RAR # 159: 10 Homeschooling Mistakes I’ve Made (so you can avoid them)

Sarah Mackenzie (00:00): Just because your child can have a really good day and finish an assignment in 30 minutes does not mean that every single day, they can finish that same assignment in 30 minutes. They have moods and hard days and good days and days where it's difficult to concentrate. They make forward momentum and then they backtrack, just like we all do with all of our growth. We have to remember our kids' performance is not a reflection on us. It's not an indication of our value or our worth or on our children's value or worth. (00:33): You're listening to the Read-Aloud Revival podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Mackenzie, homeschooling mom of six and author of the Read-Aloud Family and Teaching from Rest. As parents, we're overwhelmed with a lot to do. It feels like every child needs something different. The good news is you are the best person to help your kids learn and grow, and home is the best place to fall in love with books. This podcast has been downloaded seven million times in over 160 countries. So if you want to nurture warm relationships while also raising kids who love to read, you're in good company. We'll help your kids fall in love with books and we'll help you fall in love with homeschooling. Let's get started. (01:24): 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 our 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 it's crystal clear when you're at the end of the road looking back. (02:38): 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. I know a lot of you are considering homeschooling for the first time and I know because I read your emails and I see the messages you leave me that you don't think you can do it. You think you're not enough. You think it'll be too hard. Maybe you did some distance learning through your school last spring and you're ready to throw in the towel on the idea of home learning. (03:34): A side note, by the way, distance learning is not the same as homeschooling. Based on the conversations I've had with friends who've done the distance learning thing, I think what most families do through a distance learning program is much more difficult and much more cumbersome than what most homeschooling families are doing. Because when you're homeschooling, you get to call all the shots. You fit the curriculum to serve your child not the other way around. You get to be in charge so you can opt out of a lot of things you might not be able to opt out of in a distance learning program. (04:07): Anyway, for most of us in the coming year, our kids will be homeschooling in some sense, either full time or part time. 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. (04:37): 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. (05:36): 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 see is 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. We know 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. (06:22): 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, because 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. (07:08): The second mistake I want to tell you about is that I overplanned. We all know that our best plans are really guesses. 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. What the world is going to look like a year from now, we can't predict. And something happens when we overplan. 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. So planning wasn't my mistake. Planning was a good idea, but overplanning 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. (08:13): 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. 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 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. (09:19): 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. 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 when we can't quantify it. (10:26): 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. 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 audio books. Read aloud. (11:24): 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. (11:58): 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. 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. (12:57): 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. Homeschoolers do this all the time. Subjects that are content-based are the place that you want to combine your kids. (13:43): 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 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. I'm going to link in the show notes to a video by Pam Barnhill. She does a great job of explaining the difference between skill and content subjects. So head to the show notes to get a link to that video if you want a little more clarification on what to combine your kids for and what not to combine your kids for. The show notes, by the way, are at readaloudrevival.com/159. Basically, you want to do yourself a favor and combine your kids. (14:33): There is no way your child is going to learn about everything they need to know without any gaps in any subject. 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. (15:32): This actually is why in our RAR Premium, our 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. (16:05): 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 raised chickens and grind grain or bake 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. (16:47): 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. My kids do read every day. I read aloud to them most days. We do math. We cover a lot of ground and a lot of subjects in our reading, but mostly, I'm working on having my kids become lifelong readers, which is working out longterm because then they'll have the ability and the desire to learn for life. (17:22): 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 learning before then. So what does that mean? That means the pressure's off because our job then isn't to "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 any time I thought our homeschool needed to be extraordinary. It really doesn't. And that is good news. (18:45): All right. My next mistake I want to tell you about is trying to make my homeschool look like a classroom. This was especially true for me at the beginning of homeschooling. And if you're new to homeschooling, watch out for this one. Homeschooling does not look like school. You don't want it to look like school. The strength of homeschooling lies in the fact that it actually looks nothing like school. This is one of the hardest things to wrap our minds around when we're new to homeschooling, but you really do want to try to wrap your mind around it because I think you're going to love homeschooling way more when you release your long embedded ideas of what education looks like, what learning looks like. You want your homeschool to look like home, a home where learning is vibrant and integral, not like school with a bit of home tossed in for good measure. (19:35): So avoid the temptation to try to replicate your child's classroom at home. It will just be a recipe for frustration. It's a mistake a lot of homeschoolers make in the early years. Usually, we've shrugged it off after we've been homeschooling for a while because we realize we've got something better than that. In RAR Premium, everything we do is built around this understanding, that we want our homes to be havens of learning. Not classrooms, but places where the whole world is our classroom. The whole family is being energized. Our minds are being enlivened and we're constantly encountering interesting ideas and books and deepening our understanding across the curriculum. (20:13): So this is what we talk about in our master classes and In Circle with Sarah, which is our homeschool professional development for homeschool moms. And then all of our resources for our kids; family book clubs, WOW, Writers on Writing workshops. You'll see that we aren't trying to make our homeschools look like school. We're going for learning that we think is better than that, that we think is better suited for the home. If we're learning at home, then this is how we're going to do it. So don't make the mistake of making your homeschool look like a traditional classroom. (20:42): This actually leads us right into the next mistake, which is playing teacher rather than being mom. Look, your child could have a lot of wonderful teachers, but only you can be their mom. Only you can be their dad. No child wants to trade in their parents for a live-in teacher. If you're new to homeschooling, this is another one to watch out for just like making your home look like a classroom. You want to love up your kids so that they'll be well suited for learning, but you are irreplaceable as a parent. You're not irreplaceable as their teacher. They can have a lot of wonderful teachers in their life and that's a good thing, but only you can be their parent. So don't trade in your parent card to be the teacher. (21:27): This is especially a good thing to remember on any day that your child starts crying over their lesson or they become angry or unreasonable. It's bound to happen. If your child's crying over her lesson, zero learning is happening, take it from me. Learning, real, lasting, meaningful learning, that requires an openness of spirit, a willingness to receive or to engage. And if your child is crying and you insist that they keep going with their lesson, they're not learning anything. When we do that, we're doing it for us, not for them. We're doing it so that we can feel good about them "doing school" not because we're actually concerned about them learning because they're not learning anything. Once they hit tears, there's a wall up. This is a mistake I've made more times than I want to admit, but remember that your role as mom or dad is far far more important and crucial to your child's success than teacher. (22:28): Okay. Another mistake is comparing my kids with other kids. Oh, I've made this mistake too many times. Comparison we know is the thief of joy. And if we decide to compare our kids to other kids of the same age or to other homeschoolers or to what we know the other kids know and can do, or what the schools are teaching at a certain level, we are choosing to let that comparison rob us of our homeschool joy. Literally nothing good happens when we compare our kids with other kids. This is true of all parenting I think, not just homeschooling, but I know I slip into this too often. Over the years, I've slipped into it too often and it's never served us well. It's always, always a mistake to compare our kids with other kids. (23:16): Another mistake I've made is that I thought I could do a better job homeschooling if I had more. More money, more space, more supplies, more curriculum, more time. If only I had a bigger house, if only had a better outdoor space, if only I had a homeschool room, if only I had that expensive curriculum, if only I had more time or the budget for a tutor. None of this is true. The most important thing in your homeschool, the most important thing that your homeschool needs is a peaceful, content homeschooling parent. That matters more than the space, than the time, than the money you spent on curriculum, than the supplies you're using. A peaceful content homeschooling parent, a parent who smiles a lot, who shows up faithfully to read to them and talk to them, explore and learn with them, that's enough. Actually, that's more than enough. You can absolutely do a bang up job homeschooling with a library card and some math books. (24:18): At an RAR Premium, where you've got this community of like-hearted, homeschooling moms and training and development for you as a homeschooling parent, as well as regular family book clubs and writing workshops, and that's a recipe for a great school year. You don't need much, but what matters most is you. So if you find yourself thinking, "Man, I know I would do a better job homeschooling if I had more," fill in the blank, catch yourself. This is a mistake I've made a lot of times over the years. It's another thief of joy and it's simply not true. (25:08): This is the last one I want to tell you about. This is mistake number 10, and I think it's the most important. So if you've let your attention wander, come back to me here for now. I was too hard on myself. This is a huge mistake that I've made. I thought I wasn't enough. I thought I needed a kick in the pants. Do you know I have yet to meet a homeschool mom who needs a kick in the pants? And I've met a lot of homeschool moms. More often, we need a deep breath, an afternoon to enjoy our kids, a good night's sleep, a couple hours by ourselves at a coffee shop, a book. We need to smile more and worry less. I think the reason we're so hard on ourselves is because we think any hiccups our kids face are reflections on us. That's just not true. (25:54): We make low test scores or kids who are behind in reading, learning disabilities, math tiers, unfinished lesson plans, learning struggles, we make it all means something it doesn't mean. None of that means your child won't be successful. None of that means your homeschool stinks or that you're not cut out for this. A kid behind in math means, well, are you ready for this? Okay. A kid behind a math means that's where they are in math. That's all it means. When you're not in the throws of a busy homeschool day and you can look at things with a cooler eye, you might think, "Okay. Maybe we need to supplement with some extra math resources," or, "I need to reach out to someone who could help us here. Maybe I need to change the time of day we're doing math or explore using a different program." There are a lot of possible solutions, but one thing that remains true is that all it means if your child isn't doing well in math is that that's currently where they are in math. So then your job becomes helping them take the next step. (27:03): I love telling this story about when one of my kids was struggling with math. So I was at a homeschool convention and I asked math expert, Steve [Demme 00:00:27:10], what to do. So I went over to him and said, "I've got this kid struggling with math. What do we do? What do I do?" And he asked me what my child could do and then he asked me what he was struggling to do. So then I answered him and he listened and then told me what the next best step was. Okay. So what you need to do next is this. Well, after I walked away, I realized I had never told Steve how old my child was. My child could have been six or 10 or 17. He didn't ask because it didn't matter. What mattered was what does your child know? Because once we know what your child knows, we know what the next step is. We know the next step to take. That's the only thing we can do, is help our children take the next step, regardless of where they are. (28:02): Wherever your child is in any given subject, your job is to take them to the next step. Your only job is to take them to the next step. That means we can't make things mean what they don't mean. We don't actually grow or develop in a straight line. Humans never do. So why we all get rung up in knots when our kids don't develop academically at an equal pace or an even pace over the weeks and months and years is beyond me, but still I felt prey of this myself. Just because your child can have a really good day and finish an assignment in 30 minutes does not mean that every single day they can finish that same assignment in 30 minutes. They have moods and hard days and good days and days where it's difficult to concentrate. They make forward momentum and then they backtrack just like we all do with all of our growth. We have to remember our kids' performance is not a reflection on us. It's not an indication of our value or our worth or on our children's value or worth. (29:08): When Audrey, my oldest daughter, when she was accepted into every single college she applied to and then was given a generous scholarship at every single school she applied to. I thought one thing. I immediately hopped on the phone with one of my good friends and said, "We've got to be easier on ourselves." I have wasted so much time worrying and honestly, I wish I could trade that out. All those minutes I spent worrying, I wish I could trade them out to just enjoy her and to help her take the next step. That was the job. That is the job, right? It's a mistake to be so hard on ourselves. (29:45): So let me recap those 10 mistakes I mentioned, and like I told you, I know there are more that I've made. These are the 10 that I think might be most helpful for you to keep in mind so you don't make them this coming year. (29:56): Mistake number one, I thought curriculum choices made a huge difference. Curriculum choices are important. They're just not the be all end all. There are other things that are way more important. I overplanned. I held my plans too tightly, and I also planned to do too much. I under prioritized reading aloud when it is the single best use of our time throughout the entire school day. I didn't combine my kids for enough subjects, and when we combine our kids for as many subjects as possible, we really make our homeschool day more enjoyable and frankly, easier. I thought our homeschool needed to be extraordinary. It didn't. I tried to make my homeschool look like a classroom. I made my role as teacher more important than my role as mom. I compared my kids with other kids. I thought I could do a better job homeschooling if I had more, and I was too hard on myself. (31:04): Now I'm still homeschooling. We've graduated one. We have five more, two that are currently being homeschooled high school, a couple of first graders and incoming third grader. And what we do now lets me breathe a lot easier. It's still hard, don't get me wrong. Homeschooling a handful of kids is hard work, but it's good work. It's worthy work. We won't regret the time we share with our kids when we're homeschooling. In fact, I have yet to meet a single parent who homeschooled her kids and wished she hadn't. And so I invite you, yes, even if you think you're ordinary, even if you're not sure you're cut out for it, to join us. I invite you to homeschool with joy. Join us as we're homeschooling this year with as much joy as we can muster. Join us in smiling as often as you can. I think you'll be glad you did. (31:58): And if you'd like ongoing support, if you'd like some resources that jibe with all of these things I've talked about today, RAR Premium is built on these very principles. You can get it at rarpremium.com. It's a place where you get homeschool professional development by me, key resources like family book clubs and writing workshops that are taught by today's best children's book authors. And these resources do the things I think all homeschool curriculums should do, make your job easier, make your job lighter, make it freer, make it easier to love your kids and make it easier for you to love your homeschool and your life. Again, all of that is at RAR premium and you can get that at rarpremium.com. (32:50): Now it's time for let the kids speak. I love this part of the podcast because kids share the books that they've been loving lately. Irina (33:05): Hello. My name is [Irina 00:00:33:07]. I live in Texas and I love these books called the Magic Tree House Books. They're the best. Ellie (33:18): My name is Ellie and I'm five and I live in Oklahoma. And my favorite books are Laura and Mary, the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder because she's a teacher. Sarah Mackenzie (33:35): What's your name? William (33:35): William. Sarah Mackenzie (33:38): And how old are you William? William (33:40): Three. Sarah Mackenzie (33:41): And where do you live? William (33:44): Oklahoma. Sarah Mackenzie (33:46): And what's your favorite book? William (33:50): Ferdinand. Sarah Mackenzie (33:51): And what do you like about Ferdinand? William (33:52): That they think that he's mean but he isn't. Roy Hutchinson (33:54): Hello. My name is Roy Hutchinson. I'm from Knoxville, Tennessee, and my favorite series is Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew because they help people and solve mysteries. Grace (34:08): Hi. My name is Grace. I'm from Texas and I'm six years old. I'm almost seven. My favorite book is the [inaudible 00:34:15] Dungeon. My favorite part is when the kids get stuck in a dungeon and they have to swim out. Peter Harris (34:26): My name is Peter Harris. I'm six years old and I live in Florida. And my favorite book is Moonshot, and the reason I like Moonshot is because it is about Apollo 11 and Apollo 11 was the first mission to the moon. Elena (34:48): Hello, hello. My name I'm Sarah Mackenzie. Okay. My name is Elena and I'm four years old and I live in Arkansas and my favorite book is the [inaudible 00:35:04] because they think uncle Andrew is a tree and they plant him. Sarah Mackenzie (35:12): Elena, I think you're ready to take over my job. You've got that hello hello, I'm Sarah Mackenzie down pat. Ellen (35:19): Hi. My name is Ellen and I live in Arkansas. And my favorite book is the Magician's Nephew because the [inaudible 00:35:33] a hive, a bee's hive and the elephant brings water. Jessa (35:38): Hi, my name is [Jessa 00:35:37]. I'm eight years old and I am from Washington. A book I really enjoy reading is When God made You by Matthew Paul Turner and illustrated by David Catrow. My favorite page says you being you is God's dream coming true. This book makes me happy. Anna (36:02): Hi, my name is Anna. I am eight years old and I'm from Washington. My favorite book is Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary. My favorite character is Ramona because she is funny and naughty. It made me laugh when she hid in the basement and took a bite from every single apple. Steven (36:36): My name is Steven and I'm seven years old and I'm from Georgia. And my favorite book is [inaudible 00:36:44] because of they were all sitting by the fire and telling stories. Emma (36:50): My name is Emma. I'm nine years old, and I'm from Georgia. One of my favorite books is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I liked the sisters' adventures as they walk through life together, and I liked how they give me ideas of things to do when I'm bored. Sarah Mackenzie (37:06): Awesome recommendations kids. Thank you so much for leaving those. Show notes for today's show are at readaloudrevival.com/159 and you can get RAR Premium by going to rarpremium.com, especially if you're homeschooling this coming year. I highly highly recommend it to add to your own arsenal of tools that you can use to help your kids fall in love with books and help you fall in love with your homeschooling year. Thanks so much for joining me. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Until then, go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.