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,...

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 podcas...

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 paren...

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 m...

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 sc...

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 pr...

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 w...

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...

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 homesc...

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...

What happens when a former public school teacher sells everything to homeschool from a bus? Three years after her first appearance on the podcast, Jennifer Gossett is back with an incredible update. Since we last spoke, her family has traveled to 47 states , sold the bus, bought a home, and discovered that homeschooling doesn't have to fit inside one box. In this episode we discuss: • Why she...

Can you really homeschool while traveling the world? What if homeschooling was actually illegal where you lived? In this episode of The Homeschool How To Podcast, Cheryl sits down with Stacy, a homeschooling mom, worldschooler, and resilience coach whose family made the life-changing decision to leave Germany after discovering homeschooling wasn't legally allowed there. Today, their family tr...

What do you do when the school waits until the night before the last day of school to tell you your child is failing — and it turns out they broke his own IEP to do it?  Dr. Amy Moore joins Cheryl this week. She's a cognitive psychologist and former teacher who left the classroom to research why struggling kids kept getting missed. She's also raised three sons — now 27, 25, and 21 — all...

What if the best thing you could do for your homeschool is put the worksheet down? In this episode of The Homeschool How To Podcast, Cheryl sits down with Kaitlin Zara, former public school teacher, homeschool mom of two boys, and host of the Homeschool Connections podcast, to talk about what she saw from the inside of a classroom that changed how she teaches her own kids now. In this episode, you...

What if the biggest thing standing between you and homeschooling isn't your ability...it's your belief that you have to get everything right? In this episode of The Homeschool How To Podcast , Cheryl sits down with Chad Hufford , homeschool graduate, father of six, biochemist, financial advisor, and speaker, to talk about what homeschooling looked like in the 1980s versus today—and why p...

When Ali Johnson’s teenage daughter started saying she didn’t want to go to school, Ali initially thought she was dealing with normal middle school conflict. Then everything changed. After a serious accusation from two students, the school required Ali’s daughter to undergo an outside evaluation before returning to class. Even after she was cleared to return, administrators continued pushing the f...

What happens when you've built everything you thought you wanted... and realize it's no longer the life you want? In this episode, I sit down with Ceci Washington, entrepreneur, business mentor, and homeschooling mom, to talk about the decision to walk away from a thriving business, leave behind financial security, and choose a completely different path for her family. We discuss the fea...

Are you constantly wondering... "Am I doing enough?" It's one of the biggest fears homeschool parents carry—and after nearly 30 years homeschooling seven children, Jennifer Pepito has a very different perspective. In this episode, Jennifer shares why perfect homeschool days aren't the goal, why family connection matters more than checking every academic box, and how her oldest...

Two former public school teachers — and twin sisters — pull back the curtain on what really happens in a classroom of 25+ kids, including the one statistic that will change how you think about homeschooling forever. Kathy and Melissa share why they left teaching to homeschool their own children, why neither of them ever finished a curriculum in 30 years in the classroom, and how they turned the sc...

Rapkat was born in northwest China, fled to Malaysia at five, landed in Brooklyn, bounced through public, private, and charter school, married at seventeen, attended a coding bootcamp, got a remote software engineering job — and has been homeschooling and world schooling his five kids across Europe and Asia ever since. In this episode we talk about why he thinks getting straight A's is actual...

What happens when two parents with a 70-acre property, a wedding venue, and a 2% chance of having children decide the local school system just isn't good enough for their girls? They build something better from scratch. In this episode, Cheryl sits down with Sarah and Greg Holland of Jericho Valley Co-op in Berkshire County, Massachusetts — a homeschool support organization they built on thei...

What if the problems in public school weren't accidents? What if low literacy rates, changing math standards, social emotional learning, and ideological curriculum were all part of a plan that started over a hundred years ago? This week Cheryl sits down with Nicki Truesdell — a second generation homeschooler who has been in the homeschool world since 1983 and has been homeschooling her own fi...

What does it actually look like to homeschool five kids across wildly different ages — while running a business, managing a rambunctious toddler, and doing it all on one income? This week I'm joined by Amanda, a homeschool mom of five from St. Augustine, Florida. Amanda started homeschooling when her family left Germany in 2020 — one week before the world shut down. What felt like a leap of f...

Elyse Scheeler spent years inside the public school system as a speech language pathologist. She had a classroom full of kids making real, measurable progress. The district shut it down — not because anything was wrong, but because her program made their compliance numbers look bad. That's when she knew she had to leave. In this episode Elyse pulls back the curtain on what school staff see ev...

What happens when someone who hated being homeschooled grows up and chooses to homeschool his own children anyway? In this deeply honest conversation, Logan Hufford shares what homeschooling looked like growing up in a large family in the 90s, why he resented parts of it for years, and what he’s doing differently with his own kids today. We also talk about something many parents are afraid to disc...