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A podcast for homeschool families brought to you by Sequoia Grove Charter Alliance. Encouragement, tips & tricks, interviews with HSTs and curriculum help.
Rebecca: Welcome to the Sequoia Breeze podcast. A breath of fresh air for your homeschool. I am your host, Rebecca LaSavio. Thank you for joining me for season five, you guys. I'm excited about this. And today we are going to go back to the beginning. We have so many families that are just joining the homeschool world, whether it's because they've got a little who's finally ready for school, or whether it's because the school system that they were a part of before is just not working. We are seeing families join the homeschool world in droves. And so I want to spend today, the beginning of season five, going back to the beginning and talk about how. How to begin homeschooling. For those of you who are brand new into this and are wondering, where do I start? I was privileged to be able to give this talk in a breakout session at the northern California homeschool convention last summer, and I want to be able to share it with all of you. And many of you may not be new to the homeschooling world, but I bet you know somebody who is. And so I hope that this can be helpful to them, that you can pass this along and share your wisdom with whatever friend or family member might be thinking about homeschooling or making that leap. As I was preparing for this, I came across a quote that I've seen a few times. Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work. And I think that is at the heart of homeschooling. It's precisely why we do what we do. Our children are the most important work. I've seen this quote attributed to CS Lewis several times, but I did a little research and discovered that it's actually a pretty modern quote from a man named Doctor John Trainor. I'm not sure why the attribution has been changed. It would be lovely if it was from CS Lewis, but it's no less true coming from Doctor John Trainor. And as you get going in this, the homeschool world can easily feel very overwhelming. There's so much information, so many resources, so many different directions to go. And so remember that at the heart of it is your child, your family and you. And it's really important to keep that, to keep coming back to that. Is this what's right for. For us, for my child, for my students? Not is this what the homeschool world says I ought to be doing, or. These are expectations that I feel externally. But what is it that your child needs? And each of you are going to be coming from a different place. And so the answer to that question is going to look different because that's the beauty of homeschooling and is that we get to make sure that it's what works for our students, for our families. The first thing I want to cover before I even get into how to homeschool or where to go or how to get started is something called deschooling. Deschooling is a little bit hard to define, but basically it's the process of leaving the school system and adjusting your methods and expectations to start homeschooling. It may even be a time of healing depending on what your students are coming out of. If you are a family that is just getting started with a tk or kindergarten child, you might want to still look into what is deschooling because sometimes those of us who grew up in a traditional brick and mortar public school need to still deschool a little bit to change our own expectations of what school should be. If we haven't had the opportunity to observe alternative methods, then that might be all that we know and we don't realize how much we might accidentally just try to replicate a classroom in the home. And in doing that, while that's not necessarily wrong, there's a lot of opportunity that is missed. And sometimes you can impose expectations and ways of doing things on your home that just don't fit and it makes everybody feel uncomfortable and can put a lot of strain. And so I would encourage you to look this up. I will put a link in the show notes. I found a really great article about this on a website called raising lifelong learners and she explains her own family's process, but also gives lots of links to other things that can be helpful and really articulates well what the process of deschooling can be like. It's a chance to take a break from the structure to sort of undo possibly damage that's been done in school, or at the very least to undo the way education has happened so far. Because you don't have a bell schedule, you don't need to stand in line. You don't have to do the same curriculum at the same pace as everybody else. There's so many ways that you can take the walls off of school and discover that learning is all around you. It doesn't just have to be in the books. It's a chance for your kids to spend a lot of time playing and remembering how much learning happens just through play. It's a chance to experience learning together, follow interests to visit museums, take field trips, watch documentaries, talk about them. Learn things in ways that are just not as prescribed as you might be used to. Maybe it's a chance to catch up on some sleep to figure out your family's schedule. As far as that goes, is it better if your kids sleep in late or if they sleep too long? Do they just wake up grumpy? Where's that happy medium when you don't have to get up to catch the bus, but you can be more rested? Deschooling is not vacation. It's not watching screens all day. But it is a loosening of the schedule, a loosening of the expectations, and a allowing your mind to see learning in a whole new way. As you are looking at getting started with homeschooling and you've thought through some maybe deschooling techniques and how long that might take your family, because that can be different for different kids. And you want to get started by asking yourself a series of questions. And as you ask yourself these questions, it will begin to send you in a direction. You'll sort of be choosing a path. So do I want to do my own thing as, as my child's learning coach? As a homeschooling family, do we want to do our own thing or do we want a support system? So there are multiple ways to homeschool. In California, we actually have quite a few options that can go from almost completely independent, doing what you want through being a part of a school that tells you exactly what to do, but doing it from home. So I'm going to try and touch on some of those so that the terminology is familiar to you. But there are new options coming out on a regular basis. And so it can be a little tricky to try and lay out everything for you. So hopefully I can give you some enough information that as you start to investigate what will work best for your family, it will make sense because you've heard some of the terminology before. So at the far end of the spectrum and the most lenient is called a private school affidavit, also known as a PSA. You file that with the state of California, usually in October, and you become sort of your own private school at home, and you have very little oversight. You have the freedom to choose whatever methods and curriculum you would like to do. You don't have any support from teachers, you don't have any funding, but you have freedom. Next up the spectrum would probably be a PSP, and that is a partnership with a school that will file a PSA for you and give some oversight and some help, but you are still pretty independent. They keep records and keep track of how, where you are. Then you have charter schools and each charter school can operate a little bit differently. I know how Sequoia Grove runs, but I can. There are other schools that have varying degrees of providing curriculum, providing funding, providing support from teachers, requiring testing, allowing you to do field trips and have that built in community. But also there are sort of obligations on each side where you need to provide samples and have meetings and take testing. The school will provide support and funding. And depending on the school, there are varying levels of how that all works. Next week I will be speaking with head family liaison, Sara Graco, and the two of us are going to revisit one of the very first episodes we did of what is Sequoia Grove and how that all work. So after this week, you can join in next week to hear more specifics about how we operate. The other options that are out there are various levels of online schools. Some of the online schools are public and don't require tuition. Some are tuition based and they will provide the curriculum and the support. Usually there are some ways to personalize their education, but it's, it is all online. Some of you might have heard a cellus, which is a curriculum but can also be an online school. Time for learning is the same. You might use it as a curriculum, but you can also enroll in a school with them. K twelve, same thing. So there are some options out there where some of them are private, some are public. You can also, if you look for it, find some private schools that do online enrollments like this that are religious based. So those are some other options. You don't necessarily get to choose your curriculum and or timing and those sorts of things. They are prescribed for you, but that work is done for you. So that is another, that's kind of on the other end of the spectrum from a PSA is you are still at home, but it's all prescribed and laid out for you. Also following somewhere in there is many districts offer an independent study program, a traditional independent study program where you might check in with a teacher once a week and they'll give you the curriculum and you're kind of keeping up with peers at school, but you're doing it from home and there might be a little more wiggle room in there. So that's another option as well. If homeschooling isn't so much what you're trying to accomplish, as much as getting a child out of the environment, that they are in and they just, we want to keep going. Maybe we're going to hoping to go back to public school in another year and so we want to keep up. That's another option that you could look into as well. So in the show notes, I am going to include links to two organizations. One is called HSC or the Homeschool association of California. The other is the California Homeschool Network. So I'll put links to both of those and they can help you find schools, find help and support, figure out if what you're wanting to do is legal and those kinds of things. So those are some links that I will add in the show notes as well. The next question that you want to ask yourself is what is your purpose? Are you trying to school differently? Are you trying to what those of us who've been homeschooling for a long time would say, just truly homeschool? Or is your goal simply to get out of the classroom? And those answers will lead you to different roads. So if you are trying to school at home, then some of those online schools that I mentioned might be good options. You might also just be interested in a really traditional sort of box curriculum. I'm just going to order this and it's going to come and we're going to sit down and do it. And so there are in some ways fewer decisions to make. If that's your goal, if you want to school differently, then you're going to want to ask a couple other questions. Do you have a preferred style or method? Some of you will have been talking to friends and hearing about some different things, and you'll have an idea of what those are. Some of you don't know what I'm talking about. A lot of homeschoolers fall into a category or they're interested in a particular style of learning. And many curriculums that you research will fall into one of those styles. So again, here's a quick rundown of what some of those are. So that as you are looking at curriculum, if it says this is a classical approach, you might have a little idea of what that means. Or if something I say really triggers like, oh, that sounds really interesting, then you can narrow your search perhaps to looking at that. So one common style of homeschooling is classical. A classical approach breaks kids down into three phases of learning that is very much based on a developmental stage. They focus on studying what they would call the great books and what those are, and you can google that and find a long list of those things. They focus a lot on logic. It is a style that's been used through the centuries. So they are attempting to be classical, not necessarily modern. Some names that you'll recognize that were educated in this way are Aristotle and Plato, CS Lewis, Thomas Jefferson. That might give you a little sense of what the focus might be with a classical education. Another type, it's really two types, and some would say that they are very different, and others would say that there's a lot of similarity between them. But Waldorf and Montessori are. Are both common styles as well that homeschoolers like to focus on while they approach it differently. They both focus a lot on imagination, on hands on experiences for kids, and a lot of exploration that is directed. So allowing kids to explore, but directing that exploration so that they are learning in a certain direction there. Montessori comes with a lot of specific tools and methods. Waldorf has a different way of approaching, but those are things that both of those styles really focus on. Another very common homeschooling method is Charlotte Mason. Charlotte Mason was an educator in England in the 18 hundreds who was really frustrated with how things were being done in her time and place. She wrote several books about better ways to educate kids. She's coined the phrase living books. If you look into Charlotte Mason at all, you'll run into that term. And the idea is, instead of using textbooks, you're using books that are written in a more narrative style. They're more interesting. She focuses very much on teaching young children good habits, building habits in so that when they're older, there's less thought that goes into more moving through their day, doing chores, putting their schoolwork away, those kinds of things. And so there's a lot of focus when they're little on building good habits so that as they're older, you don't have to think about those things. There's more room for other things in their life. She focuses a lot on real life learning, less crafty stuff that gets thrown away, and more learning real skills. There's also a lot of nature walks, nature journaling, and things like that in Charlotte Mason education. And so those are some things you can look up if you're interested in that. You might also hear the term unschooling or self directed learning. And this is a style that varies by whoever uses it. And this is more of a, the child is interested in something, and so the family will help that child pursue that interest and learning more about that. And the education is not based on textbooks, and you can look that up if you're interested. It's a very difficult thing to explain, and like I said, it will vary greatly by each family that follows in. In this style. Unit studies are the idea of taking a subject and kind of using it across the disciplines. And so for maybe two, four, six weeks, you focus on this one thing, and you'll learn all of the subjects based on that theme. So, for instance, if you were going to do a unit study on trees, then you would maybe read some storybooks, as well as maybe some books full of facts about trees. You might study how they fall into various classifications, and that would be part of your science curriculum. You might study where different trees grow around the world, and that would cover some geography. They might write stories or bring all their facts together that they're learning into writing, and that would cover some English and grammar and those kinds of things. Maybe some spelling is your looking at various geographical places and science terms. You might also study, what has man's relationship with trees been over the years? So to maybe talking a little bit about environmentalism or ecology, but also, how have trees shaped culture? So where there are lots of trees, how is life different than in places where there aren't trees? How does that affect their ability to travel on water? There's lots of different ways that you can take a topic for unit studies and cover all of the various subjects with those. One that our family has used a lot is literature based. And that's where you. That can take a little bit of Charlotte Mason, a little bit of classical, and stick it together, and you basically are using books to learn about a lot of different things. Instead of a science textbook, maybe we have a book about weather, and we're going to focus on that for a while and do some activities with weather. And it's based off of these books. And our history is. We're reading a lot of historical fiction that will teach us what life was like in those times, in addition to something else that's maybe giving us timeline and facts and those kinds of things. The other style is just called eclectic. And, honestly, the vast majority of people fall in this, where they take a little of this and a little of that, and we're gonna. But we're gonna do a really traditional math program, and we're gonna do this over here, and we're gonna do unit studies for science because we like to change it up, but we're gonna. Going to follow a really, you know, a more classical approach in learning Latin and some other. So many families are very eclectic, so don't feel like you have to fall into one. But those are terminologies that you will hear as you are researching where you want to go with your family through homeschooling. If all that I just said about various styles makes your head want to explode and you think, I can't possibly figure out what to do, then there's a solution to that, too. There are lots of packaged curriculums out there, and there there is absolutely no reason to not just order one and see how it goes. For the first year of homeschooling, a few examples are book shark, Oak Meadow, timber Doodle. You can look all those up and choose one and just have it arrive on your doorstep, and you'll just do what they say to do. And throughout that first year, you will learn so much about yourself, about your child, about curriculum, about styles. So that that second year, when you're ready to start planning and you're looking for resources for that next year, you will have a much better understanding of I liked this. It worked, but this thing, it didn't work. And here's why. And now I know what to look for when I'm ordering. So that's a very valuable lesson. It's not a waste of time, money, or resources. So it's okay to just choose something and get started and use that year to learn. And you can adjust with what you have through the year and, you know, tweak it if it's not working or add a little something here or take this piece out and so you're not stuck with it for forever. But don't be afraid to just start and then learn as you go. The next question to ask yourself is, how much structure do I need? Are you happy to meander through your day, or do you need a schedule to get things done within a certain window? Maybe you work part time and you only have chunks of the day when the learning activities can happen, but maybe you don't, and you've got time to wake up when you wake up, have breakfast, do a few chores, get to school. We're going to go for a walk. We'll come back. We'll do a little more. As you're thinking through that structure, you're going to want to think about what subjects do you want to do at home and which ones are outsourced. For example, if you just love English and you really want to do writing and reading books and things like that with your kids yourself, but science was never something that you enjoyed doing, then maybe you want to take your kids to a science class each week. And so that's going to be a piece of your structure. Is that okay? Well, we do have to make sure that we have room for this so that the science part gets covered while. But that leaves these other subjects that I want to teach at home that becomes often considerably more true the older they get. So think through. What are your favorite subjects? What kind of activities do does your family love to do? Go for nature walks, read together? Do art projects? I am not the crafty mom. I don't do crafts with my kids really, but I'll cook with them or we'll read books together and think about the things that you guys really enjoy doing and then make sure that you leave time for those things. As a first year homeschooler, you are not going to know the best way to do everything, so don't put the pressure on yourself to figure it out because you can't. So do your best and learn a lot and just be willing to make changes as you need to go easy on your kids and yourself. This is a learning experience for them as well as for you. They may be relieved to be at home and away from all of the pressure of social interaction, or they might miss it. So you'll be working to find the balance in that as well. Homeschooling is never easy. It can be fun and it's definitely rewarding. But so many days we'll have challenges because your kids are wrestling with brain growth, with learning new things. Maybe they're wrestling with personal responsibility and getting their chores done, or wrestling with learning to get along with their siblings. And kids, often when they're with a parent, will be more emotional about all of this than they would be if they were at school, so they might cry when they wouldn't. At school, you'll feel like you're doing something wrong or when you need to, you know, hold them accountable to getting things taken care of. It can feel like you're doing stuff wrong. So it's a challenge, but it can definitely be a relationship builder if you allow those difficult things to build the relationship and not, and not damage it. And that is an extremely worthwhile endeavor as well. That's where kids aren't the distraction. They're the most important thing. And sometimes their characters are the most important part of the day. And that's to me, one of the big advantages of homeschooling is that you can work on those things instead of, I can't deal with this now. You just have to get in the car and we have to go. That was a little bit of a rabbit trail. So we'll get back onto as you're planning your first year, think about your goals and don't try to pack an entire twelve years of education into one year. Guilty. You can't. There's so many exciting things to learn and so many wonderful things about the world that we want our kids to know about. But we can't teach them all of it in one year. So don't forget that there's time. And if your kids are older and there's not as much time, that's okay. The most important thing you can teach them is how to learn because none of us graduated from high school knowing all there was to know about life. Hopefully we graduated from high school having a love of learning and knowing how to find the information that we need. I would also encourage you to a lot of people think that homeschoolers don't have anything to do or are bored. I would say for that's not true for most of us. For most of us, we have plenty of activity going on, and learning to balance the difference between quiet time to get work done or to explore, to do crafts, to play outside to be bored so that we can come up with new ideas versus running around for activity is a challenge. And I would encourage you to actively work to balance those two things. Don't forget your budget. Somebody asked me at the conference how much it cost to homeschool and I looked at a friend and she looked back at me and we didn't. Neither was doing to say it basically can cost as much as you can afford. You can school from the library and find used curriculum and keep your budget really low if you need to. It be very easy to spend thousands of dollars on primo curriculum and all kinds of fancy things. So figure out what your budget is and then you can find ways to stick to that. And I would really encourage you to break down the walls of school. Where are you going to do school again? Desks are required and at a classroom setting often for convenience, for fitting kids in, for making sure everybody has someplace to write. But is it a kitchen counter? Is it a kitchen table? A desk in their room? Is it the patio table outside? Is it at the park on a blanket? Is it reading upside down on the couch? So spend some time letting your kids explore and you exploring what works for our flow, what keeps us organized but allows for kids to work in a way that fits with their own style. You will hear later on in the season about a mom who's whose daughter works best while walking on a treadmill, and that really helps keep her focused. So this is the beauty of homeschooling, is take the walls off and get creative. Is school best done in the morning at your house or your kids grump faces until after lunch? And if that's so, then how can you rearrange your day so that they can work at the best time? Or are you working? Maybe you work shifts and you're gone for three days of the week, but then you can use three other days of the week to get most of that school done with maybe some assignments that you leave for them. You can be creative with how that goes. Is math done in the evening or do all of the math lessons on one day and leave them with some assignments to do on the other days? Often when someone is talking about homeschooling and they're not very familiar with it, the word socialization comes up. But will my kids be socialized? So should you be worried about that? Is that going to be an issue? I would encourage you to consider who do you want to teach your child the social skills? Do you want another student at school whose family is struggling and isn't responding to each other well? Or do you want to teach your kids yourself how to respond to a negative situation? The beauty of homeschooling is that our kids don't have to only be. Our ten year old doesn't have to only be around other ten year olds. They can be around a large group of kids that of your choosing. You know, not that we're trying to hide them away, but we have the opportunity to, as homeschoolers, to decide what group is the best group for our kids. Where are safe spaces? How much challenge can they handle? Are the kids in this class I'm taking to them to cooperating and responding well and solving problems that come up? Or is it an unhealthy place and we're going to move to a different spot, which you don't really have the, the freedom to do in a classroom. I think one of the beautiful things of homeschooling is that so often, if we can again take the walls off of our education plan, our kids can have lots of friends of different ages. Often at a park day, there are a group of kids playing together that might have four or five year age difference easily. And it doesn't matter because that's who's there. And we learn to play, and the big kids learn to accommodate the littles, and the littles learn to be challenged by the big kids and to get along with them and it can be such a beautiful thing to see kids cooperate within a large group of multi aged kids. As an adult, I have very few friends who are my exact age, and so being able to interact with a large age group can really be a positive thing. And I would encourage you to find or create the community that you need. So whether that's through park days, whether that's through church organizations, whether that's through being in a theater group or going to gymnastics, who are the people around you? Maybe it's your neighbors, maybe it's. There's all kinds. But find that group of people who will support you and support your kids and that your kids can get to know. Overall, homeschoolers are a pretty welcoming group. We love to talk about curriculum. We love to help you solve your problems, and we love to talk about the challenges and the triumphs that we're facing. And so I think if you are looking for that group of friends, they're. They're probably out there. That is something that at Sequoia Grove, we take pretty seriously is to, is building community. So there are, we do offer lots of park days, lots of meetups, lots of field trips, lots of things that you can do to find like minded people. I would also like you to consider your biggest fear is you're facing your first year homeschooling. What is it? Is it real? Is this a real fear? Or is it something that you're allowing your brain to trick you into thinking is really scary? And if it is real, what can you do to alleviate it? If you're worried how am I going to teach my child math, or are we going to be able to get along, then proactively plan those things for next school year. If you're worried about math, then you might want to choose a curriculum that has somebody teaching a video, or you might want to line up a math tutor or something along those lines. If you're worried about whether or not you and your child can get along, then you might want to establish some boundaries and think through how am I going to respond if this happens? Or what are we going, what reward can I offer? If my child can cooperate for this and this and this, or if you're worried about whether or not your child is going to have any friends, then I would encourage you to plan ahead. Part of our school time is going to be being a part of these couple of different activities where there's likely to be kids that share their interests. So homeschooling is intimidating. And because it's a really big job, and it's a serious job. And so we as parents can easily let ourselves worry the night away instead of sleeping. We can easily allow ourselves to be pretty freaked out. And I would encourage you to again find other homeschoolers and talk with them. Be proactive about trying to give yourself some confidence in the things that you're specifically fearful of. But mostly just try it and be willing to adapt as you go because you don't know and chances are you are not going to completely mess up your kids in the first year of homeschooling. So you can probably try it, fail at a few things, pick yourself back up and try again, and they'll fail at a few things and you'll pick them back up and help them try again and slowly but surely learn how to work together on this. For high schoolers, it's a whole different subject. There's plenty of support at Sequoia Grove for high schoolers. You can do a PSA for high school as well. I would encourage you to maybe not load them up too heavily their first year, depending on what's needed for them to stay on a graduation track. But it's a big change, so you might and if they're used to being fed, here's the information, do this with it. And now they're going to be more responsible for finding the information on their own and processing some of that a little bit more independently, then you might want to give them a little more space to learn the process as well as the actual subjects. One thing I want to say if you are just getting started with a Tk or kinder kiddo, is that first of all, I want you to know it is not required in California legally. Your child does not have to start school NTK or kindergarten. They can start in first grade. So if you want to just try this thing out at home and work with your kids and get to know them and have more time to play, you don't have to figure out there's no, there should be no panic involved and getting your child registered for kindergarten because you don't have to do it. I do want to encourage you, no matter what you do, to spend lots of time letting your kids play. Let them make mud puddles if you can find a creek to splash in. If you can get them to the park on a regular basis. Let them give them ample opportunity for their imagination. Count bugs. They don't need a formal curriculum. You can do it if you want. And some kids are begging you for papers. I want to fill out papers. Great but you don't have to. They can learn so much about life, about math, about reading, about sounds just through playing, counting, looking at signs, recognizing an a on a sign at the grocery store, looking at colors with you, identifying that that house has a triangle and a square in it. Finding shapes, singing songs, singing songs is so important. Play songs in the car, sing with them, find rhyming words, play silly songs, and, you know, find ways to rhyme their names. All of these things are skills that will help them so greatly as they're learning to read. And they can learn letter recognition, number recognition just through life pattern recognition. So much can be done with kids outside playing legos, play doh. All of those things can do so much for your kiddos and read to them. Nothing expands a child's vocabulary like, like a parent reading to them. It is such a valuable, valuable time spent sitting, cuddling together, looking at books, identifying what's happening in the pictures, learning to be empathetic with the characters, expanding vocabularies that they could never learn on their own, reading things that are far above their ability to read now, it will build their relationship with you, it will build a relationship with books, it will build a relationship with words, all of these things which are so important in the years to come. And if they want to read the same book every day, that's okay too, because that actually is like making all these brain connections. And I could go on, but just you can read to your kids, sing and play, and that is a really valuable four and five year old education. So you can certainly add other things to that, by all means. But there's no need at this age to push. And I tell you this, as a mom of four kids who pushed and now has learned a little bit of a lesson, I hope reading will come. You can do lots to build up their readiness to read. So don't feel a panic about that. Enjoy your kiddos and give them the opportunity to enjoy the world around them and enjoy you. You can do this, parents. You've got this. These are your kiddos and you've got resources to help you. So I will have quite a few links in the show notes that you can look at if you are interested in more and if you have questions, I'm always available@podcastsaquoiagrove.org. Dot whether you're interested in enrolling or not, I'm happy to help you on this homeschool journey or point you in the right direction to somebody else who might know more answers. But I welcome you to this homeschool journey and encourage you that it really is worthwhile building a strong family. Kids who are curious and who love learning and know how to find learning is such a valuable way to spend your time and your resources. And while you're just getting started, I do hope that all of this information has been a breath of fresh air for your home school. Thank you for joining me today on the Sequoia Breeze podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca LaSavio. As always, you can find me at podcasts@sequoiagrove.org dot please like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and feel free to share this with a friend. I'd love to hear from you, and I do hope that this has been a breath of fresh air for your homeschool.