8 Ways to Celebrate the End of the Homeschool Year

Celebrating milestones like the end of the school year can be an important part of keeping joy alive in your homeschool, so pause to appreciate that you’ve made it through the year together.

Even if you’re a year-round homeschooler, late spring marks the end of lots of regular activities and is a great time to throw an end-of-the-year celebration for your homeschool. Celebrating milestones like the end of the school year can be an important part of keeping joy alive in your homeschool, especially as students move into middle and high school, so pause to appreciate that you’ve made it through the year together. Here are a few of our favorite ways to mark the end of the academic year:

Make a time capsule.

Add a few items that sum up the year: a favorite book, a CD with your in-regular-rotation tunes on it, pictures of fun science or history projects, and a favorite artwork or two. Ask your student to write a letter about her year, and add a letter of your own highlighting some of your favorite memories from the year. (Not that you have to think this far ahead, but you could open these boxes together to celebrate your student’s last day of high school.)

Take a camping trip.

Unplug literally by heading to the nearest campground and spending the night in the great outdoors. (If you’ve never camped before, many state parks have special newbie camper programs that set you up with gear and on-site assistance. Finishing up your last official readaloud by the campfire and toasting your year’s highlights while star-gazing is definitely a memorable way to celebrate finishing another grade.

Have an end-of-the-year scavenger hunt.

Bonus points if you can tie some of your clues to the year’s highlights: Find a plant mentioned in a Robert Frost poem, find a substance with a pH level of 7.0 or higher, find a historical marker that refers to the Civil War, etc. Do a little advance planning to choose your site and clues.

Make the world a better place.

Helping others can be a great way to celebrate — consider spending your last month of school collected canned goods for a food kitchen or dog food for an animal shelter and making your donation together on your last day of school. If you’re taking a summer break, consider signing up for a recurring volunteer opportunity during the summer — for example, kids can ride along on Meals on Wheels deliveries or participate with you in park clean-up days.

Freshen up your homeschool space.

By the end of the year, half the pencils are stubby, the bookshelves are sloppy, and everything’s just kind of a mess. Celebrate the end of the year by making your space beautiful again: Clean it from top to bottom, consider brushing on a fresh coat of paint, and update chair cushions or throw pillows to make everything feel new and shiny again.

Host a lawn games party.

Break out the classics: badminton, croquet, cornhole, water balloons, and bocce ball, and spend the day competing in old-fashioned outdoor games. If you want, keep score and award paper medals to the people who do the best in each category. A day like this is a fun way to officially welcome summer to your homeschool.

Go out for afternoon tea.

Something about a classic high tea feels so special, which is what makes it such a lovely way to celebrate the end of another year. Check high-end hotels and tea rooms in your area to find a place that serves high tea, make reservations, and wear your fancy best to nibble and sip your way through the afternoon.

Have a pajama party.

Spending the day in your pajamas is the epitome of homeschool life, right? Cozy up in your PJs with a movie marathon (rent the Harry Potter flicks or all the Studio Ghibli films), eat pancakes or waffles for dinner, and enjoy your well-earned day of rest.

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“What If?:” How We Started Homeschooling

It all started with a brochure. Patricia looks back on the first days of her homeschool life and the decision that — in retrospect — seems inevitable.

Let me take you back, way back, to the fall of 1996. Maybe you were in high school or college, listening to Alanis Morissette and getting riled up, or maybe you were younger, watching Boy Meets World on TV every Friday night. Because I am probably older than you, I was a young mother of a four-year-old boy and a baby girl. The four-year-old wore overalls and a deep side part in his hair and looked a lot like Dennis the Menace. His sister had such big eyes that she kind of looked like Yoda, and some of the fattest legs you’ve ever seen on a baby. And I was their mother, still wearing little black skirts that hit mid-thigh, with tights and oxford shoes, smitten with the notion of homeschooling.

It started with a brochure. Which is a fancy word for a piece of paper folded in thirds, but it was 1996, and we still got information from pieces of paper. It was at the library, on a shelf. A piece of paper, folded in thirds, from the Northern California Homeschool Association, listing resources for homeschooling.

Homeschooling. I’d thought about it when Henry was two, and I met the first homeschoolers I’d ever come across, a family with five kids. The kids didn’t go to school — none of them. They didn’t go to school! I was a former elementary teacher and the whole notion was as inconceivable to me as the concept of email in those days. Still, I was intrigued enough to find a book about home- schooling at the library, and played with the idea for a few weeks that fall. But ultimately I lay in bed thinking about lunchboxes, and school Halloween parades, and playing tether ball on the blacktop at recess. I thought about Septembers and the new shoes that came with them. My heart jittered as I flipped through the losses. Homeschooling meant walking away from the American childhood experience, and I just couldn’t do that to Henry.

When I picked up that brochure two years later, something had changed. Maybe it was that I knew Henry better now, or maybe it was how kindergarten lurked in my peripheral vision. Or maybe it was something inexplicable, like the way the boy who grew up down the street had a different gleam about him one day in pre-algebra class, and suddenly you couldn’t stop writing his name on the inside flap of your Pee-Chee folder.

It did feel a little like puppy love. I picked up that brochure and, like that, the idea of homeschooling wrote itself into every margin of my mind. I researched it at home, dialing up AOL on our computer — dial-tone, beeps, static, that unforgettable spring-sproing, rocket launch fuzz — and after two or three attempts got connected. Do you remember the Internet in 1996? How you spent more time looking at that little hourglass icon than you did actual content? How the images revealed themselves slowly, top to bottom, like a theater curtain in reverse? None of this seemed unreasonable to me back then; it was just what it took to get to the homeschooling message boards I found and lingered on that fall. People — mostly mothers — posted questions or shared their homeschooling experiences, and others responded. I scrolled and scrolled, searching for posts that might answer my concerns. How do you meet homeschooling friends? What do kids miss out on when they don’t go to school? How do you tell your in-laws? I clicked and hoped, clicked and hoped. Sometimes it took a full minute for a new page to load. There was a lot of bickering about what did and didn’t constitute unschooling, but what struck me most was the community on those boards. Homeschoolers were real, connecting with one another! What started as a wisp of a notion gathered the weight of possibility.

What if? What if Henry didn’t go to school the next fall? What if we found a local community of homeschoolers? What if I didn’t have to send my kids off to some other teacher’s classroom, while I got a job teaching other people’s kids? The possibilities glittered brighter than a new lunchbox.

I read every homeschooling book I could get my hands on that fall, which wasn’t hard — the stack was fairly short in 1996. I read the Johns, of course: John Taylor Gatto stirred me up over what happened in classrooms; John Holt helped me see how kids might learn outside of them. Smaller, quieter books by homeschooling mothers moved me even more. There was Susan Richman in The Three R’s At Home, a book I lucked upon in the library and checked out so many times that to this day I picture it in its clear plastic library cover, instead of the jacket-free version I bought later and still own. Richman was a former teacher too, and downright gleeful in laying open her days with her kids, writing about how different learning looked outside a classroom, with one’s own children. There was Nancy Wallace’s Child’s Work, a book with a subtitle that explained everything I loved about it: Taking Children’s Choices Seriously. Wallace shared Richman’s fascination with her own children, but her approach was different. Where Richman was animated, Wallace was contemplative. She studied her children and their pursuits like a smitten scientist. These women showed me what a homeschooling life might look like, and I wanted it. As much for myself as for my kids.

So this is how I learned about homeschooling that fall: from the Internet and books. It seems a little crazy to me now. I didn’t know any homeschoolers. I went to a homeschooling information event in Berkeley one night, and saw real flesh-and-blood homeschoolers breastfeeding their children and answering questions, but it would be another six months before I’d get my kids to a park day and talk about homeschooling with an actual person.

Instead, I had an ongoing dialogue with myself in my journal. Henry was going to preschool three mornings a week that fall, and I found myself comparing what I saw him do at preschool — it was a co-op — with my new notions about homeschooling and learning.

One set of journal pages starts: I suppose the wide choices at preschool don’t necessarily encourage focus. Henry worked for days on that castle drawing in his bedroom, and I’ve never seen him as excited about any- thing at preschool. Another ramble begins: At preschool he plays with other children — very important. But does he really need that five or even three days a week? And couldn’t he get that from a homeschooling community?

If I didn’t have my journals, I’d remember that fall as a time of waffling, of back and forth worries about whether we should or shouldn’t homeschool. But page after page, line after loopy line tell a different story. My mind was made up almost instantly. One morning I picked up that brochure; days later I was resolute in my conviction to do it. It just fits the life I envision for us, I wrote. The harder part was declaring our choice — pulling Henry from the preschool and announcing to our families, to the world, that we were homeschoolers.

I marvel at that young mother in her little black skirt: how was she so sure of herself ? Keeping her kid out of kindergarten, playing hooky with society’s definition of childhood. Yet there I was, committing to a life choice that would carry on for the next twenty years, based on little more than a few books, some janky Internet message boards and a lovesick twittering in my gut. I opened that brochure, one flap, two, and we were off.

Like that.

Fine advice for any homeschooling parent is to focus on what your child knows, rather than what she doesn’t know. The 1996 me didn’t know she would still be homeschooling nineteen years later; she didn’t know there would be heartache over finding community, slammed doors over long division or teenage days of longing for something else. But I knew we’d be happy if we quit the commute to preschool, if I settled on the couch in the morning when the sun was easy, reading Winnie the Pooh aloud with voices for all the characters, even Eeyore’s sorry drawl, the baby at the breast and the boy listening at my feet with blocks, building.

“Read more, Mama,” he said, in that crunchy sugar four-year-old rasp, at the end of a chapter. And so I kept going.

PATRICIA ZABALLOS writes about homeschooling and writing on her blog, Wonder Farm. She is working on a book of essays.

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How to Be More in the Moment in Your Homeschool

Get out of your head and into the joy of your everyday homeschool experiences. Here’s why embracing the magic of the moment can change your homeschool for the better — and how you can do it, one moment at a time.

Chances are, you’re thinking about something else right now.

It’s kind of hard not to. Homeschooling is one of those projects that depends on multitasking. You may be measuring the pH level of red cabbage or tracing a map of a medieval village, but you’re probably also listening out for the clothes dryer or waiting for an email or trying to figure out how to turn the odds and ends currently in your fridge into dinner so you don’t have to squeeze in a grocery store run. Most of us, most of the time, are probably thinking about something other than what we’re doing at any given moment.

People talk a lot about enjoying the moment, but it turns out that being in the moment is a skill we have to acquire — not something that comes naturally for most of us. It seems like it should be easy to get lost in what we’re doing at a given moment, but our brains aren’t really wired that way.

One of the distinguishing features of human consciousness is our ability to do one thing while thinking about something else. Being able to anticipate the future — whether we’re doing it consciously or unconsciously — is a benefit of our big brains, and often, this ability really is a benefit. When we’re making plans or looking forward to something we’re excited about, we may actually feel happier and less stressed than when we’re engaged in routine activities. And remembering is a plus, too: Catching a glimpse of a family vacation photo or hearing a song that reminds us of a great road trip can make us instantly connected to past happiness. That’s the upside. Any homeschool mom who has ever been up at 3 a.m. replaying something another mom said at park day or worrying about her son’s math skills never developing can tell you the downside: Our ability to look beyond the present moment can also equal worry and rumination. It can also keep us from really connecting to everyday moments. If we’re worrying about what’s next and fretting over what has been, how can we reorient ourselves to be present in what actually is?

“Everyone agrees it’s important to live in the moment but the problem is how — when people are not in the moment, they’re not there to know they aren’t there,” says Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of Mindfulness.

Being in the moment — also called mindfulness — is, at its most basic is just being present in what’s happening around you. It has two essential parts: Being there requires you to focus on the actual experience you’re having, without being distracted about what you’ll do next or what might be going on somewhere else, and it also necessitates open, nonjudgmental acceptance of whatever is happening. In other words, mindfulness is being there and being okay with being there — which, for parents, means ignoring those critical thoughts about your parenting choices (Maybe this whole homeschool project is really a big mistake) or frustration at your child’s choices (Why is he standing right in that mud puddle in his brand- new sneakers?).

This is easier said than done, especially for homeschool parents who are usually juggling a never-ending to-do list of projects and worries. You may be enjoying exploding that baking soda volcano in the backyard, but if you’re like most of us, you’re also mentally organizing the post-eruption clean-up, trying to remember what you’ve got on hand for lunch, and wondering if that co-op teacher responded to your email about the age requirement for her medieval history class. Maybe you’re also worrying because your sixth grader sulked and grumbled his way through math practice this morning, even though he’s already way behind where his public school peers are in math and really needs the practice. If you were in the moment, you think — pulling yourself even further out of the moment — you’d be enjoying all the volcanic fun, but instead, you’re only part there. The rest of you is somewhere else.

“We live in a world that contributes in a major way to mental fragmentation, disintegration, distraction, and decoherence,” says B. Allan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar. Buddhists call this permanently scattered mental state that so many people tend to live in “monkey mind,” referencing its ability to swing from thought to thought without settling in any single spot. Being in the moment asks you to change this and be where you are — which means accepting all the less-than-great things about where you are without letting yourself get caught up in them. This doesn’t mean you have to like everything that’s happening: You can be a perfectly mindful person and still not love it that your middle schooler is refusing to do math. You can be a mindfulness adherent and still be bored playing your 2,000-th game of Stack the States or listening to your child explain his Minecraft project in micro details over a 45-minute traffic jam. People often think mindfulness means being happy in every single moment, and while that might be a lovely dream, there are plenty of unlovely moments in everyday life.

“Taking care of children all day can be emotionally, cognitively, and psychologically exhausting, and it’s really problematic that parents aren’t more honest about that,” says Claire Lister, a New York City-based psychologist. “Sometimes, you’re going to zone out. Sometimes, you’re going to think about the other things you need to do next. Sometimes, you’re going to be in the moment and be bored out of your mind. It’s great to be present, and I think you’re usually happier when you are, but expecting yourself to be fully present and totally delighted every single minute of parenting is likely to be a recipe for failure.”

What keeps you in the moment in those situations where you’re not basking in the glow of a moment’s perfect joy is recognizing and accepting what’s actually happening instead of immediately jumping into anger, blaming yourself, or trying to problem-solve for the future. Being in the moment is an active, open, intentional process — and it’s one that comes with a host of benefits for you.

“When people are in the mindful, they are more likely to experience themselves as a part of humanity, as part of a greater universe,” says Michael Kernis, a psychologist at the University of Georgia. “The line between self and other gets blurred in a way that’s conducive to growing strong, healthy relationships and self confidence.”

Blurring this line is surprisingly positive in all kinds of unexpected ways. For starters, it makes you more empathetic, which can be a big plus during those middle school math stand-offs. It may make it easier for you to see your child’s perspective and to feel more connected to her needs and interests. Even better, it helps you take your ego out of potentially emotional situations so that you’re less likely to link your self-esteem to events — like your kid’s academic success or how well she enjoys homeschooling on a given Thursday — and more likely to take things at face value. Ultimately, this kind of perspective can make you less aggressive, defensive, and reactive and more understanding and accepting — of yourself and of other people, says Kernis.

Learning how to be more in the moment can also help alleviate one of the plagues of homeschool life: that constant second-guessing we always seem to be doing about everything from whether homeschooling is the best choice for your child to whether you should have spent that $500 on science supplies. “Being present minded takes away some of that self evaluation and getting lost in your own mind—and in your mind is where you make the evaluations that beat yourself up,” says Stephen Schueller, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Learning how to be in the moment can reduce the overthinking that drives us to doubt our confidence and be our own worst critics. When you’re able to focus your attention on the moment, you’re better able to stop problematic catastrophizing (worrying about the future) and rumination (worrying about the past) — in the moment, definitely, but also later, when you’re back in everyday multitasking mode.

Mindfulness also seems to have physiological benefits, though it’s an area that hasn’t historically been the focus of rigorous scientific research. Still, the existing studies suggest that people who practice being in the moment, even with minimal practices like five minutes of daily meditation, report reduced stress, better immune system functioning, lower blood pressure, and even reductions in chronic pain. These small benefits may lead to bigger ones — reduced risk for high blood pressure and other chronic health problems, as well as sometimes significantly reduced depression and anxiety symptoms.

These benefits aren’t just for you either. Parents who practice mindfulness are more likely to have kids who can enjoy being in the moment, which can do a lot to mitigate some of the bigger emotional challenges of childhood and adolescence. If it feels selfish to focus on your own well- being, remember that your wellbeing when it comes to mindfulness has a direct, positive benefit for the rest of your family, too.

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Mindfulness isn’t really complicated, though we often try to make it that way. “People set the goal of being mindful for the next 20 minutes or the next two weeks, and they end up thinking mindfulness is difficult because they are using the wrong yardstick,” says Jay Winner, author of the book Take the Stress Out of Your Life. The only way to measure mindfulness, Winner says, is one moment at a time, which means every moment is an opportunity to practice mindfulness. There’s no magical way to learn to be in the moment, but these tips can help you start incorporating mindfulness into your regular routine.

Practice in happy sensory moments. Ultimately, you want mindfulness to be a part of your whole life, but if you are struggling with getting started, happy sensory moments — eating your favorite dessert, taking a bath, stepping out into the sunshine — make for good mindfulness practice.

“The easiest way to start being in the moment is with a physical sensation that makes you happy,” says Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness and a psychologist at the University of California at Riverside. Concentrate on one specific sensation—revel in it, and savor it — and you’ll find that being in the moment feels easier than you might have thought.

Let yourself relax about messes — at least sometimes. That baking soda volcano may cause a clean-up emergency in your yard, but homeschooling in general can be a messy project. Even if you’re not making oobleck or glittering up your homework, being a hands-on homeschooler will often mean that your dining room table is buried under books, your breakfast dishes are still stacked in the sink at lunchtime, and your family room is full of the clutter of everyone’s projects and activities.

To be mindful, you have to let go of thinking about clean-up while things are happening. You’ll still have to dust-bust the piles of glitter or load the dishwasher later, whether you’re thinking about it now or not, so give yourself permission to deal with the mess when it’s actually time to deal with the mess instead of proactively planning your tidying. Obviously you may not be able to do this every time there’s a mess in the making — that’s okay. But letting go of that kind of forward-thinking future planning even sometimes can really help you be more in the moment.

Cultivate a mindfulness habit. If mindfulness doesn’t come naturally to you, finding ways to encourage it can help you integrate more moments into your routine. One strategy that works well for some people is keeping a memorable moments journal and making a point to write in it for a few minutes every evening. (You don’t want to write in it — or even think about writing it — during the rest of the day since that can pull you right out of the moment.) Knowing that you’ll be looking for information to write about at night can subtly encourage you to pay more attention to moments as they are happening. This doesn’t work for everyone, but if you’re struggling with everyday mindfulness, this is a trick worth trying.

Press the pause button before acting. Homeschool parents can develop a tendency to jump right in when kids are struggling with an assignment, unsure at the playground, or otherwise experiencing a moment of uncertainty. But being in hover mode can make mindfulness impossible — that state of perpetual readiness it requires is the opposite of the nonjudgmental attention to the present moment. Practice giving your children space to explore and problem-solve on their own.

As a bonus, reducing parental steering has mindful benefits for both you and your child — solving problems on your own boosts mindfulness, decision-making, problem- solving, and self control.

Let go of the myth of “quality time.” Parents have a tendency to value special, focused time — a trip to the nature center, a family picnic — over everyday life moments, like trying to find a parking space at the karate center or folding the clean laundry. But all time has the potential to be quality time.

“My son is in college now, but his favorite memory of homeschooling is cleaning up before school started in the morning — we’d turn up the music and do a one-song clean-up session as fast as we could,” says Naomi Vincent, who homeschooled her son from 4th to 8th grade. “I planned a lot of field trips and special activities, so I was surprised that silly ritual, which was really just about trying to keep the dining room from becoming a disaster area, was his happiest homeschool memory.”

Don’t schedule away your down time. It’s tempting to do a grocery run during ballet lessons or to answer email while you’re waiting in the co-op parking lot, but this perpetual busy-ness doesn’t leave much space for mindfulness. Sometimes you may really need that gallon of milk, but when you don’t, bring a book and settle in under a shady tree or find a cozy spot to knit a few rows. This kind of slowing down won’t come naturally at first if you’re not used to it, but you’ll find it makes a big difference.

Similarly, don’t always save time just because you can. If it takes you an extra 15 minutes to walk to soccer practice instead of driving, take the walk occasionally. Bring a deck of cards to the library and play a quiet hand of spades before you leave. Stop and have your coffee at the shop instead of zipping through the drive-through. Leave more openings in your schedule for experiences.

Accept that there will be bad moments. Homeschooling is full of great moments, but homeschooling — and parenting and pretty much all of life — has its share of not-so-wonderful moments, too. Mindfulness is not going to magically make those moments go away, but mindfulness can help you through the rough moments just as it can enhance your enjoyment of the good ones.

Ideally, being in the moment lets you approach challenging moments with your kids with more empathy and understanding — you see that your third grader refuses to read because he needs to move around in a way that’s not conducive to long reading sessions or that your first grader’s tantrum is a way of testing his limits. But it’s also great if the effect of mindfulness is simply that you can accept when a bad moment is happening and not take it personally or feel like it’s your problem to solve immediately.

Make mindfulness part of your routine with these tips from other homeschool families who have discovered ways to be more in the moment.

Shake Up the Routine

Homeschools run on routine, and most of us would be lost without our everyday rhythm. That’s why the very occasional disruption of that routine can be one of the most effective ways to get you out of your head and into the moment.

Throw a surprise shake-up. A few times a year, let the gang get about ten minutes into your regular morning routine — then announce that it’s ice cream — or swimming pool or ice skating — time. The unexpected momentum shift will kick your homeschool energy into higher gear. (A version of this can also be fun for bedtime.)

Make time for mystery trips. Whether it’s a weekend in the mountains or an afternoon at the zoo, the fun of a mystery getaway is not knowing where you’re going. Help your kids dress appropriately and let them know if they need to pack a bag, but don’t tell them anything else — the anticipation is what makes a mystery trip so fun.

Shake up someone else’s day. The only thing more inspiring than giving your own routine a little jump is inspiring someone else’s day. Bake cookies to leave surprises for your neighbors, bring flowers to your favorite supermarket clerk, or stop by a senior center for a singalong. Doing something nice for other people will help you enjoy the moment yourself.

Put Adventure on Your To-Do List

It’s easy to slip into a rut, so build your own momentum by keeping fun on your radar.

Update your calendar every season with the activities you don’t want to miss: planting a veggie garden or taking a waterfall hike in the spring, visiting a pumpkin farm or navigating a corn maze in the fall, or finding a new swimming hole or painting a new fence mural in the summer. Scheduling spontaneous fun may seem weird at first, but getting the fun on your calendar is the first step to actually having it.

Keep a choose-your-own-fun box, and fill it with cards describing possible activities. Have one color card for free or cheap activities (like a picnic in the park or a hike on a nearby trail), another color for activities that require a little more cash (museum visits or favorite eateries), and a third color for splurges, like a trip to an amusement park or a camping weekend. When you have free time to spare, choose a card that suits your time and budget and head out on an adventure.

Celebrate the Little Things

Don’t save all your celebrations for a couple of annual events. Make moments all year long by scheduling low-pressure celebrations.

Look for silly excuses to celebrate, like Star Wars Day (May 4), Lost Sock Memorial Day (May 9), or National Doughnut Day (June 1). There’s no hype or stress surrounding these low-key holidays, and you can invent your own ways to celebrate them, from all-out party time, complete with costumes and props, to laid-back movie nights.

Schedule fun studies periodically. In our house, we call them DEAPs — Drop Everything and Play — and we pull them out when we feel like learning has become a bit of a grind and we want something new. A DEAP might be a new art curriculum or a complicated Lego kit; it might be a board game, a unit study, or a creative writing project. The idea is to have a built-in burst of fun to get you through the inevitable times when homeschooling starts to drag.

Have a birthday party for your favorite writer. ReadWriteThink maintains a great list of beloved kid’s lit authors’ birthdays, and you can set aside a day to read your favorite book, bake a cake, and sing an enthusiastic happy birthday to an author whose work you love.

Make a ritual of one everyday meal. Maybe it’s setting the table and lighting the candles for dinner or opening the window and pouring juice for breakfast — whatever meal you choose, establish a pattern that you follow every single day.

Have a Plan to Deal with Stress

Being in the moment can be the hardest when you’ve got big worries to deal with — when you’re confronted with a major life stress, like changing jobs, moving, unemployment, health problems, or relationship problems. Getting stuck in worry is totally normal — you’d be superhuman to get through a really big life upheaval without stress, but you can still find moments of peace by focusing.

Start with your breathing. People always say this — if you slow down and just focus on your breathing, clearing your mind of everything else, you’ll feel more centered and in the moment — but they always say it because it’s actually true. Take five minutes, and just breathe.

Single-task the little things. Resist the urge to listen to a podcast while you do the dishes or to respond to email when you’re eating lunch. Instead, use these pockets of time to be fully in the moment, focusing on the sights, smells, sounds, and sensations of the single thing you’re doing.

Make the Most of “Wasted Time”

Most homeschoolers spend plenty of time between the good stuff, whether you’re driving to and from lessons or squeezing in a load of laundry. Obviously every single one of these moments can’t be a profound experience, but there’s no reason some of them can’t.

Park farther away. Sure, a close spot is convenient, but parking farther from your destination gives you space to shake off the drive, connect with your kids, and refocus on what you’re about to do.

Do it together. Probably things like making dinner, sorting clothes for the laundry, or staking the tomato plants will take a little longer if you get your kids involved, but involving someone else in the process will automatically make you slow down and focus more on what you’re doing.

Let Housework Be Your Inspiration, Not Your Nemesis

You’re always going to have housework to do. Some people can find mindfulness in rituals like folding laundry or scrubbing toilets, but if housework just feels like, well, work, try adding a dash of fun to your chores.

Make it a party. Whether it’s a laundry-sorting mock-snowball fight, where you pile all the dirty laundry on your beds and sort it by throwing it into the correct hamper, or a sweeping and mopping dance party, making your everyday chores an excuse to play together can pull you all right into the moment.

Start a friendly competition. If there’s an everyday job you hate, turn it into a competition. Time how long it takes everyone to work together to wash the dishes or fold the laundry, and make a point of trying to beat your best time. (Make it clear that smashed plates and crumpled-up T-shirts don’t count as finishing the job!) Keep your family’s best time posted prominently, and you may find that racing the clock makes that dreaded chore zip by.

Employ a little logic. When you’re tackling a big mess — cleaning up the playroom or a big day of lawn work — up the ante by putting together a mystery for your family to solve: Borrow or concoct a logic puzzle, and break it into pieces that you hide in ziplock bags around your work site. As kids clean, they find clues to help them put together the answer. Not a logic puzzle fan? Try a scavenger hunt instead.

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How to Raise Self-Directed Learners

The homeschool dream is to have kids who learn because they want to — but what if your kids don’t seem to be finding their passion? Patience, persistence, and following your own joy is key.

Jen* was in love with project-based learning. She followed a gorgeously photographed blog by a homeschool mom whose elementary school son was always spending months researching and building Viking ships, or making obsessively detailed salt-dough maps of the continents, or filling up his birding journal by learning the names and songs of all the birds in the family’s community. This was what homeschooling was all about: A bright, creative kid following his interests wherever they led him, leaving a series of Instagram-perfect projects in his wake.

Jen showed her 10-year-old son Dylan pictures of Viking ship and the birding journal. “Cool,” Dylan said. But he wasn't inspired to launch into any projects of his own — or even to copy the projects other kids were doing. “The only thing he got excited about was playing video games,” said Jen. “He’d work on something if I pushed him for as long as I kept pushing, but as soon as I left it in his hands, he was done. And I kept looking at all these pictures of someone else’s apparently perfect kid and thinking what am I doing wrong?”

One of the great benefits of homeschooling is being able to give our kids the opportunity to follow where their passions lead them. But one of the things homeschoolers don’t really talk about is what happens when our kids’ passions don’t seem to be leading them anywhere in particular. How do you embrace interest-led learning when your child doesn’t seem interested in learning, well, anything? Or when your child is constantly interested in new things — but the minute she hits a roadblock, she’s happy to give up her passion for something easier? What makes some kids ready to leap into the pursuit of knowledge and others hang back on the sidelines?

First off, it’s important to know that life learners aren’t born — they’re made. “Most kids are born with plenty of curiosity, but learning how to take that curiosity and apply it to the process of learning is something that gets developed over time,” says Ian Leslie, author of the book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. And while some kids are born with a natural stick-to-it-ness, most of us learn follow-through by doing it over and over, much the same way you develop muscles.

And the key to developing curiosity muscles seems to lie in having the freedom to explore what you want to explore. “When we first started homeschooling, I tried to get my daughter excited about bugs, about the Civil War, about rocks,” says Anne*, who’s been homeschooling her 11-year-old daughter for three years. “I’d bring home all this stuff from the library and look up all this stuff online, and she just wasn’t interested in any of it. I’d had this vision of us cheerfully studying all these things together as homeschoolers, and I felt like I was failing.”

Then Anne happened to overhear her then-9-year-old daughter playing in her room one afternoon, reciting poetry to one of her dolls. It turned out her daughter was passionate about writing poetry, and as soon as Anne stepped back and let her daughter’s interest lead the way, independent learning bloomed in the Carver house.

“It’s hard to take that step back when your kids haven’t expressed a clear interest in something, but sometimes that’s what they need to find their passion,” Anne says.

Some kids have a clear passion from birth: My friend’s daughter’s birding adventures started before kindergarten, and now that she’s in high school, she leads birding walks in the local parks and even teaches a birding class to little kids at her homeschool co-op. Other kids find passions everywhere — one year, they’re hooked on martial arts; the next, they’re performing in community theater; then, they shift gears and become amateur astronomers. Their interests may change over time, but their passionate pursuit of them is a constant. Other kids, though, may need a little more time and space to find their passions.

That’s not a sign that your child isn’t cut out to be an independent learner, it’s just a sign that he needs space to discover what he cares about. Give it to him by making your home a space that fosters curiosity. Make a point of filling your bookshelves with a mix of interesting fiction and non-fiction books, and grab titles just because they look interesting for your library basket. Ask questions — and be genuine about it; your child will know if you’re just pretending to wonder something or if you’re asking out of genuine curiosity. Encourage your child to help you think of ideas to consider what the answer might be, then figure out how to find out together. Try to relax rules wherever you can to encourage creative exploration — fascinatingly, a 2011 study published in the Journal of Creative Behavior found that kids who were considered to be in the most creative five-percent of their class lived in homes where there was an average of fewer than one rules — such as homework time or screen time limits — while their less creative peers had an average of six such rules they had to follow. The key isn’t to push your child in a particular direction but to give her a space where she has plenty of room to discover what her passion is.

Finding that passion really is the key to self- directed learning, says Deborah Stipek, Ph.D, dean of Stanford University’s School of Education and the author of Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning. Children are motivated to learn about what interests them, so tapping into your child’s unique fascinations is the key to sparking life-long learning, Stipek says.

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Once your children have found the ideas that spark for them, your job becomes creating a space where they can explore those ideas in meaningful ways. “That’s our job as parents: Children point the way, and we help them clear the path,” says Raymond Wlodkawski, Ph.D., author of Creating Highly Motivating Classrooms for All Students. As homeschoolers, we’re tempted to turn every passion into a unit study — but while that can be a fun way to explore a topic, the whole point of self-directed learning is for kids to figure out how they can pursue a topic on their own. Helping kids clear the path to exploring their passions requires a careful combination of independence and support.

Set the right example. If you want your children to develop into life learners, you’ve got to become a life learner yourself. For some of us, this revelation is delightful — finally, a legitimate excuse to learn to knit/study astronomy/obsess over Stuart monarchs. For others, it can feel a little intimidating, especially if we’ve grown up in a world that values filling-in-the-blanks over creative exploration. Either way, the key is to think about how you’d like kids to harness their creativity and start doing that in your own life. Start your own library list, and tell them about it — “I put some books about gardening on the hold list because I’m thinking it might be fun to start a container garden.” Let them know how you’re pursuing your own projects: “I’m about to watch this YouTube video about hand-lettering that seems really cool — want to watch it with me?” or “I’ve never done this kind of weaving before, and my fingers are having trouble adjusting — how do you think it’s looking?” You’re not just modeling the tools to translate curiosity into learning — you’re also showing your kids that you value the process of self-directed learning enough to do it yourself.

Gradually shift responsibility. Most of us aren’t born knowing how to start, work through, and complete a project — we learn to do it, and kids may need a lot of guidance getting started with independent learning. You don’t have to sit back and do nothing during the early stages of project- based learning. It’s okay to set simple tasks and help your child follow through on them — “Let’s check out this video on soap carving and see if there are any tips to help with getting started” or “I saw this book on bees at the library, so I grabbed it — let’s check and see if it explains how the hive is built.” As your child learns what tools to use, you can redirect responsibility back to him: “Hmmm, good question — where do you think we could find the answer?” Eventually, your proctor role will become more and more removed from your child’s investigations, but a little hand-holding as your child develops motivation and follow-through skills can be essential.

Introduce new skills as needed. Sometimes your child’s interests will zoom ahead of the rest of her learning. For instance, your astronomy-obsessed daughter may lack the math foundation to understand astronomical orbits the way she wants to, or your son’s tennis passion keeps getting derailed because he wants to hang up his racket every time he loses a match. If you recognize that your child needs to develop a particular attitude, skill, or concept in order to succeed in his project, that’s wonderful news. When your child has the opportunity to learn something because she genuinely needs to know it to pursue an interest, the actual learning process is surprisingly easy. (I swear that my own child became a reader so that she could identify different Pokemon moves.)

Prepare for bumpy patches. Like most adults, kids can very enthusiastic about a new idea or a new subject but lose steam fast when things don’t come together as easily as they’d expected. (This can be especially true for kids who are transitioning into homeschooling from a more traditional school, where they didn’t have the freedom to explore topics independently.) Their enthusiasm wanes in direct proportion to their frustration. Some kids naturally bounce back from roadblocks, ready to seek new solutions or try new things, but others can internalize the problems — “I’m too stupid to do this” — or project frustrations onto their subject — “math is just dumb.” Sometimes frustration is a signal that it’s time to move on, and there’s nothing to gain from forcing a kid to follow her passion when she’s clearly not inspired by it at the moment. Often, though, this frustration can be overcome, and stepping in to help problem-solve can help your child over the hump. (Just keep in mind that you’re a brainstorming collaborator, not a teacher telling your child what to do next — make suggestions, but follow her lead.) The benefits to getting past a roadblock can be huge. Successfully overcoming challenges and failures to finish a project not only makes kids proud of their work, it also increases the likelihood that they’ll work to follow through on future projects. “It’s true that you’re more likely to want to do something that you think you’re good at, but overcoming challenges on your own is actually more motivating than just being naturally good at something,” says Stipek.

Look for opportunities for independence. Intellectual independence is a major component for successful self-directed learning, but kids often need other kinds of independence, too. If you gradually increase your child’s responsibility — letting him grab groceries from another aisle in the supermarket, making him responsible for getting his own lunches, allowing him to set up a movie date with a group of friends — that independence will start to bloom in his learning adventures, too.

Don’t make the mistake of needing to show off your child’s learning. It’s tempting to want to share your children’s accomplishments, but resist the urge to ask them to display their knowledge just for the sake of displaying it. (“Tell Grandma about how the Vikings discovered North America, honey.”) Instead, ask your child a meaningful question or wait for him to bring up the subjects that interest him. “It’s much better to engage your child in an active inquiry than to ask him to spit out routine knowledge,” says Lucy Calkins, Ph.D., professor of curriculum and teaching at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

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And what about Jen and Dylan, the family we met at the beginning of this article? Well, Dylan, now 13, never fell in love with project-based homeschooling, but he did discover a passion for computer coding after his grandparents bought him a Kano kit. “He’s writing code to create digital flashcards for his spelling words and writing a script for a video game he wants to create,” says Jen. “His passion didn’t end up looking the way I thought it would, but he definitely found it. And I think I can take a little credit for trying to create an environment that made that possible for him.”

*last names removed for online publication

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How to Write a Homeschool Mission Statement (And Why You Should)

It’s easy to get so caught up in your everyday to-learn lists that you lose sight of the bigger picture of what you want your homeschool life to feel like — but a mission statement can help you set a purpose so that your homeschool feels deliberate and successful.

A clear mission statement is what gives your homeschool focus, says Lillian Ahern, a life coach and homeschool mom. “Your mission statement is what helps keep you on track, helps you choose between Option A and Option B, helps you stay in touch with the values that matter to you, and helps you set goals and celebrate success,” say Ahern. “It’s one of those crucial things that we often don’t realize we need.”

A mission statement does three great things for your homeschool:

1. A mission statement gives you focus. With so many options — for curriculum and classes and activities and philosophies — how do you choose? If you have a mission statement, you choose the options that best line up with what's important to you. If family time is important, you might not want to sign up for every single activity so that you have plenty of downtime together at home.

2. A mission statement prepares you for problems. Sadly, it can't eliminate all your homeschool problems, but it can help you see them coming so they don't knock you over one Monday morning. For instance, if preparing your kids for college is a goal and you know you don't want to teach high school math, you have plenty of time to figure out a way to deal with high school math that doesn't involve you teaching it.

3. A mission statement gives you metrics for success. One of the biggest challenges for homeschoolers is knowing whether we are doing a good job — are our kids learning what they need to? And what standard do we use to determine that anyway? A mission statement gives us our own standard of measurement, and we can evaluate each year in terms of how successful we were at living up to our mission.

So how do you write a homeschool mission statement? If you've never written a mission statement, it's surprisingly straightforward — no corporate lingo required. Instead, think about three big questions: What will your homeschool do? How will you do it? What will be the end result? After you've spent some time brainstorming in your preferred way — whether that's journaling, mood board making, or just talking it through with a friend — identify two values and one big-picture goal for your homeschool.

Values are the things that are important for your family — the ideas that you want your homeschool to support and reinforce. When we started homeschooling, we were pulling our daughter out of traditional school, so my values ended up being reactions to things that I didn't like about our life with her in school: 1, I wanted my kids to develop a deep love of learning and the confidence in their abilities that goes with that, and 2, I wanted our family life to anchor our days. Your values may be reactive, too — they may point to something happening in your life that you want to change — but they can also be proactive, envisioning future possibilities. Your values may include things like giving your kids a diverse and inclusive education that isn't whitewashed, or showing them the world through travel and learning, or nurturing their creative spirits. Every family's values will look a little different — that's one of the great things about homeschooling, being able to take those individual values and use them as a cornerstone in building your child's education. As you think, you'll probably come up with way more than just two values, so one of the challenges of writing a mission statement is honing in your focus to the two that best reflect what is important to you. Focusing in on just two values gives you a clear picture of your homeschool priorities — if you try to make everything a priority, you'll end up with perpetually scattered priorities. (Don't let this scare you: Lots of times, you'll recognize that many of your priorities can fall under the umbrella of one bigger value.)

In addition to values, you need a goal — something your homeschool is working toward. For us, that goal was always to prepare my kids so that they had all their options open for whatever they wanted to do next. (I didn't go into homeschooling expecting that we'd keep doing it all the way through high school, even though that's how it turned out!) Your goal might be to prepare your kids for college, or to meet your state's academic standards every year, or to empower them to start a business, or to give them the tools they need to build whatever future they imagine, or to enjoy their childhoods without worrying about the future. Just as with values, your goal is likely to be unique to your family — and you may have a big goal that carries you all the way through high school or a smaller goal that's focused on getting you through the next six months. Either way is totally okay, as long as it reflects what's really important to you for your homeschool.

To turn your values and goal into a mission statement, all you have to do is combine them into a sentence. It doesn't have to be a fancy sentence — in fact, when it comes to mission statements, simpler is better. (Our is just “I want our homeschool to instill my kids with love and confidence for learning and to put our family life first, so that my kids are emotionally and academically prepared for whatever they want to do next.”) Do take the time to write it down, though — preferably in your own handwriting because there's something weirdly empowering about the physical act of writing out a mission statement. Write yours on a fresh sheet of paper in your best handwriting, and see if it doesn't make you feel a little more confident about homeschooling.

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