Your Crazy Quilt Homeschool
You’re creating a crazy quilt, not a patchwork quilt.
There is sometimes a temptation to find a pattern for your homeschool—putting each piece into its right slot, clipping them into the predictable shapes, ensuring they fit together in a congruent predictable way. You set the pattern and then you cut each piece to fit, paring the excess, wedging them together so that some kind of design emerges—one you can affirm and recognize.
A patchwork quilt is more like school—with its ship-shape structure, its obvious pattern, its regularity of margins and pieces that fit together the way you expect them to.
Homeschool is not like that. It’s a crazy quilt—scraps of time stitched together, subjects in unique shapes—outside at the park, at bedtime, squeezed in between dental appointments in a waiting area. The pattern is not always clear and the lines don’t mesh as obviously as a designed quilt.
Often there’s that one corner that needs a piece of fabric to bring it all together—and you wait for it to appear. No planning accounts for how to fill that hole. Inspiration comes, a source materializes, and suddenly the corner is filled with a bright satisfying color.
The charm of a crazy quilt is its unpredictability within the confines of the borders. Your homeschool is not without borders—the crazy quilt fabric scraps of various programs, inspiration, creativity, and routine all live within the big sturdy boundaries of your home and your arms. The outline of this tapestry is the faith you have in your family and the border is in the shared community of learning you build together, one crazy shaped piece of fabric at a time.
What’s so wonderful? One day you will see the finished homeschool-quilt as one whole, not all these fragmented pieces that worry you now. Instead, you’ll be amazed at the way they come together when you least expected it, at the unique constellation of colors, textures, and designs that form the wonderful blanket of love and learning that is uniquely yours: Your crazy quilt homeschool.
Keep gathering the scraps. Cherish them. Stitch them into your memories, one to another. One day, this tenderly crafted quilt will appear as a whole, and it will cover you with warmth as you fondly recall the years of its making.
