Best of RAR: 5 Homeschooling Mistakes I've Made (so you can avoid them)

Sarah Mackenzie (00:05): You've got a best of episode of the Read-Aloud Revival Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Mackenzie. (00:14): I've been homeschooling for a long time and just like every other homeschooling mom I know, I have made a ton of mistakes. When I was new to homeschooling, I really craved the insight and feedback from moms who'd been doing it for a while, so I'd pepper them with questions. What did you wish you did more of? What do you wish you worried less about? What would you do differently if you were starting over again? These are the things I wanted to know, right? So at the time, I'm recording this particular best-of episode, right now my husband and I have two college students. All six of our kids have been homeschooled all the way through. So we have two college students, our third child is about to graduate from our homeschool this spring and he's going to be heading to university across the country in the fall, and then we've also got three more, three younger kids who are 11, nine and nine, are identical twins. So yeah, we're doing things a little differently this time around. Funny how you gain some perspective and you learn things after you've been homeschooling for a while, right? (01:17): Well, a couple years ago I shared on this podcast some of my mistakes in homeschooling and they all remain true. So I felt like it was a good idea to talk about these mistakes again because I don't think they are just unique to me. I think a lot of us homeschooling moms are making these same mistakes. So today I'm airing a best-of episode in this episode, and in the next one in fact, I'm going to be sharing 10 mistakes I've made in my homeschool. I'll tell you five in this episode and then five on the next. And if you heard this a few years ago when I originally aired this podcast episode, you probably have a new take on it because you're in a new season of life now than you were then. So it's a good idea to listen through again and see which mistakes you might be leaning toward or which ones you're about to make so you could avoid those potholes in your own homeschooling journey. If you haven't heard them before, I hope you enjoy. So for today, five mistakes I've made in my homeschool. (02:22): Recently I posted on social media about my oldest daughter becoming our first homeschool graduate. I'll admit to being a proud mama. I think for a lot of us, homeschooling our kids, we hear that it works. We're told homeschooling works, we're told colleges want homeschoolers, are actively seeking out homeschoolers, but we're still a little nervous. We wonder if we've prepared them well, if this great experiment is going to work out. So when my oldest daughter not only was accepted into every single college she applied to, but received generous scholarships at each one as well, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. At the end of that social media post about my oldest daughter graduating, I left a little note for homeschooling mamas letting them know that all the lessons, conversations, books, essays, projects, field trips, the good days and the hard days, all of the work of homeschooling is completely and totally worth it. Worth it in a way you can't really see when you're in the middle of it, but that's crystal clear when you're at the end of the road looking back. (03:36): One thing I said in that post seemed to strike a chord. I said, your homeschool doesn't have to be impressive. It can be ordinary and so can your homeschool plans. My homeschool actually is pretty ordinary and the reason that strikes a chord with so many of us is because we worry that we're not enough or that our families aren't the extraordinary type, they're not amazing or extraordinary in any substantial way. Most of the homeschoolers I know don't feel like they're rocking homeschooling. They don't feel like they're doing some amazing job. And today on the show, I want to share 10 of the homeschooling mistakes I've made over the years. Trust me, there are a lot more than 10, but these are the 10 I thought would be most useful to you as you set out on a new school year, and that way you can learn from my mistakes. I want you to hear this as an invitation to love your ordinary homeschool. So let's dive right in. (04:35): Mistake number one is that I thought curriculum choices make a huge difference. I spent a lot of time in my earliest days of homeschooling researching curriculum. I spent so much time reading up on educational methods and philosophies. That's not a bad thing in its own right, but I really thought the success of my homeschool depended on the quality of the resources that we were using. And it's just not true. You know what makes a much bigger difference than curriculum choices? We do. Us, the parents doing the teaching. Me, smiling, knowing that I'm showing up every day to do the work in front of me. And yes, some curriculum is better than others, but by and large, most homeschool curriculum available today is pretty darn good and I'm convinced that just about anything you use will work if you do it consistently and you smile a lot and you love up on your kids. (05:35): The reason seasoned homeschoolers don't spend that much time pondering which curriculum to use isn't because they've already figured out which curriculum is best. It's that they know whatever curriculum they use, it's probably going to work just fine. The curriculum sees far less important than the atmosphere in your home. It has way less of an impact than a content, smiling parent showing up to learn alongside her kids every day. Whether you choose this math curriculum or that one, this history cycle or that one, this set of plans or that one, fine. Do it as consistently as you can, which probably is less consistently than you think, smile as much as you can, and that's enough. (06:20): I have never, not once, not ever finished all of the curriculum I planned for a school year, never. And I'm pretty sure I don't know any homeschooler who has. 'Cause most of us are trying to do too much and that's all based on good intentions, we want our kids to have what they need to be launched into the world. We want to prepare them well. We want to give them a good education. And all of that will look a lot less perfect, a lot less tidy, a lot less impressive than you might want it to. A lot of it looks downright ordinary, regardless of which resources you use to help you get the job done. Curriculum is not the be-all end-all. And curriculum, while it does make a difference, it's not the most important part of my homeschool and that was a mistake I made. (07:07): The second mistake I want to tell you about is that I over-planned. We all know that our best plans are really guesses, right? There is so much about the coming year that we simply can't predict. How long it's going to take a child to learn a concept, who's going to get sick, if somebody is going to need help in our extended family, you know what the world is going to look like a year from now we can't predict. And something happens when we over-plan, we hold those plans too tightly. We think the plans are what we're teaching, but we're not teaching books, we're not teaching curriculum, we're not teaching plans, we're teaching our kids. Our kids are humans and humans are unpredictable and messy. Sometimes they're hilarious, sometimes they're maddening. They're always though, always more important than whatever we've planned out for our homeschool day. (07:59): So planning wasn't my mistake. Planning was a good idea, but over planning or forgetting to keep those plans in their place, forgetting to hold those plans loosely, that was a big mistake and I made it for years. I also planned too much and this is the mistake I think I see most homeschoolers making. We think we need to do more than we need to do. We plan too much to do in a week or in a day and we never get to it all so then we worry that we're not doing a good enough job. But the problem isn't that we're not doing enough, the problem is that we planned too much. As a rule, a lot of us underestimate what we can get done in a year and overestimate what we can get done in a day. So plan less. (08:42): I still do make plans, but I hold them pretty loosely and I don't expect them to go without a hitch. And then even at the beginning of the school year, I always take my plans and I cut them down because I know that I can either make the decision of what's not going to be on top priority on purpose right now or I can let that decision be made for me in the heat of a chaotic stressful day. I like to be in charge so I'd rather make that decision myself. (09:17): The third mistake I want to tell you about is under-prioritizing reading aloud. One thing I know for sure, the very most powerful tools in my own homeschool are reading aloud and having conversations. The good news is both reading aloud and having conversations with my kids are free and we can do as much of it as we'll make time for. But especially in the early days of homeschooling, I really had a tendency to prioritize things I could write down, check off, things that show up on a transcript or a test score, or that at least have some physical proof of learning having happened. But there is virtually nothing better for our child's education than to be reading to themselves and to be read to. (10:06): Equally important are all the minutes you pass talking with your kids about books, about ideas, about dreams, about plans, about weird quirky facts that they're fascinated by, about interesting things and boring things. It all counts even when we can't write it down, even we can't quantify it. Reading aloud works when you're at odds with each other. It works when you're behind on school. It works when you're ahead of the schedule. I don't know, does that ever happen? It works to cover topics all across the curriculum, social studies, science, natural history, art, literature. It is the single best activity to enhance your child's academic experience. It develops empathy and compassion in our kids. It makes it more likely that our kids will want to read for pleasure. It strengthens relationships between siblings. It adds an opportunity for an out-breath, a moment of connection in a otherwise busy, hectic day. (11:04): Reading aloud improves our child's ability to communicate both orally and in writing, and it's free and it takes 10 minutes and you don't even have to be good at it. You don't even have to be much of a reader yourself. Shoot, you don't even have to do the reading yourself, you can use audiobooks. Read aloud. The times I under-prioritized reading aloud and made anything else in our school day more important than the read-aloud was a mistake. I promise you will not regret the time you spend reading aloud to your kids. And if you're not sure what to read, you can take our quick quiz and I'll give you a recommendation. Go to readaloudrevival.com/quiz or just text the word quiz to 33777. You answer three quick questions and in less than two minutes, I give you book recommendations on what to read aloud next. (11:56): All right, so another mistake I made is I didn't combine my kids for enough subjects. Do yourself a favor and combine your kids for subjects whenever you can. Science, history, social studies, art, use a program or choose a topic that your kids can all learn about in a family-style learning. If you have kids in all different levels of history and science and all the subjects, you're probably going to be overwhelmed. You're probably going to wonder how on earth other homeschoolers are keeping up with it all, especially homeschoolers who have a lot of kids at different ages. Here's the thing, they don't, they combine their kids in subjects. (12:36): Every time I didn't do this, and I usually did repair this mistake right away, just because it is so much harder to homeschool kids when they're all using different programs or different levels. So every time I made this mistake, I would become overwhelmed in homeschooling and then feel like doing a good job with it was impossible. Practically speaking, content subjects, subjects where the emphasis is on the topic like history or social studies, science, art, those can be easily combined, even if your kids are quite spread out in ages. Everyone can learn about Ancient Egypt, for example, and then you can scale up for your older kids and scale down for your younger kids. You could read aloud a book that appeals to everybody but have some more complex or difficult books being read by your older kids and some picture books being read to your younger kids. Different activities based on their own ability, but the whole family is learning about the same topic. (13:33): Homeschoolers do this all the time. Subjects that are content-based are the place that you want to combine your kids. Now, subjects that are skill-based and sequential like phonics, learning to read, math, those are best taught based on the child's development so you're probably going to want to set separate your kids for those. Reading, writing, and math and spelling are the ones that come to mind for me right away that are skill-based and I wouldn't combine my kids for those. But I combine my kids for everything else when possible. (14:05): There is no way your child is going to learn about everything they need to know without any gaps in any subject, right? They're not going to learn about every major historical event. There's basically no way they're going to graduate without gaps in their learning, so we don't need to worry about that. What we want to think about, whatever you teach your child this year, whether it's about insects or gravity or geology or astronomy, I guarantee there is more for them to learn in that topic. Whatever time period in history or topic in any part of the curriculum, the world is more vast than any of us can possibly know. So there's always more your kids can learn. So even if your child's covered a topic before, they can cover it more in-depth. So don't worry so much about the topics themselves, but combining your kids for as much as you can, especially in social studies, science, and history is going to be a huge help to you. And I think not doing that in the past has been a mistake I've made here and there. (15:03): This actually is why in RAR Premium are family book clubs that we do every month. They're not just for one age group, they're for whole families so that your kindergartners all the way up through your high schoolers can be learning and engaging in the same books. You have that family-style learning through the same book, but everybody's taking whatever they're fit for, they're taking it at their own level. They're engaging with the material in a different way depending on how old they are and what they're ready for. And so that's a core principle that we use at RAR Premium for all of our homeschooling resources there. (15:36): Okay, another mistake I want to tell you about is thinking that my homeschool needed to be extraordinary. We see them on Instagram, moms who go on epic field trips or who read all the books or who garden and homestead and raise chickens and grind grain or baked bread or do amazing crafts or take amazing nature hikes or seemingly do all of these things combined. What I think actually happens is we combine all of these women into one fictional woman in our mind and then we compare ourselves to her. We compare our homeschool to someone else who has totally different kids, a different spouse, different circumstances. One of the questions I hear a lot is, how do you do all the things? You've got six different kids all at different levels. My answer is always the same. We don't do all the things, we do a lot less than you think we do. We really do read alouds well and everything else is probably less impressive than that. (16:36): My kids do read every day. I read aloud to them most days. We do math, we cover a lot of ground in a lot of subjects in our reading, but mostly I'm working on having my kids become lifelong readers, which is working out long-term because then they'll have the ability and the desire to learn for life. One thing I like to remember is that because our kids will spend most of their lives not at home, not in our homes, not in school, most of their life happens after 18. Most of the reading they do should happen after they leave our home. Most of the learning they do should not happen before they graduate, it should happen after they graduate. If your child's 18 when they graduate, they have a lot of life left. You don't want them to have finished their learning or even the bulk of their learning before then, right? (17:22): So what does that mean? That means the pressure's off 'cause our job then isn't to quote get it all in, but it's to model for our kids a lifestyle of learning and reading and exploring. This is why in RAR Premium, we focus really heavily on enjoying reading and talking about what we're learning because again, like I said before, our most powerful tools in homeschooling are reading aloud and having conversations. Those are two keys to lifelong learning. I was mistaken anytime I thought our homeschool needed to be extraordinary. It really doesn't and that is good news. (17:59): Oh, I hope you enjoyed that. As promised, I'll be sharing the next five of those 10 homeschooling mistakes in the very next episode here, coming your way in two short weeks. For now though, let's hear from the kids, shall we? What are you kids reading and loving lately? Marianna (18:24): My name is Mariana and I am seven years old and I live in Wichita, Kansas. And my favorite book is The Little House Series because they go and keep moving and build houses. Evelyn (18:43): I am Evelyn and I am nine years old. I live in Wichita, Kansas, and my favorite books are this Nick and Sam series because they go on adventures and they solve the mystery of the Chimney Hill. James (18:59): My name is James and I'm five years old and I live in Kansas, Wichita. And my favorite book is Mercy Watson because there's a funny pig in it that loves butter. Speaker 6 (19:13): My name is [inaudible 00:19:15] and I'm five and I live in Norton, Kansas. Speaker 7 (19:24): What's your favorite book? Speaker 6 (19:26): Narnia. Speaker 7 (19:27): Why? Speaker 6 (19:29): Because they go up the waterfall. Speaker 7 (19:31): Jewel? Speaker 6 (19:31): Yes. Speaker 7 (19:34): In the last battle? Speaker 6 (19:36): Yes. Genesis (19:37): Hello, my name is Genesis. I am nine years old. I live in Norton, Kansas. My favorite book, my favorite series is Narnia because I like Reepicheep. Isaiah (19:52): Hello, my name is Isaiah. I live in Norton, Kansas and I am 12 years old. My favorite book is Good Hunting by Theodore Roosevelt. I like it because I like hunting. Speaker 10 (20:02): Name is [inaudible 00:20:03] and my age is seven and my favorite book is The Last Battle 'cause they are in Aslan's country. Gideon (20:11): Hello, my name is Gideon. I live in Norton, Kansas, and my favorite book is Stephen Ambrose's book on the Transcontinental Railroad called Nothing Like It in the World. Sarah Mackenzie (20:25): Thank you. Thank you kids. I hope you enjoyed this best-of episode. I'll be back in a couple of weeks with more mistakes I've made so that you can learn from them. In the meantime, go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.