A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

For homeschoolers, grading is pretty irrelevant. Grades were designed to help a teacher communicate with a parent who isn’t present in the classroom to know if their child is doing a good enough job keeping up with the class content. At home, you know how your child is doing. Who is the grade for?

If you give grades because you want to build a transcript for admission to a school, just know that most universities and high schools don’t trust your grades anyway! There’s no way to “norm” the grades a parent gives. Sometimes the parent is generous, sometimes punitive. How can a school rely on parent-generated grades? They can’t!

What sets homeschooled kids apart?

• Their unique interests
• The overall composition of their coursework (what they studied and how)
• Their personal narrative essays where they demonstrate that learning

Colleges, in particular, are looking for a diversity of experiences in their freshman classes. They want kids who care about learning and have shown that passion.

The bottom line is: don’t sacrifice learning for the standardized education that drew you to homeschooling in the first place! If you want that standard education, send them to school! Otherwise, take advantage of the opportunity to live a rich life of learning that is not demonstrated by grades but by mastery, passion, and depth!

More on this topic:

• Growth, Not Grades
• Delay Grades as Long as You Can
• Grading Ruins Everything

If you suffered while learning to read, write, or do math, you might associate pain with effective learning. It doesn’t have to be that way however. Research shows that when a child is relaxed and alert, they are learning the most.

The appropriate level of challenge is similar to what a child feels when they’re trying to solve a puzzle, beat a level in a video game, or build a block tower that doesn’t fall over.

Make the challenge smaller and look for the hook—what makes it interesting and relevant to a child.

Wonder how to do that?

As you grind to the end of the year, be extra careful of creating pain related to learning. It’s easy to push push push thinking about the summer break ahead. Instead, use this time to indulge fresh experiences:

• stomping in rain puddles,
• looking for birds’ nests,
• visiting zoo babies,
• making lemonade from scratch,
• FaceTiming with grandma and reading a picture book to her,
• drawing a picture of a child’s favorite activity from the past year.

Your most sacred trust is protecting a child’s curiosity about each and every subject. That’s such a big job and it’s not easy to do!

Certainly some kids just need a break (they’ve done the deed, they’ve mostly completed the workbook, they’ve read the hard-to-read novel, they’ve handwritten umpteen pages). This is the time for that break. You can ease into the rest of the year paying special attention to cries of boredom or discomfort.

I wish we all cared more about preserving a child’s curiosity in each subject area than getting through and getting done. If you achieve that even in one subject, Gold Stars for you!

Keep going! But slow down. I’m rooting for you.

This post was originally shared on Instagram.
Watch the accompanying reel for more.

Sometimes our expectations are unreasonable.

We imagine that there’s an actual set of practices and plans we can execute and our kids will never:

• fight,
• cry,
• resist
• or be bored.

At that point, we might felt insulted—“Can’t you see how much energy I am putting into homeschool for you?!”

I’m here to tell you…

That’s utterly NORMAL. Don’t judge your homeschool by each day’s experience. Kids are sometimes as moody and tired of the routine as you are. It’s not you. It’s not even them. It’s just life.

Roll with it. New energy will return. It’s okay to be disappointed. Shake it off.

Rooting for you!

This post was originally shared on Instagram.
Watch the accompanying reel for more.

Will your kids have education gaps if you homeschool them?

Let me rephrase the question: Do you?

There’s no finish line for learning.

Your kids don’t need to learn every subject to mastery by 18.

Our biggest task is to fuel the desire to learn so that your kids keep wanting to learn for the rest of their lives.

Let me add a caveat—because I can already picture some of the negative reactions. There’s a difference between a gap and a child who hasn’t mastered the fundamentals, like reading, writing, and basic math.

We do want to pay attention to whether or not our child is displaying a learning disability, or if the model of instruction is failing. I do wish I had learned math in a more effective manner. I believe I have the aptitude to learn it. The instruction method failed me. Even so, I have launched a successful business without math acumen.

It’s important to remember the scale of what education is and can be. A quality education isn’t simply the result of pushing your children to follow a curriculum so that you don’t leave anything out. Learning has to be effective (meaningful) if it’s going to last a child’s lifetime.

Gaps are inevitable. The key is to embrace a lifelong learning journey.

This post was originally shared on Instagram.
Watch the accompanying reel for more.

Did you miss Part 1? Here it is.

Plan your days to include the need to reassure yourself you’re doing a good job! That takes more time than we think.

You may need to:

• Scroll through Instagram for inspiration
• Read a study about why your child is okay if not reading by five years old
• Talk on the phone to friends to be sure you aren’t ruining your child

Reassuring yourself that you’re doing a great job or are on the right track IS part of what you need to do as a newbie. It will crowd out other planning and tasks, but that’s okay!

You’ll do the best job of home educating your kids if you feel confident and clear about your choice. Invest in THAT first and your year will go so much smoother!

I believe in you!

Stick around—I’ve got a lot more to share to help you feel successful and peaceful.

This post was originally shared on Instagram.
Watch the accompanying reel for more.