Brave Writer News: March 2026

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[Podcast #331] A Slew of Practical Hacks for Your Homeschool

Brave Writer Podcast

Ever have one of those homeschool days when your brain feels completely empty?

We’ve been there too. In this Brave Writer podcast episode, we share a long list of practical, creative hacks that can revive your homeschool when energy is low. From painter’s tape timelines and DIY history games to geocaching adventures, urban walking tours, and quick art projects, we explore simple ways to bring curiosity back into learning.

We also talk about:

  • focus tools,
  • seasonal nature activities,
  • and building systems that make everyday homeschooling run smoothly.

If you need fresh inspiration or a reminder of the good ideas you already have, this conversation is for you. Tune in and start your own “good ideas” list today.

Show Notes

Every homeschooling parent eventually encounters it: the moment when ideas disappear.

Maybe life is busy. Maybe the news feels overwhelming. Maybe you are simply tired. Whatever the cause, there are seasons when creative energy feels low and the homeschool day begins to look flat.

One of the best antidotes is surprisingly simple. Start making a list.

When we sat down recently to brainstorm ideas, what began as a short list of practical homeschooling tricks quickly grew into page after page of small strategies that had helped our families over the years. Many were things we had used so often that we forgot they were clever at all.

That exercise reminded us how powerful small ideas can be.

Simple Tools That Unlock Learning

Some of the most effective homeschool tools are incredibly ordinary.

A strip of painter’s tape on the wall can become a history timeline. Add index cards with events, book covers, or drawings and suddenly history stretches across the living room.

A stack of blank index cards can become a homemade history game. Write events on the front, dates on the back, and challenge each other to place them in chronological order. Because kids help create the cards, they remember the information far more easily.

Even a cookie sheet can become a learning tool. Add magnets and it turns into a portable activity tray for car rides, hospital visits, or quiet moments during read-aloud time.

The point is not fancy materials. The point is flexibility.

Let the World Become Your Curriculum

Some of the richest learning happens outside textbooks.

Geocaching, for example, sends families searching for hidden treasures using GPS coordinates. Along the way you learn local geography, landmarks, and bits of community history.

Urban walking tours offer another doorway. Cities are full of stories if we slow down enough to notice them. Old stairways, public murals, historic buildings, and even the names of streets reveal layers of history beneath everyday life.

When children begin to see their own neighborhood as a place with a story, history suddenly becomes real.

Build Rhythms That Support Focus

A homeschool day runs more smoothly when it balances different kinds of energy.

One framework we love divides tasks into four categories:

  • Focus: deep work such as reading or writing
    Fire: medium tasks that create a sense of accomplishment
  • Fast: quick chores or small jobs
  • Fun: playful breaks that restore energy

Children thrive when both concentration and joy have space in the day.

Music can also help guide transitions. A familiar song can signal cleanup time or reading time without constant reminders.

Tiny Rituals Matter

Small rituals often carry the most meaning.

Planting peas in early spring, reading one poem a day, or keeping a sticker reading journal can become anchors in family life. These activities take only minutes, yet they create continuity and delight.

The deeper lesson is this: education does not always require grand plans.

Sometimes it begins with a scrap of tape on the wall, a handful of seeds, or a single good idea written down in a notebook.

To help you put these ideas into action, here’s the full checklist of practical homeschool hacks we discussed:

  • Adhesive whiteboard that sticks to your wall. Lap-sized whiteboards for math & handwriting practice & general doodling. 
  • Painter’s tape for timelines + write events on index cards and tape to wall.
  • Make-your-own Chronology game (this is an actual card game, but we made our own with index cards).
  • Combine geocaching with local geography & history.
  • Watch urban planning videos — you learn so much about how neighborhoods are constructed!
  • A spin on the above idea — put your own area into the YouTube search bar with “buildings” or “urban planning” or other terms. We’ve been learning about specific Portland buildings & landmarks this way. Also: look up the origin of place names in your area. Great local history!
  • Cookie sheet with magnets for car trips with littles (and other uses).
  • Make a FOCUS-FIRE-FAST-FUN grid for triaging tasks.
  • Pencil sharpening! A little thing that makes a big difference: assign pencil sharpening to a weekly time slot. Get a good sharpener. Also — scissors and tape in every room.
  • Create your own bookmarks. Have the kids do wet-on-wet watercolors and then cut into bookmarks. Leave a stash on every bookcase.
  • Take an afternoon to create playlists for yourselves: one for afternoon tidy-up chores, one for instrumental music while reading, one for songs you play to transition between daily activities, etc.
  • Check out Joshua MacNeill’s book: 101 Brain Breaks & Educational Activities.
  • Have a day for choosing the best squishy stuff for playing with during read alouds – what does each kid like best? Beeswax, Sculpey, modeling clay, silly putty, playdough, wiki stix. Make the texture exploration an activity by itself.
  • With spring coming — plant some peas & sweet peas! An old custom in some regions was to plant your peas on St Patrick’s Day. They like cold soil. Cheap, easy activity for rapid payoff.
  • Decorate by cutting out frames from black card stock, stick to clear contact paper, make designs out of pieces of tissue paper. Easy holiday window decor.
  • Look up local foraging groups. Might be able to join a walk & learn about edible plants.
  • Learn about wildlife corridors. Can your yard become one? Some easy ways to assist. Pick one species you’d like to help. Look up its needs: for example, if a butterfly: what host plant is native to your area? What nectar plants attract it? What else might it need – a dish of water with stones for perching on? Or – mason bees. Various birds. Start with a single species and learn how to spot it. Notice who else shows up. A literary tie-in for older kids: Read The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. 
  • A nice tie in – a poetry anthology like The Wonder of Small Things (edited by James Crews) or Sing a Song of Seasons: A Nature Poem for Each Day of the Year  (Fiona Waters & Frann Preston-Gannon). Consider propping on a bookstand turned to each day’s page.
  • Any seasonal nature book is great to prop open. Like a field guide turned to a bird your kids might encounter. 
  • Make a list of short stories you’d like to discuss with your kids. Keep this on hand for times when you want a short-term literary activity — say, between longer books, or whenever life is filling up with appts/distractions/new baby/etc and you want something self-contained. A good short story immersion can span a single afternoon (but will likely stick with your kids forever).
  • Visual reading journal: Melissa’s daughter chooses a sticker to represent each book. When she finishes a book, she puts the sticker in her notebook with the date, gradually creating a page full of stickers. On the facing page, she writes details about the books. 

You don’t always know how much you know! Make a GOOD IDEAS notebook or Apple Note!

Resources

Connect with Julie

Connect with Melissa

Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

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How to Teach Through Conversation

Brave Writer

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.

Brave Writer

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Homeschooling Teens: Essay Writing and Academic Standards

Brave Writer

Around here, we love snuggling up with blankets and books, building forts, pouring tea, and fingerpainting. But your teen needs more than homemade cookies and read-alouds to thrive academically. 

Scary thought?

Deep breath. 

Brave Writer online classes offer warm fuzzies and MORE. Each class is designed to meet Common Core and academic standards. And among those classes, we offer both Essay Prep and Essay Writing courses. Check them out below.

Essay Prep

Essay Writing: First Year

Essay Writing: Second Year

Essay Writing: Third Year

Brave Writer Online Classes

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[Podcast #330] Board Games: Let Them Do the Teaching!

Brave Writer Podcast

What if the best critical thinking curriculum is already in your closet?

This week on the Brave Writer podcast, we explore why board games and card games do more than pass the time. From Monopoly and Settlers of Catan to Quiddler, Pandemic, and even Operation, we unpack how games build patience, strategy, communication skills, resource management, and flexible thinking—all through play.

We share personal stories, favorite family games, and one powerful rule: when your child asks to play, say yes.

Ready to rethink learning? Pull out a game tonight and let it do the teaching.

Show Notes

When we think about education, we often picture curriculum guides, lesson plans, and carefully sequenced objectives. But what if one of the most powerful learning tools has been sitting on your shelf all along?

  • Board games.
  • Card games.
  • Dice games.

Games invite children into what philosopher Bernard Suits called “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” And that voluntary part matters. When a child chooses to play, they are already invested. They care. And caring is the gateway to thinking well.

Relaxed Alertness Is the Sweet Spot

In The Brave Learner, we talk about the brain state known as relaxed alertness—a combination of pleasure and meaningful risk. Games create exactly that condition. There’s enough challenge to matter. Enough uncertainty to spark curiosity. Enough safety to try again.

Children learn patience when they wait their turn. They learn deeper patience when they struggle through confusing rules. They learn resilience when they lose and try again.

And here’s the secret: they don’t experience it as “character training.” They experience it as play.

Academic Skills Hide in Plain Sight

Consider Monopoly. Yes, it can be long. Yes, feelings may flare. But it quietly teaches skip counting, making change, budgeting, and resource management.

  • Settlers of Catan introduces strategic allocation and trade.
  • Scrabble builds vocabulary and pattern recognition.
  • Quiddler strengthens spelling awareness.
  • Prime Climb makes prime numbers intuitive.
  • Operation develops fine motor control and body awareness.
  • Mousetrap introduces iteration and engineering logic—especially if you test each step as you build.

Even a simple score sheet in Yahtzee reinforces arithmetic and pencil fluency.

We search endlessly for engaging curriculum. Meanwhile, game designers have already done the hard work of making learning irresistible.

Explore, Explain, Experiment

When you bring home a new game, consider three phases:

  • Explore. Open the box. Examine the pieces. Look at the artwork. Estimate how long learning it will take.
  • Explain. Let one child read and interpret the rules. This builds communication skills and empathy. The explainer needs grace. The listeners need curiosity.
  • Experiment. Play a practice round. Break the rules on purpose. Test edge cases. See what happens. Lower the stakes so learning can rise.

That experimentation step is often skipped. Don’t skip it.

Competitive and Cooperative

Some games pit players against each other. Others, like Pandemic, unite players against the game itself. Both are valuable.

Competitive games teach strategy and sportsmanship. They also teach negotiation, shared problem-solving, and collective victory.

Your family can benefit from both.

The Most Important Rule

Years ago, we heard a simple piece of advice: Whenever a child asks to play a game, drop everything and play.

We tried it. It changed our families.

When children invite us into play, they are inviting connection. They are ready for the lesson. If we delay too often, they eventually stop asking.

Games teach content. They teach skills. But more than that, they build relationship. And relationship is where real learning thrives.

Tonight, instead of adding one more worksheet, pull out a deck of cards.

Let the game do the teaching.

Resources

Connect with Julie

Connect with Melissa

Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

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The Kind of Writing AI Can Never Reproduce

Brave Writer

They say writing as a job will be eliminated by AI. Weirdly, I agree.

The kind of writing being replaced by AI is the kind of writing most writing curricula teach.

And that’s the problem.

When schools and homeschool programs teach writing by format, they admit that writing can be reproduced by a machine easily.

You know what kind of writing AI can never reproduce? Your:

  • original thinking,
  • ideas,
  • insights,
  • and beliefs.

Humanity First

Kids need help finding those words and thoughts that live inside them first! Their writing starts with their humanity, not structure.

AI is great at the machinery of writing.

But we humans will always be better at being our original selves.

We teach WRITERS, not writing. We would for love you to try the Brave Writer difference! Growing Brave Writers is our best program to grow a writer.

Growing Brave Writers

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