How can we make our homeschool feel more creative?

A creative learning space is less about actual stuff and more about giving your children space to explore ideas in different ways.

Veteran teacher Eloise Salvatore suggests these strategies to inspire creative learning in your secular homeschool:

Make projects open-ended. Creativity blooms when kids get to make decisions about their own learning outcomes, so when you assign a project, encourage your child to determine the scope and rubric for her project herself. The rubric is especially important, says Salvatore, because giving students freedom to decide what makes a good project has a long-term creativity benefit that goes beyond any individual project.

Leave space for unstructured learning. If your schedule is too full of to-dos, kids don’t always have room to be creative. Try cutting one class or extracurricular each season and leaving a chunk of space completely open for kids to use however they want.

Find opportunities for group problem solving. Working with other people on a specific challenge can inspire all kinds of creativity. This is easier to pull off in a classroom full of kids, but homeschoolers can get a similar benefit by joining programs like Destination Imagination or Odyssey of the Mind, which are built around group problem solving.

Get out of the classroom. Salvatore says finding fieldwork opportunities for her students is always a challenge, but homeschoolers have the edge here. Look for internships, opportunities to lead classes or workshops in areas of interest, short-term volunteer projects or job opportunities, or other ways for your students to put their skills to work in the real world.

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3 Real-Life Ways to Organize Your Homeschool

Whether you live to color-code or need a system that flexes and changes with your family’s needs, keeping good homeschool records is essential. And you can do it — all you need is a system that you’ll actually use.

Homeschooling ends up being as much a lifestyle choice as an educational one, and like any part of a busy life, homeschooling can feel like too much some days, too little other days, and a whole lot of stress in between. A schedule isn’t going to give you more hours in the week, but the right schedule can help you make peace with the hours that you have and feel good about how you’re spending them. These three secular homeschool organization methods are flexible, friendly, and — best of all — guaranteed guilt-free, even if you don’t follow them exactly.

THE WEEKLY MEETING

Works great for: Families whose schedules change from week to week

Lara and Ken Miller had the school routine down pat, but when they decided to homeschool their 12-year-old and 9-year-old sons, it felt like everything was constantly falling apart.

“Every time I’d feel like we were getting things under control, something would change — math would get more intensive, or we’d sign up for a nature center class, or one of my sons would get a part in a community theater show,” Lara says. “There was no normal, so however hard we tried to color code or share calendars or meal plan, stuff slipped through the cracks.”

After an extended soccer season made refrigerator scramble dinners and morning late-starts all-too-common, the Millers knew something had to give. So Lara and Ken decided to give up planning in favor of taking it one week at a time. Every Sunday night, they sit down together, and figure out the week ahead. Sometimes, everything falls into a neat rhythm, but usually, they’re coordinating drop-offs and pick-ups, grocery shopping and hands-on learning time.

“None of our weeks look the same, but they feel balanced because we take the time to sit down and figure them out,” Lara says. “Stuff pops up. Stuff always does. But this level of planning means that when something pops up, we can handle it without everything else falling into chaos.”

To make the weekly meeting work for your family:

• Keep a running to-do list so that all your need-tos, ought-tos, and want-tos are in one place. The key to this system is being able to accurately plot your week’s to-do list.

• Plug in downtime. “Early on, we crammed every minute full, but that’s no sustainable,” Lara says. “Now I build 30-minute windows on either side of all our activities — and Ken and I put a date night on the calendar every night, even if it’s just an hour to chill and watch The Good Place.”

• Keep a dry erase board for command central. The Millers in- clude what’s for dinner, classes and les- sons for each day, and extracurricular fun on theirs so that everyone knows what’s happening each day.

• Use common sense. You can’t always do everything, and instead of trying, a weekly meeting lets you set your priorities. It’s easier to say, “sorry, we’re going to miss park day this week,” if you can say, “but look, we’re going to see that awesome puppet show on Thursday, and we have a playdate with Ellie and Jen.”

THE PLAN-AS-YOU-GO SCHEDULE

Works great for: Families who have trouble sticking to a schedule

We’ve been homeschooling for more than a decade, and I think I’ve tried every organization method out there — for about three weeks. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how many pretty calendars I bought, no matter how good my intentions were, planning did not work for us.

I’d schedule a day for math and science and wake up with an itch to visit the beach. Or we’d schedule two hours for history and end up spending a week on a rabbit trail that we couldn’t resist. It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that I didn’t need a schedule to create balance and rhythm in our homeschool — I just needed a way to track what we did every day so that I could look back and see the overall balance and rhythm in our homeschool and so that I could make adjustments if I noticed a gap.

This system, which I brilliantly called plan-as-you-go homeschooling, has worked well for us because it acknowledges that we are not going to schedule our weeks or months in advance. We’re going to take each day as it comes, and having an organization system that embraces that has reduced my scheduling stress significantly.

To make the plan-as-you-go schedule work for your family:

• Be consistent with keeping records. Writing down what you did each day is the essential part of this method, but you really have to do it every single day. If you skip days or wait until the end of the month, you’ll forget things and lose that sense of scrupulous record-keeping. I jot down my notes every night before I pick up my bedtime book.

• Consider color-coding. I know it’s nerdy, but having a consistent color I use to make notes for each kid makes finding what I am looking for much easier.

• Review often. A key to feeling good about this method is going back to check for gaps: You may notice that you’ve been missing science for a couple of weeks or that you have been doing way more history than you thought. Reviewing helps you feel more confident that you’re keeping the right balance.

• Don’t get too fancy. The more complicated your system is, the harder it will be to maintain — and you already know you’re not a person who likes scheduling things! Cool fonts and fancy stickers can be fun, but don’t let them get between you and efficient record keeping.

LOOP SCHEDULING

Works great for: Families who have trouble getting to everything on their to-do list

When Emily Muller Rylands started homeschooling her 10-year-old daughter, she had great plans to cover everything from nature study and art to hands-on science and ancient history. But it turned out that real life kept getting in the way.

“I’d make schedules, and we’d get invited to a theater production or really get into a book we were reading or spend way more time on math than I’d planned,” says Emily.

Emily felt guilty, and her daughter Annabeth felt frustrated that they’d chosen all this exciting work that they never actually got around to doing.

Loop scheduling proved to be the answer. In loop scheduling, you don’t try to break out your to-do list into a daily plan. Instead, you make a master list of all the things you want to do, and you pay attention to where you leave off each day so that you can pick back up with the next thing on your list when you come back. Loop scheduling lets you move at your own pace, but it ensures that you don’t accidentally skip music appreciation for another year.

“We do a little math and reading together every day, so those don’t go in the schedule — and on super-busy weeks, that may be most of what we end up doing,” says Emily. “But when we start the day, I always know what we want to do next.”

Emily loops based on how much time she wants to spend on a subject, so art and science occur twice as often as handwriting and dictation. When they get to the end of the list, they start again back at the top.

“This doesn’t seem complicated, but it revolutionized our homeschooling,” says Emily. “Before, I always felt like we were behind and not getting enough done. Now, we have a plan.”

Tips for making loop scheduling work for your family:

• Use the categories that make sense for your homeschool. For some people, that might be as simple as “math,” but other people might want to schedule time for “Beast Academy” and “Singapore.” Your schedule can be as specific or relaxed as you want.

• Be creative. Emily uses loops to keep work from being routine — she and Annabeth include artist studies, painting, drawing, and mixed media on their loop so that they're experimenting with different art projects throughout the year.

• Keep a master schedule. Emily laminates hers and uses a dry erase marker to check off each item as they get to them. When they’ve worked through the whole list, she erases and starts over.

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Our Morning Routine

How you start your homeschool day sets the tone for everything else. There’s no one right morning homeschool routine — but there’s a right routine for your family.

It’s so exciting to be writing about homeschooling kindergarten through fifth grade for home/school/life. My 6-year-old son Malcolm and I have just started our homeschool journey together. I am drawn to Waldorf-style homeschooling, so we are doing lots of art and hands-on activities — and we have established a morning routine that has become our favorite part of the day.

Morning time is a Waldorf idea. I don’t use the Oak Meadow curriculum because I am not sure we are curriculum people, but a friend lent me The Heart of Learning, and I felt really drawn to the idea of the morning routine. We follow our own rhythms for waking up and making our morning meal and preparing for the day. Since we don’t need to be anywhere most days, we don’t bother with an alarm clock but follow the natural rhythm of our bodies instead. When we’re ready to move from waking-up time to learning time, we light a candle together to mark the transition and recite our morning verse together:

Good morning dear earth Good morning dear sun
Good morning dear flowers and fairies, every one
Good morning dear beasties and birds in the tree
Good morning to you
Good morning to me

We stretch down to the ground as we say good morning to the earth and up to the sky as we greet the sun so that we move our bodies to match the words of the rhyme.

We then collect a scoop of birdseed and walk outside to scatter it in our backyard. We check the thermometer and rain gauge on our back porch and observe the sky together. When Malcolm is older, he will write these observations down in our Weather Book, but for now, I am the record keeper. Back inside, Malcolm crayons a picture of the morning sky in the Weather Book, and we enjoy trying to find just the right shade of blue or gray together. Someday, I would like to collect a year’s worth of drawings into a Sky Book. I am learning, though, that I can’t think too much about the future during morning time because morning time is about being in the moment. Malcolm is good at this already, but I am still learning.

We choose a book from our reading basket together every Monday, and we read the same book together every morning that week. At first, the idea of reading a book over and over again seemed like it would be boring. I was afraid my active little boy would not have the patience to keep listening to the same story. We’ve discovered, though, that his attention span actually stretches the more times we read a story. By the end of the week, he is more transfixed and focused than he was the first time we read it.

“I am learning, though, that I can’t think too much about the future during morning time because morning time is about being in the moment. Malcolm is good at this already, but I am still learning.”

After our story, we sing together while we do handwork. Malcolm is finger-knitting, and helping him takes all my patience and concentration. If I try to do something else — sneak in some reading of my own or start lunch preparations or even just daydream about our afternoon plans — this part of the morning never goes well. I must be fully present. This routine is teaching me that I have not always been as present with my son as I believed myself to be. I am learning to be with him where he is, and I am humbled by how challenging it has been for me to do this. The songs we sing are simple songs about the seasons or the outdoor world—most of them are from Channa A. Seidenberg’s I Love to Be: Songs in the Mood of Fifth. I did not grow up with many little songs, and so I find this book a useful resource.

When we are ready to move on with the day, we return to our candle, which is still flickering merrily. We watch the little flame dance for a few minutes, and then, when he is ready, Malcolm leads us in our closing verse:

Round and round the earth is turning,
Turning always into morning,
And from morning into night.

He blows out the candle with a big burst of air and laughs as the orange flame turns into white smoke. Morning time is over, and we are ready for whatever adventures the day holds for us in our homeschool life.

Aminata is the author of HSL’s It’s Elementary column, focused on homeschooling the early years. This column was originally published in the fall 2018 issue of HSL.

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How to Get Excited about Homeschooling Again

When your homeschool starts to feel like more work than fun, it’s time to make a change.

When your homeschool mojo goes missing, the day-to-day work of homeschooling becomes a slog. And this doesn’t just happen to folks who use workbooks — homeschool slump can strike any kind of homeschooler. Sometimes, all you need to get that mojo back is a break — hello, summer! — but if you’re lounging by the pool in late July still feeling blah about next year’s homeschool, these strategies might be just what you need to get excited about homeschooling again.

Do more of what you like and less of what you don’t.

What if you only did the parts of your job you actually liked? This is the questions Marla Koutoujian, a career coach in New York City, who helps professions who feel stuck in a career rut, asks all her new clients, and she says homeschool moms should ask themselves the same thing.

Koutoujian says homeschoolers and corporate bosses often run into the same problem: The better you get at your job, the less you get to do the parts that you actually like. For business folks, this can be a harder problem to navigate, but homeschoolers have the freedom to recreate their homeschool from the ground up every day. Start by thinking about the things you really like — go back in time, too, and think about the moments in your homeschool that brought you the most joy. Those are the things that should be at the top of your to-do list every single day and the things that you should give the most time and energy to because those are the things that give back to you. 

This summer is the perfect time to do just that: Make your list, and figure out how to get more of what you love about homeschooling into every single day. Maybe this means you’ll sign up for more classes or that you’ll stop taking so many outside classes. Maybe it means you’ll toss the workbooks or that you’ll buy more workbooks, that you’ll get back to reading aloud every day or that you’ll play outside more. The key is to identify what brings you joy and to build your homeschool days around that joy list instead of a less-than-thrilling to-do list.

Find your social support network. 

“I could not homeschool if I didn’t have people to talk to about homeschooling,” says Debra,* a homeschool mom in Ontario. Debra relies on weekly park days with friends and an active online discussion group to keep her homeschool motivation going strong.

A strong support network can be the difference between a ho-hum homeschool and one that’s bursting with energy. “I am much more excited about homeschooling when I hear about other people’s great homeschool ideas and successes,” Debra says. “And talking about challenges sometimes reminds me of solutions I’ve found and forgotten about.”

If you’re not lucky enough to have a strong local homeschool community, keep looking: Homeschool networks tend to be small, grassroots organization that aren’t always easy to find and tap into. The more homeschool events and activities you visit, the more likely you are to find a group that’s the right fit for your family. And if you can’t find a local group, look online: There are tons of homeschool forums and support groups that exist in the virtual world. If your homeschool friends are far-flung, you might also consider starting an online or email group, where you can share your homeschool stories. If you do, Debra recommends establishing the same three rules that she says work well for her group: Limit griping, focus on problems as something to be solved, and share personal experiences (“This worked for me”) rather than giving direct advice (“You should do this.”).

Revamp your space. 

Sitting in the same chair and staring at the same walls for years can gradually erode your enthusiasm for anything you do in that space, says interior designer Laila Carsters, who specializes in office design. Start in the room where you spend most of your hands-on homeschooling time — maybe it’s a school room, but it might be your kitchen, living room, or even your back porch. Refresh the walls with a new paint color, hang a few new or moved-from- other-rooms pictures, rearrange the furniture, switch the blinds for sheer curtains to let in more light, introduce a few plants — you don’t have to spend a lot of money or be professionally trained to give your work space a facelift, says Carsters. If even a small redo isn’t an option right now, relocate. If you usually homeschool in the school room, start doing your readalouds in the living room or in the backyard.

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Homeschool Makeover: How Can I Make Our Homeschool Less School-y?

Jenn’s been struggling to find a balance between the structure and academics she needs and the fun, laidback vibe she wants her homeschool to have. We help her make some adjustments to make her homeschool more relaxed.

“I love the idea of unschooling, but I’m never going to be an unschooler,” says Jennifer Harris. Jenn homeschools her 9-year-old son Ian in a style that she calls Charlotte Mason-ish—“but lately, it’s feeling like all workbooks and dictation and sitting-at-the-desk time, which is too far in the other direction,” Jenn says.

We asked Jenn to track her time over a couple of weeks so that we could get a clearer idea of what a typical day in her homeschool looked like. Jenn was surprised to discover that she and Ian usually spent about two hours a day on school time—“it feels like so much more,” Jenn says. On most days, they’d start school after breakfast, then sit down together at the table to work. Sometimes Ian would read independently, sometimes Jenn would read aloud, but they’d stay at the table, working their way through one subject at a time, until it was time to start lunch. Jenn’s husband, Frank, comes home for lunch every day, so she and Ian hurry to get the table cleaned up and lunch prepared so that they can all enjoy the meal together.

“It’s gotten to the point where school feels like work to both of us,” says Jenn. “I care about staying on top of things academically, but I hate the way our learning process is starting to feel like a job. Is there a way to bring back fun without sacrificing academics?”

The PLAN

Since it was pretty clear that Jenn wasn’t overdoing it time-wise — two to three hours is a reasonable amount of hands-on school time for a third-grader — we decided to focus on the way she was using her time. By spending all their school time at the table and keeping an eye on the clock ticking toward a lunchtime deadline, Jenn and Ian weren’t able to relax into their routine. Here’s how we changed things up:

Moving classes to the afternoon. When I asked Jenn why they were doing all their school work before lunch, she paused and said, “You know what? I don’t even know.” It turns out that afternoons are quiet at the Harris house. Except for a regular Friday park day, Jenn and Ian are hanging out at home in the afternoons. We suggested moving their second hour of school time to the afternoon to make the morning more relaxed. Instead of jumping into their next lesson after handwriting, Ian starts his independent reading and Jenn gets household stuff out of the way until it’s time to prep lunch.

Starting the day with a meeting at the table. Jenn felt like table time was essential to starting their homeschool day. “I need the structure of sitting down in a consistent spot every day and saying okay, now we’re homeschooling,” Jenn says. We suggested that Jenn keep doing this — but instead of spending an entire morning at the table, she and Ian could get the same down-to-business boost from a morning meeting there right after breakfast. While they’re at the table, Ian does his daily copy work and handwriting practice.

Relocate for different subjects. The kitchen table is the best place for Ian to practice handwriting, but his other subjects might benefit from a change of scene. We suggested that Jenn and Ian switch locations each time they move to a new subject: math on the patio, history on the couch, spelling at the desk in Ian’s room, etc. This kind of musical chairs isn’t just a way to transition between subjects—researchers have discovered that students who work on material in different places retain it better than those who sit in the same spot to study every day.

Integrate more reading aloud. Ian’s a strong reader, and Jenn’s been encouraging him to do more independent reading, but since readalouds are one of the things Jenn and Ian like best about homeschooling, we suggested that they bring back the readaloud. (Kids benefit from being read to long after they’re able to finish chapter books on their own, and reading together means you get to learn together—which is one of the best ways to feel like your homeschool is a fun, relaxed place.) We suggested that Jenn and Ian go back to doing book-based subjects, including history and science, as readalouds and letting Ian keep his reading skills sharp with independent reading.

The results

“I didn’t realize such simple changes could make such a big difference, but they really have,” Jenn says when we follow up with her. She and Ian have been implementing their new routine over the past month, and Jenn says everything is working better than she had hoped.

“I think I bought into the idea that when we hit third grade, school should become more school-like,” Jenn says. “And the result was that Ian was learning about the same amount but we were having a lot less fun. I think I needed someone to say ‘Hey, you can teach your kid what he needs to know and still have fun doing it.’” 

This column is excerpted from the summer 2016 issue of HSL. Do you need a homeschool makeover? Email us at hello@homeschoollifemag.com with a description of what’s tripping up your homeschool life, and we may feature your makeover in an upcoming issue.

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7 Easy Ways to Simplify Your Homeschool Day

How can homeschoolers get their work done and still find time for fun? It’s all about balance and letting go.

Let’s face it. Some homeschool days can drag on and on. There are days we overschedule, days when the kids seem to take forever to complete the simplest of tasks, and still other days where an emergency visit to the doctor to have an eraser removed from your two-year-old’s nose takes precedence. 

As the summer winds down, many homeschoolers are looking for ways to schedule their homeschool year without pulling their hair out. How do we balance it all without feeling like we are tied to textbooks at our kitchen table? Here are seven ways I’ve learned to relax and finish our day in record time. 

1. Stop when you achieve mastery.

Does your child really need to do those thirty math problems just because they are in the workbook? Do they understand the concept by completing only ten problems? Go with that, and move on when your child has mastered the skill. Don’t feel obligated to complete work just because it’s there or because a textbook publisher thought six pages was the appropriate amount of learning in this lesson. 

2. Skip the parts that don’t speak to you.

We use textbooks as more of a guide, rather than a script to follow. We pull out what we need and what excites us, and ditch the rest. All of the links, bonus questions, extra experiments, and “check this out” areas need not be done. Keep it simple. 

3. Combine subjects when you can.

Combining subjects is a great way to streamline homeschooling time. Work in language arts essays with history work. Combine art and language arts. We use unit studies when we can. And some subjects, like history and science, can work for kids at multiple levels with minimal adjustment on either end. Even if you’re not ready to lean all the way into this, combining a few subjects is a terrific way to seamlessly blend subjects into a cohesive learning experience. 

4. Make a schedule that works.

Not every subject or learning experience needs to be covered every day. Try a four-day schedule, and leave the fifth day for down time or for finishing up projects or work that needs more attention. Try a Monday, Wednesday, Friday/Tuesday, Thursday schedule. Maybe foreign language or physical education only needs to be done twice a week. If you are scheduling every subject daily, be sure that you are realistic about the amount of material you think you can cover. 

5. Don’t let your schedule rule the day.

Schedules and routines look great on paper, but the reality is that the day seldom goes as planned. If we miss an assignment due to illness, or life, we simply move it to the next day. I also evaluate the lesson to decide if this is something that can be tossed entirely. Certainly, you don’t want to skip learning that needs to happen in progression, but tossing an experiment, art project, or busy work is perfectly acceptable. 

6. Stop comparing.

Comparing your day or homeschool to others is a quick way to lose confidence. Comparing makes you feel as if you can’t keep up with what everyone else is doing. Set goals for YOUR children and YOUR homeschool, and work toward those. On days when you fall short, look at the bigger picture of what has been accomplished and where learning has leapt ahead. 

7. Try something different.

If you are feeling suffocated by a schedule, try tossing it to the side. Go with the flow for a few days and see how the kids are responding. If it’s working, great; if not, try again. Unschooling can be a great way to alleviate the pressure of a schedule. Give it a go to see if it works for your family. 

Pinterest, blogs, curriculum providers, and Instagram can suck time from our day and make us want to try every new thing that comes along. Loosely schedule what you want to cover each week in a planner and then whittle it down to more specific details. Be flexible when you don’t get to everything. Tomorrow’s another day. 

5 Questions that Will Help You Plan Your Homeschool Year

Planning your homeschool year is about more than just making a weekly checklist or figuring out what to use for science. If you want your homeschool to grow with you and take your kids where they want to go, keeping these questions in mind can help you stay on track.

When you plan your homeschool year, you probably spend a lot of time on the nuts-and-bolts: What math curriculum will you use? How will you organize your days? What kind of output and assessments do you want to rely on? These planning pieces can be helpful, but they’re only part of the story — and for most of us, they’ll end up being the least important part.

“If you’re homeschooling, it’s usually because of something bigger than just curriculum,” says Felicity Sterling, a homeschool consultant in Chicago. “Defining what that ‘bigger’ is may be the difference between a successful, happy homeschool experience and one that leaves you unsatisfied.” There’s no one right way to plot your homeschool’s bigger picture, but these questions can help you figure out what matters most to you in that bigger picture.

Where do you want to be a year from now?

It’s easy to get so focused on getting through the year that you forget to think about where you want to be when you declare the year officially over — but the whole point of the journey is to aim for somewhere you want to be. Think about what would make your homeschool feel successful and productive: It might be getting into a groove with your schedule, or checking off some academic milestones, or being part of an active homeschool community. Really think about what you’d like your homeschool to look like when next summer rolls around — what do you need to do to get there?

What’s working great?

A lot of people get excited about trying new things when they’re in the middle of homeschool planning, and new things are awesome! But planning season is also an excellent opportunity to pause and reflect on all the things that really worked for your homeschool. These are the things you want to hang onto — whether it’s a schedule that kept the days running smoothly, a learning style that always clicked, or even a kind of notebook that everybody loved. Don’t get so distracted in the pursuit of the Next Great Thing that you lose sight of the things that are already pretty good. You want to make sure that in your excitement about trying new things, you’re not sidelining tried-and-true homeschool joys.

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What are you doing because of other people?

It’s not that other people’s input is useless: If your mom thinks your 7-year-old needs more friends or another homeschool mom has had awesome success with the local forest school, that information may be useful for your homeschool — but it also may not. Part of successful homeschooling is being able to hear what other people have to say, take what works for you, and let go of the rest. Pay attention to how much of your plan is based on other people’s input — your sister-in- law’s concerns or that cool mom on Instagram’s plans — and be willing to adjust those plans first if things aren’t working. You know your kids best. You are their best advocate. Lots of people will have opinions, especially when they find out you are homeschooling. You just have to remember that you know your life better than they do.

What are you doing to build relationships?

Homeschooling can get complicated because you are both parent and teacher, but the beating heart of both of those roles is your relationship with your children. Yes, you have academic and social goals for your child, but make sure that you’re being intentional about building a relationship with her, too. Make room for the things you student loves, give her plenty of say in how her days are structured, and really listen when she gives you feedback on how things are going — especially if it’s not feedback you really want to hear. Bringing your kid into the planning process is one of the best ways to build a homeschool that works.

Where’s the fun?

What are you looking forward to? When you look at your plan, is there anything that makes you smile just thinking about it? If not, why not? One of the keys to successful homeschooling is enjoying what you do — if you’re slogging through a to-do list that nobody is excited about, you’re missing all the fun and possibility of homeschooling. There may be parts of your homeschool life that feel hard or challenging, but there should be at least an equal number of parts that feel fun and exciting. If there aren’t, it’s time to readjust your balance.

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The Simple, Stress-Free Way to Make a Homeschool Plan You’ll Actually Use

The best way to plan your homeschool year is the way that works best for your particular homeschool — and like all the rest of homeschooling, it may require some trial and error to find the right balance. That’s why our “perfect” planning method is adaptable as you need it to be: Use the skeleton to make a loose frame for the year, or go all out and plan every week in advance. It’s your homeschool. Make a plan that works for you.

Here’s a dirty little secret about homeschooling: You don’t have to plan out your year to have a great year. In fact, some people wing it completely, while others pick a few big areas to focus on and let their kids’ interests and development guide them through the year. Planning is not an essential part of homeschooling — so if you’re not a planner or the prospect of mapping out your year in advance causes you more stress than pleasure, you are allowed to skip it.

“Homeschooling doesn’t require the same advance planning that running a classroom full of kids does,” explains life coach and homeschool consultant Gillian O’Keefe. “That means you can do it because you want to do it — because it makes your life easier or planning is fun for you.”

Reframing the question from “how do I plan my year?” to “do I want to plan my year?” makes planning an opportunity instead of an obligation. As a long-time planning nerd who is famous for mapping out every class before the first day of school, I appreciate the appeal of a shiny new planner full of color-coded priority lists — but as a homeschool mom, I have found that a looser approach actually works better for the way we learn. Other moms I know skip the planning completely, and their homeschools stay busy and productive all year long. And yes, some moms do keep spreadsheets for every subject for every class.

In other words, the best way to plan your homeschool year is the way that works best for your particular homeschool — and like all the rest of homeschooling, it may require some trial and error to find the right balance. That’s why our “perfect” planning method is adaptable as you need it to be: Use the skeleton to make a loose frame for the year, or go all out and plan every week in advance. It’s your homeschool. Make a plan that works for you.

Set Your Priorities

What’s the big point of this homeschool year? If you had to set two major goals for each of your kids for the coming year, what would they be? 

Sometimes, there’s a clear academic mission: Get better at handwriting, learn to read, finish algebra, write a research paper. Other time, it may be something academic-adjacent: Find some social outlets, learn how to be more comfortable taking criticism, get better at focusing on work while it’s happening. Your goals may be even more removed from actual academics: Build confidence, get comfortable trying new things. Before you dive into the questions of history curricula and robotics classes, get a sense of the big picture: What is it that you really want your kids to accomplish this year?

“Homeschoolers can get so focused on the details that they miss the big picture,” explains O’Keefe. “Without goalposts, you don’t know which way to run or when you’re getting close to success — so you never know how well your homeschool is working.”

When we homeschool, we’re making an unconventional choice, and that means we often lack a clear framework for checking our progress: Those grade-by-grade standards list may not match up to what we’re doing in our homeschool — in fact, they may be very different from what we want to do in our homeschools. In that case, though, we’ve got to create our own goals and priorities. Two per student is a good place to start — you need more than one goal so that if you need a break, you can take one to focus on something else, but if you start piling on goals, you lose that clear view of the horizon that well-set priorities can give you.

You can stop there if you want to, but for many of us, it helps to break those big priorities down into bimonthly goals: Come up with six “checkpoint goals” for each of your priorities.

“Think of checkpoint goals as progress checks — if your big goal for third grade is to work on handwriting, what are some steps that get you closer to that goal?” O’Keefe asks.

She suggests mini goals, like writing a letter to a friend or relative, finishing a handwriting workbook, taking notes from a video, and making a grocery list. Checkpoint goals don’t have to be big goals — the key is to pick things that reflect progress for your particular child. And while it may seem like these goals should spread evenly over the year, be aware that they often cluster.

“You may not make any visible progress for a couple of months, and then see several checkpoint goals happen in the same week,” says O’Keefe.

Buy Supplies

When it comes to choosing curriculum, you have to know both what you need and what you’ll actually use each year.

“Before you buy anything, take an honest inventory of your homeschool,” says life coach Colleen Bhasker, who specializes in helping homeschool families. “Be ruthless: Write down all the things that worked great in one column, all the things that worked fine in one column, and all the things that didn’t work in another column. Make a fourth column for things you don’t have but know you need.”

Before you replace something that isn’t working, take some time to figure out why it didn’t work: Were there too many practice problems? Did your kids want more human interaction? Did they tune out during videos? Get feedback from your kids, too: A good question is “what did you like about this program?” which often elicits more useful responses than “what didn’t you like?” (Consider recouping some of the cost by re-selling your used curriculum — one family’s miss is often another’s solid gold hit.)

It’s worth rooting around in your computer downloads (try searching different key terms) and through your bookshelves to make sure you haven’t already bought something for a subject you need to cover this year. Lots of us download stuff willy-nilly only to rediscover it a few years later, after we would have used it, so don’t skip this piece of planning. 

If you know what you need, you can start comparison shopping — many homeschool curriculum companies have their biggest sales around Memorial Day and in the early fall, so sign up for mailing lists to get information about discounts and coupon codes. If you need something but haven’t yet figured out what will fulfill that need, set a hard time limit for researching options. With so many choices, you could research curriculum forever, so you want to push yourself to take the next step.

Use your other lists to guide your purchases: If something’s on your worked-great column, it’s usually because the style as well as the content is a good fit for your family, so pay attention to patterns: Maybe your family does well with short, daily lessons or lots of project-based assignments. When you buy new curriculum materials, look for lessons that incorporate the things you already know work well for your family. Similarly, you can learn a lot from curriculum that works fine, even if it’s not life-shakingly inspiring. 

“Everything isn’t going to end up being a magic moment,” Bhasker says. “If something is working just fine, it’s probably worth sticking with it.”

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Homeschool Planning Central

Everything you need to plan your best homeschool yet

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Fill Your Days

There are two methods for planning homeschool days, and each has its pros and cons: 

Plan your weeks in advance, or keep a record as you go. If you are a planner and finishing your curriculum is important to you, planning things out can be a more comfortable strategy. Start by figuring out how many weeks you want to “do school” this year — for most people, that ends up being somewhere between 28 and 36 weeks. If you’re not sure, block off holidays and vacation time on your calendar, then add two weeks off in the spring and fall to cover sick days, don’t-want-to days, and unexpected fun days that might pop up. Break down your curriculum into units for each week that remains: Depending on how your program is set up, you may do a lesson or more a week, a chapter a week, an experiment a week, etc. You’ll need to spend time with lesson layouts to make this work.

Once you’ve broken down the curriculum by week, all you have to do is pencil it into your calendar, one week at a time. Since you’re already doing the work, now is also a good time to make a list of supplies you’ll need each week: art materials, supplies for experiments, etc. You may also want to make a note of tests and evaluations so that you can schedule those in the best way for your student — you might not want your first class back after the winter holidays to be a big math unit exam, for example.

Keep in mind that your schedule is a guideline, not a law, and that it probably will change, says O’Keefe. “Public school teachers rarely make it through their full syllabus, and you probably won’t either,” O’Keefe says. Be prepared to make adjustments as you go: A Trello board or sticky notes make this a little easier to do, since you can move pieces around instead of erasing or copying and pasting every week.

My personal preferred method involves tracking what you do instead of planning what you will do, but this can feel like flying by the seat of your pants to some people. The method is simple: Instead of plotting out what you’ll do every week, you work through your materials at your own pace, keeping track of what you complete each week. This lets your homeschool develop organically — if you want to spend more time on quadratic equations, there’s no rush to move onto the next thing; if you’re done with bugs after two weeks, you can jump right into your weather unit. There’s no way to fall behind, but you do have to trust that you’ll get where you need to go. This method is more comfortable for experienced homeschoolers, says O’Keefe, because we’ve learned how to trust the process. 

If you’re intrigued by this method but not sure you’re ready, try keeping a list as an ancillary to your other planning. At the end of the year, how you feel looking over the list of things you accomplished in your homeschool will be a good indicator of whether this method is for you.

Be vigilant about keeping up with whatever method you choose so that you have a record of your year.

Homeschool planning is as much art as it is science, and your method will ultimately be as individual as your homeschool. “You’re the one doing the work, so make sure the method works for you,” says Bhasker. “It doesn’t matter if it looks good on Pinterest or if it would convince your mom that homeschooling was a good choice, what matters is that it works for your homeschool.” 

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Take a Homeschool Retreat

Week 38 of the Happier Homeschool Challenge: Get inspired with a DIY homeschool retreat.

Mothers are the only workers who never get time off, said Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and that’s doubly true for homeschooling mothers, who cheerfully derail dinner prep to look up a particularly strange beetle in the bug guide and listen to impromptu poetry recitations while they’re in the bathroom. (Maybe that’s just me?) But time off every now and then is essential to maintaining your homeschooling mojo. While your books may be neatly shelved and your plans for the coming year ready to go, your homeschool soul could use a little nurturing. Whether you can spare a whole weekend or just a long afternoon, it’s worth the effort to make time for a homeschool retreat.

Retreats may seem like an old-fashioned notion, but the concept of reconnecting with yourself as a person and as a homeschooling parent is practically radical in these days of plugged-in, logged-on, non-stop presence. But homeschoolers are nothing if not radical (in both the original and now-dated modern sense of the word), and a retreat may be an inspiring way to bring fresh energy, insight, and life to your homeschool.

There are as many ways to plan a retreat as there are to homeschool, so we’ve put together a few suggestions that might work for your retreat or that might just serve as inspiration for your own retreat ideas.

Make your plans 

If you’re like me, you have a never-ending list of books you’d like to read and lectures you’d like to hear. Whip out that list and start narrowing down the options. Are you starting to freak out about the prospect of putting together transcripts for college? Maybe it’s time to download that mp3 on homeschooling high school. Do you need help with setting a rhythm for your days? A Waldorf book about parenting young children could be a good bet. Try to focus on a mix of practical information—you want to change up your science curriculum or you need help getting inspired to teach writing next year—and strictly inspirational stuff. (We’ve included some great books and lectures below.) And go ahead and throw in all those awesome curriculum catalogs you’ve been hoarding so you can finally flip through them at your leisure. Try to add a mix of media: You won’t want to spend the whole day listening to mp3s or staring at your computer screen.

Choose a location 

If you’re an introvert like me, the thought of a weekend of pure alone time probably seems blissful. But if you’re a social animal, you may get more from your weekend retreat if you invite a friend or two to join you. Either way, try to get away from the everyday—it’s going to be hard to give yourself over to recharging your batteries if you’re staring down a pile of laundry or constantly jumping up to refill someone’s cup of juice. If you can, splurge on a location that inspires you to relax, whether that’s a fancy hotel with room service and plush robes or a cozy cabin surrounded by hiking trails. Even an easy-on-the-budget, no-frills hotel room can make a comfortable setting for your retreat if you bring your electric tea kettle and a few candles. If money’s an issue, consider swapping baby-sitting with another homeschooling mom and set up your retreat in a spot with free wi-fi, like the library or a coffee shop.

Inspire yourself 

Whether it’s your first year homeschooling or your fifteenth, you’re your own best inspiration. Start your retreat by making a list of all the things you’ve done right: great trips you’ve taken, fun art or science activities you’ve done, parenting moments where you got it just right. If you’ve been homeschooling, use this time to write down what’s really worked for you in the past, whether it’s starting the morning with yoga, doing narrations with Story of the World, or making Monday your baking day. Not only will making this list of homeschool successes remind you that you’re already doing a great job homeschooling, it will also help guide your choices for the coming year and may remind you of fun stuff that’s worth incorporating in your homeschool plans.

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Define your homeschool’s mission 

What’s the purpose of your homeschool? Ideally, you have an answer to that question that sums up your homeschool’s philosophy: “To grow curious, engaged children who believe they can learn anything and do anything if they are willing to do the work” or “Our homeschool teaches our children how to find, evaluate, and use information so that they can achieve whatever goals they set for themselves” are both examples of the kinds of big-picture goals your homeschool might have. Not so much of a mission statement writer? Make a homeschool vision board instead, putting together quotes, images, and other items that represent your ideas of what you want your homeschool to be like in the coming months. 

Set your goals 

In addition to setting academic goals for your students, consider setting some goals for yourself. Whether you’d like to be better informed about chemistry before you tackle the subject next year or you’re longing to be less stressed about unfinished assignments, take a few minutes to think about what you’d like to accomplish personally this year. Homeschooling can be an all-consuming activity, and it’s easy to be so absorbed in guiding your kids that you lose track of your own needs and wants. Use this opportunity to focus on yourself and to make a map of where you’d like to be this time next year as a teacher, a parent, and a person.

Make a little you-time 

The purpose of your retreat is to recharge your homeschooling batteries, so build in some time to just relax. Giving your brain free reign inspires new ideas and connections that you don’t get when you’re dealing with the daily grind. You know what gets your creative energy flowing: Maybe it’s a hike up a waterfall, a session with a massage therapist, or an hour of uninterrupted knitting. Treat yourself to your favorite leisure activity, and you’ll be surprised by how it improves your mental clarity.

Write your bad day mantra 

Bad days happen, and when you’re doing double duty as teacher and parent, it’s easy to take them personally. Right now, while you’re feeling energized and excited about the coming year, write a message to yourself to read when you’re having a bad day. Think about the words you need to hear when a math lesson ends in tears or you snap at your toddler for making a mess of the science center, and write them down in your best handwriting. Keep this message to yourself close, and pull it out when you need to as a much-needed reminder that you’re doing the right thing even when things don’t go just right.

Ideally, you should leave your retreat with a clear vision of what you want the coming year to look like (and the confidence to change your mind about that vision any time), a handful of new ideas, and a renewed sense of enthusiasm for the homeschooling fun ahead. But even if you just come away with some good questions, you can consider a retreat time well spent.

Tips for making your homeschool retreat a success:

• Make a schedule to keep focused

• Turn off your phone, log out of Facebook, and don’t check your email

• Set aside time for just relaxing as well as time for being productive.

Food for Thought

Listen:

• Susan Wise Bauer: Homeschooling the Real (Distractable, Impatient, Argumentative, Unenthusiastic, Non-Book-Loving, Inattentive, Poky, Vague) Child

• The Homeschool Scholar: A Homeschool Parents Guide to Grades, Credits and Transcripts

• Pam Sorooshian: Unschooling and Math

• Donna Simmons: Talking Pictorially and Living Actively with your Young Child

Read:

• Rafe Esquith: Lighting Their Fires: How Parents and Teachers Can Raise Extraordinary Kids in a Mixed-up, Muddled-up, Shook-up World

• James W. Loewen: Teaching What Really Happened: How To Avoid The Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History

• Sharifa Oppenheimer: Heaven on Earth: A Handbook for Parents of Young Children

• David Mulroy: The War Against Grammar

• Lori Pickert: Project-Based Homeschooling

• Grace Llewellyn: The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education

 

Your challenge this week: Figure out a game plan for your homeschool retreat, and write an official retreat date on your calendar.

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6 Surprising Signs You’re Actually Doing a Great Job Homeschooling

One of the hardest things about homeschooling is that there’s no report card at the end of year telling you how you’re doing. We tend to chalk up our successes to good luck or fortuitous timing and to take all the blame for every challenge we run into. But chances are, you’re doing better with this whole homeschool thing than you think you are. These six signs are all indicators that you’re on the right track — and we think that’s something you should celebrate with pride.

You’re happy to start your day.

One of the best signs that you’re doing just fine as a homeschooler is that you like doing it. Sure, there are bad days — but if for the most part, you’re upbeat, energetic, and excited about the prospect of a new homeschool day, there’s a good chance your homeschooling reflects that.

You’re always surprised by lunchtime. 

Time drags when things are hard, but the hours seem to fly by when everything is going well. If lunchtime manages to get the jump on your and your kids most days, that’s a sign that you’re all really engaged in what you’re doing — which is a sign that your homeschool is a productive, positive place.

You’ve gotten comfortable with moving past mistakes, wrong turns, and things that just aren’t working.

You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to try curriculum materials that don’t work, classes that feel like curses, and being too strict about something that turns out to be not all that important. When you’ve hit your stride as a homeschooler, you’ll be able to recognize your mistakes, own them, and move on, a little wiser.

You find yourself taking a new homeschooler under your wing.

A sure sign you feel confident about how you’re doing as a homeschooler: You’re willing to share your experiences and insight with other people. When this happens, you’ve become an expert — maybe not in homeschooling in general but certainly in your particular homeschool.

It’s sometimes hard to plan your days — not because you don’t know what to do but because there are so many things you want to do that you don’t know where to start.

When your to-do list is so exciting that it’s actually a pleasure, you know you’ve figured out a system that’s really working for you. Yes, it may turn out that you can’t actually do all the things you’d like to — but that’s a much happier challenge than feeling like there’s nothing you want to do.

You don’t feel the need to defend homeschooling every time someone makes a rude comment about it. 

It’s very human to feel defensive when you’re still figuring things out — and some comments deserve a reasoned rebuttal. But as you grow more confident as a homeschooler, you’ll realize that you don’t have to engage with every misinformed stranger you meet. Sometimes, you just smile and walk away.

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Homeschooling Isn’t Just for the Kids

5 surprising ways to build a homeschool life that works for your whole family — including you.

“If your homeschool isn’t giving you personal satisfaction most of the time, something needs to change,” says life coach and homeschool consultant Gillian O’Keefe. 

O’Keefe says it’s easy to fall into a rut of thinking “this is just the way things are,” but very few homeschoolers are in a position where they’re helpless to the daily grind. “Homeschooling isn’t a punch-the-clock job — it’s a job that you make up each and every day as you go. So if something’s not working for you about your homeschool, all you have to do is change what you’re doing. You just have to know where to start.”

We bet you’ll find the inspiration you need to look at your homeschool life in a new way in these stories from real homeschool moms who took big, bold measures to get past a homeschool hump, from quitting homeschooling to keeping homeschool going after their kids opted back into traditional school. Whether your homeschool could use a little injection of energy or a big makeover, use the big perspective shifts in these stories to inspire your happiest homeschool year yet.

“I took a sabbatical.”

I homeschooled my oldest straight through high school, but by the time he graduated, I was genuinely burned out — even though I had an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old still learning at home. I tried to get motivated about another year of homeschooling, but that whole summer, as my oldest was getting ready to go to college, I kept thinking, “I just want a break.” And not surprisingly, when the school year started back up, everything felt so ridiculously hard.

My husband works in academia, so I am familiar with the idea of a sabbatical — a planned break from your everyday responsibilities that gives professors a little space to do their own work. And I thought, “I need a sabbatical!” So I took one.

I didn’t move to Tibet. I was still at home, doing laundry and cooking dinner and even going over tricky math problems. But we switched all the boys’ school work to things they could do 90-percent independently. They took online classes and a couple of local classes, and I was just there for support, like a regular mom with kids in regular school. I took a landscape painting class and beginning French at community college, read a big stack of books, none of which talked about homeschooling, and genuinely enjoyed spending time with my family again. At first, I wasn’t sure if I would ever want to go back to homeschooling, but by the next spring, I was eyeing new curriculums with a twinkle in my eye. I didn’t hate homeschooling. I just needed a break. And, three years later, I’m still running on the energy that sabbatical gave me.

—Allison 

“I started a homeschool group.”

I liked homeschooling from the very first day, but finding a homeschool group made me feel like Goldilocks: This one was too big, that one was too strict, the other one was too unreliable. I worried and worried about socialization and never having friends for way too long before I realized that I could start a group myself.

This was about 10 years ago, when my girls were 6 and 9 years old. I started by asking a couple of families I’d met through other groups if they would be interested in getting together for a regular park day. (I didn’t want to be a jerk, so I made sure to pick a day that didn’t conflict with another group’s regular park day. I was really nervous about making other groups mad, but it turned out that no one but me really cared.) The park days got pretty popular, and another mom suggested we buy group tickets for The Nutcracker. Soon, we were doing field trips regularly, and a couple of years later, we’d started a co-op. 

Both of my kids are done homeschooling now— my oldest is in college and my youngest decided she wanted to go to a private high school with some of her friends — but that homeschool group is still going strong. For me, it became a really important homeschool lesson: You may not find what you’re looking for on the rack, so to speak. Sometimes, to get what you want, you have to make what you want.

—Carolyn 

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“I stopped teaching math.”

Almost from the first day we started homeschooling, my daughter Alana and I were fighting over math. Every single math lesson seemed to end with one of us in tears. I had nightmares about math. Alana would yell at me that she was stupid, that she hated math. Sometimes she would yell that she hated me. This was so, so, so not what I envisioned when we started homeschooling.

I was talking to my friend, who is a high school English teacher, about how hard math was for us, and she laughed and said, “That’s why I don’t teach math!” She was just kidding, but it made me think. I hated math. I’d never been good at it in school, and it brought up all kinds of stress and insecurity from me. It was so obvious I was passing that on to Alana. And there was no good reason for it. I didn’t have to teach her math.

And I stopped, that day. I bought Teaching Textbooks, which has DVDs with instructions, for that first year, and the next year and every year after that, I signed her up for homeschool math classes at a hybrid school. She’s a junior this year taking trigonometry. Next year, she’s going to take calculus. She genuinely likes math, and, as it turns out, she’s actually pretty good at it.

Outsourcing a subject so completely wasn’t how I envisioned our homeschool. But it was the best thing for both of us, and quitting math has opened up the space for us to have a happy homeschool and a happy relationship, two things I’m really proud of. 

—Julia 

“I got rid of our school room.”

When we first started homeschooling, I was very excited to turn our dining room into a school room. I bought a big map and a bunch of Ikea bookcases and thought it was the greatest thing ever. I was so proud of that room. It was like having it proved that we were “real homeschoolers.”

But the “school room,” as I liked to call it, soon became one big messy space. However much I cleaned it up, it always felt messy and cluttered. No one wanted to spend time there. The kids did their work at the kitchen table or on the living room floor or on the patio. The school room just sat there gathering dust.

Last Thanksgiving, a bunch of out-of-town relatives decided to visit us. In order to have enough chairs for everyone, we had to move our old dining room table out of the garage and back into the dining room, and I had to pack up all the books and manipulative and science equipment and move it to the garage. A couple of times, one of the kids would say, “Hey, where’s the microscope?” and go find it in its plastic bin. But most of the stuff, nobody missed. Nobody was looking for it. Nobody wanted it. 

We started eating at the dining room table again. The kids do their work there sometimes. My partner and I have our morning coffee there. Having a school room is never what made us real homeschoolers. Now our whole house is the school room, the whole world is our school. 

—Gwen

“I kept homeschooling after my kids quit.”

Homeschooling was one of my favorite things I ever did, so when both my kids decided they wanted to go to our public school when they started middle school, I was pretty disappointed. I liked seeing them happy, and there was no question that they were where they wanted to be. But I missed homeschooling.

I looked for a job, but my resume had a huge gap and I didn’t have particularly great experience in anything. I couldn’t even get an interview for a cashier job at a craft store. We’d gotten used to living on one income, the kids still needed a ride to soccer and karate, and I still did the shopping and cooking and housework-type stuff, but I was bored out of my mind.

Then one day, when I was sitting home watching the clock for school pick-up time, I thought, well, maybe I’ll try to do that geometry program we didn’t get to use. Learning new things with the kids was my favorite part of homeschooling, and it turned out I liked learning things on my own, too. I learned geometry and algebra, Revolutionary War history, all about the Stuart kings of England, The Great Gatsby, all kinds of things. I pretty much homeschooled myself, and I ended up going back to college at 47 to study environmental science.

—Christine 

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How to Find the Big Picture for Your Homeschool

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. 

A lot of us start homeschooling with a big, shiny vision of what our homeschool lives will look like. We have homeschool philosophies and founding principles. We have stacks of books and plans. (Some of us start by the seat of our pants and no clear idea what we’re going to do, and that’s fair, too!) But somewhere along the way, we get pulled into the busy-ness of our everyday life — the never-ending to-do list of home-keeping and kid raising and homeschooling — and that big picture we started with fades into the distance. We haven’t forgotten it, exactly, but it doesn’t feel relevant to what we’re trying to do on a busy Tuesday morning.  

It is, though! That big picture is the whole point of homeschooling. It allows us to see where we can improve when we need to, it helps us make good choices with our time and money, and — maybe most important — it reminds us why we’re homeschooling in the first place. When people feel like they’re struggling in their everyday homeschool, it’s often BECAUSE that big picture has gotten lost. We’ve lost touch with the most important metric for measuring our homeschool success. We’re making choices and plans based on the moment and not the horizon — and if we do that enough, we can feel like we’re going nowhere.

The good news is that your big picture homeschool is still there — you just have to get back in touch with it. Here are some strategies to help you do just that.

Get back to your mission statement. 

Many of us write a homeschool mission statement in that first fever of homeschool excitement and forget about it. But a clear mission statement is what gives your homeschool focus, says Lillian Ahern, a Pennsylvania-based 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.”

If you have a mission statement, dust it off and make sure it still reflects the homeschool you’re trying to create. If you don’t have a mission statement, now’s the time to write one. The most effective mission statements are concise, specific, and answer three questions: what will your homeschool do? how will you do it? what will be the end result? (Ahern says her family’s mission statement is: “The mission of the Ahern family homeschool is to educate our children thoroughly in the Charlotte Mason learning tradition at home, using living books and nature study as the foundation for an education that will instill in our children a love of and confidence in learning and allow them to find jobs or get into college after graduation.”)

Feel your way. 

Often, it’s easy to focus on the things we want to do in our homeschool, but successful people put their feelings first, says Lauren Wills, a U.K. life coach who specializes in coaching moms. Wills suggests thinking about how you want your homeschool to feel— peaceful? energized? organized? rigorous? excited?—and to use that feeling as your starting point for every decision.

“If you dream of a relaxed homeschool, but you’re signing up for activities every day of the week, you’re going to feel unfocused,” says Wills. “Or if you want a peaceful homeschool and you’re fighting with your child about math every single day, it’s quite obvious what you need to change.” 

Take advantage of group-think. 

When homeschool gets out of focus, it can be because you and your kids don’t share a common goal. Maybe your son wants to do more science, while you’re trying to stick with a Classical schedule — or your daughter wants to go to fashion school and is frustrated by a traditional academic schedule. “Focusing means getting on the same page,” says Ahern. The first step? Sitting down with your kids to talk about their goals and expectations.

“The minute you stop saying I and start saying we, magical things can happen in your homeschool,” says Ahern. Once you understand each other’s wants and needs, you can point your homeschool in the right direction. Sometimes that direction is immediately obvious. Other times, it may take some compromise and negotiation to figure it out. Either way, talking about it is the first step.

Lean into the NO. 

One of the most effective ways to hone in on what’s important to you is to figure out what you don’t want. There are trade-offs for every choice: If you’re embracing a fully child-led learning style, that means math might end up on the back burner for big stretches of time. If you’re opting into a structured Charlotte Mason homeschool, you won’t have the kind of wild and free forest school experience other homeschoolers share on Instagram. As you articulate what you want your homeschool to be, take some time to spell out what it won’t be, too. Every homeschool is different, but knowing what’s NOT part of your homeschool vision can help keep you from getting distracted by shiny ideas that aren’t true to your particular priorities.

Let go of clutter. 

If you’re saving stacks of art projects, curriculum you know you’ll never use again but feel guilty getting rid of, or dusty science supplies that never see any action, cleaning out your school space can have a significant positive impact on your sense of focus, says career coach Beverly Jones.

“When you declutter, you aren’t just cleaning up,” says Jones. “You’re deciding what is valuable and what is not. It’s a physical, practical way to engage in making decisions about what matters to you and what you really want to do.

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Six Steps to Turn the Homeschool You Have into the Homeschool You Really Want

1. Understand What You Really Want

The first step to getting what you want is knowing what you really want. That sounds simple, but this is where people often get hung up on vague ideas or not-quite-thought-out scenarios. 

How do you want your homeschool to feel? What do you want it to accomplish? Life coach Erin Michaelson recommends borrowing a trick from the home decorating world and creating an inspiration board for your homeschool. “Choose images and words that reflect the way you want your homeschool to feel,” says Michaelson. “Don’t overthink it — just grab the images that appeal to you and start pinning them on a wall or Pinterest board.”

Your dream board may look different from what you imagined — maybe you had visions of a nature-centered Waldorf environment, but all your pictures are of cozy book nooks. That’s okay, says Michaelson. “Often, we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for until we start to pin it down. Sometimes, that disconnect can make us feel permanently dissatisfied because we haven’t taken the time to understand what we really want — we’re working toward the wrong things and trying to figure out why we’re so unhappy.” Really focus on what you want — not on what seems affordable, or reasonable, or doable in your current situation. This is your chance to dream big.

2. Know Where You Are

You need to know where you are before you can figure out how to go anywhere.

You probably spend a lot of time thinking about what you’d like your homeschool to be, but it’s equally important to understand where you are. Start another inspiration board to capture your current homeschool life: What is a typical day like? What do you do all day? How do you feel? How does your day look? Find words and pictures that reflect your homeschool as it actually is right now — and be honest. There will probably be good parts and parts that aren’t so photogenic — that’s okay. Go ahead and include what feels true, which may include messes and arguments, unfinished projects and kids playing video games all day. This is where you are, and it’s essential to have a clear picture of where exactly that is.

You probably have a clear idea of the things that aren’t going right, and that’s part of this project. But don’t neglect the things that are working for you, whether it’s little things like finally finding the perfect pencil sharpener or bigger-picture things like figuring out the right bedtime routine. Here are some things to consider:

• Curriculum. Think both about the curriculum you are using and the subjects where you aren’t using curriculum. What’s working? What isn’t? What’s getting done, and what’s perpetually on your yeah-I-should-really-get-around-to-that list? What do your kids look forward to, and what do they dread?

• Routine. What do your mornings look like? How do your afternoons feel? How do your days wind up? Pay attention to the parts of your routine that work really well and to the parts that aren’t really working. When do you feel the happiest? When is everyone the most productive? Definitely consider the parts of your day that fall under the traditional homeschool umbrella — the times when you are learning or working in focused ways — but give attention to the rest of your day, too, which is an important part of your family’s regular routine.

• Yourself. This is one of those things that you might not usually give a lot of your energy to thinking about, but how you feel about yourself can play an important role in your homeschool. How do you feel during the day? What do you look like? What’s the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing on your mind before you go to sleep?

3. What’s Missing?

Here’s where things get fun: You’re going to plot a course to start transforming the homeschool you have right now into the homeschool you really want.

A lot of inspiration boards start and end with step one, but to really start to make your happiest homeschool come to life, keep going. Create a follow-up dream board for each of the important elements in your main inspiration board.

For example, if you collected lots of photos of happy families making art in a sunny room but art is always getting shoved off your to-do list, start a list called “Let’s Do Art.” Start adding images of what you imagine your ideal art homeschool would look like — cool pictures and projects, a big table, great art supplies, a gallery wall running up your staircase, etc. Do this for all the repeated images that you put together in step one: Maybe you’ll have a page for field trips or carschooling, a page for a super-organized homeschool room, or a page full of nature activities. You might have a page of a happy, well-adjusted student settling into college life or a page of mom outfits that don’t involve yoga pants — anything that you pinned to your dream board more than once should get fleshed out with more images and details. Don’t try to convince yourself that anything is unimportant or unnecessary — you may end up needing to set priorities down the road, but this is not that time. It’s okay if this process takes a while, too — there’s no need to rush.

“It’s tempting to jump right into thinking about what you need to do to get from Point A to Point B, but it’s important to really give yourself room to explore the Point B you want to reach,” says Michaelson. “Pretend that you have all the money/time/ space/whatever in the world: What does this particular thing you want look like?”

4. Let Go

Just as it makes sense to hone in on the specifics of what you really want, it’s important to spend some time considering the parts of your current life that you’d like to change.

Make a page for each thing that’s not working: A schedule that feels too hectic, arguing kids, a perpetual mess, that permanently frazzled feeling you have at the end of every week — whatever it is that’s making your homeschool feel stressful or boring or unhappy. Collect images and ideas for changing these difficult moments: You may want to search for ideas online or in magazines or ask friends for advice about strategies that have worked for them.

“A lot of times, we get so caught up in trying to figure out what’s causing a problem that we never actually address the problem,” says Joshua Holland, a career advisor who specializes in helping people align their career paths with their passions. “Sometimes, though, your time is better spent moving forward in a productive way.” 

Instead of wondering why your kids grouch out over morning math or why you fall apart every night after park day, think about what you might be able to do differently to change that problem part of your day. Knowing what you want to avoid is just as important as knowing what you want to concentrate on.

5. Start Making Changes

Only now is it time to start actually making changes — and that’s because now you know what you really want and how to get it.

You can start with adding things you want or with trying to erase things that you aren’t happy with, but it’s usually more fun — and maybe more straightforward — to begin with adding something new. For example, if your wish-list includes more nature time, you might start by checking out a stack of nature guides from the library to familiarize yourself with local plants and wildlife or sign up for a naturalist-led hike at a nature center. Start spending more unstructured time in the backyard, or set up a bird feeder near the window. Add a daily nature sketch to your journal or challenge yourself to take a nature photo every day. Your goal here isn’t to jump in with a new curriculum or a structured plan of study; instead, you want to incorporate your new experience into your life. Once it feels like it fits naturally into your routine, you may want to look for a curriculum or classes, but for now, you just want to get comfortable.

“Give yourself space to figure out how this thing you want for your homeschool fits into your actual life without the pressure of spending lots of money or time on a curriculum,” says Michelson. In other words, don’t be tempted by quick-and-easy solutions: Some things you will try during this time will be revelatory — they may change your homeschool forever and for the better—but many will just be okay and some will be total failures. Commitment is the last thing you want right now — the thing you need is freedom to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Follow the same procedure to change the things that don’t work. Try earlier bedtimes or saving math until after lunch if you feel frazzled. Sort and toss artwork every week to minimize clutter, or set up a specific shelf for library books so they don’t get lost. Experiment with lots of small, different things to find the ones that work for you.

6. Move Forward

The process of creating your ideal homeschool is an ongoing one. Every year, the rhythms and needs of your homeschool will change, and you’ll begin this process all over again.

This is a continuous process, so keep updating your dream boards as your experiences dictate: Maybe free access to all the art materials got too messy, and art study works better one medium at a time. 

Pull those overstocked art cabinets off your inspiration board and replace them with station-style art storage. Maybe school outside is distracting, and it makes more sense for your family to do hands-on learning inside. Update your dream board with photos of attractive learning spaces. You may find that the more you focus on reading aloud, the better your homeschool works — add more pictures of books and reading to your dream board. Images and ideas will go up and come down — that’s totally normal. Your homeschool is a work in progress.

You can also update your real homeschool board as you find things that work for you: Add that great science curriculum or the writing program that really worked. Add the covers of books you’ve read together and loved or posters from movies that had an impact on your homeschool. Take photos of your own happy, smiling kids to paste on your board, or add tickets from movies, museums, and concerts. Let the board of your homeschool life gradually evolve to reflect your dream homeschool—the one you're actually living.

This was originally published in the summer 2017 issue of HSL.

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How Do You Know When It’s Time to Officially End the School Year for Your Homeschool?

Your official last day of school can be whenever you want — so pick a date that matches your family’s homeschool rhythm (or don’t pick a date and have a year-round homeschool).

OK, this may be a stupid question, but how long should our homeschool year be? This is our first year homeschooling, and I’m not sure how to know when it’s time for summer vacation.

I’m actually a terrible person to answer this question — when we started homeschooling (in the middle of my daughter’s 2nd grade year), I was so indecisive about when to stop that we ended up becoming year-round homeschoolers. We just kept going until September rolled back around. It worked, so we’ve been doing it ever since. But maybe that also makes me a good person to answer this question because I can honestly say that you can make your year as long as you want to.

Some states require homeschoolers to log a certain number of learning days each year, so of course you want to make sure that if your state has such a requirement, your homeschool plan meets it. Beyond that legal essential, though, deciding when to declare it summer in your homeschool is up to you.

Some curricula make this easy. When you finish them, you can close up shop and call it a year for math or history. That’s easy if your students generally keep pace with the curriculum, but if your child works faster or slower or if she’s faster in some subjects and slower in others, it can be trickier: If you finish one book in January, it makes sense to start a new one, but what if you finish in April? Or what if it’s August, and you’re still plugging away at history? 

It might be simplest to just pick an official date as your “last day of school” — your homeschool’s “last day of school” might match up to the date your local school closes or be the week your pool opens or just be the first day May — and say “This is when our year ends.” Bookmarks go into unfinished curriculum, evaluations get written, and you clean up the school stacks. That doesn’t mean you shut down learning, obviously. Homeschooling is a year-round process, whether you put the books away for the summer or not, but you can set a date to stop doing structured learning time unless a kid specifically requests it.

You can also follow my lead and just keep a casual homeschool going year-round. The benefit to year-round homeschooling is that it’s easy to introduce new books and curricula as they become appropriate, and you always know that you can go as fast or as slow as you want without worrying about a deadline. (The downside is that you miss out on all those “New curriculum!” photos in late summer — though personally, just buying things as we need them has worked out pretty well for me.) A year-round homeschool doesn’t mean you’re always “doing school;” you just spread breaks out through the year, so you might take a month off to watch the Olympics or a week off for birthdays.

However you decide to end your academic year, make sure you pause to celebrate your success. One of my friends makes a cake with her kids to mark the end of the great year; we usually plan a pancakes-and-pool-day fiesta at the end of summer to celebrate starting a new grade. When you decide to start and stop isn’t really important, so if you try something this summer that doesn’t feel right, you can adopt a different practice next year. Just like every other part of homeschooling, knowing how your annual schedule runs is something that you’ll figure out for your family one year at a time.

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Teaching Literature-Based History without a Curriculum

“Truly, the biggest hurdle to cobbling my own history curriculum together has been organizing the resources in such a way that I know where they are, I remember all of the ideas that I had, and I don’t leave anything out.”

I must have filled in so very many history worksheets as a kid sitting at a desk with a textbook, but I can’t tell you much that I learned sitting in that desk. The truth is that most of the history I learned as a kid came from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and historical fiction that I found on the library shelves. For that reason, I knew that I wanted to take a literature-based approach to history with my kids. 

The secular homeschooling community isn’t exactly awash in literature-based options, though. Last year when I couldn’t find anything that would work for teaching early American history to my 2nd graders, I decided to wing it. We made our way from prehistory through the colonial period, and this year in 3rd grade we’re attempting to read our way through the Revolutionary War through the Civil War. Given how many great books and resources are out there, it hasn’t been so hard to put it together myself, and, as so often happens in homeschooling, I’m learning considerably more than I knew before.

Truly, the biggest hurdle to cobbling my own history curriculum together has been organizing the resources in such a way that I know where they are, I remember all of the ideas that I had, and I don’t leave anything out. 

My solution to the organization issue is creating a collection of spreadsheets for the year. I divide the year up into units, with each unit getting its own spreadsheet. This year, my spreadsheets are titled Revolutionary War, Westward Expansion, Slavery, and Civil War. Those with older children studying in greater detail may also want to divide larger units into mini-units and give them their own spreadsheets. For example, World War II might be divided into mini-units such as The Role of Women, Allies and Axis Powers, The Holocaust, The Homefront, and Military Technology.

The spreadsheet has two purposes. First, the spreadsheet serves as a comprehensive list of all of the resources I’d like to use within a unit. It includes field trips, historical fiction selections, selected activities from supplemental resources like History Pockets, nonfiction literature, videos, poems, and audiobooks. 

The spreadsheet’s second purpose is to help me keep track of where things are. My columns at the top are On Hand, Library, Field Trip, and Activity. Given how many books we’ll use, it’s important to keep track of which books I have on hand at home and which books I’ll pull from the library shelves. This makes it easy, too, for putting together our list for the library. The Field Trip column serves as a visual reminder for me to make room on our calendar and take any necessary planning steps to pull off the field trip. In the Activity column, I mark the page on which the activity can be found and the acronym for the book it can be found within. 

In addition to my spreadsheets, the other organizational tool that keeps my DIY literature-based history curriculum humming is a milkcrate. I’ve pulled every history resource I’ll use for the year and placed it in the milkcrate for ease of finding. It helps to avoid all of those awful times when you’re meandering around saying, “I know we have it somewhere, but I can’t find it.”

Whatever period of history you’re studying with your kids this year, I hope that these organizational tips can help you feel more in control of the sprawl that comes along with studying history with literature. 

(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.)

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The Easiest Way to Get Organized for Homeschooling High School

This easy organization method won’t stress you out and will make your life a whole lot easier when you start working on transcripts and other official paperwork for high school graduation.

Homeschooling high school doesn’t have to mean acquiring organizational super skills. This easy organization method won’t stress you out and will make your life a whole lot easier when you start working on transcripts and other official paperwork for high school graduation. (This is our most-requested reprint from the magazine.) The envelope solution is elegant, effective, and so simple you can’t screw it up. Start it in ninth grade — eighth if you’re feeling particularly ambitious — and when it’s time to start the college application process, you’ll be all set. Here's how it works.

Label a large envelope for each class with the full name of the course and grade number (such as 9-Honors English 1 or 11-AP U.S. History). Add a separate envelope for extracurricular activities — if your child is serious about an activity, like soccer or theater, you may want to create a separate envelope for that particular activity as well as one for general extracurricular activities.

Label another envelope with your teen’s grade level and Honors — you’ll use this envelope to stash certificates of achievement, pictures of science fair experiments, and other awards and recognitions. Add one last envelope for community service — again, be sure to label it with your student’s grade level.

Make a basic information sheet for each class your child is taking. Include:

• the textbook(s) used, with ISBN number

• a copy of the textbook’s table of contents (Do this now. The last thing you want to do is end up rooting through boxes in the garage in a couple of years to figure out if your son’s freshman biology class included a section on genetics.)

• the course description and syllabus

• the name of the teacher (yes, even if it’s you!)

• the number of credit hours the course entails

Tuck this information sheet securely in the envelope. Add items to envelope as the year progresses. Things you’ll want to include:

• graded papers and tests

• samples of presentations, lab reports, or other work done in the class

• a running reading list (Add titles of books and essays to the list as you read them so you don’t have to try to remember everything at the end of the year. Even better, have your student keep an annotated reading list — with notes about each book.)

• notes about associated activities — visits to museums, lectures, theaters, etc. — that relate to the class

At the end of the class, write the final grade and total credit hours on the front of the envelope. Inside the envelope, add:

• official grades — community college report cards, printouts from an online class, or your evaluations

• Ask any outside teacher to write a recommendation letter or evaluation for your student. Do it now while your student’s work is still fresh in their minds, and add the recommendation to your envelope. If you decide to ask this teacher for a recommendation when you’re working on college applications, you can give him his original recommendation to refresh his memory.

• If your student ends up taking an AP or CLEP exam in a subject, add the exam results to your envelope. Similarly, if your student publishes or wins an award for work she started in the class, add those credits to your envelope.

Use a binder clip to group your envelopes — depending on how your brain works, you may want them grouped by grade level, by subject matter, or by some other criteria. However you group them, they’ll make writing that final transcript a lot easier since all your information will be organized in one place.

Reprinted from the winter 2015 issue’s Problem: Solved feature, which also tackled writing your own curriculum, keeping up with library books, getting over bad days, how to tell the difference between a homeschool slump and when you’re ready to stop homeschooling, and lots more

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My 3-Step Homeschool Planning Strategy

Planning out your year doesn’t have to be scary or stressful.

Believe it or not, even though I am infamous for planning my classes at the Academy down to the pause-for-laugh in my lecture notes, I am actually pretty relaxed about homeschool planning. The thing that helped me most — that helps me still — is to remember that homeschooling is not like defusing a bomb. You do not have a countdown clock flashing in the background while you desperately try to figure out what wires to cut — you have all the time you need, and if you cut the wrong wire, you may have to fix something, but nothing is actually going to blow up.

So with that in mind, I want to talk about the three strategies that I use to plan my year:

1. I figure out what three things I actually want to accomplish for each kid.

2. I use love it-leave it-need it lists and make my kids keep them, too.

3. I plan as we go.

I think it’s important to have a bigger-picture idea of what you want to accomplish because if you don’t, how do you know if you accomplished anything? I say this a lot, but in homeschooling, you have to make your own metrics for success, and I do this every year with my kids. What do I want my kid to have mastered by the end of 3rd grade, or 5th grade, or 10th grade? I limit my list to three things, which means I’m not focusing on every single individual subject every year — we’ll do every subject, but setting these goals helps me have priorities, which helps when the days and weeks are too short to squeeze everything in and when I am tempted to buy ALL THE CURRICULUM. (And I just want to say, about buying all the curriculum, you never stop wanting to do this — people actually send me free curriculum, pretty frequently, to review, and I am still never satisfied. So just know that the curriculum itch does not go away, you can have stacks of curriculum and still want to keep buying more.) Anyway, my point is, priorities help me know where I want to spend my time and money. I usually have a couple of academic priorities — like, I want my son to write a research paper this year, or I want to work on handwriting or taking notes, or something else. But I might have other kinds of priorities, too — like finding friends, building a community, that might be a goal, and I might spend more time driving around or signing up for activities than I normally would in the pursuit of that particular goal.

I have written and talked about my love it-leave it-need it lists a lot, so I will just recap them here: these lists are just what they sound like. Every month, you take a beat and write down all the things that are working great — it might be a whole curriculum or one project or even something like pushing the start time for your day back an hour. Whatever’s clearly A GOOD THING in your homeschool goes on the list. And you write down the things that aren’t going great — it could be curriculum, but it could also be never finishing your daily to-do list or getting out the door to co-op with everybody’s shoes on (why is that so hard?) — anything that’s clearly NOT working. And you make a list of things that you need, because your child has expressed a sudden interest in marine biology or you realize you need to go back and cover grammar or you want a more structured after-lunch routine since your mornings are creeping closer and closer to lunch time. The trick here is to get your kids to make these lists, too, every month — you have to do it every month because otherwise you forget things that aren’t part of the immediate past. These lists are planning gold, y’all — they tell you so much about your homeschool. You can plan a whole year with nothing but these lists to guide you.

Finally, controversially, I do not plan out my lessons or our schedule in advance. Instead of making a list of what I want to accomplish, I keep lists of what we DID ACCOMPLISH. I write down what we did at the end of each day. This is like the most liberating thing ever, you guys. I pick our books and resources and curriculum, and we do a little each day, as much as we want, and then I write it down. We can speed through things if we want to, or we can spend weeks on one lesson. I cannot overstate how this has revolutionized our homeschool — it may not be for everyone, but the minute I stopped trying to plan in advance, my homeschool relaxed and my homeschool confidence rocketed.

These strategies have seen me from kindergarten through senior year, and while homeschooling sometimes got more complicated, my planning method has stayed fairly simple.

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Clean Up Your Computer

February 11 is National Clean Out Your Computer Day, but do you really need an excuse? Get all those curriculum plans, worksheets, and other great ideas organized so you can find them when you need them.

A messy computer can be as frustrating as a messy bookshelf — you know you’ve got that Roman history download somewhere, but where the heck is it? Especially if you’re prone to download freebies just-in-case (and who isn’t?), your computer can end up a tangled mess. Take an hour to get organized this winter using the following steps:

Delete duplicate files. You can search, but the quickest way to track down dupes is with an app such as Duplicate Detective.

Set up a file hierarchy. Three big folders is ideal: one for personal stuff, one for learning-related stuff, and one for friends and family stuff is a good set up for many homeschoolers.

Make sub folders. In your homeschool folder, for instance, you might have a history folder that contains folders like World History, European History, Asian History, and U.S. History, with folders inside those relating to specific events or time periods.

Delete your downloads folder every few months. This is a practical way to free up space.

Keep a desktop folder. I like a clean desktop, but I’m also a person who always has a lot of desktop folders going. I minimize the clutter by stashing all my desktop files in one Desktop folder. 

Delete programs you aren’t using. We’re always downloading stuff for classes or based on recommendations — that we use once and then never again. Deleting them once a year frees up a lot of space on your hard drive.

Consider moving your photos. An external hard drive or cloud folder gets them off your computer hard drive.

Always name your files. Thoughtful names are the key to an organized computer — name that curriculum file History of Rome- Cicero’s Speech Analysis, not HoR-C. In three years when you’re trying to find this file again, you’ll be glad you gave it a name that’s easy to search for.

Actually clean your computer. Dust the keyboard, wipe down the screen, and disinfect your mouse. You’ll be amazed what a difference it makes! 

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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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6 Ways to Reinvent Your Homeschool (Without Spending a Dime)

When you get that stuck-in-a-rut feeling — and we all do sometimes — these simple-to-pull-off changes can make your homeschool feel bright and shiny again.

1. Don't wait for opportunities to come to you.

If you’re always test driving groups and classes without finding the perfect match, maybe this is the time to start your own group. If you wish a specific kind of curriculum existed but can never find it, consider making your own. It’s true that your efforts may not result in exactly what you want, but taking a more proactive approach to building your homeschool life will automatically boost your energy and enthusiasm.

2. Turn your schedule upside down.

One of the great things about being a homeschooler is that your days don’t have to follow the standard routine. If you’ve been following a rough 10-to-3 school day, shake things up by totally changing your schedule: Do science experiments on the weekend, take nature walks after dinner, or start the day doing a little math practice bed. Changing your routine can change your whole day.

3. Start a year-long project.

It might be a timeline or an illustrated taxonomy, a comparative mythology exploration or a local history quest. Whatever it is, your project should be big enough to keep you busy for several months but focused enough that you can wind down to a satisfying stopping point when you’re ready. Having a big project you share will naturally add a new structure to your days and shake up your routine in a gentle but definite way.

4. Move your furniture around.

It’s amazing what a difference it can make. Create a reading nook, or relocate the computer to the family room. Turn your hallway into a library, or add a little table in the kitchen. Switch your dining room and living room, or turn a closet into a cozy crafting desk. Changing your home’s internal set-up, even in fairly minor ways, can inspire you to try all kinds of new things.

5. Map your neighborhood.

This is one of those endeavors that can pay off richly if you make the most of it. Start by mapping your street— depending on your interests, you may identify trees and plants, or focus on streets and houses. Go slow — add one or two things each day, gradually expanding the circumference of your map. You’ll make surprising discoveries about an area you might think you know well, get more familiar with geography and compass directions, and have a cool record of the place you call home.

6. Start planning a big trip.

Planning a trip delivers almost the same benefits as actually going, and mapping your route through Germany or planning day trips in Costa Rica can make everyone excited to explore new topics and places throughout the year.

This was originally published in the summer 2018 issue of HSL. Subscribe here.

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