A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Allow your homeschool to evolve, morph, grow (or shrink!). Be strong and courageous to stick up for your choices. Remember: individuals over systems.

You can’t get it right.

That’s the good news! Each time you notice that you want to tweak your homeschool, high five yourself for doing the real work of home education—

• adapting,
• morphing,
• changing,
• and growing.

There’s no arrival point.

Homeschooling is not a destination.

You’re creating a routine and set of practices that necessarily evolve because so do the people in your family. As your kids get older, they:

• develop preferences,
• get bored,
• master one topic and need more support in another one,
• and learn at different rates during different years.

Not only that, you get bored, you have other commitments that require attention, you learn more about homeschooling each year, and some subjects and levels are harder for you than others.

If anyone gives you guff, you can let it go. You’ve chosen tailor-made education, not institutional schooling. This is exactly how it’s supposed to work.

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!

Homeschooling is a performance of love between family members over a sustained, daily, intimate period of years, led by a parent who puts relationship ahead of books.

At the heart of it all: relationship.

Why do we educate our kids? So they will build better relationships—with the subjects they study, with the people they meet, with the values they curate. All of it starts with their relationship to you.

What is love in the homeschool?

What is the life-giving relationship they develop with you?

In my experience, I see it like this:

• Mutual admiration
• Curiosity about each person’s interests
• Celebration of what makes that person unique
• Good meal time conversations
• Games
• Generous hugs and kisses and hand holding
• A laughing out loud sense of humor
• Patience. Patience. Patience.
• Respect for each person’s point of view
• Enjoying each other’s company
• Letting the little and big things go
• Freely offered apologies
• Reading books and watching movies together
• Believing the best

You do a few of those each day and you’ll find that love blooms between you. There are years where patience is your best method of loving and learning. Remember that when it gets a little tough. Believing the best can help you.

Sending love and heart to you this day!

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!

One of the most important parts of your writing program is helping your children find a reason to talk to you. So be present. Pay attention. Give feedback that shows you were listening (don’t shush, control, or revise the output; receive it).

Talk, talk, talk.

The most important part of your writing program is giving your kids a chance to self express in a variety of settings about all kinds of topics. Even the taboo ones, like fart jokes.

Some children are more reluctant to talk. They may be introverts or they may worry that you will find their ideas problematic.

Ways to draw kids into conversation:

Sidle up to your child (while that child is happily engaged) and show interest. Could be a video game, could be while crafting, could be while kicking a soccer ball into a net in the backyard. Be where your thriving child IS and show interest.

Serve a drink and a snack and invite your child to sit with you, just the two of you. If you worry that there will be nothing to discuss, simply be together. No pressure. If you are quiet long enough, the quieter child often finds words to share.

Leave the house. Get in a car and go somewhere. Take a hike, visit a museum, get frappucinos to go and sip them at an outdoor table. Make it a one-on-one date.

Talk in the car. It’s when you’re all trapped in one space and conversing is the main thing that can be done there!

The goal isn’t to force conversation, but to allow it to bubble up and to be valued.

ONE WARNING: if you allow self-expression, you need to prepare to hear what you didn’t want to hear. Your task is to receive it, not comment on it. Save your private thoughts for a journal.

If you make room for this kind of space-giving conversation-promoting practice, your children will find more words for writing.

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!

Let go! Declare this week as “getting it wrong on purpose” week. Push boundaries. Break rules. Make messes. Play. Open the space for creativity, not just accuracy. All the teaching you want to do is possible when children know the space is safe for risk-taking.

You can make the mess outside on the deck, if you get the heebie jeebies thinking about glitter embedded in your carpet and velvet chairs. But not all messes are artistic or physical.

For instance, what would happen if you added fractions without finding common denominators first? Can you compare the “wrong” answer to the “right” one using measuring cups and flour? What did you discover? What happens if you bake muffins where you double some ingredients but not others?

Try making a mess of reading. Pick a picture book and start by reading a page in the middle. Or read the last page first. What do you think you know about the story? What can’t you know? Read it straight through now. Now read a picture book backwards—start with the last page and read each page before it until you get to the first page. What was that like?

What other messes can you make? How about a kids’ “Declaration of Independence”? What would your kids put in a declaration like that? What demands would they want to make of you? Can they follow the model of the US Declaration or will they come up with a new model?

How can you turn a beloved fairytale hero into a villain and vice-versa? What storyline changes would need to be made?

What else can they get “wrong”?

How about reinventing punctuation—all their own marks that signify whatever they want to indicate.

• Maybe they make a squiggle mark that when read means raise an eyebrow.
• Maybe they put triangles at the end of sentences when they want you to slow down and reread a sentence.
• Maybe they use a loop to indicate that this word should be shouted.

Breaking the rules means violating the habits of thought we take for granted. One way to promote critical thinking is to violate all your expectations and make a big mess and see how that breaks open new ways of thinking and knowing.

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!

As home educators, we give our children the gift of valuing their growth—without grades, without measurements. We do this because we believe their success as people doesn’t depend on being better than others, but being the best people they can be.

When I sat with Peter Elbow, my writing mentor, in his Seattle apartment downtown, I told him about how we apply his writing philosophy to our methods. There was a moment where he put up his hand to slow me down.

“Wait—do homeschoolers give grades?”

I replied: “Not usually. We don’t have to.”

Peter looked away for a moment and then said, “That’s brilliant. That means you can apply my methods in the way they were intended. Grading ruins everything.”

Grading ruins everything.

I got a kick out of that conversation because I knew he was right—but people who are in traditional education don’t have that option to just get rid of grading. Peter had tried unsuccessfully to remove as much grading pressure as possible from his classes. Yet in the end, was still expected to assign grades.

We at home? We’ve got none of that pressure. Grading is meaningless. Our goal isn’t to measure our kids against the phantom student, but to help this child right here make meaningful progress.

When my youngest daughter went off to public high school, she made me make one promise to her: that I’d never look at her grades. Her reasoning? I had never graded her or evaluated her before based on grades. Why should I start now?

And so, for all eight years of high school and college, I never logged in, had no idea what GPA she had or how she was doing. In her final semester of college, she sent me a text reporting a comment her writing teacher made on her paper: “You have such a strong writing voice. It’s a pleasure to read your work.” She wanted me to know: the goal we had all along had been achieved.

The grade never mattered.

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!