A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Every day your kids show up to learn. They open themselves to your leadership. They offer you their trust. They put faith in you to:

• support,
• teach,
• guide,
• and love them.

And so you design an education for them.

Here’s where it gets sticky.

If your focus is on the education more than the child, it’s easy to get impatient, anxious, and annoyed when your child doesn’t live up to your expectations.

Instead look for the evidence of growth: notice the risk.

• A child who handwrote even after saying handwriting is hard: perseverance.
• Finishing the page even if some of the answers are wrong: effort and practice.
• Strong emotional reaction to a book you’re reading: attentive listener, invested.

Turn the evidence before you into a commentary on your child’s skills and development, not a verdict on your homeschool or you.

You can do it!

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

Word to the wise friends: you’ll get further, with a stronger sense of accomplishment, if you go slow first.

Give yourself permission to waste time learning.

Go all in on one lesson—stay there thinking of more ways to

• unpack,
• test,
• explore,
• try,
• learn it.

How many ways can you discover more about adjectives or geometric shapes or autumn or colonial America? Get stuck. Keep digging. Keep narrowing the focus and expanding all the ways you encounter the topic.

Go slow to go fast. Learn more, not less. Learn lots, not just enough to rush to the next lesson.

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

Your interests will influence your kids. Even if the topic is home organization or how to fold laundry KonMari style. Even if that topic is caring for African violets or CrossFit. Even if you are wildly into BTS or college football.

Passionate sharing of your interests is a model for how to be interested and how to enjoy that interest and how to grow it! Family culture is formed by this natural enthusiasm for what you love.

An Example

You may be a person who surfs. Your love of surfing makes you care about your community, protecting the ocean from pollutants, and physical health. It leads to learning:

• geography (great surf spots around the world),
• history (microcosm of feminism as well as related to ancient cultures and their mastery of navigation),
• natural science,
• ecology (properties of surfing waves, the tides, the quality of the water, wave production…)
• and more!

Give in to the thing. Do it more, not less. See where it takes all of you.

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

Can I help you lower the bar to experience success?

In our desire to do a great job of teaching, we sometimes forget that the learning is happening whether the final product is pretty or not. I remember being at a meeting led by a credentialed teacher in a CA Independent Study Program to train homeschool parents how to ignite a love of reading. The teacher showed us how to make these adorable homemade versions of the books we were reading aloud to our kids. Her example books were art level amazing and every mother in the room swooned imagining a basket filled with these wrapping paper, decorated, cleverly designed little books.

I went home eager to follow suit. The project became this steep learning curve for me—I’m not a crafter, I’m not careful, and I had five little kids underfoot. I gave up. We read the books. The books—by the authors—held their own magic.

Instead of making my own books based on those, I let my kids create books that meant something to them. One year, my two youngest got enamored of fairytales so we decided to create a fairytale book over the course of the whole school year (one tale per month-ish).

This is the gorgeous (cough sputter) book that resulted. It IS gorgeous to me. But it’s not at all of the level of design or careful production that I remember from that CA teacher.

The danger in home education is we live for two results. First, we want our kids to learn. But right behind that is our second desire: to appear to be doing high quality work. Don’t let that one distract you.

The real learning happens inside a person and doesn’t have to look like a cute book or poster or handicraft. The retained learning is invisible to you.

My kids enjoyed this project immensely (it’s the first writing project in our program called Jot It Down!) and the results were cherished—even if not Instagram swoon-worthy.

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

Are you exhausted? Looking for a patch of sunshine and a mud bath? I feel ya!

Whether you are two days or two weeks in, it’s absolutely natural to feel totally wiped. Not only are we all still carrying the invisible stress of COVID vigilance, not only are some of us recovering from hurricanes or literally escaping wild fires, not only are we fighting for Black lives to matter, not only are we worried about our kids and digital media, but all of us are trying to love, nourish, educate, and raise the generation that’s going to deal with the aftermath of all these crises! It’s a lot.

So yeah. You might feel a teensy bit ready to collapse. And that’s okay. It’s in fact part of the marathon training of homeschool.

You’ll get more comfortable with being less “productive” as the year goes on. You’ll:

• skip the boring book,
• deep dive into one subject without guilt,
• understand that learning happens even on chaotic days,
• not have to prepare so much.

Your kids will remind you of what they need, and you’ll learn how you learn together.

So put your feet up on three pillows (truly, get your feet above your heart) and let that stress drain from you. Breathe. Be.

Regroup tomorrow.

You’re doing important work. Pace yourself. We need you!

Wise Saying: Be like the bison. Sun, sleep, mud masks.

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