Hope for Your Homeschool

It's August and it’s a crazy time for schools and families alike, trying to navigate COVID-19 and the new rules and regulations that have come with it, as well as multiple ways to educate kids in person, online, and through hybrid models.  It’s such a strange time and I am thankful that our plans for my senior daughter are not that different because we have always home educated her, but at the same time, we are trying to help my son prepare to go back to living on his college campus for in person classes with lots of new rules.

I also have friends and family talking about keeping their kids at home for school, and not virtual school, but actually considering withdrawing them from their brick and mortar schools to home educate their kids and truly homeschool.  Almost all parents are faced with some type of decision about how to handle school for their children during this pandemic and it’s not easy for anyone.

Although each family faces unique circumstances and choices, we can all try to make the best decisions for our own family and if you do choose to educate your family at home this year, I can offer some encouragement!  You may be fearful, anxious, and extremely uncertain about how this "experiment" of educating your kids at home will go, but don't fret, many people have done this for generations and you can do it, too!

One Year at a Time

Thinking back to 2006, when we began our home education journey, I initially felt a strong desire to try home schooling for my oldest child's Kindergarten year, for several different reasons, but I was afraid to talk to anyone about it!  After I finally brought it up to my husband, he supported me and started asking other people about homeschooling, which scared me even more!  I had been a music teacher to kids at church, in public and private schools, but could I teach my own precious kids everything that they needed to know?  My husband wisely told me to take it just one year at a time.

As I timidly started to share our idea with family and friends, I did have relatives and friends who were kind and well-meaning, ask us those dreaded questions about “socialization”, although we had already been part of children's church ministries and choirs, soccer teams, basketball teams, and music lessons.  The opportunities to "socialize" only expanded when we became more involved with our local home school community.  My mother-in-law also reminded us that she was actually homeschooled for many years while living overseas as the daughter of missionaries and I appreciated her support. 

 

Most of our family were very supportive and we started finding a few families in our community who were already home schooling and began building relationships with them.  It was in the local home school community and an online message board for the curriculum that we were using at the time that I began to find support and mentors in home education.  There were many times when I could not see how this was going to work out, but I learned to take it one year, one month, one week, one day, and even one moment at a time and it was great to have other home educators to turn to with my own questions.

Unique Learning Journeys

I was determined to give our kids the best education for their personal mix of strengths and challenges.  I also really enjoyed researching curriculum, trying new ideas, and learning about how to best teach my own children.  We tried many ideas that didn’t work, but we also continued to use what was working and I was able to find ways to help them enjoy learning! 

 

My college music education Professor, Dr. Dimmick, always taught us Music Ed. students to become "lifelong learners" and that's what I wanted my kids to become.  I did not have all the answers, but I found lots of resources and ideas to try along the way and you can, too.  One of the big ideas I had learned from my education background was to look at the different ways that each child learned naturally, with their strengths and unique personality.  I really enjoyed doing lots of reading and educational activities together, but also having some time to focus on their own individual needs and strengths. 

Leading the learning for my kids continued my own journey of lifelong learning as I learned more each year about the subjects we were studying, how to teach our children in a different way, or by reading books that were new to me.  Over the years, I found more resources in person through a larger homeschool community and online as the internet grew and developed more ways to communicate like Youtube and Facebook.

Blessings of Time Spent Together

As I look back now, with one graduate of our home school and one senior, I can say that I have been blessed to have had this gift of time with our children while they were growing up.  We have many memories of doing so many things together.  We know each other so very well and we have our own "family culture" of our shared experiences, jokes, funny memories, frustrations, sad moments, and joyful times.  We have shared many stories and wonderful books, games, puzzles, field trips, travel experiences, concerts and performances.  The kids have their own nostalgia now over the funny things they did together while growing up not only as siblings, but as schoolmates.

They are also growing into fine, young adults as they continue growing and learning.  I am thankful that we lived a lifestyle that allowed us the time to talk about character traits and the Bible each day during school.  We read inspiring stories about people who overcame great challenges to serve and help others.  We also learned so much together about history and the Bible and how God's story is woven throughout history and mankind.  None of us are perfect, by any means, but our kids have a solid foundation of knowledge and understanding of the Bible and I can see them using wisdom to apply it to their own lives now.

If you are feeling a deep desire to just keep your kids at home and spend time with them this year, I would encourage you to try it!  You can help your kids to learn in fun, enjoyable ways in your own home.  It may look very different than any school you have ever attended, but that's really okay.  You may find that the learning lifestyle is a great fit for your own family!  You know your children better than anyone and you can learn how to help them learn in their own unique ways. There really is hope for your home school!

 

 

Stay at Home 2020 Tip #4: Remember to Have Fun With Your Family

It may be hard to not feel stressed or anxious right now, with the current crisis of COVID-19.  However, the connections you have with your family are what everything else is built upon, so don't neglect them.  Invest time and energy into just having fun with your kids and getting to know them.  School is important, but don't let it surpass your connections with your children or your spouse.  It can be easy to feel like you have to let academics take the priority because the education of your children is such an important responsibility, and now with this crisis we all fer that our children will "fall behind", but don't forget to enjoy each other, too!

Families are having to get creative at finding new ways to have fun when all of our activities have been cancelled.  Recently, our go-to family fun activities are walking our dogs in the neighborhood, taking hikes, watching movies or TV, and our kids enjoys video games with friends, social media, and Face Time with friends.  We also enjoy lots of different kinds of music.  I've seen families in the neighborhood walking, riding bikes, working in their yards, and one fun family brought out their professional DJ equipment and shared fun dance music that rang through the neighborhood all afternoon to bring a little joy to our area!

My kids are now 17 and 19 years old and as their interests and hobbies have changed many times through the years, our family time has also changed, but it's been a wonderful journey.  What are your families doing right now to have fun?  I remember long winter days indoors when the kids were small and they would find fun ways to play inside.  One thing they liked to do was to get out our single person sized, thin, inflatable camping mattresses and "sled" down our long flight of stairs.  They would also set up their play tents over an air conditioner vent and have the dogs hang out inside the tent with them.

We all learned how to ski in the winter when the kids were young and enjoyed being outside, even in the winter.  Family games on the Wii, Apples to Apples, or different versions of Monopoly and Uno have also been fun ways to spend time together.  We like to sit outside around a small fire when the weather is nice outside.  We also enjoy kayaking, fishing, boating, paddle boarding, and swimming in the summer.  Through the years, our fun activities have changed, but we have found that when we have more time, we tend to become more creative.  It has been fun to see photos or videos of ways that other families are entertaining themselves during our stay-at-home orders.  What kinds of fun are you having right now?  Let's share simple ways to have fun, even in the middle of a crisis.

Family Fun Ideas

• Read together
• Listen to or play music together
• Board games, card games, outdoor games
• Physical activities: walking, running, gardening, yard work, hiking, swimming, biking
• Cooking and baking new recipes
• Chalk drawing outside on the driveway or sidewalk
• Planting flowers, vegetables, or herbs
• Creating your own Tik Tok videos
• Face Time extended family and friends
• Play with your pets 
• Watch TV and movies together
• Play family video games like wii bowling, Mario Kart, or Just Dance

Stay at Home 2020 Tip #3: Read Aloud

We used to go to the library every week when the kids were really young.  They had a wonderful story time there complete with "The Libary Song" with hand motions, fun stories read aloud by a librarian, and some more fun songs and possibly an activity.  We mothers loved story time because we could bundle up all of our babies, toddlers, and pre-schoolers and drive them to the library for a few fun moments with the kind librarians and other shiny faced parents and children.

As our kids grew, we chose to home educate them, so we continued our tradition of going to the library on many Fridays to get out, see my mom and step-dad, who both worked there, and to find some new fascinating books to read the following week.  I had a large green canvas tote bag from Lands End that was super durable and held many, many books!  I would keep most of the books in that bag between visits, so I didn't lose a book or start racking up fines.

Over the years, our trips to the library have not been as frequent as the children got involved in more activities outside of our home and there are so many other ways to "read" on electronics now.  However, I still prefer to read "real" books with physical pages and so especially when we have a break from school, I usually go to the library to peruse the books and hope to find a new book to enjoy during my "down" time.  Reading aloud can be a fun, bonding experience for families of all ages.  Even teens can enjoy books read aloud or audio versions of books.  This does not have to be only for young children that can't read to themselves.  Our years of home education included reading aloud and the children and I enjoyed so many stories together.  This builds a culture and a worldview.  We have great memories of stories we read together.

During this strange time of COVID-19 shut-downs and stay-at-home orders, we may appear to have more time for reading, but we cannot even go to our local library!  However, there are many options to find great books of all kinds to enjoy.  For those of you who are suddenly at home with your family all day, what does reading aloud look like?  Well, it can look as unique as your family compared to mine.  One thing I have learned is that for many children (and adults) it works better for them to keep their hands busy while they listen and they will be able to pay attention to the story more easily, instead of being more distracted.  It will actually help them remember the story.  Here are some ways to read aloud:

• Read books together for a half hour in the morning at the breakfast table, while your children are eating or busy doing something like playing quietly with toys or drawing
• Read poetry aloud and have tea or snacks to go with it - Julie Bogart of Brave Writer calls this "Poetry Tea Time"
• Listen to audio books while doing everyday chores, like laundry, or while traveling in the car
• Choose a great fiction book to read a chapter of each evening after supper or before bed
• Read the Bible each day with your family, or another book of prayers or spiritual meaning for your own faith  as part of your daily routine

More tips for reading aloud:
Brave Writer Lifestyle - Reading Aloud
Homegrown Learners - Reading for Kids

Some of our very favorite audio books:
The Chronicles of Narnia set by Focus on the Family Radio Theater - we love this version with a full cast of character voices and sound effects and we have listened to it multiple times one long car trips
Jim Weiss recordings are fabulous!
Adventures in Odyssey recordings are another well done collection of fascinating stories by Focus on the Family
The Story of the World Series are also narrated by Jim Weiss and they provide hours of interesting and fun stories from history

Here are some great places to find book suggestions:
Read Aloud Revival book lists
Honey for a Child's Heart
Honey for a Teen's Heart
Brave Writer Arrow book list for ages 8-12
Brave Writer Boomerang book list for ages 13-16

Stay at Home 2020 Tip #2: Build a Routine

Setting up a routine can help everyone who is stuck at home right now during the COVID-19 crisis.  Routines bring some comfort and help us to get things done.  When I get into a routine, it helps me feel "normal" and I don't have to worry about making decisions on some of the things I just do automatically in my routine. 

Schedules are different.  It's not bad to think about how much time certain activities take and when they fit best into your day, but if you are trying to get your kids to stick to a hard and fast schedule with a specific time for each activity throughout your day while you are all at home all the time, it might cause undue stress.  Don't feel like you need to recreate the school schedule that your children once had.  The schools needs schedules because they are organizing and coordinating large numbers of students, teachers, administrators, custodians, and other workers into each day.  They are moving around hundreds of people, but you are only coordinating one family. 

You can set up a routine for your family!  We naturally plan days around meals, even when kids are in school, so that's a great place to start.  In our 14 years of home education, we have had routines that work around meal times, too.  Everyone needs to eat!  Routines can be a list of things that happen in a certain order, but don't have to have a designated time.

For many years, the kids and I generally followed this routine (you do not need to re-create it, this it just to give you ideas that might be helpful):

• Everyone gets up, has some time to themselves
• I fix breakfast
• Kids eat breakfast with me at the kitchen table
• I do some reading aloud while they eat
• I clean up the kitchen, while they go get dressed and ready for the day
• I get a quick shower, get dressed, put on makeup and shoes
• I start a load of laundry
• We begin working on school work

We generally try to start school by 9:30 or 10 and work until lunch time, usually around 12pm, but again, that is really "scheduling".  However, I thought it might help to give you a ball park idea of time. For the chunks of "school time" we would also get into a rhythm or routine, but it would look a little different each year, depending on the age of my kids and what we are working on at that time.  When they were young and in elementary school, for several years, it would look something like this:

• Copywork at your desk or we work on handwriting all together
• Morning meeting where we looked at a big calendar, practiced memory work, and maybe sang a song
• Read aloud time - I read aloud books that might include great literature, history, science, music, poetry, art or even math stories, a few different books in one sitting, while the kids did something quiet like play with Legos, draw, or stuffed animals
• Snack time (see, there's another meal!)
• Math work
• Lunch time

We almost always took a full hour for a lunch break, so when the kids were done eating lunch, they could play outside or inside and have "free time".  I also cleaned up in the kitchen and moved the washed laundry to the dryer and usually started a second load.  I would also try to take a few minutes to do something else like make a phone call, plan errands I needed to run, go outside and play with the dogs for a few minutes or check email.

Our afternoon routine would usually include:

• Individual time with each child working on reading and spelling, I would give them something to do while I worked with the other one when they were small, and as they got older, I would have one of them do independent reading while I worked with the other child.
• English and language arts together
• Afternoon snack
• Play outside

Usually, that would cover everything and then in the afternoon, I would try to get errands, grocery shopping, and other things done like putting away the laundry before I needed to start supper.

This is just one way to build a routine, the combinations are truly endless!  Find a few priorities for your family and starting building a routine around them, if you haven't already.  What makes a routine work for you?

Stay at Home 2020 Tip #1: Give Yourself Space to Grieve

I hope to encourage you during this COVID-19 crisis, but I feel that I must start this series of tips with the reality of what we are dealing with.  Give yourself space to grieve.  We have all lost our everyday way of life right now and even if you are used to being at home a lot, the world is a different place during this COVID-19 crisis.  Change is hard and change equals loss, while loss equals grief.  It's okay to have strong surges of emotion suddenly in the middle of a pandemic.  It's normal to feel the strong sense that everything in the world is not okay.

There may be moments when you or a family member suddenly feel an overwhelming sense of loss and you feel strong emotions.  I have had those moments, too.  It was good when I had one of those moments last week and I finally cried for a few minutes.  I had not cried for the two weeks prior and had been "staying strong" and "staying positive", but the counts of active cases in our area suddenly jumped and it felt overwhelming.  I don't typically watch the news, but I have felt the need to check the local and national news every day with all of the new information coming out. 

Last week, before I let myself cry that day, I got frustrated with one of my children about something and snapped at them and we had to stop what school work we were working on and just take a break.  I took a few minutes to think and shed a few tears, but then I realized the true reason why I was frustrated.  It helped me to name what I was frustrated with and it was not my child, it was this unknown virus and the unknown future of it.  It's hard to deal with something that we cannot see, but is affecting so many aspects of our every day life.  I had the opportunity to take part in a Zoom meeting where a supportive community of friends from around the world talked about how they were coping and we participated in a short meditation exercise where we focused on our own breathing and naming some of the emotions we were feeling.  I came away with a more peaceful heart, realizing that I do have these fears and yet today, I am okay.

I went back and communicated to my child that I had decided to check the number of active COVID-19 cases in our state when I was sitting there with him and it had upset me.  I apologized because it was not him that upset me but my gut reaction to the news.  I'm trying to limit my exposure to the news about the Coronavirus COVID-19, choosing to check on it just twice a day for about 20 minutes or less. That is helpful.  I am intentionally focusing on the news about my state and the overall nation, but not spending a lot of energy reading about other areas of the country because it just increases my own anxiety.  I also will be more intentional about when I check the updated news each day and not do it in the middle of helping one of my kids!  My anxiety had suddenly increased about the Coronavirus, but the anxiety showed up in me getting frustrated with my child.  I was glad that I could take a moment to recognize this and go back and explain, so our relationship was set right again. 

All of us have lost something in this time.  We collectively grieve the losses of many lives around the globe.  We may know someone who has become sick or who has lost someone from this virus.  Even the loss of our normal social activities outside of our homes, work, school, jobs, finances, or routines still feel like losses to each of us.  We have lost the security that we can go out in public to shop for groceries and not be worried about how close we are to other people.  We have lost our freedom to go do things that we need or enjoy doing.  Many of us have also lost time with our families, as we try to stay apart to protect the more vulnerable.  So many losses at once can weigh down heavily upon each one of us.

Tips for dealing with grief:

• Take a few moments to close your eyes and breathe, to feel how you are doing in that moment, without judging yourself
• Name your feelings and fears
• Write them out, put them all there on the page, and then leave them  
• Pray and talk to God about it

It's a strange time and we will have grief, but God sees our tears and understands.  John 11:35 says, "Jesus wept."  Yes, it's the shortest verse in the Bible, but it is very important because it shows us that when Jesus lost a good friend who had died, he wept, like us.  He understands our grief.   Isaiah 53:3 describes Jesus as "despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief."  He goes on to write in verse 4, "Surely He has born our griefs and carried our sorrows."  Jesus suffered greatly, for us.  This week, as we look toward Easter, we may have a new understanding of loss.  On Good Friday, Jesus gave everything for us.  He understands our loss and loves each one of us so much that he suffered loss for us.  Joshua 1:9 says, "Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go."  May it comfort you that Jesus understands and will walk through this trying time with you.

COVID-19 and March, 2020

In less than one month our world has changed.  We were watching the Coronavirus spread across Asia and Europe about a month ago and in the last two weeks, guidelines and requirements have been changing daily or even more frequently. Suddenly, almost all public events and gatherings have been cancelled or postponed indefinitely.  The whole world is trying to figure out how to stay safe and healthy and how to stop the spread of this COVID-19 virus to ourselves and to others.  We don't know if we have it or have come into contact with it, that's how viral infections work!  Some people have dangerous symptoms that could potentially be devastating, but some people who have tested positively thought they felt fine.  In the last week, almost all schools and universities have closed and are transitioning to online classes.

On March 12, we flew to St. Petersburg, Florida the first Grand Prix of the Indycar 2020 racing season.  We were with our friend and Indycar driver on Friday when he heard the news that Sunday's race was cancelled.  Our son's university first announced that they would be extending spring break and moving to online classes for two weeks, but that has changed to the rest of the school year.  Our nephews, along with many other seniors around the country, have already heard that their commencement ceremonies in May are cancelled.  Our daughter, who has been showing horses in Florida this winter, has had her season end early.  We have friends who children have had to change or postpone celebrations of wedding plans, as well. 

Yes, these are very strange times.  I start to feel anxious and afraid when I can barely keep up with the newest guidelines - gatherings of no more than 250 people, to 50 people, and now, no more than 10 people.  Two weeks ago, I sang with less than 10 people from our worship team on Sunday to do a Facebook live recorded worship service for our church family, who cannot attend.  The following week, I helped my stepdad watch the service on a Zoom meeting online.  My mother also had to have surgery and stay in the hospital for four days without any visitors at all.  It's been challenging to face the unknown when it really is unknown for everyone in healthcare, economy, industry, hospitality, education, finance, and government.  This pandemic reaches all people around the globe in all sectors and all areas of life.

My husband and I were talking the other day about how the closest feeling we have had to this experience was when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11.  Then we started thinking of other times of crisis in our country throughout our lives.  We have seen wars begin and end, terrorism, other deadly viruses, the fear of what might happen with Y2K, recessions, and changes in many areas of life.  When we look back, we can see how well God has provided for our needs.  We have hope.  We know that we serve a might God and ultimately, He will prevail.  We cannot see how this will work out in the future and we are really living a day at a time, but we are thankful that we have information to help slow the spreading of this terrible virus.  We are thankful for many people who are trying to come together to help those in need during this difficult time.  We pray that this virus will be slowed and stopped and few lives taken with it.

I felt the need to journal this experience on my blog here, but it has taken some time for me to process it all.  In the coming days, I hope that I can share more positive and encouraging stories, tips, or ideas to help you during this difficult time.

"Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.  I will say of the Lord, "He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust."  Psalm 91:1-2