Everyday Homemaking

Everyday Homemaking is Vicki Bentley's life-skills curriculum, the Everyday Family Chore System, Everyday Cooking, and related titles, built to give children and teenagers the household competencies that most academic curricula assume someone else is teaching. It is a narrow product line from a specific tradition, and it knows what it is.

Last updated: 2026-04-24 · Every Homeschool Editorial Team

At a glance

Method	Life-skills curriculum / practical training / routine-building
Worldview	Christian-evangelical (biblical-womanhood framing)
Grades	Roughly ages 4 through 18; usable as high-school Home Economics credit
Formats	Print books and workbooks (spiral-bound)
Cost tier	Budget
Parent intensity	3 (front-loaded: heavier in the first month, lighter thereafter)
ESA-common	Varies; approved on several marketplaces
Accredited	N/A (supplemental life-skills)
Established	Imprint 2007; Bentley's prior materials circulated since the 1990s
Website	everydayhomemaking.com

Our scoreboard (1-5)

Criterion	Score	One-line reason
Academic rigor	3	Serious about skill mastery, not about academic content in a transcript sense
Ease of teaching	3	Simple to start, requires parent commitment to follow through
Content quality	4	Practical, tested, and written by someone who clearly did this with her own large family
Flexibility	5	Not grade-locked; adapts to any family structure and any ages
Value for money	5	Books last a decade and cover multiple children
Worldview scope	2	Biblical-womanhood and Christian homemaking framing throughout
Visual/design	3	Practical spiral-bound format; functional rather than polished
Support resources	3	Author's blog, limited online community, conference speaking

Who the publisher is

Everyday Homemaking is a single-author imprint published by Vicki Bentley, a longtime homeschool educator and HSLDA national events speaker. Bentley homeschooled her own family of eight children and hundreds of foster children over several decades; her materials emerged from that experience and first circulated in photocopied form among conference attendees before being formalized as books in the mid-2000s. The imprint remains small and essentially direct-to-consumer. Bentley writes, publishes, and sells primarily through her own website with limited distribution through homeschool retailers.

The flagship title is The Everyday Family Chore System, a system for age-appropriate chore rotation, training children in household tasks, and building family rhythm. Everyday Cooking, often used as the practical component of a high-school Home Economics credit, pairs with it. Additional titles address homemaking as vocation, pantry management, and the training of young children in routine. The catalog is small; everything Bentley publishes is in print and available from the author's own site.

Theologically and culturally, Everyday Homemaking writes from within Christian-evangelical homemaking tradition, complementarian in gender framing, with homemaking positioned as a vocation for daughters and as family stewardship for sons. Bentley's own writing and speaking circuit (HSLDA events, evangelical homeschool conferences) make the tradition explicit rather than implied. Families from different traditions find the underlying chore systems and cooking content usable with substitution around the framing material; the materials themselves do not bracket their assumptions.

The core pedagogy

Bentley's method is straightforward: children learn household management by doing household tasks at age-appropriate levels, under adult training, until the task is mastered. The Everyday Family Chore System organizes this by (1) identifying the tasks a household actually has, (2) dividing them into age-calibrated skill categories, (3) rotating assignments so every child learns every task over time, and (4) building the review and training touch points into a weekly routine rather than leaving mastery to chance.

The books are written for the parent, not the child. The parent reads the Chore System, implements the rotation, and trains each child on each task. A four-year-old is taught to set the table, wipe a counter, and put away clean clothing; a ten-year-old handles laundry start-to-finish, vacuuming, basic meal prep; a fourteen-year-old is expected to be able to run the household for a weekend. The system assumes the parent will invest front-loaded time in training and that the return comes in year two and beyond.

Signature mechanics: (1) Skill mastery over schedule. A task is not rotated away from a child until the child can do it to standard. (2) Age-layered expectation. The book provides explicit lists of which tasks a four-, six-, eight-, ten-, and twelve-year-old can realistically do with competent training, drawn from Bentley's direct experience. (3) Binder-driven implementation. Families are expected to build a household binder with task cards, rotation charts, and training logs. This is not a single-consumable workbook; it is a system to implement.

Everyday Cooking operates as the companion practical layer: menu plans, pantry staples, and emergency-ready cooking patterns that teach teenagers to produce family meals independently. Together the two books form what many families use as a full Home Economics credit in high school.

A day in the life

Daily life under Everyday Homemaking looks like ordinary household routine with the difference that it is explicit and assigned. In a family using the Chore System with four children, the morning starts with a fifteen-minute room reset (each child clears their own sleeping space); after breakfast, each child does their assigned rotation task, an eight-year-old loading the dishwasher, a five-year-old sweeping the kitchen floor, an eleven-year-old starting laundry. The parent spends ten to fifteen minutes observing, correcting, and teaching the task currently in the training phase for one of the children.

At dinner, a teenager on Everyday Cooking prepares the family meal from the week's menu plan, with the parent available for consultation. The parent records mastery and rotation on the household binder once or twice a week. As a Home Economics high-school credit, a student documents hours across cooking, pantry management, laundry, budgeting, and household maintenance. Bentley's materials include suggested logging formats.

What they do exceptionally well

Age-appropriate skill expectations. The single most valuable element of the Chore System is Bentley's granular list of what a child of each age can realistically be trained to do. Families pulling this expectation up from scratch invariably underestimate young children and overestimate teenagers; Bentley's calibration is battle-tested and widely credible within the homeschool community.

Honesty about training cost. The books are forthright that the first month of implementation is harder than doing the tasks oneself, and that the payoff is in months four through twelve. Families who accept this framing and persist get the outcome; families who expect quick compliance give up. Bentley's prose is direct about this, which serves the reader.

Doubles as a high-school credit with minimal extra work. The combination of Everyday Cooking, the Chore System's teen-level tasks, and Bentley's logging recommendations produces a credible Home Economics half or full credit for high-school transcripts with only a few hours per week of student work.

What they do poorly

Framing is tradition-specific. The biblical-womanhood posture threads through the introductory and chapter-opening material. Families outside that tradition. Catholic, mainline Protestant, secular, or egalitarian evangelical, will find usable content but will be reading past framing material they do not share. Substitution is possible but requires ignoring or translating portions of the introductory prose.

Visual and editorial polish is modest. The books are spiral-bound, photo-light, and laid out for function. Families used to the production values of Sonlight, Beautiful Feet Books, or the current generation of picture-rich life-skills curricula may find the presentation dated.

Small catalog, limited depth in specific skills. Everyday Homemaking is strong at routine-building and general household operation; it is thinner on specific technical skills (sewing, gardening, auto, home repair) that a family wanting a comprehensive life-skills curriculum may want layered on top. Bentley covers the core domains of cooking, cleaning, laundry, and pantry management with depth; sewing and textile work, home repair, gardening, and vehicle maintenance appear in passing rather than as developed tracks.

Direct-to-consumer sourcing only. Bentley sells primarily through her own site and a handful of small retailers; the titles are rarely stocked at major homeschool distributors, convention booths, or used-book marketplaces. Families who prefer Amazon shipping or co-op consolidated orders will find the purchasing friction higher than it is with larger publishers.

Who it fits / who it doesn't

• Pick Everyday Homemaking if: you are a Christian homeschool family wanting explicit training in household skills for children across a wide age range; you have three or more children and need a system rather than ad hoc chore charts; you want a high-school Home Economics credit that produces actual competence; you value Bentley's decades of direct experience and are willing to work through her framing; your household runs on routine rather than flexibility.

• Skip Everyday Homemaking if: you are from a tradition where the biblical-womanhood framing does not resonate and you do not want to read past it; you want a highly visual, picture-book-style life-skills curriculum; you have only one child and the rotation system overbuilds what you need; you prefer a curriculum with independent student work rather than parent-led training; you want a broader life-skills program that covers technical trades (auto, home repair, sewing) alongside homemaking.

Cost honest assessment

Per the Everyday Homemaking product pages as of April 2026, the Everyday Family Chore System retails at approximately $20-$27 for the print book, and Everyday Cooking at approximately $17-$22. Companion titles run in similar ranges. A family adopting the full Bentley suite spends approximately $60-$100 one-time and uses the materials across multiple children for a decade or more.

Compared to Managers of Their Homes (Steven and Teri Maxwell) (roughly $30-$40 for the core scheduling book, also Christian, different emphasis on family schedule) and to Training Children in Godliness (Michael Farris) or broader character curricula, Bentley's catalog is narrower in scope (life skills specifically) and similarly priced. A family that would otherwise buy Managers of Their Homes plus a separate cooking curriculum often finds Bentley covers both at half the cost.

A realistic all-in family budget for Everyday Homemaking as the life-skills and high-school Home Economics spine runs $60-$100, one-time, with no consumable component.

ESA eligibility notes

Everyday Homemaking is reimbursable on several state ESA marketplaces where life-skills and supplemental curriculum are permitted. Families on Arizona's ClassWallet and West Virginia's Hope Scholarship have historically submitted Bentley materials for reimbursement successfully. States that restrict religious materials will flag the biblical-womanhood framing in some cases; families should submit descriptions that emphasize the life-skills and household-management focus if their state program applies a restriction. Direct purchase through the publisher's website is typical; the catalog is not generally stocked at major homeschool retailers.

Alternatives

• Managers of Their Homes (Titus 2), a family would choose Managers of Their Homes over Everyday Homemaking for a focus on family scheduling and routine-building rather than life-skills training, from the same Christian homemaking tradition.
• Life of Fred Home Economics / Kitchen Table Math families or Home Ec Adventure, a family would choose a literature-based or project-based life-skills alternative over Everyday Homemaking for a more self-directed teen-level approach with less parent-led training.
• Pearables Home Economics for Home Schoolers, a family would choose Pearables over Everyday Homemaking for a grade-level-structured home economics program with workbook-style student pages, closer to a traditional classroom Home Economics course.

How we verified this

Our editorial team reviewed the Everyday Homemaking product pages, sample excerpts, and author biography at everydayhomemaking.com. We cross-referenced against Cathy Duffy Reviews' Everyday Family Chore System entry and Bentley's speaking history with HSLDA. Prices and program details verified April 2026.