This month, I sent the following email message to the homeschool families that I supervise. I like to send them monthly updates that hopefully engage, educate, and encourage them in their homeschool endeavors. When I went back and re-read the email, I felt like the message might be able to help even more than just my families, so I decided to post it here, as well. I hope you enjoy it!
Hello my fellow homeschoolers!
This month, I have some good news to share and some bad news. I like happy endings, so I will lead off with the bad news….November is here already! Do you know what that means? For many of us, it means the beginning of the holiday season, which is informally known, in our house, as the time of year when hardly a week goes by that we have all 5 weekdays to commit to school. Family commitments, church rehearsals, and holiday preparations creep into our weekday schedules and at least one day per week gets sacrificed for the good of the holiday cause! Heck, the week of Thanksgiving, we hardly get any school work done at all! I had to make peace with this fact of life years ago, but for many of us, who have just wrapped up the first quarter of our school year, it is hard to see our productivity plummet! Take steps now to have a plan for those days when you spend more time in the car than in the “classroom.” Remember that learning takes place in many different ways and now might be a great time to bring along the Fandex to help keep them learning along the way. Keep your bookshelves stocked by visiting the HSAP library so your students can keep their memories and their imaginations engaged even when you can’t give them your full attention. Lastly, I have found that game time is perfect for those days when you feel frazzled and your children are easily distracted from their school work. Games like Scrambled States, Math Cubes/Story Cubes, or even old fashioned Scrabble can help encourage learners who need a break from the books. Hopefully these tips can help you all as much as they have helped me in the past.
As far as the good news goes, I have finally moved! We have found a wonderful home that we hope to spend the rest of our earthly days in, celebrate graduations in, and where we will welcome grandchildren someday! Time will tell, but for now, we are blissfully blessed to call this new house our HOME.
In closing, I want to share a quote from Ann Voskamp about comparison. As homeschoolers, we often compare what we do in a day to what we think our children would be doing if they went to “regular” school, or what we accomplish in a day to what other homeschool families get done in a day. Comparison isn’t helpful to you or your family and Ann’s words strike the perfect tone when dealing with comparison. “Pick up a yardstick to measure your life against anyone else’s and you’ve just picked up a stick and bashed your own soul.” YOU are uniquely equipped to educate your child/children. Never allow the seeds of Doubt that comparison can plant in your soul to take root.
I believe in you! Have a wonderful rest of the week!