Piney Woods Homeschool

  This is Part 6 of 6.  Find the other parts here. Less than perfect *is* success.  Focus on what happened, not what didn’t happen.  Today, this week, this term, this year, what did you and your students accomplish?  Where did you grow?  What new experiences did you have?  How did you improve?  Appreciate the beauty in what you *are* doing.  It’s easy to feel inadequate and worry that you’re failing.  And of course we have to consider where we need to improve, but first we have to seriously look at where we’re doing well.  So your Year 1 student isn’t narrating beautifully even when you read a paragraph at a time.  But what *is* she doing that she wasn’t able to do at the beginning of the year?  Where can you see growth or forward progress? Where are you seeing small glimpses of success?  Maybe your Year 4 student isn’t adding Latin or taking to Plutarch or the original Shakespeare plays, but is he enjoying one ...

This is Part 5 of 6.  Find the other parts  here. When you make your plans, plan to delegate.  The first place to delegate is to your kids.  Pass responsibilities to your kids as they can handle them.  This looks different for each child and each home; it will even look different from week to week sometimes.  Don’t fear for their failure.  You want to be wise about adding responsibility, but you also need to let them own the responsibility even if it turns out to be more imperfect than you would like.  Plan for boundaries to help teach them as they take on these new roles.  They need regular checkpoints where they can see the consequences of their success or failure.  This helps them learn to manage their own work.  But within those checkpoints, give them freedom.  Some of them will pick up on what they need to do sooner than others.  I have one child who starts his week’s work on Sunday evening and tries to come ...

This is Part 4 of 6.  Find the other parts  here. The map should not rule us.  Plan, but hold plans loosely.  AmblesideOnline’s booklists, schedules, and other plans are such a help!  They give us a place to start.  Sometimes we can work with those plans with very few changes, and other times we’ll find we have to make big adjustments.  When you’re ready to plan, plan for what you think you can realistically accomplish plus a little more.  Give yourself room to grow into the plans.  Looking at the schedule for a new term can seem overwhelming--all those books!  All those new types of work!  And we weren’t getting everything done *last* term!  Don’t panic!  Take that work, and organize it into whatever template works for you so you can see how it might actually play out in your home with your unique situation. Adjust your expectations down if you need to, but don’t adjust them all the way down to a level that feels c...

This is Part 3 of 6.  Find the other parts  here. How do we measure success?  Charlotte Mason said it wasn’t how much a child knows, but how much he cares, and the connections he makes.  Most of the time, I don’t get much indication of how much any of my children care. I worry just like anyone else about where I’m falling short.  When the kids were young, it was sometimes really hard to find signs of caring and connections.  Somehow my kids never seemed to act out the stories they read in school like I hear about other people’s children doing.  Now that they’re older, I’m more likely to see connections in a dinner table argument over Richard III.  I’d prefer not to have the argument, but it’s undeniable that the participants both know and care about the history they’ve studied.  My kids normally don’t love their handicrafts, and that’s a subject that gets skipped regularly by at least one of them.  But that one has voluntarily tak...

This is Part 2 of 6.  Find the other parts  here. Imperfection feels like failure, doesn’t it?  We want to know that we’re doing what’s best for our children, that we’re competent at this job of homeschooling that we’ve embraced, that we measure up, and the clearest way to know that is to judge ourselves and our children against the standard.  But what if our standard isn’t the right one?  And what if we aren’t competent to judge how we measure up because the results aren’t necessarily visible?  What if our expectations fail to account for the true challenges we face?  What if the “right thing to do” isn’t actually best for our specific situation? My oldest and my youngest both learned to read painlessly and early.  My youngest taught herself by helping me do DuoLingo Spanish on my phone at bedtime every night!  (That’s not an officially approved method of reading instruction.)  When my oldest started Year 1, for her reading in...

This is not a post about how to do all the right things.  This is a post about finding success in the midst of the impossibility of doing things right.  No matter how long you’ve been homeschooling or how carefully you study and work to implement Charlotte Mason’s methods, you know the sting of imperfection.  None of us is doing everything “right”, no matter how we define “right.”  Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what “right” even is, especially when what’s “right” for one somehow doesn’t seem to achieve the same results for another. I’ve been using Charlotte Mason’s methods in my home for a long time.  My oldest will graduate from high school in May, and we started when she was in preschool.  I take this seriously.  I believe that Charlotte Mason’s principles and even her specific instructions are wise and well founded and almost always I can find a reason for why she suggested what she did.  You might think that means that my home is a p...