Roll call
About Homeschooled Mom
I'm Bethany Ellison, and the tagline is the whole biography: homeschooled as a kid, homeschooling my kids. I did K–12 at a kitchen table in rural Wisconsin in the '90s and 2000s — co-op classes in a church basement, 4-H at the state fair, and yes, the jean-jumper jokes, which I heard from the inside. Then I went off to a state university (it went fine, thanks for asking), spent years as a library programs coordinator, and married a public-school teacher. Now I'm teaching my own three — 8, 6, and a 2-year-old who still naps, which is the only reason any of this functions.
That resume makes me a second-generation homeschooler, which is rarer than it should be in this corner of the internet. Most people writing about homeschooling are either selling a curriculum, running a directory, or figuring it out for the first time. I'm none of those. I remember what busywork felt like from the student's chair, what "socialization" actually looked like, and which parts of my own homeschooling I'm deliberately repeating — and which parts I'm quietly leaving in the '90s. We've already run this experiment once. This site is the lab notebook.
What you'll find here: getting started for the overwhelmed-at-the-kitchen-table stage (begin with how to start homeschooling — the post this whole site hangs off), curriculum corner for choosing materials without panic, schedules & rhythms for days that survive real life, teaching days for the actual teaching, and homeschool life for socialization, burnout, and the rest of it.
What you won't find: a worldview to sign up for. Families homeschool for a dozen different reasons, with curricula secular and faith-based, and I cover them as what they are — tools on a shelf, described factually. You also won't find school-bashing; I'm married to a public-school teacher, and our own kids' path gets re-decided every year, one kid at a time. And you won't find legal advice — ever. Homeschool law varies by state and changes; I'll always point you to HSLDA's legal pages and your state organization instead of playing lawyer at the kitchen table.
The honest history of this domain
Homeschooledmom.com is older than my homeschool. From 2001 to about 2017 it was a real family homeschool site run by another second-generation homeschooling mom — hand-built article pages and journal entries in the early years, then a long-running blog of curriculum choices, kitchen-table math, and grocery-store field trips. The site went quiet after 2017 and sat dark for years. In 2026 I took over the domain and revived it with entirely new writing. I'm not the original author, none of her posts or family details appear here, and she isn't involved with the site today — but I share the second-generation identity the domain was named for, and this revival tries to honor that: same kitchen table, new handwriting. Where an old address still gets visitors, it points to the closest new page on the same topic.
A note on affiliate links: some posts contain affiliate links — if you buy through one, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Recommendations are worked examples of things our family or our co-op circle genuinely rates, never a sales quota.