We've done it.
Our new homeschool year has officially begun. It feels good. We're still speaking and I haven't wished the yellow school bus would come scoop up my boys one time.
Really.
This is the first year in a long time, probably since we moved, that I feel genuinely giddy about what we'll learn. A lot of that has to do with Brave Writer, but it's also where we are. Everyone is *kind of settled. Well, as settled as you get in this life.
I was pretty hard on myself about it until I looked back and realized we had gone through a series of 'little t' traumas that left us all pretty worn out.
August 2018, though, the Shepherds have their groove back!
Most days.
Some days.
I've needed some time to get my head around how different our school is. My first two kids, my girls, are both attending college. Even though they live at home we rarely see them. I know they've come home because leftovers are gone. Or my half and half has been used. Or their pile of shoes are in the front hall. But for the most part they're just out in the world on their own working and schooling and navigating adulthood.
It's so weird.
So now it's me and my boys. Spencer is 14 and Liam is 8. That's a spread, I'll tell you. Gone are my days of doing read alouds while my four kids crowded around me. I've had to find a different routine with these guys. It's a lot of working with one while the other does his own thing then switching out.
Brave Writer held a camp (webinars and giveaways, etc.) where I learned so much.
I've learned I need a routine.
I loathe schedules. I really do. As a recovering perfectionist schedules are the quickest way for me to quit. If I get off schedule I think I should just quit and try again tomorrow. Seriously, that's how my brain works.
I was talking with my friend, Linda, a fellow writer, and we were discussing our current situation of non-writing. I told her that I had read in many writer's memoirs that you just had to do the work of sitting down every day at the same time and writing. She told of one of her most productive writing times she was at the beach with her sister. She'd wake up and write, every day, and the words kept coming. She continued that habit once she returned home and said it was how she got her book finished.
It was duh and aha moment for both of us.
If you build it they will come.
I think this can be transferred to every single thing that we do. I just need a homeschool routine - not a schedule. Here's a video from Julie Bogart that talks about the difference.
Anyway, once I was home I couldn't quit thinking about what Linda and I had talked about. Every moment of growth in my life, in my homeschool, in my housekeeping, in my cooking, in my friendships, has been built on habit, or routine.
I don't like commitment. It's just part of my quirky personality. I like having room to do something more fun than the other thing I've already planned. I'd always thought of routine as a trap that I couldn't get out of.
Routine is not a trap; it's a safety net!
See, routine doesn't pin us down, it anchors us. Flibberty gibbets like me can wake up and decide it's a perfect day for hiking and exploring because tomorrow we can return to our routine. We can pick up where we left off.
Home education means walking away from public school fixings of schedules, have-to's and shoulds. That's not a knock on public education, it's just reality. When you agree to public school you are agreeing to someone else's standards and schedules.
Home education means you get to pick, your kids get to pick. You decide what's important and it doesn't have to be based on What Your Child Needs to Know When. Oh how I wish I'd never been given that book when my kids were little.
So much of our early days of home learning came from fear-directed decisions. I don't blame my younger self. I didn't know. I was doing a thing that not a single other friend was doing. All I had to compare our work to was public school and what it produced.
Home educators are doing a new thing. We cannot compare ourselves to any other system out there.
How do you feel about schedules vs. routines? Do you ever feel trapped by yours?
Tomorrow I'll share how I came up with our current routine, how I already implement routine, and how I plan on changing the universe with routine.
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