A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Welcome to Season 5 of the Brave Writer Podcast!

I’m delighted to share with you the personal, warm, meaty conversations I had with parents just like you in this season of the podcast. In fact, I can’t wait for you to listen.

This collection, titled “Ask Julie,” is comprised of episodes I’m particularly excited to share with you. We put out the call for your toughest homeschool dilemmas…and a whopping 200 of you responded! My team and I have assembled what we consider to be a representative group of the issues parents face when they want to be a meaningful part of their kids’ education.

My guests are smart, kind, caring, and creative. They were open and vulnerable, sharing about their fears and insecurities.

In short: I admire every one of them.

Episode One is called “Embracing Elements of Home” (with Tammy Kim).

If you wonder why your kids balk at your best efforts to ensure a great homeschool experience, this is the episode for you!

The Parent & The Dilemma

Tammy Kim is a homeschooling mother of three girls, ages 13, 11, and 8. She reached out expressing a sense of overwhelm and worry over her effectiveness as a homeschool educator.

Tammy said, “I’m struggling with managing the time to create fun, interesting lessons the girls can all be excited to learn from, while trying to take our homeschooling to a higher level.”

Along with the “normal” stressors of everyday life, Tammy’s family has recently uprooted and moved to Paradise, CA, the town where she was born and raised, in order to be closer to family and to receive more homeschool support for herself and her girls.

Before we start answering some questions, we just want to make one thing clear: it’s okay for us to feel over overwhelmed and reach out for support! All of us have felt that way at some point or another, and no one makes it through this journey entirely alone.

What about managing your time and keep your children’s’ interest, while also taking homeschooling to the next level?

In homeschool, we want to figure out how to make learning come alive for our children – and how we do that is not the same for every child.

This is why many of us first shied away from a cookie cutter approach, but we still have the pernicious ghost of our own public school past, influenced by expectations set by the curriculum, whispering not-so-sweet nothings into our ears about what school is and where our children should be.

The structure of public school doesn’t always take individuals into account, and you don’t have to feel pressured by your memories, other parents, or anything else to import that structure (or the institutional expectations that come with it) into your home.

Instead, you get to use the properties of home to transform your children’s learning experience!

Julie’s Recommendations for Tammy

To help make the most out of home school, Julie offered three suggestions:

1. Let go of morning chores and warm up to the day with a little more coziness.
2. Allow your kids to have more say in how much of their assignments they have to complete (maybe doing 20 math problems sounds daunting today!). At the same time, give them room and breaks.
3. Don’t go past noon. Use your afternoon to pursue the things that live in your mother and teacher imagination! Seek out those meaningful opportunities and feather learning in naturally.

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Help a homeschooler like you find more joy in the journey. Thanks!