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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Tips for Setting and Achieving Homeschool Academic Goals

On the home/school/life Facebook page, a reader named Liz said she was new to homeschooling and would like to hear how other families approach their academic goals. Do they set daily goals, weekly, quarterly, or yearly goals? I thought I would begin by trying to explain how I set academic goals for my boys, and then I invite you, other homeschoolers, to please explain how you do this in your homeschool. Hopefully it will help Liz and many other homeschoolers starting out on this journey.



My boys are still young, but so far, I would say that I have set certain priorities – one or two academic goals – for each year. In order to do this, I have to remember that my boys have a long education ahead of them, and we don’t have to teach everything at once. If I were planning to put them in school, I might have to change tactics, but even while focusing on a few core subjects each year, I don’t abandon all other subjects, so that’s still not much of an issue. Let me explain…

By focusing on just one or two subjects each year, I give myself plenty of time to experiment, try different resources and see what works. And it alleviates the panic I might feel, if I were trying to teach every subject in depth. By giving myself a whole year to, say, make sure the study of art is part of our homeschool, it slowly becomes part of our weekly routine, so the next year when I’m going to focus on incorporating more Spanish lessons, I’m not worried how I’m going to do art. That’s already there. I’ll explain more about this later.

Before I did any of this – before I even began homeschooling “officially”– I sat down and considered what my priorities would be for my boys. At that time, they were only five- and two-years-old.

What surprised me is that this list of priorities is still my core priorities. It has given me something to come back to when I worry about a bad day or week. It reminds me that in actuality, I have created a daily life that incorporates all these things, so even on the worst homeschooling days, we’re still doing pretty good.

Here’s that initial list I made:

• Imagination/Play/Motion– Let them use their imaginations and be in motion as much as they need to be.

• Literature – Immerse them in books and storytelling.

• Exploration/Nature – Let them explore the world and get into nature as much as possible.

• How to find answers – Encourage them to ask questions and teach them how to find answers.

• Spend quality time together – Use our time wisely. Don’t over schedule the kids or myself. Allow for plenty of time at home for free, unstructured playtime.

• Teach responsibility– Explain why we (mom and dad) need to work and why we all need to take care of our home.

This may not look like it covers many academic goals, but it does. When you create an environment where learning is part of your daily life, and exploration, questions and creating are honored, your kids will cover many points in a typical course of study by themselves. For those homeschoolers who choose to unschool, this will meet their goals very well. For homeschoolers like us, who don’t unschool, I find it fairly easy to fill in the gaps with a few hours of formal lessons each week.

Here’s a few examples of how I’ve prioritized our learning each year:

• When my eldest son was six, seven, and even eight, my first priority was helping him learn how to read. This doesn’t mean that I pushed him. On the contrary, I went at his pace, but we worked on it first and a little bit everyday. We also studied math, science and various other subjects. (My son loves science, so it feels effortless to learn a lot about science.) What I’m speaking about is that I put more of my efforts into finding the right resources for reading, which didn’t come as easily to my son. Now that he’s nine, he’s reading quite well. I think it’s because he was ready to read, but it helped me to make that my focus. I wasn’t panicking trying to teach everything at once.

• Before my eldest turned six and my youngest three, I didn’t do any formal art lessons with them. My boys are very creative, so they had fun painting and doing projects of their own, but I wanted them to learn the fundamentals of art and also about the most significant artists. So that year, I decided to build it into our schedule by making Fridays “art day.” I spend just a little time “teaching,” and then we make some art. Right now all I require of them is to listen to me for a few minutes and look at some artwork online. The art making is completely optional. However, they usually want to make art, and even if they choose to do something of their own design, I’m very happy that art is now a regular part of our routine. We’ll continue to use Fridays as the day we delve into the arts in a formal way. Over the duration of their entire education, I know we’ll cover a lot of ground.

• Now that my son is reading well, I’ve decided my priority this year will be math. Again, it’s not that we haven’t already been working on math, and he is not behind in math, but I am putting more of my efforts into math. I started this summer. I made a list of math games we would play, I found art lessons that incorporated math, and I checked out some math books from the library, such as The History of Counting and Mathematicians are People Too. Since the new school year began, I have done math lessons with my son everyday, and we do more of it too. (I used to do it two to three times a week.) If I’m going to spend time researching strategies to teach, it’s going to be on how to teach math, and I’m not going to worry as much about the other subjects. (But remember, we already have a good footing in reading, and we have literature and art embedded into our schedule. And science is covered because it’s my son’s first love. We also get a lot of social studies through reading, watching documentaries, and going on field trips.)

• For my six-year-old, my priority this year for him is teaching him how to read. I’ve started the same program with him that I used with my older son. If it doesn’t go well, we’ll try something else. I also do math and handwriting with him, but we usually do reading first in case he has an off day, gets grouchy, and loses concentration. I don’t push. But by keeping reading as his priority, I feel certain we’ll at least accomplish one significant thing this year.

• This year I am also making more effort to do Spanish lessons. This is mostly for my older son who wants to learn another language, but my younger son benefits by listening in when he wants to. Like the year I incorporated art, this priority is just about making the effort to carve out a little more time in our schedule. Now that my son is nine, he seems ready to take on more. So this is another benefit of doing yearly priorities – the ones that my son hasn’t been ready for usually slide to the back burner.

I can see ahead where I will have a year when we study writing and grammar more in depth, and another year when we will focus on history. Maybe one year when my son is older we will take on a more rigorous and systematic curriculum in science, especially if he is going to continue in this direction for a career. Though we’ve made strides in all these areas, by putting my focus on one or two subjects each year, I feel good that over time, we’re incorporating a wide variety of lessons. And just because we shift focus, that doesn’t mean we are abandoning all other subjects. It’s just a subtle shift and a little more concentration in one area, and once we gain momentum in one subject, it’ll be that much easier to continue with it.

Now, please, share how you approach your academic goals. Because one size never fits all. :)

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How I Use My Bullet Journal for Our Homeschool’s As-We-Go Schedule

I feel like I should apologize up front for my unbeautiful bullet journal pages. I have seen many gorgeous bullet journals, and mine is not one of them. For me, it’s a tool — a tool that works really well as long as I don’t get caught up in obsessing about how it looks more than how it works. But it’s a little embarrassing to put these pages out in a world full of much more beautiful bullet journals, so I feel like I need to make some kind of disclaimer.

Along similar lines, I use these cheap, paper-covered Moleskine notebooks for my bullet journal. I’ve experimented with fancier notebooks, but I keep coming back to these—they’re big enough not to feel cramped but small and flexible enough to toss in my purse or school bag or picnic basket, and because they’re inexpensive, I never feel bad about ripping out pages or going through one more quickly than anticipated. I am the un-fancy bullet journaler, you guys, which is why it’s taken me so long to write this post. Please don’t mock my utilitarian pages, but if you have pretty ones, feel free to post them in the comments.

(If you’re unfamiliar with bullet journals, this post will probably make more sense to you if you watch this video, which outlines the general method quite succinctly.)

The Basics of My Method

I was never able to find a planner that worked for the way I like to plan our homeschool stuff, which I like to call call plan-as-you-go homeschooling. Instead of trying to map out what we’ll be doing each week, I record what we actually do each day . That way, I have a reliable record of our homeschool and I can keep a running to-do list, which is different from a daily schedule, and keep up with appointments and other things that happen at a specific time.

I do the bulk of my “planning” in the summer, when I choose the books we’ll be using for the next academic year. Once I’ve chosen the books and materials we're going to use, we just work through them at our own pace until we finish them—no matter how I try to plan in advance, the days never stack up the way I intend, and I end up moving things around, or forgetting things completely, or getting genuinely stressed out. At the beginning of the year, I write the materials I collected for each kid on a sticky note, which helps me make sure I don’t forget about a cool art book or nature study guide (which has happened), but by the middle of the year, I don’t usually need them anymore.

As you can see from the photo here (I warned you to expect messiness!), I jot down what we do each day, broken up by subject. I used to just jot down notes without the subject tag, but I find it’s much easier if I can always tell what subject I’m looking at. I actually thought about assigning each subject a color and going back and highlighting them for an even more obvious visual indicator, but since I would probably stick with that for about 13 days before giving up, I let that go. I DO use different colored pens for each kid—purple for my 9th grader and green for my 3rd grader—which works really well for me. (And I can just keep the pens clipped to my journal.) The day shown here is a pretty typical one, though some days are shorter and some days require multiple pages. You can see that I include things we did as well as assignments made, and I read through my previous week’s pages on Monday morning so that I can migrate any outstanding stuff to my to-do list. 

You can see that I also make a little weekly schedule down the right-hand side with any appointments/deadlines. We don’t have a lot of things like this, so I don’t leave a lot of room—I give each day a couple of lines, and that’s always been plenty of room for our stuff. I carry this schedule from page to page, though I’m thinking of moving it to a sticky note so that I don’t have to copy it over every day or two. (Though I think writing it multiple times helps me remember it, which is a plus for me.)

I also keep a running list of things I need to do, which you can see in all its messy glory here. My list includes things like registering for classes or signing up for tests, lists of supplies we need—things like new pencils or index cards as well as science or art supplies, library books to put on hold, organizational to-dos—scanning, sorting, shelving, etc., and research I need to do, whether it’s reading ahead so that I know what we’re talking about or looking for resources for something that’s piqued our interest. I also make notes of books, curricula or other materials that I want to check out. I color-code these lists, too, and cross tasks off as I complete them. After I fill up a page, I draw arrows to mark any unfinished tasks and move them to the next blank page to continue my to-do list. I like having one master list instead of lots of smaller lists.

The index page is the best part of the bullet journal in my world because it lets me feel like my hodgepodge of lists and notes is actually an organized planner. I just make a note as I add new pages.

I compartmentalize with separate bullet journals for work and homeschool. I tried keeping one “master journal,” but my rhythms for work and homeschool are so different and they both eat up a lot of pages, so I’ve switched to keeping separate ones, which feels much simpler. I clip them together with a big binder clip (or a big rubber band if I can’t find a binder clip, which happens more often than I’d like to admit) so that I don’t always have the one I don’t actually need.

I use washi tape to mark the index pages. You could just turn down the corner, but washi tape makes it easy to see at a glance. I bought a five-pack of washi tape a couple of years ago that I’m still using, so its cost-per-use is pretty cheap. I use a different tape for my homeschool journal and my work journal so that they are easy to tell apart.

I keep the symbols simple. I use a checkbox for things I need to do (so that I can have the satisfaction of checking them off when they are done) and a dash/dot for notes/brain-dumping. If I don’t finish something on my to-do list when I’m done with a page, I mark it with an arrow and move it to the next to-do page. There’s a whole world of bullet journal symbols out there, but I honestly can’t keep up with more than a few.

I use pages in order. At first I tried to figure out how many pages certain categories would take, but I was usually wrong and ended up stressing about empty pages or not-enough pages. So now I just uses pages in order and remind myself that hey, that’s why there’s an index page, right? (One great tip I picked up somewhere: If you’re skipping a bunch of pages, indicate the jump to the next page number at the bottom of the page, as in 25 —> 41. You can easily check the index, of course, but this is like an extra bit of simple.)

I use different colors to keep track of my kids. I use a purple pen for my daughter’s stuff and a green pen for my son’s because I’ve found that having different colors really helps me to quickly find information I’m looking for. I keep the pens clipped to the cover of my journal. For everything else, though, I just use whatever pen or pencil I have handy. Again, I do not let myself get caught up in the aesthetics.

Collections I Use

“Collections” are basically just lists or things you want to keep track of in your bullet journal. These are the ones I use for homeschooling: 

UPCOMING

I do a seasonal list of upcoming events—birthdays, holidays, Buffy anniversaries, etc. that I can quickly refer to when someone says, “Hey, are you guys free for dinner on the 22nd?” or when I am worried that I might have forgotten Passover. (In all fairness, that was a really tough year.) I tried doing these as monthly lists, but there’s just not enough stuff in a month to fill up a page—and a yearly checklist quickly got overwhelming. Seasonal works well (and it goes with the home/school/life magazine publication schedule, which is a nice plus).

BOOKS WE READ

I think this one’s pretty self-explanatory! I keep a running list of what we’re reading together—the kids keep their own reading logs, too, which includes all their reading, not just the homeschool stuff. Green for my son, purple for my daughter, and just any color for the readalouds we do as a family. 

BOOKS TO READ

Again, this one is kind of obvious: I keep a list of books I want to read or find out more about. I don’t bother color-coding these. If I request a book from the library or check it out, I cross it off the list.

MOVIES WE WATCH

Like our reading list, this movie list gives us a record of what media we’ve consumed in our homeschool life. I jot down everything we watch together, including our family movie night picks but especially movies and documentaries we watch as part of our homeschool. (If I have notes I want to make about a particular movie, I make them on my daily notes page—this page is just a list.)

JOY JOURNAL

I write down three good things at the end of every day. I really believe this is one of the little things that keeps me from getting burned out on homeschooling. I have kept a separate journal for these notes in the past, but it’s so much easier just to keep a running list in my bullet journal.

CONFERENCE NOTES

Every quarter, I sit down with my kids individually for a conference, and I use a page for each of them to keep a running list of things that I want to talk about. I probably add things every week or so, usually on Mondays when I’m reviewing the week, and I include accomplishments I’m especially proud of (which are usually related to persistence and hard work) as well as notes about things I think we could be doing better. If my child expresses an interest in a particular class or subject, I’ll jot that down here, too, so that we can discuss how to pursue it at conference time. 

IDEA MAPPING

I also use my bullet journal to make plans for subjects or topics I want to cover. I know I keep apologizing for messy pages, but this one is really messy because (with this one exception!) I am the only person who will ever use it. I really just brain dump on these pages, and eventually some of the info will migrate to its own page (4th grade reading list, 4th grade history, etc.). Aside: You can see that we are planning NOT WHITE MEN HISTORY next year, for which I am writing my own curriculum and about which I am nerdily excited.

MENU PLANNING

If you are a regular reader or podcast listener, you know that I am constantly baffled by how much feeding people is involved in homeschooling. I keep my menu plan in my bullet journal—I plan for the month, then copy each week onto a weekly schedule to post in the kitchen. You may wonder if this means that people ask me “what’s for breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack?” less often, but no. No, it doesn’t. 

So that’s my (messy) bullet journal in a nutshell. It’s the only homeschool planner that’s ever worked for me, probably because it’s not really a planner in the traditional sense at all, and I love that it allows me to feel organized about my homeschool life. So many planners and organizers seemed like a great idea when I bought them but never really worked with my actual life. This one does, and I really like having everything in one place and being able to quickly tell where we are and what I need to do next.

What about you? Do you bullet journal? Or do you have a planner you really love?

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4 Easy, Effective Ways to Plan Your Homeschool Year

Whether you’re a new homeschooler not sure how to get started or an experienced homeschooler looking for a little planning inspiration, these simple strategies will help you get organized for the learning year ahead.  

 Have a student-teacher conference.

Include your kids in the planning process. When they are active participants in planning, they take on some responsibility for their own educations and take more pride in their accomplishments. Start an end-of-the-year tradition hanging out together at coffee shop or diner to conduct a post mortem of the school year. Which curriculum did your child like or not like — and why? Which publishers’ texts would he like to use again? What area of study is he most interested in exploring further? If you have multiple kids, try to make time for a separate sit-down with each one. This simple tradition can give you direction and focus when planning the next year. It can be helpful to bring a list of classes and activities to consult during your conversation — it’s easy to forget things that happened back in October after your second mint-chocolate-chip frappe.

Host a planning party.

Invite a few homeschooling friends over for a casual curriculum party. Keep it simple — open a bottle of wine and order in dinner — and ask your guests to bring their favorite curricula from previous years and new material they’re excited about using. These informal get-togethers can be a great way to get inspired and to discover curricula you never knew existed. These planning parties are also a great way to clear some space on your bookcases — keep a giveaway stack of books and materials, and pass on outgrown or not-quite-right materials. This is also a great opportunity to chat about everything from organizing your day to keeping track of lessons to finding the best calculus teacher. The real experts in homeschooling are the parents who do it every day, so you’re much more likely to find a brilliant system from a fellow homeschooler than you are from a generic organization website. If you’re still building your local homeschool community, a planning party can be a great way to get to know other homeschoolers, but you can also get planning support from Facebook groups and online forums. If your homeschool pals are scattered far and wide, consider hosting a Facebook curriculum party instead of an in-person get-together.

Make a love it-need it-hate it list.

Whether it’s your first year homeschooling or your fifteenth, you’re your own best inspiration. Get oriented by making three simple lists. Start with a list of all the things that are going great, whether it’s making Monday baking day, doing narrations with Story of the World, or starting the morning with yoga. You already know that these things work well, so when you’re stuck between two choices, opt for the one that’s closest to something that’s already a perfect fit. Next, make a list of all the things you need to cover in the coming year — maybe it’s time to get serious about multiplication, or your daughter’s dream college requires a lab science for sophomore year. You’ll want to find materials to help you fill these needs. Finally, do yourself a favor and make a list of all the things you just plain haven’t enjoyed, whether it’s your drill-and-drone math curriculum or your way-too-busy Monday schedule. Get rid of the things that aren’t working for you, and fill that space with books and activities you do like.

Set up a DIY homeschool retreat.

Sometimes, you just need a little inspiration before you dive into another year. Book a hotel room for the weekend, and pack your suitcase with some of those books you’ve been dying to read (On our list: Lighting Their Fires: How Parents and Teachers Can Raise Extraordinary Kids in a Mixed-up, Muddled-up, Shook-up World by Rafe Esquith, Teaching What Really Happened: How To Avoid The Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History by James W. Loewen, Heaven on Earth: A Handbook for Parents of Young Children by Sharifa Oppenheimer, and Pocketful of Pinecones: Nature Study With the Gentle Art of Learning: A Story for Mother Culture by Karen Andreola) and lectures you want to hear (consider Susan Wise Bauer’s Homeschooling the Real (Distractible, Impatient, Argumentative, Unenthusiastic, Non-Book-Loving, Inattentive, Poky, Vague) Child,” The Homeschool Scholar’s A Homeschool Parent’s Guide to Grades, Credits and Transcripts, Pam Sorooshian’s Unschooling and Math, or Donna Simmons’ Talking Pictorially and Living Actively with your Young Child.) Feel free to add your favorite inspiration sources in the comments.

This was originally published in the spring 2014 issue of home/school/life magazine.

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How We Plan Our Homeschool Year in One Coffee Date (With a Little Help from Monthly Note-Making)

My daughter is about to start 11th grade, which means we have been homeschooling for (gulp) nine years. A lot of the credit for navigating that process successfully goes to her—she has been an engaged, interested participant and a totally good sport about pretty much everything. But I also think a planning routine we established early on has helped us achieve our version of homeschooling success.

Not everyone is a planner, and not every homeschool needs a plan — but my inner worrywart could not handle homeschooling without some kind of framework. If you follow the blog, you know that I try to have it both ways: I am an as-we-go homeschooler for the day-to-day (which basically means that instead of trying to predict what we will do each week, I keep track of what we’ve actually done), but I also like to have a big-picture sense of what our year will be like before it starts. (If you’ve used my planner, you know that the beginning is all about setting those bigger goals!) Those bigger goals are the point of our annual coffee/planning meeting.

I’ve talked before about making love-it, hate-it, need-it lists, but they have been such a helpful tool for our homeschool. Every month-ish, we all jot down a list of things that are going great or that we’re really excited about — that’s our love-it list, and it might include anything from a big Minecraft building project (my 10-year-old) to an awesome Japanese tutor to a particular book or subject. I think it’s also important to take stock of the things that just aren’t clicking — a clunky science program, too much writing in history, getting up early for a class at the nature center. The hate-it list is a place to vent, sure, but it’s also a good record of what doesn’t work well for a particular kid or subject, which is useful information for adjusting our schedule now if possible and definitely helpful for future planning. Finally, there’s a need-it list, which for my high schooler includes the classes colleges will be looking for on her transcript. (She isn’t particularly excited about chemistry, for instance, but since her favorite college option right now requires three years of lab science, she’s got Chemistry I on her need-it list.) The need-it list isn’t just about have-tos, though — want-tos go there, too, which makes it a more fun list than it would be without them. More practice writing essays, drama classes, more park days, “messier science experiments,” and Pokemon taxonomy have all featured on need-to lists alongside more prosaic entries like grammar and algebra.

Because we keep monthly records this way, we can chart whether a passion is short-term — geometry featured on my daughter’s hate-it list for a couple of months before she realized that she actually enjoyed it — or persistent. (More outside time shows up on my son’s need-it list every single month — and I swear it’s not because we don’t make his outside time a priority!) It’s also a good reminder of things that we get excited about but then forget — my daughter’s “something with Studio Ghibli” note on her want-to list morphed into one of our all-time favorite high school classes a couple of years later.

I keep my own lists, which are based on my observations and so often look a little different from my kids’ lists. My love-it list emphasizes things that seem to be working well and my kids’ particular strengths; my hate-it list is usually made up of things that cause friction or stress or that just don’t seem to be delivering the way I’d hoped they would. And I keep a kind of master need-it list based around each grade’s major milestones and/or college requirements as well as adding the random interests and ideas that pop up in our learning life. Like the kids’ need-it lists, mine is not a prime directive but a list of suggestions — some things from it will end up in our final plan and some won’t, and that’s fine. It’s just reassuring for me to have that big master list, which I update with specifics every month.

This monthly tracking makes it simple when we sit down over the summer to plan the coming year. We sort through our lists (and sometimes also through previous year’s lists) to see what feels important to consider in figuring out the next year’s plan. It’s usually a mix of some things that are working great that we want to keep going, some things that we cannot wait to see the hind end of, and some things that we’d really like to (or really need to) explore adding to the schedule. We also grab our book lists (which are so long at this point that it’s borderline ridiculous to keep adding books to them because science is really going to have to make some serious breakthroughs if we are going to get through these lists in one lifetime) and go through them together, highlighting titles that connect to things we know we want to study. By the time we get to this point, we’re usually on our second iced coffee drink and a little too excited about everything, but there’s one thing left to do.

The final stage of our planning meeting is taking our plan and figuring out what we need to get from where we are to where we’d like to be over the next 12-ish months. (We are year-round homeschoolers.) Sometimes, we have something that we already love and know we want to continue. (Our awesome Japanese tutor!) Sometimes, we already have an idea in mind of what we want to try for a subject. (Zumdahl chemistry!) Often, we leave with a list of things that need investigating. (How should we organize our feminist literature/history unit? What would make the best spine for AP Language and Composition?) We usually take a few weeks to do a little independent research, then meet back to fill in those last few blanks. From there, it’s easy to strategize our three to five big goals for the year. (That seems to be the sweet spot for us — fewer doesn’t seem like quite enough, and more feels like it stretches the goals too thin.)

I’m realizing that what feels like a one coffee date planning session is actually something that we work on all year — those love it-hate it-need it lists have been one of my favorite homeschool innovations because they really help all of us stay tuned into what we’re doing throughout the year, even as our methods and the specifics of our plans may change. We’re able to figure out our plans with so little stress overall because we’re building them all year long, one month at time — by the time we sit down to actually plan, we’re ready to focus on the fun stuff.

How do you get ready for the upcoming academic year?

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7 Easy Ways to Simplify Your Homeschool Day

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 MASTERY HAS HAPPENED. 

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 PARTS OF TEXT BOOKS 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 IF PRACTICAL.

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. Even if not embraced fully, combining 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 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 A DIFFERENT METHOD

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. 

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

Jenn’s not an unschooler — but she’d like to bring a little more free-spirited energy to her too-structured homeschool days. We help her figure out where to loosen up while keeping her priorities in mind.

“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. Jenn’s been struggling to find a balance between the structure and academics she needs and the fun, laid- back vibe she wants her homeschool to have.

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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Homeschool Makeover: Is It Possible to Homeschool and Be a Working Mom?

Lauren’s excited to go back to work—but she’s not ready to give up homeschooling her two kids. We help her find a way to have it all.

THE SITUATION

“I’m going back to work part-time, and I’m struggling with how to make our new schedule work with our homeschool life. Help!”

“I feel so lucky that I got to be a stay-at-home, homeschool mom for so many years, but it’s just not feasible for us financially anymore,” says Lauren*. Lauren has been homeschooling her 10-year-old daughter Bree and her 12-year-old son Adam their whole lives, using what she calls a “project-based, Waldorf-type method.” After twelve years, Lauren is reentering the workforce as a part-time administrative assistant—she’ll be working from home, but she’ll have firm office hours from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. three days a week. “Even though I don’t do a lot of hands-on instruction, I am available all the time right now,” she says. “In a few weeks, that won’t be the case.”

As usual, we asked Lauren to track her homeschool time for a couple of weeks so that we could get a clear picture of how her family’s homeschool works before she started her new job. Lauren noted that she spends a couple of hours a day with Bree doing math and readalouds (Lauren uses the Build Your Library reading list as the spine for their homeschool, but they rarely do any of the recommended activities or projects) while Adam works on his Minecraft building project for a couple of hours. After lunch, they switch, and Lauren reads and does math with Adam while Bree tackles her own project time. (Lately, she’s been making a leaf identification guide for the leaves she’s collected on family nature walks.) Lauren is very hands-on with both kids—she frequently pauses reading time to answer questions about project work as they come up. Both kids use separate science curricula three times a week. (“I try to remember to prep for labs, but sometimes we end up just watching an experiment on YouTube,” Lauren says.) Adam and Bree have riding lessons on Saturdays and attend a weekly homeschool park day once a week.

“It doesn’t sound like we do that much, but with one thing and another, we really are going until dinnertime most days and sometimes beyond,” says Lauren. “I’m just not sure how to successfully condense what we do into two days a week.”

THE PLAN

It’s obvious that for Lauren’s new work schedule to work, Adam and Bree will have to fill in some gaps with independent work. Since readalouds are one of Lauren’s favorite things about homeschooling, we made keeping reading together time a priority, even though Adam and Bree read well enough independently to keep up with Build Your Library’s daily reading schedule on their own. Here’s how we suggested Lauren shake up their routine to suit her new schedule:

Think university model. Most college classes meet twice a week, giving students the rest of the week to tackle assignments and pursue other interests. Since Lauren has two open weekdays for homeschooling, we suggested that she condense as much hands-on instruction and learning as possible into those two days. These two days are the days to do science experiments, tackle new math concepts, etc.—anything that requires introducing new ideas or hands-on assistance from Lauren. On the days when Lauren’s working, Adam and Bree can solve practice problems, update their science notebooks with charts and definitions, and do other solo work.

Set up a Hey Mom station. Lauren’s new job requires her to be available during her scheduled shift, so Adam and Bree can only interrupt her during working hours if there’s an emergency. We suggested setting up a whiteboard in a convenient place where the kids can jot down questions that pop up during the day. That way, nothing important gets lost.

Reconfigure readalouds. The Build Your Library curriculum has more readalouds than the family can comfortably squeeze into two mornings a week, so we looked for other places in the family schedule where readalouds might fit in. We suggested moving the literature readings to bedtime on the days when Lauren’s working. Lauren can also add a couple of extra chapters to books on the two days when she’s actively homeschooling to help them stay on track with Build Your Library’s weekly schedule.

Bundle science classes. Bree and Adam are close enough in age to tackle the same science curriculum—and sticking with a single schedule of experiments and assignments is much easier to keep up with. Since Bree and Adam are covering the same material, they can also help each other answer tough questions or understand tricky concepts while Lauren is unavailable. (We talked about the possibility of bundling Build Your Library, too, but Lauren didn’t think it would work to jump Bree up two levels and Adam has already covered the grade in between them.)

Take advantage of “dead time.” The family is in the car for a little more than an hour every weekend taking Bree and Adam to and from their weekly riding lessons. Not all the books in their curriculum are available as audiobooks, but quite a few are—and Lauren can also record the poems Bree and Adam are working on memorizing so that they can practice as they drive.

THE RESULTS

Two months into her new job, Lauren says they’ve found a rhythm that works. “We’d always homeschooled a certain way and it had always been such a happy experience, so there was a part of me that kept trying to squeeze the way we’d always done things into our new schedule. It helped so much to have someone to help me see the big picture and to recognize that we could keep the spirit of our homeschool even if we changed some things.”

Lauren says the Hey Mom board has become an essential part of their homeschool and has really helped manage her own guilt about not being available. Condensing into two days has worked even better than she expected. “I’m so impressed by how Adam and Bree have taken the reins of their education,” she says. “They were definitely ready for this even if I wasn’t.” 

This homeschool makeover was originally published in the fall 2016 issue of HSL. *Last names omitted for online publication.

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How We Turn Our Homeschool Goals into a Daily Lesson Plan

I’m definitely what you would call a planner, but I am not a rigid planner. If I didn’t make some kind of homeschool schedule, I would wake up each morning and begin focusing on random stuff. Maybe it would be educational, or maybe I’d clean the house, or maybe I’d exercise or write. I wouldn’t waste the time, but since we have specific goals we’d like to accomplish, I have to make sure I make those a priority and do them first. I save the random stuff for late afternoons and weekends.

My system for planning daily lessons has evolved over the years until I landed on what seems the simplest way to do it for me. It may be too simple and/or kind of messy for you. I take notes in different places for different reasons, and it's a little different from Amy’s bullet journal, but since we all have to figure out our own way of doing things, I’ll tell you what I do.

A MASTER LIST

photo: shelli bond pabis

I keep one “priority list,” which I made during the summer, on what I’d like to accomplish this coming year with the boys. It’s a general list and not in any order. I note a few of my curriculum choices, but not all of them. I don’t need to know the details because I’ve already figured out the books and curricula, and I keep them in stacks around my room, so I can grab what I need when I need it.

As you can see in the photo, I have a list for each boy. (I’ve covered their names for privacy.)  I also have a list of lessons that I do with the boys together. In the bottom right hand corner, I’ve listed the things they’ve told me they want to study this year, and we’ll probably add more to that later.

This list is simply a reminder to me as I plan our daily lessons: “Shelli, don’t forget to use News-O-Matic. Or that new cursive workbook.” “Don’t forget that the 8-year-old wants to do more science experiments.” I keep the list right on top of my desk, which is crucial to remembering to use it.

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 THE DAILY LESSON PLAN

photo: shelli bond pabis

As far as planning our daily lessons, I am super sophisticated. (NOT!) I keep a stack of blank scrap paper that I’ve cut into small squares (recycled from odd prints outs that I don’t need anymore) on my desk, and every morning (or — if I’m really on the ball — the night before), I make a list of what I hope to accomplish that day. 

(I also start off the year by making a “I hope to accomplish…” weekly schedule too, which tells me that it works pretty well if I, for example, do math on Mondays & Wednesdays and writing on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but I usually stop referring to this after I get into a groove for daily planning.)

This agenda is not set in stone, but I always put the most important item first. As you can see in the photo, “Music Theory” is at the top for Monday because in the afternoon, my son has his piano lesson, and I don’t want to forget to have him do his theory homework. We may or may not get to our Spanish lesson, and that’s okay. Spanish will rotate into a higher “priority” position on another day. (See my post: Our “Order of Things.”)

This little list of our “daily plan” gets thrown away at the end of the day after I’ve recorded what we’ve actually done on my homeschool chart.

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 THE HOMESCHOOL CHART 

photo: shelli bond pabis

The other item I keep on my desk is a chart I created for myself so that I can record what we’ve actually done that day.  Our day may have turned out a little (or a lot) different from my plan, and that’s okay. I use the chart to note what happened, and it’s used for record keeping and attendance. With the chart, I can see what we’ve already worked on this week, which helps me decide what the priority will be the next day.

By the end of the week, these charts can look pretty messy. I use a lot of abbreviations that I’ve created for myself, and most of my notes are brief enough to fit into the boxes, or I might spill over into another box. I don’t worry about being neat because I’m the only person who will see these charts. (Note: The chart in the photo is from this summer when we were going lighter on lessons, so it’s not nearly as messy as a chart from mid-winter.)

These charts get filed into my boys’ yearly portfolios (3-ring binders). (The portfolios are where I keep loose worksheets, fliers to museums we visit, receipts for classes, and the items required by law in my state.)

Click here, if you’d like to download a chart to adapt to your needs.

This system is working well for me right now, and it helps me not worry about finishing any particular curriculum in one year. We can slow down and focus on areas that need more attention, or we can skip those things that don’t seem necessary, which becomes apparent as we move through the year. As long as I can see that the boys are making progress, I’m happy. 

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Four Easy Ways to Homeschool Lunch

One of the biggest practical challenges of homeschool life is feeding everybody all the time. And lunch — right smack in the middle of your day — can be the biggest challenge of all. These four strategies won’t make lunchtime hassle-free, but they will free up your brain enough to worry about what you're going to do for dinner instead.

Solution 1: Lunchboxes

• Pros: lunch is ready to go whenever you are

• Cons: requires night-time prep; not always the most budget-friendly option

Take a cue from the school set, and simplify lunchtime by packing it up the night before. Stick with the classics — we like hummus, quinoa, cucumber, and grated carrots on a spinach tortilla or peanut butter, honey, and banana on oatmeal bread for easy sandwiches, with little containers of yogurt, fruit, veggie chips, and a cookie for dessert. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can steal some cute bento box ideas, but kids who don’t pack a lunch every day are likely to be just as excited about a plain sandwich and apple combo. (I get all my best sandwich ideas from the Saltie cookbook.) Make a lunchbox or brown bag for each kid, stash it in the fridge, and lunch is ready to go even before you start your morning coffee. 

Solution 2: Freezer Meals

• Pros: easy on the budget

• Cons: gets boring; does require some advance planning

Once-a-month freezer stocking ensures that you’ll always have a hot lunch at the ready. Our freezer faves include macaroni-and-cheese bowls; black bean and butternut squash burritos; soups and chili; and chicken potpies. There are lots of freezer meal cookbooks out there, but I’ve splattered and dog-eared Not Your Mother’s Make Ahead and Freeze Cookbook enough to recommend it. Freeze meals in individual portions (so you don’t have to listen to a 10-minute argument about whether you should heat up spinach lasagna or kale, sweet potato, and lentil hand pies), pop them in the fridge at bedtime, and they should be ready to heat up for the lunchtime rush.

Solution 3: Snack Plates

• Pros: great for picky eaters, no cooking needed

• Cons: assembly required; can be expensive

The beauty of this cheese plates-inspired lunch is that you can assemble it with all the random bits and pieces in your fridge and cupboards. Presentation is what makes a snack plate like this feel like lunch, so take the time to arrange small wedges of cheese, little stacks of chopped vegetables or fruits, cured or smoked meats, leftover tuna salad, and other hearty nibbles. Add crackers or vegetable chips — homemade or store-bought — and spoonfuls of mustard, jam, chutney, and purees to the plate. Set it out, and the kids can assemble their own lunches from the ingredients. It’s nice to give each kid her own plate, but you can also set up a fancy spread on a serving plate or cutting board for everyone to share.

Solution 4: Emergency Pizza

• Pros: versatile; easy to customize for picky eaters

• Cons: requires last-minute stove time

Until a genius friend introduced me to tortilla pizzas, I always thought pizza was too much hassle for lunchtime. But using a tortilla for a base makes a quick pizza as easy as a grilled cheese sandwich. The usual tomato-mozzarella-mushroom combo is great, but you can get adventurous with pesto topped with leftover grilled chicken, veggies, and fontina cheese; butternut squash puree topped with goat cheese and bacon; or even hummus with crispy chickpeas, avocados, and roasted garlic. Lay your tortilla flat in a cast-iron skillet, layer on toppings and cheese, and let it bake in a 375-degree oven for about 13 to 14 minutes, until the edges are lightly browned and crispy.

This article is reprinted from the fall 2014 issue of home/school/life.

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Why You Need a Homeschool Review Mid-Year

For many homeschoolers, the year is halfway through, and maybe you are wondering what you’ve accomplished. The New Year is a perfect time to reflect on your homeschool plans, and give a good review of everything you have done so far. Rather than feel pressured to do what other homeschool families are doing, take time to reflect on what is, and isn’t working in your homeschool. 

A mid-point review will propel your homeschool forward and help you tweak areas that need a little extra attention. Here are five tips for reviewing your homeschool year.

Whenever a new year approaches, I start with the goals I set way back in the summer. 

1. REVIEW YOUR GOALS

Whenever a new year approaches, I start with the goals I set way back in the summer. The wonderful thing about goals, is that they can be changed. Take a hard look at what worked, what partially worked, or what didn’t work at all. Adjust your goals as needed, or write new ones. As homeschooling parents, we sometimes get goal setting wrong for our children. Just as we think we have it figured out, the kids do a complete one-eighty and turn us on our backsides. Kids learning does not happen in a straight line, so know that your goals will need adjusting, rewriting, or just plain tossing out. 

2. STAY ORGANIZED

Staying organized is paramount in homeschooling. Believe it or not, I was far more organized homeschooling three children than I am with just one. Keeping up with three kids, each with five-plus subjects and extracurriculars, is enough to make any homeschooling mom a bit crazy. I had a detailed system each week for doing lesson plans, reviewing work, and reaching goals. As the last child moves up through the ranks, I find that I’m still organized, but perhaps far more relaxed. 

At the midpoint of the year, I review several things:

• Is my child on track with the amount of work completed? Is he chapters behind, on track, or ahead? If lagging, a schedule change may be in order. If your child is ahead, it may indicate that a more challenging curriculum is needed. Be aware that children often learn in bursts and might tackle several topics or chapters very quickly. They might also struggle with topics that are challenging and spend significant time to complete them. A few weeks behind or ahead doesn’t likely warrant an immediate change. Observe to see if a speed-up or slow-down is a recurring pattern or the normal ebb and flow of childhood learning.

• Is the quality of work acceptable? Is my child getting the work done just to get it off his plate? Or is he spending quality time on the topic? 

• Are grades on point? If you use grading as a measurement in your homeschool, are your children where you want them to be? Do you need to outsource extra help to get them over a hump?

• What curricula is not working? Don’t be afraid to toss that math curriculum if it’s making everyone miserable, and doesn’t encourage learning. 

• Is your portfolio up to date? Those in states that require mid-year reporting, or portfolio review will want to stay on top of paperwork. Take care of that now before the mid-point review. 

• Ask your children what is working, and do more of that. Toss out, adjust, rearrange, or revamp what isn’t working. Involved kids are more invested in their learning.

3. DON’T WORRY WHAT OTHERS ARE DOING

Comparison can quickly derail any homeschool. The quickest way to feel like a failure is to compare yourself with other homeschooling families. It doesn’t matter if the Jones’ children go to music class every day and play five instruments. Homeschooling allows us to meet our children where they are and to create a learning environment developed specifically for them. Comparison will always make you feel like you are living in a world of lack, rather than abundance. Celebrate the milestones and joys along the way, and resist the urge to compare. 

4. AVOID OVERWHELM

Overwhelm can quickly turn the best day, into the worst. If a mid-year review has you wondering if you were ever out of your car for more than five minutes or wondering how you managed to get any homeschooling done, you might need to scale down what you are doing. Jam-packed schedules can lead to burnout and overwhelm. Are the fun things constantly being pushed to the side so that you can squeeze in one more activity? Take a hard look at your schedule to see what can be dropped in the coming year. Drop things that no longer serve you or your child (clubs, playgroups, co-ops, homeschool groups, music, classes, sports, etc.). Save your time for those things that make your heart sing. 

5. IGNORE OPINIONS

Don’t give power to people who aren’t responsible for making decisions about your children.  Friends and relatives may be full of advice, ready to tell you what they think you should do. Relatives may be quick to point out all the things that they think are going wrong, where you lack in parenting skills and knowledge, and what your children need in terms of a solid education. Let them know that their opinion isn’t needed at this juncture because you have made the best decision possible for your kids. Spend some time creating appropriate responses that honor your choices, while emphatically letting them know that you have it all under control.

Mid-year reviews are a perfect time to reflect on all you have accomplished and where you want to be in the coming months. Reviews are also a great way to open the lines of communication between parent and child. 

If you feel like you are never accomplishing enough, keep a journal of your daily activities, milestones, and significant leaps in learning. It’s an incredible reminder of the path you have chosen in home educating your child!

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The Easiest Way to Get Organized for Homeschooling High School

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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Mission Possible: Totally Doable New Year’s Resolutions for Your Homeschool

The ancient Babylonians — who started the whole New Year’s resolutions trend with annual self-improvement promises to their gods — had the right idea: Their resolutions were simple, concrete acts that they could accomplish easily — returning borrowed farm equipment or planting a tree. Today, New Year’s resolutions seem silly if they are not big, sweeping goals: be happier, make more money, keep a cleaner house. The nebulous nature of these pursuits (what does one do to be happier?) make them almost doomed to fail, but if we can hone in on specific, small, actionable pieces of these goals — making time for ourselves each day, say, or stopping the out-the-door chaos on co-op mornings — we can actually see our New Year’s resolutions, well, resolve themselves. We can make it a better year—realistically and meaningfully. So read on for steps you can take to tackle some of the more common homeschool life road bumps, and resolve to make 2016 a better year for your family, one step at a time.

RESOLUTION: Stop being late for everything.

If your clan is chronically late, changing into people who show up on time can be a big task—but it’s doable if you—and your kids—are willing to commit to making a series of small changes every day, says Pauline Wallin, clinical psychologist and author of Taming Your Inner Brat: A Guide for Transforming Self-Defeating Behavior.

Start small. Set one manageable goal per day: I will not hit the snooze button this morning. I will put the library books by the door tonight instead of trying to find them in the morning. If you can’t commit to these small inconveniences, being on time may not be as important to you as you think it is.

Retrain your sense of time. Track your activities for a week — jot down daily tasks, how long you think each will take, and how long each actually takes, from morning readaloud to the breakfast dishes. Often, people are late because they have a fixed but incorrect idea of how long an activity takes.

Resist the urge to do one more thing. The need to feel productive is why you suddenly start opening mail or wiping counters when you should be walking out the door. Train yourself to stop what you’re doing — even if you’re in mid-wipe — at your designated go-time and walk right out the door.

Aim to be early. Plan to be exactly on time, and any unexpected event—your 6-year-old’s missing shoes or forgetting to charge your phone—will make you late. Instead, plan to be 15 minutes early, and bring along an activity you enjoy to fill those 15 minutes. (Family Uno game, anyone?)

What if it’s your kids who are always late? You can’t force someone to be on time— and tricks, like pretending events start earlier than they do, only work once or twice before kids figure you out. If being on time is important for an activity, talk to your kids about whether they’re willing to make it a priority. If not, this may not be the right year for that activity.

RESOLUTION: Clean up your homeschool clutter.

Let’s face facts: for a lot of us, some clutter is part of homeschool life. Even if you’re fairly vigilant about pruning papers and organizing supplies, stuff can get out of hand — and if you don’t stay on top of things, you can watch your dining room table disappear underneath your piles. You may never be a super-organized homeschooler, but you can make your space feel less chaotic with these tips and tricks. 

Aim higher. Add shelves to make your bookcases stretch all the way to the ceiling, and you’ll be amazed by how much extra space you get. Store very specific (5th grade math manipulatives or extra printer cartridges) or seldom-used items on the higher shelves.

Color code. Assign each kid a color, and use that color consistently: Buy notebooks, folders, and pencils, cover schoolbooks, and flag important pages in your own books or binders with your chosen color, and you’ll instantly know whose stuff is where. If your kids have lots of writing assignments, you may want to edit their papers using a pen in their designated color, too.

Back up. Invest in an off-site Internet service or external hard drive to keep your computer data safe, and you can scan and toss (or just plain toss) papers when they start to pile up.

Get into the habit. The key to staying organized is to spend about 10 minutes at the end of your school day tidying up your learning spaces and prepping for the next day. There’s no dramatic before- and-after with this habit, but the long-term difference is huge.

RESOLUTION: Get comfortable with imperfection.

Perfectionism gets a bad rap, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing: Heathy perfectionists know how to set ambitious-but-attainable goals and work to achieve them, which gives you a strong sense of purpose and accomplishment and a healthy perspective on the times when things don’t go right. (“This will make a great story someday!”) The problem is that it’s easy to veer into unhealthy perfectionism, where you’re mentally setting expectations that are just plain impossible and ensuring you hang on to that sinking feeling of constant failure. The key is to channel the good parts of your commitment to excellence without dragging in all the negative baggage — and a big piece of that is getting comfortable with the parts of life that may not live up to your high standards. “To be enlightened is to be without anxiety over imperfection,” Buddhists say, so think of these imperfection-accepting strategies as steps along the path to enlightenment.

Be your own measuring stick. Forget your friends, forget the blogs, forget Pinterest, and measure yourself against only your own abilities, says University of British Columbia, Vancouver clinical psychologist Jennifer Campbell. No one can be good at everything.

Know when okay is okay. Sometimes you want to be the best, but sometimes (Tuesday night dinner? Friday morning math?) just getting the job done counts as success.

Embrace the minimum. It is much better to have a terrific spontaneous 20 minutes of history than to plan out an entire year with a schedule so intense that you’re overwhelmed just reading your lesson plan. Find a balance that works for you, and don’t assume that more always means better.

Acknowledge the failures. Sometimes things go wrong, and it’s okay to say “this reading curriculum just isn’t working,” and let it go. Making failures into “I’m-not-trying-hard-enough” is a sure way to get stuck in a bad situation.

Be present. Live where you are with things as they are rather than getting hung up on the future or the past.

RESOLUTION: Make time for yourself.

We get it—oh, boy, do we ever get it: You’re busy. Like, insanely busy. But if you don’t make yourself a priority, you’re going to get burned out and grumpy. There’s a fine line between generosity — an integral part of being the kind of giving, doing parent we all want to be — and martyrdom, and we cross it when we get hung up on doing everything, including the things that someone else can do just as well — or sometimes better — than we can. It’s tempting to see this perpetual doing-too-much as an expression of love, but always putting yourself last will ultimately make you feel stressed out and resentful. And worse, over time it actually makes our kids appreciate all the things we do less and less because real respect can only come when someone recognizes that another person has hopes, dreams, and goals, too. Make this the year you channel some of your generous spirit into an area that needs it: you.

Consider yourself important. You are going to feel guilty about making me-time as long as you have the idea that your me-time is somehow less important than making-dinner, teaching-science, or cleaning-the-bathroom time. Say no to things that don’t feed your soul. Making yourself a priority means crossing some things off your to-do list. What can you let go of?

Write me-time on your calendar. Treat it just like any other part of your schedule, and write in 15 minutes a day of me-time — in pen.

RESOLUTION: Stay motivated when homeschooling gets hard.

Starting the school year, we have all these great plans and ideas for making this year the Best One Ever. By February, though, many of us hit a slump, where homeschooling feels like a slog and we’re taxing our inner resources just to do our version of the minimum. Sometimes, this is a sign that you need a mid-winter break. But if a break doesn’t boost your motivation, there are other ways to get it back.

If-then your routine. When you’re planning your week, anticipate bumps so that you have a plan in place to handle them: If we don’t get to math in the morning, we’ll do a lesson after dinner. If it’s raining, we’ll watch a documentary for nature study.

Be reasonable. If your homeschool plans are too ambitious, you can lose steam and give up. Set smaller goals, like doing an hour of school every weekday or doing one family project a week, and increase if you want to as you build stamina.

Keep a daily record. Some people opt to be accountable on public platforms, but even jotting down a paragraph in your homeschool journal every night can be commitment enough to keep you motivated. Feeling responsible to someone, even if it’s just yourself, can really help you stick with something when you aren’t feeling motivated.

Find a support network. One of the best tools in your motivation toolbox is a network of people who understand your challenges and will empathize or cheer you on as the situation requires. Every homeschool parent really needs at least one fellow homeschooler in her social circle — if you don’t have a real-life community, find an online group where you feel comfortable. (Just don’t forget to return the support when your friend is the one needing a motivation boost.)

Put your own learning on the lesson plan. One of the best ways to stay motivated in your homeschool life is to enjoy the process, so why limit all the learning fun to the kids? Sign up for a local college or online class that sparks your interest, and share your enthusiasm with your kids.

Remind yourself why this all matters. You’re more likely to stay motivated when a goal has true personal meaning for you, and when you hit a slump, remembering that meaning can pull you through. Multiplication drills may not inspire your heart, but raising kids who don’t stress over every math test they encounter might. Keep an eye on the big picture.

This article is excerpted from the winter 2016 issue of HSL.

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Delightfully Doleful Books for Dark and Dreary Winter Days

After a (too) long, (too) hot summer, winter has finally arrived in Georgia and the weather people on the news are saying things like “prepare for ARCTIC BLAST 2017.” It’s gloomy and grey outside and pitch black by 6 p.m., meaning that I’m ready to get PJ-ed and hop into bed by 6:30. Some people like to read about the beach and happier tropical climes when the weather outside is frightful, but I prefer to hibernate with a stack of library books by my side featuring frost-bitten protagonists trying to survive the elements, so I can revel in my warm, afghan-covered indoor-ness while they’re being chased by wolves. It’s time to build a fire and read To Build a Fire.

For many in my generation, Joan Aiken is the queen of this sort of middle grade gothic, with her loosely connected alternate history series beginning with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. In Wolves, two young girls fight back against an evil governess (and an assortment of wolves) with the help of hermit-boy Simon, who lives in the woods and raises geese and bees. Simon moves to London and becomes the protagonist in my favorite book of the original trilogy, Black Hearts in Battersea, where he thwarts a Hanoverian plot to assassinate the king. Simon’s friend, Dido Twite, takes up the narrative (and visits America) with her adventures in Nightbirds on Nantucket. I didn’t realize at the time that Dido went on to star in several more books written by Aiken, but I’ve been catching up with the series and all the treacherous Hanoverian plots, my favorite of which involves sliding St. Paul’s Cathedral into the Thames during the coronation of King Richard IV.

If you prefer your wolves and evil plots a big closer to home, Serafina and the Black Cloak by Robert Beatty is the start of another great middle school series, set in the Biltmore Estate and the surrounding forests and mountains of Asheville, Tenn. I’ve visited Biltmore several times, and it’s a treat to see the rooms I’ve toured come alive in Beatty’s version of life at Biltmore in 1899. Serafina, daughter of one of the house employees, prowls the house at night and designates herself Chief Rat Catcher, but children both upstairs and downstairs are going missing and Serafina soon realizes that there are evil forces at work, discovering her own magical heritage in the meantime. The second book in the series, Serafina and the Twisted Staff, picks up where the first book leaves off, continuing the fight against evil and Serafina’s journey of self-discovery.

This past year, my favorite example of Dickensian dreariness was in the three volumes of the Iremonger trilogy by Edward Carey. Carey, an Englishman, has said that he was inspired to write the series after moving to Austin, Texas, and missing the grey gloominess of London. Beginning with the first novel, Heap House, he creates a complete world around the Iremonger family, who live in the midst of the vast rubbish dump produced by Victorian-era London. The enormous heaps are a dangerous ecosystem of their own, but also the source of the Iremonger wealth, and each member of the family is assigned a “birth object,” a particular item that they must carry with them for their entire lives. I loved everything about these books: the detailed (and very gloomy) illustrations, the always-not-quite-right Iremonger names, and the story, which ultimately spills out of the heaps to infect all of London. The books are aimed at middle school readers and teens, but I think they’d be great fun as readalouds, as long as the listeners are okay with the occasional (very) unfortunate event.

Let me know if you have any grey and gloomy favorites that keep you warm over the winter, and Happy Reading!

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

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How to Turn Homeschool Movie Days into Active Learning Days

There's nothing wrong with a movie marathon, but sometimes, you need to kick it up a notch. If you're looking for a way to write your next movie day into your curriculum, we've got you covered with fun activities inspired by the movies.

WATCH: Edward Scissorhands
Tim Burton's story of fear and difference set in a technicolor suburban landscape may just be one of the great modern fairy tales.

DO: Soap carving
Get inspired by Edward's exotic topiaries and make your own sculptures with a butter knife and cakes of Ivory soap.

WATCH:: Home Alone
Come on, who doesn't dream about having the whole house to yourself every now and again?

DO: Indoor obstacle course
Build your own adventure with cushions, pillows, books, and whatever else you have lying around the house, inspired by Kevin's DIY home security system.

WATCH: The Gold Rush
Charlie Chaplin's chilly classic has some of the most iconic cold weather scenes in movie history.

DO: Pantomime show
Borrow Chaplin's silent movie style to create your own silent comedy show based on British holiday pantos.

WATCH: The Karate Kid
Choose your experience: the classic with Ralph Macchio as a misfit turned karate master or the newer version with Jaden Smith as a the karate kid.

DO: Karate
Rent a beginner's DVD, and turn your family room into a temporary dojo. If the horse stance proves a hit, you can sign up for real-life lessons.

WATCH: Treasure Planet
Disney's updated-for-the-space-age take on Stevenson's classic novel is surprisingly good.

DO: Have a treasure hunt
Make a map and send your young explorers in search of hidden treasure.

WATCH: Zathura: A Space Adventure
This underrated flick has all the qualities that director John Favreau would put to such great use in the blockbuster Iron Man.

DO: Make your own board game
All you need are markers, paper, and cardboard to create your own board game. Obviously, making all the rules is one of the best parts,

WATCH: The Gnome-Mobile
This hidden treasure of a film sends two children (yep, they're the kids from Mary Poppins) and their grandfather on a quest to help a gnome find a wife.

DO: Make a gnome habitat
You can occupy several hours creating a gnome garden complete with quirky inhabitants.

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How to Beat Midwinter Cabin Fever in Your Homeschool

Feeling cooped up can muck up your sleep schedule, set your nerves on edge, and even make you sick — and in the middle of another shiver-me-timbers winter, cabin fever can be the straw that breaks the parent’s back. We can’t make spring get here any faster, but we can suggest a few ways to stymie cooped-up boredom and get a little break from the cabin fever blues.  

Go camping in the living room. Set up a tent (or rig one out of pillows and blankets), roll out the sleeping bags, and eat s’mores while you tell stories by flashlight.

Go on a treasure hunt. Put together a series of maps or clues (bonus points if they rhyme) to guide kids to a treasure hidden in your house. Use your kids’ ability level to decide on your clues: They should be tricky enough to need solving but not so tough that kids lose interest. Your hidden booty might be a new game, a craft project, movie tickets, or another boredom buster.

Paint a mural. Kids who like drawing or painting will love the opportunity to work on a big-scale project. Cover a wall with a giant canvas or roll of paper — or paint right on the wall, if you’re feeling particularly brave. Get kids started mocking up their mural on standard-size paper, then transfer the perfect mural to the wall using the grid method.

Set up an obstacle course. You can keep it simple — do 10 jumping jacks here, run around in circles there — or get more complicated with Lego building stations, Ninja-sliding walls, and pillow-jumping paths.

Start a marshmallow war. Build marshmallow shooters and compete to see who can shoot marshmallows the farthest and most accurately. You can get cull instructions on the Come Together Kids blog, but all you’ll need are plastic cups, balloons, mini marshmallows, and a pair of scissors.

Make a time capsule. Pick a future date, and let the kids write a letter and put together a package for their future selves. Store this in a safe place, and you and your kids will be delighted to rediscover it down the road.

Learn a secret code. Pick up a copy of a book like The Book of Codes: Understanding the World of Hidden Messages: An Illustrated Guide to Signs, Symbols, Ciphers, and Secret Languages and read up on the history of codes from prehistoric cave drawings to modern day graffiti. 

Host your own film festival. Pop plenty of popcorn and settle in for a movie marathon. We think a mix of classic musicals (Singin’ in the Rain, Annie), engaging documentaries (Miss Representation, Walking with Dinosaurs), and family favorites (Toy Story, Labyrinth) is just about perfect.

Publish a family newspaper. Kids can review movies, music, and television shows, report on important family news, interview each other for profiles, and opine on current events in editorials. If you’re handy with a video camera, you can turn your paper into a news show.

Find a pen pal. A pen pal can be an excellent opportunity to hone writing skills and give your kids something to do on quiet afternoons. Find a pen pal through your homeschool group or an organization like Homeschool Pen Pals, and stock up on stationery.

Break out the family pictures. Face it: Your 90s prom hairstyle is never going to stop being hilarious to your kids, so suck up the embarrassment and pull out your childhood photos. Consider creating a scrapbook — The Johnson Family’s Most Embarrassing Memories, for instance — or a photo album of great family photos with captions. 

Create a concert light show. With Snap Circuits Lights, you can create individualized light shows for your favorite (and least favorite) songs. Kids can build their own light board, then program it to interact with songs from an mp3 player.

Throw a mad tea party. Dress up in your fanciest party clothes and your favorite hat for a Wonderland tea party. Of course you’ll want to serve tea and crumpets.

Make a puppet theater. Home Depot has a handy plan for building a permanent puppet theater, or you can just repurpose a cardboard for your family puppet shows. Make sock puppets from partnerless socks, yarn, fabric glue, and other odds and ends, and put on puppet shows based on classic fairy tales, nursery rhymes, or your own stories.

Start a chain story. Begin a story with a few paragraphs, and take turns adding “what happens next.” You’ll be amazed at your kids’ imaginations — and all the wacky twists your story can take.

Hold a music education class. Mosey on over to YouTube, and let each family member put together a list of must-listen music to share with the rest of the clan. It’s fun to talk about what makes a song your favorite versus the best and how much that answer can vary from person to person.

Have a costume parade. It’s really a shame that Halloween only comes once a year when making your own costumes is so fun. Set a day for your family costume party that gives kids enough time to work on their costumes — you can set a theme, such as Literary Characters or Animals, or let imaginations roam free — and hook everyone up with supplies and costume-crafting assistance. This can be especially fun if you invite friends to join the dress-up party.

Plan a road trip. Collect a pile of travel guides from the library and plan your ultimate family vacation. 

Put together a science fair. This one may take a little effort on your part, but as Shelli discovered, it’s well worth it. Kids can choose a topic, conduct research and experiments, and present their findings — and if you can find a host location and get other homeschoolers on board, too, so much the better.

Make a laser course. Use yarn or string and masking tape to create a web of “lasers” for kids to make their way through, super spy-style. This works best in a hallway or narrower room — just don’t block the way to the bathroom.

Play cards. Pagat.com can remind you of the rules to pretty much any card game you can think of, from the basics like rummy and spades to games you’ve never heard of, like Skitgubbe or Svoi Kozyri.

Make a bird feeder. Plenty of birds stick around through the winter, and a bird feeder is a practical way to assist your local wildlife in addition to being a fun boredom buster. Position your feeder near a window with a bird identification guide handy, and you can start a list of local birds. 

This list is excerpted from the winter 2015 issue of home/school/life.

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Transitioning Back to Homeschool After the Holiday Break

This week most homeschoolers are getting back into the swing of things after a few weeks off for winter break. It’s hard for everyone – adults and children – to start getting up early and getting back to work, so here are a few ideas to make that transition a little more bearable. Please add your ideas in the comments section!

Play Games

Instead of pulling out the curriculum, pull out your games. Pick the most educational games you have on hand and do it during your regular school time. If you like to get up a little earlier in the morning for your homeschool routine, use the games as a way to ease back into that schedule. It’s much easier waking up for a fun game than spelling lesson!

Plan a Field Trip 

If you spent a good portion of your holiday in your pajamas, sleeping late and watching movies, you might find that planning a field trip will help you ease back into a routine. You’ll need to get up early, get dressed, and best of all, you can plan a trip to a place that will spark someone’s interest. Ask your child to take a notebook and sketch their favorite exhibits or jot down ideas for follow-up once they get home.

Plan a Trip to the Library

This is easy, and it feels good to watch our kids pick out their own books. While you are there, you might pick up that history book you’ve wanted to read to the kids too. Once you’re home, you have a stack of books that will kick start your new season of learning.

Find a Good Book 

You might not need a stack of library books, but just one great book that pulls everyone together on the sofa. And especially if you spent most of your holiday visiting relatives, dressing up, and being on your best behavior, you might enjoy easing back into your regular routine by cuddling together in your pajamas for a good readaloud. (Click here to check out some books we've recommended in the past.)

Watch a Documentary

Do you want to do something educational, but you’re still not ready to do much planning? Try getting the family together to watch a documentary. See Family Time: Our Favorite Documentaries for a must-see list of documentaries.

Make Art Your Lesson

A great first day back might be an art day for your family. Be sure to check all the past issues of home/school/life for Amy Hood’s great ideas on how to explore art with your children. You can read one of her columns online too.

Ask Your Child How to Begin

Finally, if your child is just not transitioning well, or even if he is, but you want to make the transition fun, ask him what he’d like to do to get back into the swing of things. How about research a new subject? Make a poster. Make a film. Or do a puppet show? You might kick start a whole new project!

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We're Behind in Math — How Can We Catch Up?

My sixth grader is really behind in math. She was struggling when we pulled her out of school last year, and she’s still scoring at least one grade level behind in every placement test. I don’t want her to stress about math, but I also don’t want her to keep falling behind. How can we catch up?

I’m going to answer the question that you’re asking, but first I’d like to tell you something that I think might reassure you. My husband teaches high school math, and over the last five years, he’s become a popular tutor for unschoolers who want to take the SAT or ACT. Most of these kids come to him with no formal math experience—many don’t know their multiplication tables or that decimals and fractions describe the same thing. He usually gets them about a year or two before they want to actually take the test, but sometimes they only have six months together. And you know what? All of these kids have always learned enough math in that time to get a decent score on their official tests. Obviously this isn’t the strategy you’re taking with your daughter—but isn’t it kind of reassuring to know that even if you do fall behind, catching up is easier than you probably think it is?

On to your question: If your daughter’s placement tests are putting her a year behind, I’d forget forging ahead and instead let her work at the level she’s ready for. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, you don’t have to hold onto rigid ideas about grade levels when you are homeschooling. I bet you wouldn’t worry if your daughter were a year ahead in math, right? The longer you homeschool, the more you’ll realize that grade levels are kind of arbitrary, and the important thing is to choose the work your child is ready for, whatever the number on the workbook happens to be. Second, there’s a good chance that your daughter just missed a foundational step in math that’s making it hard for her to move forward—she might have missed a few days of class or had a not-great teacher or just not been ready to make the mental connection. There’s a really good chance that if you go back and work through that grade level together, she’ll pick up what she needs to know and be ready to move on— maybe in less time than you think. (And sometimes it helps to play out the worst case scenario because it’s not as bad as you thought: What if your daughter is always a level behind in math? Maybe she won’t take calculus in high school, which isn’t terrible unless she has her heart set on taking calculus or a career in engineering.) Remember: You don’t have to follow the math book problem for problem. You can find the areas that are tripping her up and spend most of your time on those, and move on as she masters concepts. By not making a big deal about “being behind,” you’re also teaching your daughter that it’s more important to understand something and be able to put it to use than it is to learn just enough to get through a set of test questions.

At the same time, consider ways you can make math more of a part of your everyday life. Stock up on board games that make math fun (see the spring 2017 for ideas) and living math books. Use an alternative approach to math, like Simply Charlotte Mason’s Pet Store Math, which lets kids pretend they’re the bosses of their own pet store, or Life of Fred, which turns math into a playful readaloud. (Life of Fred isn’t totally secular, but I feel like the places where it’s not are so ridiculously over-the-top that it’s easy to discuss them as you go.) Encourage kids to use math in everyday life: Split your pizza into eight even pieces, double a cupcake recipe for a party, or see if your budget will stretch to that new video game. There’s so much math in life that it’s not hard to find opportunities to just do it, without a formal book or any worry about what level it is.

I honestly think a combination of these two strategies—being okay with starting at the level where your daughter is and increasing the numeracy, or math literacy, quotient of your home—will help your daughter’s mathematic knowledge increase significantly. But if you’re really concerned about getting her up to a specific grade level, double-time your way through the math she tests into—if you’d usually do three lessons a week, do five or six—until she’s working at grade level. Really, though, I think this is a place where going with your daughter’s flow and trusting that she’ll get where she needs to go if you keep working together will serve your homeschool best.

This reader question was originally published in the spring 2017 issue of HSL.

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How Do I Write a High School Transcript for an Unschooler?

Lisa asked: My always-unschooled 17-year-old has always been adamant that college isn’t on is to-do list — but now, just as he’s getting ready to start what’s technically his senior year this fall, he’s fallen in love with a fairly traditional college (with a reputation for being tough on homeschooled applicants) and made up his mind that’s what he wants to do next. I want to support him, but I have no idea how to pull together a high school transcript (which his dream college does require) when we’ve done very little formal schoolwork for high school. Can you help?

Obviously your life right now would be a little easier if you’d been keeping careful records for your son’s high school transcript since eighth grade, but honestly, it’s no big deal that you’re just starting to think about it at the end of junior year. (I’m not sure if it’s exactly comforting, but there’s a not-small percentage of homeschool parents who don’t start thinking about transcripts until their student’s senior year is ending — and many of them do just fine pulling them together even at that very last minute.) Putting together this transcript is totally doable.

Start with a simple transcript template like this one so that all you have to do is fill in the blanks. (Transcripts for very traditional colleges are one place where creativity doesn’t really pay off — you’ll usually fare best if your transcript looks like everybody else’s.) Now look at the college your son has his sights set on: What core academic classes does it require for incoming freshman? Often, the requirements look something like this: 4 units of English, 2 units of algebra, 1 unit of geometry, 1 unit of trigonometry, calculus, statistics, or other advanced math, 1 unit of biology, 1 unit of chemistry or physics, 1 unit of additional science, 1 unit of U.S. history, 1 unit of European history, world history, or world geography, 2 units of the same foreign language, and 1 unit of visual or performing arts.

Now a list like this might initially make you feel kind of panic-y because it seems like the most structured thing ever and your problem is that you’ve got almost no structured stuff to draw on, right? In fact, though, a list like this is a great thing for homeschoolers because it helps you focus in and figure out how all the learning your son has been doing might fit into a more traditional framework. Just because he hasn’t been checking off boxes for the past three years doesn’t mean he hasn’t been learning — which you know, of course, but which can be easy to forget in the face of a form full of those boxes. For instance, all that time he spent hatching tadpoles, creating microscope slides, growing carnivorous plants, dissecting owl pellets, and volunteering at the zoo? That might add up to Biology. Or the year he spent reading every Philip Dick book and comparing the books to movie interpretations of them? That’s comparative literature in action and can count as a semester of English. What about math? Frankly, if you haven’t done organized classes, the simplest thing to do may be to just to ask your son to take a few placement tests to see what math he’s mastered — then you can list the maths he’s mastered on his transcript. As you realize how much your son has actually accomplished over the past three years, his transcript will fill in pretty quickly — and you may be tempted to get whimsical with course names and descriptions, but if the school he’s aiming for really is super-traditional, it really is best to just keep it as simple as you can: Biology, rather than Exploring the Natural World, or Literature: Science Fiction instead of The Worlds of Philip Dick. Yes, coloring inside the lines is a little boring, but you’ve happily lived outside the lines (and can continue to do so). This is just a hoop that you’ll jump through more easily if you present your out-of-box experiences in a form that fits neatly into the admission committee’s boxes. (Plenty of colleges are receptive to homeschool resumes and appreciate the kinds of interest-driven classes that homeschoolers have the opportunity to take. You just want to know what the school you are applying to is looking for.)

After all this list-making, you may have some holes — but you’ve got his entire senior year to fill them. Don’t worry if you have multiple classes to fill in — maybe you need to cover geometry and trigonometry or take two English classes. This is pretty easy to manage with a little strategic planning. Sit down with your son, and come up with a game plan for what to do over the next year so that his transcript matches up with the requirements for his dream school. (If you need to, you can set your graduation date for the end of summer instead of spring to get a little more time. Remember, you’re the one who has the power to determine your academic year.)

You don’t mention whether you’ve been doing any outside classes, but if you haven’t, make sure to enroll in a couple this fall. They’ll make your transcript a little easier, yes, but they’ll also connect you to other teachers who can help describe your son’s achievements and college suitability when the time comes to start soliciting teacher recommendations for your application. You can handle the transcript thing on your own, but you will definitely benefit from having outside, unbiased teachers for your son’s teacher recommendations.

Good luck! It can feel intimidating to tackle this on your own, but just like every other part of homeschooling, taking it one step at a time and keeping your student top of mind will get you through.

This Q&A was originally published in the spring 2016 issue of HSL.

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When Is It OK to Let Kids Quit?

I signed my sons up for a class at our nature center because I thought they’d love it — but three weeks in, they’re asking if they have to go every week. I’ve probed and probed, but it doesn’t seem like the class is bad or the instructor is mean — a friend’s daughter took the class with the same instructor last year and loved it — they just don’t want to go. Should I let them quit? And if I do, am I raising them to be quitters?

It sounds like you signed your sons up for this class without really getting their opinion on whether they wanted to take it — which is fine. How will kids learn what they love if they don’t try lots of different things? Part of our job as homeschool parents is to plant seeds that might bloom into interests. But not every seed blooms. Trying lots of things means that you’ll also discover things you don’t like — and that often involves quitting something that just isn’t a good fit.

We’ve stigmatized quitting, pitting it against virtuous qualities like persistence and follow-through, but quitting isn’t necessarily a bad thing, says Shimi K. Kang, author of the book The Dolphin Way: A Parent's Guide to Raising Healthy, Happy, and Motivated Kids-Without Turning into a Tiger. It’s a normal part of pre-adolescent development, as kids experiment, explore, and find their passions through trial and error. The problem, says Kang, is often that we sometimes leap right into a three-month class commitment instead of giving our kids free space to explore their interests on their own. Just like you, we think, “Oh, Marshall loves going to the nature center — I bet he’d love this nature class,” when we might be better served looking for one-day programs (check nature centers, community centers, state parks, and libraries in your neck of the woods) that let kids sample an activity without commitment. And don’t underestimate the power of free play for letting kids test out different interests — the modern-day prescription to any childhood interest tends to be a structured class, but that isn’t always the best way for kids to test the waters. Kids who have a pattern of wanting to quit activities may just need fewer activities and more free time. This may be the case with your sons — they like nature study, they just don't want to get up and do it every week in a structured way.

Now, if your sons were the ones who pushed to take this class, I’d feel differently. Yes, trial and error are an important part of finding your interests, but time and money aren’t unlimited for most of us. If a child is interested in a class or activity, it’s smart to talk about expectations up front. For team sports, choirs, theater troupes, and other activities where other players are depending on your child’s participation, your child should plan to see the season through before he signs up — part of signing on to that kind of activity is becoming part of that community. If you’re paying for a class or activity, agree together on what a “reasonable effort” before giving up entails. A full semester? A month? The length of the class? Then hold your child to her commitment. (Of course, if kids want to quit because they are being hurt, physically or emotionally, they should always be able to quit.)

Bottom line: Quitting isn’t all bad, and you should address it on a case-by-case basis before the activity even starts.

This was originally published in the spring 2015 issue of HSL.

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