history, grow an organic vegetable garden, take weekly field trips, and study a new composer and artist every week of the year. We have to consider reality, and usually it’s helpful to start there.

2. Insist on Margin Once you figure out how much time you have in your daily budget of hours, fill only 80 percent of it.

In her e-book Plan Your Year, Pam Barnhill says, “While most states require a set number of days for school, not a single state requires you to school on any specific day. Not having to follow the traditional school calendar gives a family an amazing amount of freedom.”

The loop is for tasks you don’t need to do every day, but you want to tackle with some regularity. These tend to be content-based subjects such as history and science, not skill-based subjects such as Latin or math. Alternatively, you can loop within a daily task to offer some variation. For example, prayer needs to happen daily, but one could loop spiritual reading, lectio divina, personal devotions, and communal prayer to offer some variation within that

find that short loop schedules are more effective than long loop schedules. Having three to five items on a loop means we’ll get to each task more often, which helps us progress through books and materials at a satisfactory rate. It

Passing on the faith to my kids—arguably

arguably the entire reason I educate my children at home in the first place—gets squeezed out of the schedule. Those experiences that shape my children’s souls and order their affections get set aside.

In our home, this rarely happens in the morning, so we actually call it Symposium. “Symposium” has Greek roots and means “a convivial meeting . . . for drinking and intellectual conversation” or “a philosophical dialogue . . . dealing with ideal love and the vision of absolute beauty.”16

What I find so helpful about Morning Time is that it places first things first—it’s a liturgy of love. When

going deep, and relishing rather than on “getting through.” Nothing stirs up a mom’s anxiety more than pressure to “get through.”

Now, during that time, encounter beauty with your children. Read Scripture, recite poetry, read from a classic. Look at a piece of great art and talk about it, then choose another book and read that. Drill your catechism. Discuss what you read together. Diagram a sentence together as a family. Morning Time is when you gather for subjects that the whole family can do together. The key is that it happens regularly and takes priority over everything else.

Create a Morning-Time Box: The

Morning-Time box only comes out at this time of day. Rotate what is in the box every now and again to keep it interesting. Allow your small children

to play with whatever is in the box at the kitchen table or on a blanket on the floor. Some i...

playdough Color Wonder markers and paper (no mess!) a rice or bean sensory tub a tub of water with funnels, measuring spoons and cups, etc. animal figurines (my kids love the Toobs from Safari Limited) a snack in a muffin tin (they can move their snack from liner to liner, taking bites here and there but mostly playing!) paintbrush and a small dish of water (to be used in the high chair; this also makes a fabulous outdoor activity with fat brushes and a bucket of water—tell your small chi...

Finally, the best way to shed frustration and angst about the schedule is simply to remember that your time isn’t yours to begin with—it’s His. We

When you are reading a picture book to your small child, preparing dinner, or helping your child draw a map or tackle a math problem, are you also doing something else? The problem with multitasking does not lie in doing more than one thing at a time. The problem arises when you miss a “now moment” because you are wrapped up in some imaginary one that hasn’t happened yet (or won’t happen at all).

But there is no prize for the mom who checks the most boxes on her to-do list. (Darn it anyway, I would win!) There

What we usually think of as multitasking is actually task switching, and it is both an inefficient and ineffective way to work.

This can be a real struggle for those of us who homeschool. We have so much to get to: the laundry, meal planning and preparation, housework, errands, running children hither and yon, making time and space for other daily efforts such as exercise, our spouses, and our personal development. We want to be good stewards of our time,

Teaching from rest doesn’t mean we aren’t planning ahead (in fact, we will likely need to use written plans and checklists), and it definitely doesn’t mean we are lazy. It means that we are doing one thing at a time, and we do that thing with all our heart.

town to preach to another. He hid away to pray. He got tired. He never interacted with the vast majority of people on the planet. He spent thirty years in training and only three years in ministry. He did not try to do it all. And yet, he did everything God asked him to do.19

When you think you have a general plan for your day, pray over it. Ask God to reveal to you where you are missing the point.

Andrew Kern, founder and president of CiRCE Institute, states: The most important thing every teacher should understand is that teaching is the art of being imitated. If you want a student to perceive a truth, you have to embody it. That’s what teaching is. When you teach, whether you intend to or not, you are saying to your students, “imitate me.” Make yourself worthy of imitation.22

“When God rested after six days of creation, he was not tired,” Dr. Christopher Perrin tells us in his online article “Learning and Leisure: Developing a School of Scholé”: He celebrated and blessed his creation (Gen. 2:3). The Sabbath rest and the regular feasts were not given so that God’s people would do nothing, though it did mean ceasing from typical daily labor. Rather it was meant as a time for a particular kind of robust activity—feasting, celebration and blessing. The Sabbath rest is not the mere cessation of labor, but the orientation of the human to his highest end—the “work” of leisure, the “work” of praising, serving, feasting and blessing.23 Do you have this kind of Sabbath in

When you are performing mommy triage—that is, when you have a crisis moment and have to figure out which fire to put out first—always choose your child. It’s just a math lesson. It’s only a writing assignment. It’s a Latin declension. Nothing more.

Isaiah 30:15 says, “For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, ‘In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.’ ” Repentance, then, goes hand in hand with rest.

task of home education at all—because a government school would not see our children as the image bearers that they are.

You are cultivating your child like a tree, and trees will bear fruit in time.

Choose a literary mentor.

tend to choose literary mentors who are somewhat prolific so that I can choose just a couple of titles from their literary buffets. Just a few ideas to choose from: C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Elizabeth Goudge, Flannery O’Connor, Wendell Barry, P.D. Wodehouse, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charlotte Mason, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Alfred Tennyson, Anthony Esolen, James Sire, Dorothy Sayers, T.S. Eliot—just pick one author, steep yourself in his or her writing, and see what impact that has on your reading and on your living. Take a class.

At Classical Academic Press, Dr. Christopher Perrin teaches a seminar for teachers and homeschool moms to infuse their learning environment with scholé—deep and restful learning (see ScholeAcademy.com). The CiRCE apprenticeship (see CirceInstitute.org) offers personal tutoring and training

Keep a commonplace book.

When I’m reading and I run across a beautiful passage or something that moves me, I copy it into my commonplace. Sometimes I draw a line down the middle of each paper and copy the passage on the left and my response to that passage on the right. Other times I just copy down the passage. Writing it out by hand helps the passage become a part of me somehow. It’s a little hard to explain, but if you try it, you’ll know what I mean.