Plan Your Year: Homeschool Planning for Purpose and Peace

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Introduction

The Person in Front of You

My husband and I started toying with the idea of homeschooling long before our children were school-age. I taught public middle and high school for seven years and had become disillusioned with the state of the public school system, its emphasis on testing, overcrowding in the classroom, and the increase in student behavior problems.

Knowing you want to homeschool early on in your children’s life is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, I had years to research and plan for the first day of kindergarten. I had years to obsess over the perfect method of instruction, the perfect curriculum, the perfect day.

As you can likely guess, my children did not fit neatly into my perfect homeschooling plans. They had their own ideas, their own agendas, their own developmental timetables. It was a struggle to get them to sit for long stretches and soak up my carefully constructed units. My oldest did not read easily. She hated math. My second child was either clamoring to be a part of what we were doing, needing my attention, or destroying another part of the house.

It didn’t take me long to realize I had missed a vital part of the planning process. In considering my vision of the perfect homeschool day, I missed the fact that my children are not perfect and neither am I (though I’m pretty close). My perfect plan ignored the most important factor of all: the people in front of me.

Make no mistake, I am not advocating exclusively child-led learning. Planning is a triad: the plan, the child, and the mother. Why was I creating an expectation for myself to spend hours outside studying nature when I hated being outdoors? I hate the heat, the bugs, the possibility of snakes. Ick. I don’t know a woodpecker from a warbler, and yet I felt guilty for not checking off my scheduled nature study box each week. The same goes for elaborate crafts, piles of cute printables, and morning calendar time. While these things work great for some homeschooling families (maybe even you!), they were simply not me.

My epiphany came when I decided I was no longer striving for the perfect homeschool plan. Instead, I would strive for the perfect plan for us: the plan I would actually implement, the plan that would work for my children. I threw out everything that wasn’t working, shut out the noise from the homeschool experts, and blocked out the voices from my public school past. I took a long, hard look at who we are, what we are willing to do, and the things we actually enjoy. Then I scheduled in those things, became a happier homeschool mom, and started to feel successful. Funny thing is, my children thrived as well.

Homeschool planning is a big subject for one little book. Most veteran homeschoolers have created their very own methods of planning that work best for their families. Who am I to come along and say that my way is the best way?

I’m not. In fact, my goal in writing this book is not to show you the one right way to plan, but instead to encourage you and give you ideas for making the plan and the process your own. No matter how you decide to plan your homeschool, I want you to break free from your old paradigms about education and the expectations placed on you by the state, your family, and that supermom in your homeschool group. Instead, I want you to approach planning your homeschool by looking first at what is right for your children, your family, and yourself as a teacher.

Success breeds success, and confidence brings even more confidence. A good plan will help you build those things, and a good plan begins with the people in front of you, both in the mirror and across the breakfast table. Let’s get started!

Chapter 1

Cast a Vision

When I was a teacher, there were not enough classrooms in the high school where I taught. Every room was filled every period. Therefore, during my two planning periods, I spent many hours in the teacher workroom grading papers, preparing lessons, and listening to the older teachers lament the fact that they no longer got to teach what they loved. Instead they spent all of their time teaching to the FCAT exam. I was saddened to see so many people who were passionate about their subject and their students be throttled by the system to which they had given their lives. It had a huge impact on my decision to homeschool, though I didn’t realize it at the time.

Has anyone ever asked you why you homeschool? If they did, could you tell them? I used to have problems with this. I would stumble over my words, not really sure how to explain my convictions, worried that the next thing out of my mouth would give offense (easy for anyone when you’re discussing a touchy subject, and super easy for me).

Then, one day, I sat and recalled those days in the teacher workroom. I thought about all the things I wanted to give my kids through homeschooling. I took the time to contemplate and write about what I wanted their home education to do for them—the opportunities, the practices, the things we valued in our day-to-day. It was only after doing that—after casting a vision for what our days could look like and what was important to our family—that I began to be able to articulate why we were doing what we were doing.

While some folks are looking for a fight when they question your desire to homeschool, many are simply curious. You might be the only homeschooling parent they’ve met. The concept is completely foreign to older generations. Whether their motives are confrontation or curiosity, I have found that the best way to answer people’s questions is to have a clear idea of the vision you have for your homeschool.

In addition to answering questions, a vision also serves multiple purposes in your homeschool. It acts as a compass for making your plans and a call to action when motivation lags. As we contemplate how we want our homeschools to look, the only thing that really matters is the kids in front of us. Are we doing what is right for them? How would we know? To know that, we need a homeschool vision statement.

What Is a Homeschool

Vision Statement?

Let’s start with what a vision is not. It is not a picture of the human you want your child to be in twenty years. That is beyond your control no matter how hard you try. And we never waste time creating a plan for things beyond our control. It will only frustrate us.

So what is a vision statement? It is a statement of intent. It is comprised of the things that are important in your homeschool. A vision is not about what the future results of your homeschool will be, a vision is about what the day-to-day atmosphere of your homeschool can look like.

I love this quote by Rosabeth Moss Kanter: A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more.

Homeschooling without a vision is kind of like wandering around in the dark with your hands tied behind your back and then being surprised when you stub your toe. Why? Homeschooling is hard, and when we humans find ourselves facing something difficult, we are easily distracted and head off in directions we never meant to go, taking the easier path. When we come up against something hard, we might try switching curricula mid-year or we might feel despair our kids are behind other kids and push too hard (which rarely works), or we might even consider putting our kids in school.

Homeschooling without a vision is kind of like wandering around in the dark with your hands tied behind your back and then being surprised when you stub your toe.

If you know your why for homeschooling, though, and can articulate it, then you are better equipped to face tough times and answer critics—even the one who lives in your head.

There are a number of ways to go about writing your homeschool vision. I am going to present a few different ways you can do this. Don’t stress—just choose the method that appeals most to you.

One Vision Statement Method

Your vision statement is a manifesto of sorts about the education taking place in your home.

A helpful place to start is to look into the future. Ask yourself, As my children graduate from my homeschool and leave my home, what kind of people do I want to see before me? What skills do I want them to be proficient at? What books do I want them to have read? What ideas do I want them to have been exposed to?

Imagine that future young adult standing in front of you. Now sit down and make a list of what he has experienced and what he is capable of. Try to keep it general, about 10-15 items. This is a document you will review one or two times a year, but even then you will not want to slog through 100 bullet points. List only general ideas and skills, not specific booklists and benchmarks.

The longer vision statement is not something you are going to spring on the stranger who asks you why you homeschool, but it might be something you discuss over tea with a friend who is considering the homeschooling path for her own family and who questions you more deeply about your methods.

Some vision statement bullet point examples might be:

We want our children to be able to comfortably and effectively communicate through spoken word and in various forms of writing from formal to informal.

We want our children to have a relationship with the great works and thinkers of Western culture, including the literature and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome and the doctors of the church.

We want our children to have a working familiarity with the geography of the world around them and be able to identify major countries, landforms, and water features.

Your specific vision statements may look very different in content from the ones above, but they should be unique to your family and the kind of education your desire for your children. Don’t forget to include practical, physical, and artistic (music, dance, visual arts) skills as well as academics.

Keep in mind that a vision is exactly that—something you see for the future and not a current reality. While your vision statement will give you purpose as you plan and work, it may not end up being completely true. The person in front of you ten years from now may have different plans or abilities than you imagined. That doesn’t mean you avoid creating a vision, but it does mean we consider the person and his or her individuality. The vision is the tool, not the master.

The Outlook Inventory Method

Another way to create a vision is to use the Homeschool Outlook Inventory. I have included a copy of this at the end of this chapter.

Imagine your children twenty years from now, as they are thinking back on their homeschool years. Now write the answers to these questions.

What do you want them to say about their homeschool experience?

What do you want them to do as adults (what are their skills, loves, desires)? (Remember: This is not a list of their accomplishments of the past twenty years, but instead skills and loves you would like them to have.)

What do you want them to think about you as a homeschool mom?

How do you want them to feel about being homeschooled?

Once you have given some thought to these four questions and written down your answers, consider how you can work toward those results. The means you use to work toward what you want your kids to say in the inventory are the statements that make up your vision.

To help you craft these vision statements, you are going to ask yourself the following three questions about the responses you wrote:

What actions do you need to take as a homeschooling mom?

What subjects and activities do you need to include in your studies?

What kind of atmosphere do you need to create in your home?

Then write two kinds of statements:

In our homeschool we