I have triplet daughters who will be starting K4 here at home this fall (2015) as well as a baby boy. Of course I’ll be figuring out how to keep little man occupied while teaching his sisters, and I know many people do that with even more children than I currently have, but what about teaching multiples? We did the LOTW last year, and they’ve all got a good foundation to continue building on, but they’re all so different, yet at the same age and maturity level. Any suggestions from someone who homeschools multiples?
I didn’t do multiples however I taught my oldest children together as they were less than a year apart. For a long time I lumped them together for everything and this year I plan on separating them for some things because like you mentioned they are so different.
You might want to start with a gentle curriculum (have you picked curriculum yet? Have you been leaning towards anything in particular?)
We did Abeka our first year with my two DC and a niece who was the same age as my younger DC at the time, so it was me teaching 3 children who couldn’t read, write or spell, to read, write (in CURSIVE… who told me to do that?!) and spell, and it was very hard because Abeka is rigorous and I thought I had to do everything it said.
So general advice, whether you have multiples or single children- you don’t have to follow the whole guide. Tweak it to work with each child according to their needs, you may eventually need to separate them if they learn differently or if there is competition between them, or you could do one of those multigrade curriculums to meet the needs of all three children while only buying 1 curriculum.
The good news is with 3 similarly aged children we made it. They all learned to read, write and spell and they are good at Math, there was a lot of learning along the way to find out what worked, my younger children will have it much easier now that I have learned so much.