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[Podcast #315] The 8 Stages of Homeschooling

Brave Writer Podcast

How do we move from “I think I want to homeschool” to “We’ve created an education that fits us”?

In this Brave Writer podcast episode, we walk through the eight natural stages homeschool parents experience, from jumping in without a clue, to swapping curriculum in search of the “perfect” program, to finally trusting ourselves and embracing “us schooling.”

We share real stories from our own homeschools, talk about ideological pressure from methods and social media, and offer practical ideas for planning from behind and building a routine you can bend without breaking.

Tune in to discover your stage and what might come next, and then join us to share where you are in your journey!

Show Notes

The longer we homeschool, the more we realize that we’re not just teaching our kids—we’re growing up as educators right alongside them. No one hands us a diploma that says “qualified homeschool parent.” Instead, we move through a series of stages, slowly gaining confidence in our ability to craft an education that fits our families.

Getting Started: Jumping In

Many of us start with a rush of enthusiasm. We catch a glimpse of what home education could be—through a book, a podcast, an Instagram account, or the chaos of online schooling—and we jump in. We buy the books, order the curriculum, and suddenly our children are looking at us like, “Okay, how does this work?” That feeling of being underprepared is not a sign you’re failing; it’s often the first stage of growth.

Recreating What We Know

From there, it’s natural to “play school.” We recreate the classroom we remember: bulletin boards, workbooks lined up in magazine files, color-coded schedules. We’re trying to make learning look official, because that’s what we know. Over time, though, we notice a gap between the tidy plan and the messy reality of family life. Someone melts down, someone’s sick, someone’s building an elaborate Lego world during read-aloud time—and, secretly, we’d rather join them than fight it.

Exploring Methods

That’s when we often discover methods. Charlotte Mason, unschooling, classical education, Montessori, Waldorf—each offers a philosophy that promises deeper learning. We read books like The Well-Trained Mind and John Holt’s Learning All the Time. We join communities and try on new language: living books, strewing, narration, nature study, project-based learning. This can feel like getting a personal master’s degree in education. At the same time, the pressure to “do it right” according to a method can be intense. It’s easy to believe that if we just followed the rules more faithfully, everything would finally run smoothly.

Curriculum Swapping and Second-Guessing

When the method stops working—or doesn’t fit every child—many of us slide into the curriculum-swapping stage. We collect programs the way other people collect hobby supplies. A shiny new resource appears on social media and we wonder, “Am I shortchanging my kids if we don’t use that too?” Underneath all the second-guessing is fear: fear that there is a secret right answer out there, and we haven’t found it yet.

Building Confidence Over Time

What gradually changes is not our children or the market of materials, but us. After enough experiments, we start to notice patterns. We:

  • see which routines hold us together and which expectations always backfire,
  • pay attention to how each child learns best,
  • and begin to trust that a consistent, flexible rhythm—a shared read-aloud, some language arts, a bit of math, space for science, history, and play—can carry more weight than any single book or program.

Seeing Growth Through Planning From Behind

We also discover the power of “planning from behind.” When we chronicle what actually happens in a notebook or blog rather than obsessing over undone plans, we start to see growth that would otherwise be invisible. A struggle that felt overwhelming in October has quietly eased by April. A child who once resisted writing is now creating comics or stories for fun. Those realizations build our confidence more than any external approval ever could.

Arriving at Us Schooling

Eventually, we arrive at a place we might call “us schooling.” We’re no longer trying to fit someone else’s mold. Instead, we’ve pieced together an education that reflects our family’s values, capacities, quirks, and dreams. It’s not perfect. There are still hard days and unfinished assignments. But there is a growing sense of calm: we know our kids, we know ourselves, and we trust the learning that unfolds in the middle of real life.

Wherever you are on this continuum—jumping in, swapping curriculum, or quietly owning your “us school”—you’re not behind. You’re in process. And that process is exactly how you become the educator your children need.

Resources

Connect with Julie

Connect with Melissa

Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

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Brave Learning: Homeschooling and the Holidays

Brave Learning

Recently on Brave Learning…

We’ve been talking about homeschooling through the holidays on Substack!

  • 10 Ways to Take Advantage of the Holidays: The holidays are upon us. The tendency is to brace oneself for the onslaught of spending, relatives, too much food, and the pressure to make “perfect memories for the children.” Pause. Appreciate the good you’ve already got going.
  • Squeeze Writing into the Holidays: There are so many ways to make writing a natural part of life, but holidays take it up a notch! Here are six tips.
  • When They Don’t Get It: All fall, you’ve blissfully gone along planning your days, teaching your children, enjoying the closeness of family learning unaware that anyone outside your four walls would suspect you of inflicting harm or undermining your children’s social skills or academic prowess.

Subscribe to Brave Learning on Substack where we chat, discuss, problem-solve, and create together. Here’s what you can expect: weekly themed content, freewriting prompts, and a podcast for kiddos called Monday Morning Meeting (first 6 are free)! 

Brave Learning with Julie Bogart on Substack

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When We Find Someone Else’s Viewpoint Irrational

Brave Writer Raising Critical Thinkers

Let’s talk about how to think critically when we find someone else’s viewpoint irrational.

Naturally how we define terms, the way we understand the difference between community values and individual rights is going to shape how we evaluate anyone’s opinion or perspective. I’m not saying that we can’t call out what we see as fundamentally immoral.

But persuasion out of a view that feels comfortable and natural to another person doesn’t come from one of us simply telling that person they are wrong.

Critical thinking is…

To me, critical thinking is not so much about getting it right and then trying to convince others. That’s a conversion mindset that rarely works. Instead, Critical Thinking is about understanding the logic that any individual or community applies to their viewpoint, even when we think that person or group is being illogical.

Every person thinks their viewpoint makes justifiable sense. Every. Single. One. Our job as thinkers is to discover that logic—to understand better and to allow that understanding to be a part of our solution-making.

Watch the Accompanying Video

Raising Critical Thinkers

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[Podcast #314] Two Honest Thoughts About Tech in Homeschool

Brave Writer Podcast

Is tech quietly ruining your homeschool?

In this Brave Writer podcast episode, we explore what happens when we trade the shared adventure of learning at home for one-child-one-screen schooling.

We look at:

  • why so many of us feel pressured to meet standards,
  • how online platforms promise to “save” us,
  • and what our kids might be losing when learning is reduced to logins, slides, and quizzes.

We also imagine a different path: learning as a lifestyle, full of real conversations, messy projects, and magic moments that don’t fit into a metric.

Tune in, then join us in reclaiming the joy of being learners together at home.

Show Notes

If you’ve homeschooled for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed a shift. Where home education once meant cozy mornings with books, baking, and science experiments at the kitchen table, more and more families are turning to sleek online platforms that promise to handle everything for us. Kids log in, work through modules, and we receive reassuring dashboards of data.  

We understand the appeal. Many of us want the fruit of homeschooling—delight-led learning, flexible schedules, freedom from school dysfunction—without the constant pressure of planning, teaching, and troubleshooting. When life is already full, “homeschool in a box” can feel like mercy.  

Tech as a Tempting Shortcut  

Online programs offer exactly what tired parents crave: independent work, built-in accountability, and the sense that someone else has thought of all the subjects and standards our kids “should” be covering. We can work, run a household, or care for younger children while a platform delivers lessons on geology, grammar, and everything in between.  

The trouble isn’t the occasional online class. Used as a “turbo boost” for a specific subject or season, tech can be a gift. The problem comes when those platforms take over the *whole* day. Our kids begin to associate learning with screens, quizzes, and progress bars instead of with real people, real conversations, and the real world. We risk becoming homeschool managers rather than home educators—referees enforcing someone else’s system instead of partners in our children’s curiosity.  

Learning as a Lifestyle, Not a Metric  

Homeschooling gets complicated when we treat it as a DIY version of school: same standards, same benchmarks, just at the kitchen table. We worry about grade-level expectations and test scores, then wonder why our kids resist or shut down. Underneath their squirming and “I hate this” complaints is often a simple fear: “If I really try and I’m not good at it, I’ll disappoint you.”  

What if we laid down the yardstick for a while?  

When we stop obsessing over how our children compare to an invisible average, we’re free to notice something far more important: Are they meaningfully engaged? Do they light up over certain topics? Do they feel safe enough to try, fail, and try again? Real learning connotes use; it happens when kids are doing something that matters to them—baking, filming, coding, building forts, writing stories for a sibling—not just filling in boxes on a screen.  

Making Room for Real-Life Learning  

This is the daring idea at the heart of home education: an ordinary parent is good enough to create a rich learning life. Not a Pinterest-perfect life, not a constantly magical one—but a life where there’s time to explore, daydream, tinker, and talk.  

That might look like:  

  • A simple daily routine with pockets of unstructured time.  
  • Short bursts of skill work (a math page, a phonics lesson, a bit of copywork).  
  • Immediate, meaningful application: Yahtzee after math, read-alouds after phonics, freewriting once handwriting is in place.  
  • Shared adventures—nature walks, museum trips, documentaries, kitchen experiments—that no algorithm could have predicted.  

When we toggle gently between skills and application, without turning every experience into a graded performance, we string together what we like to call “pearls”: those unexpected moments when something clicks, a project takes off, or a child does something new simply because they care.  

We aren’t against tech, hybrid schools, or co-ops. We’re for using the hours we *do* have with our kids to offer something different from metric-driven education: a taste of learning as joyful, relational, and deeply human. When our children discover that they are learners—not just students—we’ve given them a gift no platform can replicate.

Resources

Connect with Julie

Connect with Melissa

Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

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Tech Guidelines in Your Home

Brave Writer

It is important to have good guidelines for tech in your home. I know you will have frank and kind talks with your kids. But if your life is being reduced to endless vigilance and fear of dopamine hits and scary internet searches, that’s harming your relationship with your kids. It shouldn’t be how you spend your daily parenting energy. It’s also not your fault.

People (who don’t spend 24 hours a day with their children like homeschoolers do) have proposed lots of solutions. In speaking with some adult children who were homeschooled, many are going analog with flip phones and DVDs and a desktop computer out in the living room rather than iPads and laptops all over the house.

But regulation doesn’t mean that your kids are immune to the impact of tech all around them. And it doesn’t mean you won’t end up in emotional battles around the desire to use the most exciting technology ever created in the history of the world.

When everything you do feels countercultural (homeschooling, analog tech, add your other countercultural practices), you become exhausted fighting the cultural flow.

And I’m sorry that we are living in a time where parents feel called on to be at odds with their children and the culture all day every day.

That’s why you’re tired! That’s why you give up sometimes.

There are no easy solutions.

Let’s keep brainstorming how to support and help each other. That’s what I try to do in my books—I want to give you that support. You’re not crazy and you’re not weak for finding this moment in parenting really challenging.

Two Instagram accounts to follow:

  1. @devorahheitnerphd
  2. @thegamereducator

This post was originally shared on Instagram.
Watch the accompanying reel for more.

Brave Writer Natural Stages of Growth

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