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

Keeping it Simple!

 

Simplifying our lives can be a challenge, as well as simplifying our home schools.  We began our home education journey when our son began Kindergarten, there were so many decisions to make, or so it seemed.  However, my husband reminded me to keep it simple and I chose to order materials and plans for Kindergarten from a wonderful curriculum company who took the complicated things and simplified them for me.  Although I had been writing my own music education and teaching for five years prior to our childrens' births, it was freeing to have a "guide" with lesson plans and directions and a schedule for the year.  I still had the flexibility to add in extra, fun things including many books to read aloud and we made trips to the library almost every week.  It was so much fun, and it was fairly simple!
I stayed with that curriculum for five years and gained some on-line friendships, when I felt led to make the decision to leave this approach in order to use a different curriculum where we could benefit from meeting regularly throughout the school year with other like-minded, home educating families.  My kids and I needed more support and we craved relationships with real people that we could meet with more often.

So, the next two years were filled with many more events and activities, including 24 weeks with a day of classes together.  We built tremendous friendships and the children gained so many skills that they would not have tried or learned at home with just the three of us, like how to give a short presentation, diagram sentences, write a research report, and we learned so many more facts through our memory work and review games that the children knew they would play each week in class.  A positive peer pressure has been good for them!  I have also developed myself as a tutor of moms and kids in our classes.  It has been good!

The tricky part is that this is not a "packaged" curriculum.  I have had to figure out the curriculum, the schedule, the lesson plans, and how to get it all done!  I have great support for the portions that we work on together as a group, but knowing which history books to read from, how much, how little, how often, are all things that I ponder over and figure out myself now, because I don't have everything all laid out for me on one page or coming in one giant box in the mail.  This has been somewhat freeing and I have found many other resources that I did not know about beforehand, but sometimes I forget to keep it simple!  I begin to  doubt my plans and think they are too simple and add more.  Sometimes I think and write and re-write for weeks until I plan a schedule out exactly the way I want it and then find that we can't do it all.  Approaching another school year, I am in that mode again, trying to figure out all of the curriculum and planning for the next year.  How can I keep it simple?  And yet effective?  Here are some thoughts:

Choose your main method or approach and don't try to combine too many of them at the same time:
I am sticking with the Classical method and "tweaking" it to make a it work for my students and our family.  We love participating in our Classical Conversations community, so that gives me the backbone of what we will be learning about this year through the Foundations and Essentials programs.

Choose your priorities: 

• Our top priority has always been to disciple our children and teach them from God's Word.
• We want our children to have solid academic skills so that they can learn anything and communicate with anyone.
• We want our children to have integrity and empathy.
•  I also want our children to really know the memory work and to gain all of those "pegs" of information to hang other information on later, while they are still in the grammar stage.
• They want to be Memory Masters and my daughter accomplished this for the first time this April, so now I understand that if my son wants to do this, he needs to start with the confidence that he can also do this at the very beginning of the year and really put the effort into it.

Consider your students' strengths and weaknesses:

• I have learned over the years how to modify and adapt our curriculum to help my dyslexic, dysgraphic child.  
• Whenever possible, we will look for materials that lean toward each child's natural learning style, giving them tools that they can use most efficiently.
• I also want both of my children to grow in independence this year, since they are 10 and 12 years old and finally they are both reading on their own. 
• If something is not working, it's okay to switch gears!  I try not to make changes in curriculum often, but we are still "tweaking" our plans for certain subject areas this year that may need something different than what we did last year.
  

Working on math lessons on the computer

THEN, choose your materials:

• I will use Christian, good quality materials that help us to achieve our goals.  We may not read everything in every book that I buy for this school year, but I can plan for the priorities listed above.  
• We will use Classical Conversations materials for our memory work in Foundations and for our English and language arts in Essentials.
• We will use materials that lean toward our children's most natural learning styles, since we already have considered their strengths and weaknesses.
• I also believe in finding the best resources that we can use, so for many subjects we will choose "living books" that tell a story well and engage the reader with high quality literature.

Practicing English grammar memory work

Schedule your lessons so that you can use your time wisely:
I may need to do things differently, now that they are 10 and 12 years old, my children can be more accountable for completing a certain amount of material on their assignments, instead of working for a set amount of time, like we have done in most subjects.  I have had to do that for a number of years because of my son's learning challenges.  I did not always know how much he would be able to accomplish, but I have a better handle on that now and I think I need to give both kids more training in having some independent time and some assignments that they can complete on their own.

So to keep the planning for our home education simple, we will need to choose a main method, select priorities, consider my student's strengths and weaknesses while selecting materials, and then schedule what we can reasonably accomplish.  It sounds like a lot of work, right?!  However, with all of this in mind, I can start to narrow down my overwhelming stacks and lists of books and materials that look good, to what we can reasonably accomplish in light of all of the above.

*Above all, don't forget to cover all of these decisions in prayer!  I ask God to show us the path that He wants us to take for the next school year, but I think that He also wants me to use all of the information He has already given me to make choices and to see what we can truly accomplish and what we realistically have time to do well!  My children are also older and now I can ask them questions about some of their own preferences on materials or subjects to study.  God gives us all of this information, but we must also take time to listen to Him and make sure that our plans are in alignment with His!

May God bless your planning!
Rachel

This post is linked to Living and Learning at Home:  Trivium Tuesdays - Classical Link-Up #68 and Hip Homeschool Hop - 7/30/13.