Advocates for Home Education in Massachusetts, Inc.

Yum: A Bite-Sized and Nourishing Homeschooling Strategy for All Ages

by Sophia Sayigh

The following is a slightly edited version of an article which we first offered in 2020. Though the world is no longer on lock-down, a cold and dreary February can make any homeschool family a little stir-crazy. We hope that this will inspire anyone who needs to change things up a little this time of year.

Are you struggling with the kids home full-time? Maybe you feel a little trapped a claustrophobic as sleety winter storms seem to roll in day after day. For anyone needing a change and a chance to recharge, I offer this strategy to reset life at home.

Take what you like, and leave the rest. There is not one right way to homeschool. In fact, that is one of homeschooling’s strengths—flexibility to meet the varied needs of individual members of a family. If what you’re doing is working for you, stop reading and carry on!

A couple of things to acknowledge that make school different from learning at home:

The 90 minute strategy includes:

The 90 minutes is meant to be spent all together, not per child. Aim to interest the oldest child, and rest assured the younger ones will be fine coming along for the ride. And if someone doesn’t want to take part, don’t push it. No power struggles.

If you find that in the course of reading or cooking or sewing, your child catches a bug and wants to read all of a series, or invent their own recipes, or learn about the science of cooking, or contribute to (or start!) a community drive to donate to the local food pantry, or in any way dig more deeply into a subject, let them run with it! And if they tire of it, just go back to your 90 minutes and see what arises next.

Leave available at all times whatever supplies you have on hand for art, music, and reading lying about. Audiobooks are great accompaniments to crafting or building, as are podcasts. Of course have available games, puzzles, dress up, and toys as well, and let free play rule! Conversation that happens between family members over the course of a day counts for a lot. And another pastime, daydreaming, is underrated.

Try to be flexible, and if you realize anyone is stressed, stop and breathe. If the strategy is not working, change the strategy, as many times as you need to. If at the end of a week you haven’t amassed the equivalent of 90 minutes a day of these activities, wipe the slate clean and start over. And take note—if it works to read for all 90 minutes and not play games or make things, go with that flow. If you can only manage 30 or 60 minutes, that’s fine. Be kind to yourself. This framework is meant to help make your homeschooling easier and less stressful, not more.

Some of the millions of possible ways this could play out:

At the end of a day or week, if you have the energy for it, jot down some of what you’ve observed your kids engaging in. How are they spending their time? What are their interests? What habits have they developed? It will be fun and eye opening to look back on these notes.

I am guessing that your children, if they have forgotten, will rediscover their innate ability to learn voraciously, and you might too! Embrace this change as it happens. When you return to your normal routine, I won’t be surprised if you find that your time will be more productive and less stressful.

* How is structured learning defined for public school? From the Massachusetts DESE: Structured learning time shall mean time during which students are engaged in regularly scheduled instruction, learning activities, or learning assessments within the curriculum for study of the 'core subjects' and 'other subjects.' In addition to classroom time where both teachers and students are present, structured learning time may include directed study, independent study, technology-assisted learning, presentations by persons other than teachers, school-to-work programs, and statewide student performance assessments.

Translation: pretty much everything constitutes structured learning time. If your child is engaged in an activity and is learning from it, it counts. And I challenge you to find an activity that a child doesn’t learn from.


Sophia Sayigh and her kids homeschooled their whole lives up until the kids decided to go to college. They did not do any formal math or writing until they were tweens. Today they are grownups–one a software engineer, the other a nurse anesthetist. Sophia is a retired librarian and co-founder and director of Advocates for Home Education in Massachusetts, a statewide nonprofit providing information and support to homeschoolers. You can read a fictionalized account of living life out of school in Unschoolers, a book Sophia co-authored.