Embracing Each Season of Homeschooling
You Don’t Need Permission
It seems like I’m always rearranging our schedule and reorganizing our homeschool plans. This is our 8th year homeschooling, and I’ve come to learn the normalcy of that. Every season is different. What works for my family this year, may not work next year. What worked for us last year, isn’t working for us this year. Every year, our children are at different ages and stages, life holds different adventures – and trials. The beauty of homeschooling is that our days are 100% customizable to those stages and seasons. We are not bound to a curriculum, to a timeline, to any aesthetically beautiful planner we poured our heart and 39 hours into, or even a certain method of homeschooling.
So, before I tell you what amazing new epiphany I’ve had in dumping the stress of a school day, and how we’re making our week both efficient and life giving… I want to tell you this:
You have permission. To dump the curriculum and buy a new one. 20 lessons in, 98 lessons in, doesn’t matter. If the curriculum is not serving you, breathing life into your school days, and working for your individual child, ditch it. Ditch all of it.
if something needs to change, change it
You have permission to stop feeling like you need permission. This family is yours. These children are yours. If something needs to change, change it. Change it all if you have to. You don’t need permission.
You have permission. To switch from a classical education to a travel schooler. From an unschooler to a Charlotte Mason education. To a gameschooler. To unit study based learning. To the Waldorf method. Get me? You get to make that choice!
You have permission. To school in the evening instead of the morning. To do two subjects a day instead of beating yourself into the ground for not being able to do six. To put your child in level 3 when she should be in level 5 or vice versa. To not check all the boxes. To join a co-op, to leave a co-op, to school year round, 4 days a week, or 5 months out of the year.
You have permission to stop feeling like you need permission. This family is yours. These children are yours. Homeschooling is an amazing, beautiful, life giving, freeing experience that takes what is nurtured and built in the home to a level we couldn’t have imagined before. If we let it. If you’re stressed out, maxed out, and school is a chore that begrudgingly HAS to just get checked off every day… something needs to change. So, change it. It’s too precious to squander. Change it all if you have to.
You don’t need permission.
