A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Your interests. They not only fuel your homeschool, they fuel you!

When you follow an interest, you discover that you’re a smart person—that you have curiosity and skill and capacity to grow.

Tapping into your interests:

• improves your outlook on life,
• allows your children to see you happy and learning,
• makes adulthood look awesome,
• and gives your kids a role model for what it means to pursue an interest.

You may find that what you love enhances a school subject or acts as a key to unlock a previously opaque subject. Your curiosity is aroused which allows you to be creative!

For instance, if you are suddenly into sewing, you may whip up a batch of capes for dress up clothes for history or tea cozies for poetry teatime. If you get curious about native plants to use in landscaping, where might that lead in your family? Might you discover the history of where you live, how the original inhabitants lived with those trees and shrubs?

Let your interests lead you, so that you can lead your children into a world of skill and happiness. An education is fueled by connections and joy in learning. Bring yours to the table!

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

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 @juliebogartwriter 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 @juliebogartwriter 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 @juliebogartwriter 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 @juliebogartwriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!