Learning from Your Mistakes and Planning for Next Year
It’s that time of year for homeschoolers—spring break is over, the end of the school year is in sight, and we’re so, so ready for summer vacation! It’s also a wise time to sit back and evaluate what went right and wrong this school year and figure out how to adjust for next year.
For our family, this has been perhaps the hardest homeschool year ever, and only partly because of moving to a new state in the middle of a pandemic. With so much chaos this summer, we joined a hybrid program used by some of our friends here. Because of covid protocols that essentially separate activities for my four big kids onto four separate days, it’s meant that we don’t ever just have a full day at home for our all-together activities, and the big kids have so much more busy work with their google classroom virtual classes than I even knew was possible.
So, what have I learned from this experience? First of all, if you’re looking for advice from another homeschool mom, it’s a good idea to make sure your goals are aligned. My friends who use this program we’ve tried here have confided that their main goal for middle school is getting their kids comfortable with using a chromebook, navigating google classroom, and learning to work independently. Since I’m a very low-tech homeschooler, using chromebooks and google classroom were not priorities I had for my middle schoolers, and my vision for working independently looks completely different than this hybrid situation we’re in. For my friends, whose families use more technology than ours and whose kids are looking at a different type of college situation, they have found what works best for them. But since our family has different priorities, it hasn’t been as helpful for our kids. On the other hand, I aspire to have my kids reading Latin comfortably by the end of high school. We dedicate part of every day to Latin, but for most of my friends who don’t know or care about Latin, it would be absolutely silly to copy our plans for foreign language! I don’t use an all-in-one box curriculum because I love lesson planning and researching and putting things together myself, but another mom might do much better just picking a curriculum package and sticking to it. In short, look into the strengths and weaknesses of the mentors you’re following, and if your lifestyle or philosophy doesn’t look the same, then don’t tie yourself in knots trying to follow something that doesn’t work for your family.
Second, hold on to your ideals loosely. Last spring, when things were shut down and we weren’t leaving the house, we did a ton of art, music appreciation, and family read alouds. We finished our math and spelling and grammar books for the first year, ever! This year, with everyone going different ways on different days, we’ve barely opened our sketchbooks, read alouds have slowed to what Dad reads after dinner, and my big kids who are awash in busywork haven’t been able to participate in our family poetry memorization. Science happens in occasional clumps, we haven’t gone on a field trip in a year, and I just did three weeks worth of catch-up history last Friday. I could feel like a total failure for not providing my kids with all the rich learning opportunities I wish for them, but I can also acknowledge that this is an unusual year.
Third, recognize what you have managed to do well. We’re really just focusing in on math and language at this point of the year, and those subjects are showing progress, even if I'm not doing everything we did in the fall. Math in general has looked different for me this year, as I’ve slowed down to work all the way through each lesson with each kid on a markerboard (rather than teaching the lesson and the sending them off to do their practice problems on their own and eventually get around to grading them even later). In doing this, I realized that one of my kids had some math facts that just weren’t as solid as they needed to be, so we stepped back and drilled them ten different ways for a couple weeks. They are now rock solid, and she’s moving ahead again with confidence. If you’ve managed to get a child reading fluently, are getting math done solidly (even if it feels that’s all you’ve done), or have finally gotten a child interested in practicing an instrument, celebrate that as a worthy achievement!
Fourth, as Miss Stacy says in Anne of Green Gables (which I read aloud to my middle two girls this year in another accomplishment worth celebrating!), tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet! It’s especially encouraging to hear my public school teacher friends share that they also feel like this year has been a disaster for kids, but that they’re going to try again next year. For our family, starting fresh means stepping away from the local hybrid homeschool classes and going back to our own tried-and-true combination of well-run online tutorials for the big kids and Mom teaching most of the core subjects again. Instead of heading out every day for something or other, we’ll be limiting regularly-scheduled outside activities to once a week. A year of dull textbook science for my big kids has reinforced my commitment to Charlotte Mason-style nature study next year. This year has been hard, but next year could be great!
