Erin Napier is defending her decision to homeschool her and Ben Napier’s children.
“Some people think homeschooling is weird. I did too when I was young,” Erin, 40, said in a Sunday, April 19, Instagram post. “Around the time Helen was born, we met some homeschoolers who were so remarkable, so mature, so communicative, and interested in learning, it made us realize we wanted whatever that was.”
Erin showed a series of images in the upload, including a pic of daughters Helen, 8, and Mae, 4, working at their desks in their Mississippi home.
“The day starts with chores: dishes, laundry, feeding dogs, watering the garden,” she wrote over a video of the girls doing their responsibilities in the kitchen, adding that Mae’s “job is watering the garden every morning.”
Erin noted that her and Ben’s team “generously carves out 2 or more hours from our filming day to teach the girls 3 of those days, sometimes 4.” (Erin and Ben, 42, are the hosts of an HGTV home renovation show Home Town, as well as the spinoffs Home Town Takeover and Home Town: Inn This Together.)
“If there’s a day that construction needs us the whole day, our friend who is a retired teacher subs those 2 hours for us,” she wrote.
Erin went on to share details of how she and Ben split their roles, explaining that he has a degree in history, minored in English and is a former youth pastor, so “he does a daily deep dive on teaching history, Bible and math.”
“While he does his subjects, I work with Mae on phonics and simple arithmetic,” she wrote in the caption. “Then we switch, and I teach Helen language arts (grammar, spelling, poetry, cursive), etiquette (I’m learning some things alongside her best of all!), art and science. We do classic literature read alouds (we only have time for 1 chapter a day), with narration afterward where Helen tells us everything that happened first, then next, then last. We ask her a lot of questions that require logic to answer.”
Erin explained that Sunday afternoons are a “planning day” where she fills out the “week at a glance” and makes the lesson plan for her children.
“What happens on the off day?” Erin wrote. “They have French lessons, piano lessons, go to work with us and learn how we do our jobs, job shadow the vet taking care of our animals (Helen’s dream job!), they go horseback riding or to museums or homeschool courses at the zoo. They pick the vegetables they grew in the garden, and last week they learned canning from my parents (just in case we need to be pioneers one day??). I plan to have Ben’s mom teach them sewing soon. Sometimes, they are traveling with us for work.”
As for friends, Erin explained that the children have group extracurriculars or sports — such as gymnastics, tennis, ballet, art class, track team — every day.
“They see 12-20 of their friends for about an hour every day. There are even homeschool reading fairs and science fairs and field trips to be part of,” she wrote. “We hope to do this for as long as it serves the girls, and someday send them to high school. It has been the best season of our life as a family that I thank God for every night.”
