Are you sick of trying to do a better job of homeschooling? Good!

That means you are closer to trusting yourself instead of comparing yourself to everyone else.

The biggest missing ingredient in today’s homeschools is confidence. Confidence comes from risk—try something! Put joy or curiosity at the center. If you don’t see those happening, pivot! You deserve to have a good life! That matters the most—way more than “hitting a bunch of standards.”

Experience Ahead of Image

Evaluate your homeschool by how it feels, rather than how it looks. Put your energy into creating an experience rather than an image. Every day we are shown pictures of smiling children, learning effortlessly in clean, trauma-free homes. Yet homeschooling thrives in lived-in homes, with caring adults who are growing and adapting.

You’re doing better than you realize every time you put experience ahead of image.

Need more support?

If that sounds impossible, read my book The Brave Learner. I spell it out for you. It provides handholds to make life a learning adventure rather than a carefully curated “school at home” that looks beautiful but feels rigid.

Every so often, we’ll give you a peek into Brave Learner Home, our supportive online community. Today’s post features an encouraging message by Dawn Smith (President of Brave Writer) that she recently shared.

There’s a word I used to catch myself mindlessly saying, and I hear it everywhere. Someone asks how life is going, and out comes: “Busy.” It just slips right out. But when my kids were still quite young, I started using a different word, and it changed something for me.

Busy or FULL?

There’s something about the idea of fullness that shifted my perspective.

• A full day of exploring nature with my kids.
• A full pantry and a table filled with good food.
• A house full of experiments, innovation, and learning.

It’s the same mound of laundry growing with each muddy nature walk, the same need to feed endlessly hungry mouths, and the same pile of cardboard, tape, and markers scattered all over the floor, but full days feel like something to cherish, rather than something to endure.

As you lean into this season, I encourage you to look for the fullness in your days. When you reflect on your homeschool year this way, even assessment shifts. Instead of something to get through, it becomes a reflection on everything that filled your days. It’s a chance to see what your family actually did, what your kids learned, and what surprised you.

That’s not a daunting task to endure. That’s a gift to cherish.

“What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children’s growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn’t a school at all.” ―John Holt

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a child in possession of a good instructor must be in want of an education.

Alas, kids don’t care.

It’s impossible to demand inspiration, passion, or self-discipline without affinity for learning.

Let me rephrase that: You can’t coerce caring!

Though adults try. We use grades, little statues, and ice cream sundaes to prod kids into reading, diagramming sentences, and practicing piano. Meanwhile, that same child will stand in the hot sun for five hours shooting free throws to break a personal record.

No reward except satisfaction.

How do we get more of that into traditional school subjects?

A happy house for homeschool is one where every inch is used for learning, messes are welcomed, people are more precious than furnishings, and household maintenance is a varying standard with fluctuating amounts of help. And we’re all okay with it most of the time.

To have more effective home education, I realized I needed to abandon the trappings of school and harness the energy of home.

“[O]rganized games are not play… Boys and girls must have time to invent episodes, carry on adventures, live heroic lives, lay sieges, and carry forts, even if the fortress be an old armchair; and in these affairs, the elders must neither meddle nor make.” —Charlotte Mason

A gentle reminder that free play is essential for children. It’s not a “break” or “recess” or a reward for finishing schoolwork or chores.

Play is THE ESSENTIAL teaching tool the child has at their own disposal.

Let playing children play!

Loosen the schedule so enough time exists for play to begin, continue, and wane without interruption.

Need more support?

• [Podcast] Teaching Through Play
• [Podcast] The Right to Play: An Interview with Eloise Rickman
• [Webinar] Parallel Play!
• [Post] Learning Through Play
• [Podcast] Party Schooling with Lise McGuinness
• [Webinar] Party School!
• [Post] Make a Mess!

A mom once told me that she used our Dart program to share read alouds with her 10-year-old son. They had the best conversations she’s ever had with him about books.

Her son was so jazzed that he started reading chapter books on his own and pointed out punctuation and literary devices in them. He has now read 800 pages on his own!!

The mom told me that she didn’t realize how easy it was to teach through discussion. Yeah: we forget how much we learn through simply talking with real people.

That can be true for you too!

The video linked below is a brief example of how you might converse with your child using a passage from Charlotte‘s Web.

Watch the Video

If you’d like to ditch the workbooks, Brave Writer has a level that is right for your family and we’d love to help you change the way your kids learn so that it sticks.