Homeschoolers ♥️ Books

 A few years ago, Marie Kondo started an organization revolution. In her book and her Netflix’s show, she teaches her tidying philosophy that boils down to people keeping only the things that bring them joy. Everything else should go. Well, what’s one thing that brings a homeschooling parent joy you ask? Books. You have mountains of books that Ikea can’t make enough bookshelves for you to store them in. 

And these books have their categories. And you have them all, that’s not to say you don’t use the library. Homeschoolers’ second home is the library. But some books we work through slowly and libraries have due dates. When your kids hit middle school and high school, they will want some autonomy. Having the year’s worth of books on hand so that they can move through them at their own pace is worth it.

But as a teacher and Mom, we have such a huge To Be Read list. 

• We have books we need to read for our job as the homeschool teacher.

• We have books we want our kids to read, maybe. We need to read them first to see.

• We have books to read to our kids. Even middle schoolers like being read to.

• We have our personal books we want to read. If we have enough energy left.

So I would recommend following Marie Kondo’s advice, if that book doesn’t bring you joy don’t keep it. Don’t follow her guidelines to limiting yourself to 30 books in the house. Maybe 30 books in your to be read sooner than later?

Graphics designed on Canva.com using free features, images, ai generated images, templates.

References

Kondo, M. (2014). The life-changing magic of tidying up: The Japanese art of decluttering and organizing. Ten Speed Press.

Kondo, M. (2019, January 1). Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Netflixs.
 

Take it back

 There is a nice southern saying, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." I'm sure it was meant to be encouraging. But sometimes there are too many lemons being dropped, thrown, rolled and left on your doorstep to deal with it. There has been times that I felt that lemons were all I had, I was swimming in them and I couldn't make enough lemonade, pound cake, cookie, bar, or muffin to find my way out from under them. Trust me I tried. 

So

Here are the dumpster fires I mentioned earlier.  Life is going to give you dumpster fires, you might as well get used to that idea now. There are two ways you can handle these fires when they happen.

Panic and add more stress because you are worried that your kids are going to miss school for X amount of days.

 Or 

embrace the warmth and find a marshmallow to roast while you are at it.

Here are some marshmallows we found to when fires happen:

• When taking care of sick family members, include the kids in the work. Have them help with the cleaning and tasks as much as possible.

• Let them do a research project or book report, even upper elementary aged kids can do this. They can pick the topic or you can give them perimeters and let them research to present for when the time comes around.

• Have them work on a skit/ play together. There are lines to memorize and then can figure out how to do it. They can even watch a movie version for ideas to help plan out their scenes. 

• Have them create a Rube Goldberg machine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine). Sky’s the limit on this. 

• Create a kids market day items for sale. Many towns and cities have craft fairs and kids markets where you can register for a little or no fee to sell your wares. 

• Just play board games and read.

Kids love the idea of planning out their own education. Giving them the responsibility once and a while won't hurt their college propositions.

Sometimes, a fire means everything HAS to STOP and that includes school. That is ok. You can teach them valuable life lessons in how to react to stress and what to value. When a fire happens what is the first thing you grab? This value will transfer to your kids, choose wisely.

Graphics designed on Canva.com using free features, images, ai generated images, templates.

Educational Philosophy

First up, if you are new to homeschooling, I’m sure those words sent you panicking. Stop, take a big breathe in and slowly let it out. Have you calmed down? Ok, let me explain. An education philosophy is a fancy way of answering questions like what is the purpose of education? What should your kids learn, and how should they learn? (Identifying Your Educational Philosophy, 2021) Answering these questions will help you feel grounded, give you the why to the question we know you’ll get asked “Why are you homeschooling?” That usually delivered in a nasty tone as well. Once you know your why, your passion and knowledge will usually silence the naysayers. If that doesn’t wow them, then tell them to shove it. Unless you feel like you need their acceptance, then let your child steal the show.

Let me explain. My kid, we will call Thing 2, was about 7 when he got to show off his knowledge set. We were at Disney with the fun Uncle waiting at the bus stop. I had the baby and tried to get everything set up while keeping baby happy and Uncle wanted to keep the kids entertained. So he suggested a word association game, mind you he had only interacted with public school educated kids previously. Thing 2 not only won each round, but taught the fun Uncle LOTS of biology and paleontology at the same time. Fun Uncle was flabbergasted. Now that he has two kids of his own, their plan is to homeschool them. 

That was a great story of how you dealt with the naysayers, but what about your why? What's my education philosophy? It may seem like a contradiction, so wait till the end before passing judgement please. About 8 years ago, I came across a friend that brought me into the Thomas Education (TJEd) or leadership education, fold. TJEd for me is two fold. The first fold is how we teach. We teach what the student wants to learn, within limits. We learn with them and model the behavior as a way to teach. It is about letting them picking what they want to learn, but me being the parent also being willing to set boundaries (DeMille, 2012).

Secondly are the projects that a company called LEMI, Leadership Education Mentoring Institute, designed and trained mentors to run. My encounter with them was vastly different from past co-ops experiences. The mentors, which were trained Moms, worked to develop a classroom that invited, allowed opinions, cultivated individual thinking, simulated real world experiences and was fun. Their goal was to help the students to unlock their potential through education and self evaluation. The course focused on helping them to "think like a lawyer, write like an author, compute like a mathematician, and so on"(Leadership Education, n.d.). Around the same time, I discovered a video from a leader in education at that time stating that the last thing we need to do is to teach our children to be computers and to compete with computers. They could never outcompete a computer in anything. But what we need to be teaching our children is compassion and what it means to be a human. (Sorry, I can’t find that video.)

Together it has merged into a mess I have today. Yes, we can’t out compute a computer, but we need to be able to compute. Yes, we have things like audible and text to talk, but we still need to know how to read. The important thing is to learn and expand our education, it doesn’t matter how that happens. The most important thing first is to get us (Mom is definitely include because we need to model what we preach) to love to learn.

If you are interested in learning more about Thomas Jefferson education, Oliver DeMille has some great books and resources.

Graphics designed on Canva.com using free features, images, ai generated images, templates.

References

DeMille, O. V. (2012). A Thomas Jefferson education: Teaching a generation of leaders for the twenty-first century.

Identifying your educational philosophy. (2021, February 5). Coalition for Responsible Home Education. https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/guides/resources-for-homeschool-parents/educational-philosophies/

Leadership education. (n.d.). Scholar Projects Help Parents Mentor Their Homeschoolers Successfully! Retrieved October 8, 2024, from https://leadership.education/scholar-projects/