The ultimate goal of homeschooling

Plus the joy of homemade, and one word that’s working

Giving up, taking stock, starting over

Writing this newsletter makes me very aware of how much I chop and change our plans and activities. Over the last few months, my son has practised handwriting in a handwriting book; I’ve written out lines from Beowulf for him to trace and/or copy; I’ve had him draw letters using his fingers in a tray of tea leaves, and draw big letters over and over using different-coloured pencils. At the moment, his handwriting is just spelling practice, and surprisingly it’s the best writing I’ve ever seen him do. My daughter worked steadily through her Jolly Learning Grammar book for several months, but at the moment she detests it, and I’m just teaching her the grammar myself.

Does this show lack of tenacity, want of perseverance? Or is it simply adjusting to my child’s changing needs and interests, trying to keep things fresh, doing whatever it takes to get him to hold a pencil for a few minutes a day? There’s a stigma about ‘giving up’, and rightly so: if we all gave up every time something got hard or boring, mankind wouldn’t have got very far. It can be good to keep going even when you don’t want to, even when you think you have no hope of success. But also, people and seasons change. Children change very fast indeed, and perhaps the textbook that was the perfect fit in September is no longer so appealing come March.

If you’re 16 and studying the biology syllabus to take an exam, you probably need to stick with the main textbooks. But if you’re just trying to immerse your children in learning, to keep them interested and wondering and keen, I think it’s ok to switch things up. Working through a book or curriculum from beginning to end has great appeal to us adults. It’s an easy way to feel good about our child’s education, that it’s thorough and somehow complete. But education is never complete, no matter how many books you read. Tenacity is one skill we want our children to develop, but there are many others too. I don’t want my children’s work to become drudgery for them, or for them to just go through the motions to get it done for the day. I’ve seen them do that, and there’s zero learning going on.

It’s easy to forget how small our children are. Mine are 6 and 8. Sometimes I have to remind myself that my image of children sitting at the table, heads bent studiously over their books for long stretches of time, is not an image shared by the typical 8 year old. Education is a long game—a lifetime’s game, in fact. For now, my approach is that a small amount of learning every day is a good thing that slowly, slowly builds up into something greater than the sum of its parts. That is the goal, not the completion of individual textbooks or curriculums.

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One word that’s working

I noticed recently that our mornings of work are going really nicely. The children are engaged, focused, and willing. We’re doing so much good quality work that we are all pleasantly tired by the effort, and there’s still plenty of time for play, too.

There are, of course, many reasons why this happens—or doesn’t. One of them is my new list/planning system, which I’ll share in another post. Some of it isn’t in my control—I wish I could control what moods we all wake up in! But in this case it also comes down to one single word:

Pause.

As in: “It’s 8.30. At about 9 o’clock I’m going to ask you to pause your game so we can sit down and do some work.”

Or: “My goodness, that was a great maths investigation. Let’s all take a pause and then sit down together at 11ish to read a book.”

It doesn’t particularly change the reality of what we do, but the children definitely respond much better to the idea of a pause than an ending. They’re happy to pause a game because it means they can go back to it later. When I tell them we’re pausing in our work, they expect that we will be restarting in a little while so it’s no surprise when we do.

The joy of homemade homeschooling

I know that I recommend a lot of books and resources that involve spending money. I trust that you only buy what’s useful to you and what you can comfortably afford. I’m well aware of the temptation to throw money at a problem, and I also know that even the most useful and valuable things still take up space in our homes and require energy to use, store, clean, and care for. And energy just to exist with!

But homeschooling doesn’t have to be expensive, and sometimes there is great freedom in doing things on the cheap. Recently I have been making matching pair games where the children match a Greek word to its English translation. I made another paper activity where the children had to put various nouns in the right group according to whether they are common, proper, or collective nouns. We investigated sharing things between two by cutting up paper ‘cookies’. I wrote the things to do to help someone who is unconscious on individual cards so that my daughter could arrange them into the correct order and copy them out herself.

Not perfect, but perfectly good enough.

All these activities involve nothing more expensive than paper, pens, and scissors. They can all be recycled when we’re finished with them. The children like them because I made them just for them. And because they are so simple, there’s much less pressure involved. When you buy an expensive curriculum or book or whatever, you need the child to like it, and a lot of the time the child can sense that pressure even if it’s not verbalised. You’ve invested, and you want your investment to pay off. When you scribble some words on some paper, the stakes are much lower. You don’t mind too much if the child rejects it or isn’t interested right now, which makes it more of an invitation than an expectation, which of course increases the odds that they’ll want to give it a go.

(And please don’t imagine that I’m spending my evenings making beautiful matching pairs games, practising my calligraphy and artwork to make paper activities to treasure forever and hand down the generations. I’m no perfectionist, and there’s a reason How We Homeschool is not on Instagram! By all means get the art supplies out if that’s what your soul desires, but my soul desires more time on the sofa reading novels, so for me, felt tips and wonky edges are absolutely fine.)

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