The Homeschool How To

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
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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