Insta-homeschool

This one is for the parents who have found themselves suddenly home with their children, setting up a makeshift homeschool life, in the midst of unprecedented social turmoil. Has it really only been a week since schools closed? I’m that crazy homeschooling mama that chose this lifestyle… well, without the whole “shelter in place” order thing (that sure puts a damper on home education). I am writing to tell you I see you. I do not envy you. The rug has been pulled out from under you and your kids. Maybe you have imposed a rigorous schedule and they are fighting you on it, venting all their feelings of confusion and frustration on the only authority present: you. Or maybe you haven’t even bothered planning, because the news changes by the hour, so what is the point of even looking at the packet the teacher sent you, when you can’t even find toilet paper?! Others of you may have begun by throwing off your schedules with gleeful abandon, celebrating a longer spring break, but are becoming increasingly concerned that schools will remain closed, and you will need to do something that resembles learning. Many of you have been given packets with enough academic work to fill 7 hours of your child’s day, while others still have not received anything from their schools. Others have embraced the opportunity to experience the life of a homeschooler temporarily (maybe you always wondered if it was something you wanted to try, but never felt sure enough to actually risk your children’s education by bringing them home), and it’s been fun, but you are already running out of ideas. 

While all the difficulties of family strife stuck at home together 24/7 are intimately familiar to me, homeschooling is my jam. I was homeschooled, and I have been homeschooling my own 5 kids for 7+ years. My family is definitely impacted by the sudden erasure of every single thing on our schedule (and I’ll be honest, I don’t know if I’ve ever been so entirely tired of being around these loud little people), but not in the same way yours is. Days at home together are common here, and we have a rhythm for that. If you are setting up an insta-homeschool, I can offer you some encouragement and support, and I can connect you to helpful resources. I’ve spent years building this, so please, let me share it.

Please fully read this next part:

There are as many great ways to school at home as there are homes, and anything I share may or may not work for your home. What I am sharing here are suggestions based on years of mistakes and struggle. Please only take what is helpful to you, and feel completely free to dismiss anything that does not seem to fit your family.

The following are 8 suggestions for beginning, and again please, please read them as only that: suggestions.

1.  I would highly recommend that you not go down the rabbit hole of researching and purchasing expensive curriculum. For me, this is hands-down the most stressful part of homeschooling, and no one needs extra stress right now. At the beginning of my homeschooling adventure, I would disappear for days at a time into curriculum catalogues, homeschooling books, and websites, then emerge fuzzy and confused. Toward the end of this post, I will give you a list of resource suggestions that are cheap or free, fun, easy to begin, and can be used over and over. Please take this as permission to start with things that are fun and easy. So much natural learning happens when kids are having fun. Start there.

2.  Play to your strengths. What does your family love? What do you already do well together? What lights your children up and makes their interests come alive? Any interest or passion can be used as a launching point to learn everything else. Start with what they love. Immerse them in it, and be amazed at all the tangents you can take that lead to other learning. My son Micah is an accomplished woodcarver. This has led him to learn about different types of wood, which has led to an interest in trees. He already had a passion for wildlife and conservation, and now these things are expanding together, leading into an interest in the Arbor Day Foundation and their effort #teamtrees to plant 20,000,000 trees. His love of carving has also led him to make wooden sword replicas of weaponry from different eras, which has led to researching history and ancient cultures on his own. If your child loves board games, you can play all the games, research their backgrounds, create your own games and discuss probabilities and strategies. If they love legos, start with cantilevers and arches, and teach architecture, make replicas of famous structures and learn about the people who built them, then organize the legos and learn to keep an inventory. Any interest can be a great foundation, and you can have your child’s full attention.

3.  Maybe don’t try to recreate the classroom at home. This is my personal opinion and preference. I have seen lots of people do this really well, but why would you when you have countless other options? Why not use the characteristics of home to make education homey, cozy, comfortable, relaxed? Or use the outdoors to make school wild and adventurous. Or use your car to hunt down experiences. Whatever the environment, use its strengths to learn. I am an artist, and my main living space often resembles a messy art studio. On any given day you may come in to find children painting, drawing, building robots out of cardboard boxes, or constructing cities out of recycling. As I type this, they are sculpting with clay they dug out of the ground.

4.  Choose an order rather than a schedule. One of my favorite parts of homeschooling is that we are not slaves to a clock. No bell is going to ring and interrupt everyone’s focus when they are really into something. And on the flip side of that, no one says we have to keep plugging away and power through misery for 22 more minutes before we can move on. We have a consistent order to our day, a routine, a repeating rhythm, so everyone knows what comes next, but it is able to bend and flex to suit the day.

5.  Choose only a few things (I suggest 2-4 depending on age) that need to go according to a specific plan, then stagger them with things that are flexible to follow the child’s inspiration. So if you have a planned out assignment from your child’s teacher that is going to involve complicated direction and intense focus, maybe do that first and follow it up with a lego building project coordinated with friends via FaceTime.

6.  Simplify your goals. Write out your most basic goals for a school day that looks like learning success to you, then pare it back even more.

7.  Narrate. At least once or twice a week, take 20 minutes to jot down a summary of ALL the learning that day — not just the learning you planned and prepared, or was assigned by a teacher. Every time I do this, I am staggered by how much my children are really learning. That ugly argument they navigated taught them about mutual respect (or lack thereof), team building, and leadership. When the baby opened their science kit and ate the chemical contents, they got a great lesson in health and safety, and social service programs like the Poison Control hotline. My natural bent is to only count as successful learning the things I wrote on a list and crossed off. What a foolish mentality! Children are always learning. It is the natural state of the developing human brain. I am simply there to provide nutritious options for their hungry brains.

8.  Prioritize retention. Think about your own childhood memories and notice what stands out. What makes an experience special enough that it gets preserved in a child’s long term memory? Much of what is happening right now will be remembered! I’ve been keeping my kids up to date on the news as it develops, and they have been journaling about it. We have a written account of my grandmother’s experience as a young woman during the Great Depression, and it is such a valuable piece of history to my family. We also have had so many amazing, unforgettable homeschool days: acting out pirates in boats on a pond, taking a class in an old schoolhouse, hunting for mushrooms in the woods. How much of the knowledge presented to a seated child in a classroom do you suppose they retain? And I am talking, permanent retention. How much will they carry into adulthood? 15%... 10%... 8%? Less? One of the amazing things about personalized education, is that we can provide more of the special, memorable experiences. And think about it, if you have the power to boost retention to upwards of 70%, then the pressure is off! You don’t need to prepare nearly as much material, or invest so heavily into planning and executing. You are free to slow down and really connect with your child. 

When I began homeschooling, I was so eager to make sure my kids weren’t missing anything they would get in an institutional school. Every year, I have pulled back a little more from strategizing/managing/pushing, and have focused more on connection and enjoyment. People say to me all the time, “I don’t know how you do all that you do.” And I feel guilty that they are giving me WAY too much credit. I am schooling kids from preschool through 6th grade, and none of them spends anywhere near 6 hours a day on academics. The range of time they spend doing focused book work, depending on age, is 15 minutes (preschool) to 2 hours (6th grade). The rest of the time is spent on creative projects, experiences, reading for pleasure, developing passions into skills, researching interests, etc. We don’t do homework in the evenings. I don’t wait in pickup lines. I don’t pack lunches. I don’t go to parent-teacher conferences. Most of our days begin slowly and quietly, not with a mad rush to get everyone out the door. Honestly… How do you do all that you do??? Things are overwhelming right now. But that is not the nature of homeschooling. I’m a little nervous about how this experience is going to color the public’s perception of homeschoolers. Although, I am unashamedly enjoying all the extra connection I am getting to experience with my “normal-schooling” friends!

I really, truly hope that people will have the opportunity to connect with their kids during this time. I hope you can use some of the above tips, and the resources below, to have some meaningful time with your kids while they are home.

Resources-

Audiobooks: 

Stop right here. Don’t ignore this. There are some really fabulous audiobooks out there for kids, read by some marvelously talented voice actors. We listen in the car, we listen at home while we clean, while the kids color, you name it. And… we listen for free. If you have a library card, you can download the Overdrive app, the Libby app and/or Hoopla, and stream audiobooks for free. Audible.com is another online database of audiobooks that you can subscribe to for a monthly fee. Some great audiobooks for the whole family: The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series by Maryrose Wood, Circus Mirandus by Cassie Beasley, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. Honestly, I could recommend a list 10 pages long. Please email me (Ali.b.droz@gmail.com) if you would like more recommendations.

Podcasts:

I regularly listen to the Wild + Free podcast, and The Brave Writer podcast by Julie Bogart. These are created by people that want to encourage you to homeschool well. They are full of grace, kindness, and practical help. I highly recommend them. I used to think I didn’t have room in my life for listening to podcasts, because I’ve always had a newborn or toddler that requires intense attention. I still have a toddler, but I have discovered that a Bluetooth speaker while I am folding laundry, cooking a meal, or cleaning, makes it happen. Encouragement may be the most valuable commodity for me these days, and I literally cannot afford to do without.

YouTube:

Smarter Every Day by Destin Sandlin, Mark Rober videos and Brave Wilderness (specifically the ones by Coyote Peterson) are fabulous ways to teach kids science.  My whole family loves these, and we learn so much from them.

Math Antics videos have also become a go-to tool in my house for explaining or reviewing math concepts.

Ideas for Connecting Through School

What interests you? What things are you good at that you haven’t yet shared with your kids? Or, what have you always wished you had time to learn yourself? Now’s the time!

Math:

-Countable treats for preK-4th. Throw a bunch of raisins, chocolate chips, marshmallows, or whatever yummy thing you have a lot of onto the table. Ask the kids to estimate the total number. Then have them count by sorting piles of ten. They can learn so much math with this exercise. For preschool and kindergarten, we used to do it every day. We didn’t always use food, but food had the added thrill of getting to eat it when they were done. I would also take the time to play around with different groupings and count by 2’s, 5’s… you get the idea.

-Math with manipulatives. Like the countable treats above, any opportunity to do math will engage more of your child’s brain in the learning process. Cutting fruit into fractions, taking like items (legos, marbles, beads, all the rice and beans you stocked up on) and splitting them into groups to teach division. You can also create your own units of measurement. Did you know that the measurement of a foot, was based originally based off of the length of the king’s foot? Measure your child’s foot, hand or finger and then go around the house measuring things with your new unit.

-Create your own story problems. I have always wondered why my kids’ math books have them weighing fruit at the grocery store, calculating wage differences, and buying appliances. My kids don’t care about that stuff. But every time we get in the car, they ask how long it takes to drive to where we are going. I like to make math problems using the math they care about: screen time, driving time, distance for creating a zip line across our creek or a yarn zip line across our living room for their stuffed animals to ride on a hanger.

-Bake. Take a recipe, and summon your extraordinary patience to let your child do all the measuring. I personally struggle with inviting my kids into my kitchen. I am fast and efficient when I cook. My kids go at their own pace, and they bake like Jackson Pollock paints. Yet, I still feel this is a great opportunity for practical math application. And there are ample opportunities to measure not just the ingredients, but the capacities of different containers. You can increase a recipe to practice multiplying fractions. You can give them a ½ cup measuring cup and ask them how they can use it to measure out ¾ cup. So many opportunities to teach!

Reading:

Read aloud. A lot. Make it snuggly, make it fun. Pop popcorn, get out all the blankets and pillows, read in funny accents. Pull up YouTube for help learning how to imitate an accent well. Reading together is important. Children do not fall in love with the act of reading. They fall in love with stories. Fall in love together.

Science:

-YouTube as mentioned before.

-Get outside! Bring snacks, water, sketchbooks, binoculars and field guides (or load iNaturalist onto your phone). Go look for something (skunk cabbage, salamanders, frogs, morel mushrooms, etc). Learn how to build a debris shelter. Play, with just a little bit of planned direction.

-Kitchen science. Double dip on baking something for math; and while you are going nuts waiting for them to slowly trash your kitchen, explain about the chemical reactions of ingredients, and why they matter. Don’t know? Google it.

Writing:

-Find an easy poem you like (Google “where I come from” poems), get an example, write your own, then read both to your kids. When I did this, my kids started writing their own before I even had a chance to ask.

-Display/share/keep what they write. Hang it on the fridge, take a picture and send it to Grandma. Show them that the value of writing is recording and sharing their extraordinary thoughts. 

-Don’t worry overmuch about correcting. Maybe make some gentle suggestions to clean it up before sharing, so it isn’t embarrassing, but really make it about celebrating the content not the form.

-Give them fancy stationery to write a letter, then mail it for them.

-Encourage them to email and text their friends. Gosh, now is a great opportunity for kids to see the value in writing!

One final word of advice: connect with others! I know this is an especially hard time to feel that other people are with you. And a lot of the chatter on social media is humorous complaint about how ridiculously hard it is to be home with kids. Trust me, I’m there too. My daughter is an extrovert who legitimately needs to connect with people outside her immediate family daily. The word quarantine might as well be a death sentence in her eyes. But what I have tried to offer here is another picture of home education, one that inspires and encourages. Many people imagine homeschoolers as hermit families, but my kids and I have a rich community of friends that love to learn together. While our interactions with them have been aggressively pruned back, we are finding ways to connect virtually. My kids are FaceTiming with their friends, and sharing pictures and videos of their lives at home. Meanwhile, I am plugged into online support groups, and my friends and I are checking in with each other daily. We all, no matter our regular education-style choices, need each other to get through this. Happy homeschooling, friends!