Home Sweet Home
We’ve talked about the key difference in home education versus school being the word “home.” Home makes all the difference. If we are at home, with family, living a lifestyle of learning, how we educate will be different than what happens in a school building. We may also have a different set of goals or expectations for home learning than a school has.
For instance, how can Algebra foster close family relationships?
Algebra only fosters close family relationships if
- the child has bought into the idea that Algebra is a necessary part of his or her future success,
- and the parents are willing to help a child who finds it challenging by working side-by-side, trying new curricula, or hiring outside help to enable the student to develop competence without debilitating frustration, tedium and failure.
On the flip side, in a family where Algebra is an expectation and not a goal the child has owned for himself, where the curriculum is tedious or difficult, where frustration attends the daily schoolwork, family relationships will suffer as the child resists learning the subject matter and finds ways to subvert the learning process leaving the homeschooling parent exasperated and discouraged.
Inspiration First
Let’s look at one particular homeschool subject I know well: writing. There are two aspects of writing: the mechanics and the inspiration. Traditional academic settings tend to focus first on mechanics and then on creation, inspiration. Brave Writer reverses that order. We start with inspiration. We create a context for writing to spring to life for the child first, through reading quality literature, through jotting down a child’s thoughts and sharing them with an interested audience, through nursery rhymes and poetry, through word play, through celebrating a child’s attempts to write without help even while the writing is not legible or has mechanical errors.
Home is a great place for inspiration to occur. Parents make natural cheerleaders, they seek connections that are personally tailored to the child, they offer time and commitment to a child’s interests and use those as a means to enliven a subject area like writing.
What I love about homeschool families is how often the parent’s own working life becomes raw material. I hear from parents who freelance, parents who run small businesses, parents who do shift work and fit school around odd hours. The writing that already happens in their day — emails, invoices, proposals, product descriptions — turns into a living demonstration that writing is not just a school exercise. When a child sees a parent drafting and revising for real stakes, the mechanics stop being abstract rules and start being tools that adults actually need.
Some of the most creative cross-pollination I’ve seen comes from parents whose professional writing has nothing obvious to do with education. One mom who wrote catalogue copy for a regional seed company had her kids drafting their own seed packet descriptions by age seven, complete with planting zones and “compelling adjectives” they picked out together. A dad who produced web copy for bitcoin sports betting sites started having his teenager fact-check his drafts for clarity and logical argument — the subject matter was beside the point; what mattered was that the boy was learning to read critically and spot weak claims. Another family I worked with ran an HVAC repair service and used their own service reports as models for procedural writing. In every case, the parent didn’t need a teaching credential. They needed writing that was happening in front of the child, for a real purpose, with a real audience.
That is the Brave Writer principle at work beyond the curriculum box. The inspiration doesn’t have to come from literature alone — though literature matters enormously. It can come from the texture of a family’s actual life, from the work a parent already does, from the conversations that happen around the dinner table about what went right or wrong in a piece of writing that day.
The Mechanics Follow
Once a child discovers the joy of writing, learning how to read, hold a pencil, handwrite, spell, punctuate, incorporate literary elements, revise, and publish will follow naturally because these are what make it possible to participate in the joy of writing. They can be accomplished in ways that inspire:
- copywork
- dictation
- reading novels
- reading non-fiction
- freewriting
- funneling a topic
- poetry teatimes
- keeping a journal
- writing a screenplay for a favorite story…
Home becomes a place where skills are married to joyful acquisition, not to painful subjection. Over time, new challenges in writing offer a child not only the opportunity to develop new skills, but to explore uncharted territory, to have a fresh adventure. The point is that writing is not a subject to be endured because a parent says to do it. Writing becomes a means to an end, that end being, the purposeful use of writing in the child’s real life.
For kids who find that writing (for example) is not their passion, they may still discover its uses in their lives in a home that celebrates writing as relevant and approachable. Perhaps those kids will also see writing as a means to an end: an effective tool for academic pursuits. If that is the case, the child who has been taught writing through inspiration followed by perspiration (the joy followed by the mechanics) will have more success in studying the essay format and preparing for an essay exam than a child who has only learned to hate writing or who has had minimal success to that point.
Writing can be taught to a student for whom it has a utilitarian function. Not all of us have to love every subject, skill equally. Still, the key then is tailoring the kind of writing instruction and opportunities to the objectives of the child. A student who is preparing for college will approach writing differently than a child who is planning to go into a trade (like auto mechanics or culinary school or cosmetology).
Does relaxed schooling mean that a child never feels strained or that a big effort is not required of him or her? Not at all. If any of you have kids who love console games or play sports at a high level, you know that putting in big effort is key to their success. You also know that they don’t mind working hard when the objective is meaningful to them.
So here’s the trick of home education:
Parents are responsible to facilitate their children’s goals using whatever tools create the most conducive environment for joyful learning.
See if you can apply some of those principles to other subject areas. How can we take advantage of the intrinsic value of any subject matter to first, bring it to life (inspiration) and then second, to develop competence (mechanics)?
