8 Ways to Spark a Breakthrough in Your Homeschool

Engage in the process of putting the spark back in your homeschool exactly the same way you started your homeschool in the first place: with patience, trial and error, and a little expert advice to get you started.

Stuck in a rut? The good news is that the occasional rut is part of the natural evolution of a homeschool that’s going well. It’s tempting to view these plateaus — when things are going fine but no one is especially inspired — as a negative. After, all being stuck in one place feels like a problem. But reaching a plateau is usually the result of a lot of committed hard work. When your homeschool plateaus, it’s because you’ve finally gotten things to a place where you’re comfortable and confident with what you’re doing.

After all those years agonizing over curriculum choices, charting individualized learning course designed with your individual kids in mind, and sacrificing substantial amounts of free time and financial wiggle room to make your homeschool work, realizing that you’ve reached a point where you’re so relaxed that everyday homeschool no longer holds major challenges should be as much a celebration as a cause for concern.

So pause, take a deep breath, and appreciate the fact that you’ve climbed high enough to be temporarily stuck. For most of us, it’s no easy task to reach a point where our students are learning, our work is respected, and we’re ready to tackle whatever obstacles attempt to block our paths.

“Contrary to popular belief, a rut isn’t a problem that you should take personally,” says Jenny Blake, author of Pivot: The Only Move that Matters Is Your Next One. “When you hit a plateau, it means you have succeeded in what you were trying to do, and now you are ready for the next even greater growth, meaning, and impact.”

A lot of the early homeschool experience is about climbing: You’re constantly stretching yourself to define and meet your goals. You’re learning new things every day. You’re always trying something new, and poring over books, journals, and homeschool Facebook groups for new ideas for history or science. But a moment comes when your efforts actually pay off: You’re no longer having to create every day, every subject, every year from scratch. Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, calls it the “OK plateau,” a point where you’re good enough to phone it in when you need to. You no longer have to push yourself every minute to learn new things or experiment with new learning techniques. Your days have found a comfortable routine. You can predict with a reasonably high degree of accuracy what math curriculum will work best for your middle schooler or when your 6-year-old needs a structured spelling program and when he’s learning spelling fine on his own. You’re not worried every minute about getting it right because you know what you’re doing. Plateaus are moments of triumph, but they’re also signs that you need a new challenge to keep learning and growing.

Not every plateau is bad — if you’re starting a new job or project of your own, you may find that a homeschool that runs almost on its own is just what you need. “Not every project has to challenge you, but if nothing in your life is challenging you, you’re going to get very bored, very fast,” says clinical psychologist and life coach Jenny Radcliffe. “You can be in a perfectly enjoyable rut with one part of your life as long as you’re getting challenged in another part.” It’s only when a rut starts to feel like a rut that you need to worry — if you’re bored, frustrated, or unsatisfied, those are signs that it’s time to start climbing again.

“People don’t stop needing to learn and grow, but when you’re busy enough and good enough, you often forget that as complicated as challenges can be to navigate, overcoming them is part of the satisfaction you get with growth,” says Leslie Griffen, a career coach and consultant. When you don’t need to get constantly better to achieve your everyday goals, you can gradually lose passion and satisfaction without even realizing that it’s happening. And when you finally realize it, you’re bored, frustrated, and ready to make any change just so things feel different.

Lots of people make the mistake of jumping right into major changes as soon as they feel stuck, but if you let yourself live for a while with your dissatisfaction, you’re more likely to find a satisfying breakthrough. Realizing that you’re at a plateau isn’t the time to major changes — resist the urge to totally revamp your science curriculum or start studying French or launch a new co-op. Instead, give yourself space to really feel the boundaries of where you are right now and to imagine where you’d like to be a year from now. You can’t force or rush a breakthrough, says Foer. “Breakthroughs often seem like they happen overnight, but — just like reaching a plateau in the first place — getting to a breakthrough is a process that can take time and effort.”

What you can do is engage in the process of putting the spark back in your homeschool exactly the same way you started your homeschool in the first place: with patience, trial and error, and a little expert advice to get you started.

Spark a Breakthrough by Thinking with Your Feelings.

Often, the change we need isn't an intellectual shift but an emotional one.

Danielle* has been homeschooling her three children since 2012, but last year she found herself dreading Monday morning. It wasn’t that things were terrible — she almost felt bad complaining when other people were dealing with math meltdowns or frustrating games of musical curriculum — but the days felt long, and she daydreamed about sending the kids back to traditional school. Then one day it hit her: Homeschooling wasn’t fun. It was engaging, it was academic, it was working well for her kids, but there was a big ingredient missing.

Danielle tried to remember the last time homeschooling had felt really, truly fun. She remembered a big family project, making a board game version of the story of the Odyssey after they listened to the audiobook together. They’d spent weeks drawing the board with its different islands, making cards for each of the characters, and inventing an increasingly complicated set of game rules. They’d had to wrap up quickly, though, Danielle remembered, because she’d only allocated eight weeks to the Odyssey, and it was time to move on.

“That’s when it hit me that the problem wasn’t that I was bored, the problem was that I’d gotten so fixated on a particular destination that I forgot to enjoy the journey,” Danielle says.

She shifted into slow gear immediately. Instead of keeping herself focused on what came next, Danielle immersed herself in what was happening right now, whether that was long-division or medieval Europe, and she encouraged her children to do the same.

“Honestly, our days look almost exactly the same,” Danielle says. “No one on the outside would know anything had changed. But now our homeschool feels like a place I am excited to be every day.

Spark a Breakthrough by Embracing Complete and Total Failure.

Sometimes transcendence comes after a spectacular crash-landing.

“I remember one of my bosses in the tech world telling me after we’d had a launch we’d worked on for almost a year go so completely wrong that we had to re-start the project from scratch that one day, I’d say that failure was one of my biggest successes,” says Laurie*, who left her tech job in 2003 when her son Aiden was born. “She was right, but it was many years before I was able to apply that lesson to my homeschool.”

Sometimes ruts happen because we’re afraid to fail. We stop taking risks, we play it safe, and eventually, our homeschool goes stagnant. Diving into a new challenge doesn’t always mean that you’ll succeed, especially if you define success as having everything go perfectly. (In fact, we can pretty much guarantee that it will almost never mean that.) But if you expand your definition of success to include the willingness to try something, the courage to admit that you’ve failed, a willingness to see where you can improve, and the strength to try again, failure can become a necessary ingredient in the recipe for success.

“If I fail, I know I am one step farther down the road to doing it better,” Laurie says. “As Samuel Beckett wrote: ‘Try again. fail again. fail better.’”

Spark a Breakthrough by Not Trying to Spark a Breakthrough.

Determination and hard work will take you far, but sometimes what you really need is a little fun.

“If you’re working too hard at a breakthrough, you may be working yourself right out of one,” says Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D, an Ojai, Calif.-based life coach. Hendricks says working hard is part of success, but for innovation, hard work isn’t enough unless you have a spark to inspire it.

“Many of the world's inventions don't come from people simply working hard and throwing themselves at a project,” she says. “They come from wonder — from curiosity and a willingness to be delighted. That is your fuel source and your reservoir, and most people need to practice it at least 10 minutes a day.”

Hendricks suggests setting aside time every day for just plain fun — do something that engages your mind and that you enjoy without trying to figure anything out or come up with a grand plan. Just play. Let your mind roam where it will. “That’s where new ideas happen,” Hendricks said. “That’s when you know how to focus your work in the most productive way.”

Spark a Breakthrough by Recognizing that Your Breakthrough Only Has to Make Sense to You.

A breakthrough sounds like something that should be worthy of a ticker-tape parade, but it's OK if you're the only one who knows it happened.

Patti’s* biggest homeschool breakthrough was a purple pen. It doesn’t sound very exciting, but for Patti, that pen changed everything. “My daughter was a reluctant writer,” Patti says. “She’d moan and groan her way through every writing assignment like it was torture. She was a fine writer when it came to the actual work. I think if she’d been really terrible at it or really good at it, I would have found better ways to handle it, but I didn’t know what to do with a 7th grader who could write just fine but hated to do it.”

Lots of things in the their homeschool were going right, so Patti let the stress about writing simmer on a back burner of her mind. There were more important things to deal with and more fun things to enjoy, so the writing issue was just a nagging annoyance. “I didn’t worry about it every day, but I thought about it every day,” Patti says.

Then, just by chance, Patti grabbed a purple pen out of the art cabinet to make notes on one of her daughter’s essays. The pen looked pretty on the page, and Patti found herself writing more than she ever had before, circling places where her daughter had chosen the perfect word, jotting questions in the margins, suggesting alterations for choppy or unclear sentences. When she finished, she felt guilty; she’d been having so much fun writing notes that she hadn’t realized how scribbled-over her daughter’s paper would look.

To Patti’s surprise, though, her daughter was thrilled. The extra feedback seemed to be the magic missing piece she needed to get excited about writing. Suddenly writing was a pleasure, and Patti and her daughter both started looking forward to writing assignments.

“It’s such a little thing that it seems almost silly to call it a breakthrough,” Patti says. “But for us, that’s what it was.”

Spark a Breakthrough by Putting Yourself Out There.

Sharing your big plan can help you put it into action.

When you know what you need to do but you need a push to do it, putting your intentions out into the world might be just what you need, says Blake. “We all feel inspired to push through the hard stuff if we know people are holding us accountable, even in a loose way,” she explains.

That was definitely true for Ashley*, who announced her intention to start a homeschool co-op to her circle on Facebook long before she felt totally confident that she was up to the task. Ashley had been dreaming of connecting with a group of like-minded homeschool parents who could team up to put together a middle school program that would take the pressure off her—and other parents — to teach classes outside their comfort zone, but she knew it was a huge undertaking.

“I knew it was what we needed if we were going to keep homeschooling through middle school, so I posted it on Facebook: ‘Looks like I’m going to be starting a homeschool co-op for this fall. Y’all wish me luck.’”

Friends immediately jumped in to wish her luck and to volunteer to help out — one even offered up her preschool classroom for afternoon classes a couple of days a week. Knowing that people were paying attention, Ashley kept pushing forward, and her co-op celebrated its third birthday this fall.

“I might be posting about a high school co-op soon,” she says. “We’re coming up on 9th grade!”

Spark a Breakthrough by Recognizing that Breakthroughs Can Be Incremental

Sometimes a breakthrough is a series of small changes that add up to a big difference.

We tend to think that we’re making progress when something big and dramatic happens — we invest in a new curriculum, we join a co-op, we start a new grade. But often, we’ve got breakthroughs-in-the-making going on all the time. They’re just less flashy and exciting, so we don’t notice them.

Cynthia* says her son’s reading breakthrough was almost three years in the making. Anton, who was 6 at the time, was not interested in anything to do with reading, though he enjoyed making up stories and having his mom read books to him. So Cynthia took a deep breath and decided to follow his lead. Every once in a while, she’d see an idea that might appeal to Anton and added it to their schedule. Anton enjoyed running the letters of the alphabet, as their Oak Meadow curriculum suggested, and he liked dictating stories to him mom, who wrote them down so he could illustrate them. When he finally started reading, enthusiastically and independently, he was 9 years old.

“I would call it more of a process than a breakthrough, but it definitely felt like a breakthrough when he started tearing through the Percy Jackson series this summer,” says Cynthia.

Incremental changes that address your child’s abilities and interests can add up over time to the kind of big breakthrough that revolutionizes your homeschool, even if they feel less dramatic in the moment. In fact, these slow-and-steady breakthroughs can feel the most successful because you’ve worked long, hard, and patiently to earn them.

Spark a Breakthrough by Embracing a Little Silliness

Just because you're taking things seriously doesn't mean you can't find epiphanies through play.

We’ve got goals, we’ve got plans, we’ve got to-do lists, and we’re ready to tackle this homeschooling thing wholeheartedly. Whether we’re totally relaxed unschoolers or seriously academic school-at-home-ers, we are all committed to giving our kids the very best education we can with the very best tools available to us. We take our jobs seriously. But sometimes, maybe we shouldn’t.

“One of the things I’m always telling new homeschoolers is not to forget the fun,” says Teresa*, who runs a workshop for her homeschool co-op helping new homeschoolers get started. “If you don’t have fun, none of the other stuff matters.”

When her own homeschool starts to slump, Teresa says she’s learned to immediately ask “What was the last thing that made us really laugh?” The answer usually reveals what’s missing: “If we last had fun reading a funny book together, I hit the library for a new readaloud. If it was on a field trip, I know it’s time to plan a field trip. If it was a documentary day, I start scanning Netflix. I’ve learned to trust that fun will take us where we need go,” Teresa says.

Spark a Breakthough by Doing It Yourself

Sometimes, a breakthrough is as simple as asking yourself, "Is there another way to make this happen?"

When Amanda* realized her homeschool had fallen into a serious rut, she knew exactly what she needed. The problem? What she needed didn’t exist.

“My kids were bored stiff with the way our traditional history program was structured, and since the rest of our curriculum was built around history, boring history meant boring everything,” Amanda says.

She tried half a dozen different programs, including homeschool favorites like The Story of Us and History Odyssey, but the hands-on, critical thinking-focused, biography-heavy program she was looking for wasn’t out there. She kept trying to make the not-quite-right programs fit into her homeschool, but one day, she realized that there was no point in trying to force a fit that just wasn’t there.

“When school didn’t fit, we made our homeschool,” Amanda says. “I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that when history didn’t fit, we should make our own history.”

Amanda and her two children ended up building a curriculum from scratch, all contributing ideas and resources to the project. After a year of compiling and creating together, they had a history plan that carried them happily through middle school.

*last names omitted for online publication (This feature was originally published in the fall 2017 issue of HSL.)

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