[00:00:00] Amanda Capps: Comparison is the thief of joy. Your family, your children, where you’re at, what you need, what they need, that is entirely in your realm. Don’t sit there and take on things.

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[00:00:18] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. I am so excited to have the opportunity to welcome two of my favorite people on the planet to have this conversation with you today. Lisa Chimento and Amanda Capps have worked alongside me. Amanda actually probably has been here at Demme the longest, and Lisa is right behind me in the number of years that she has been here. The three of us have had the joy of supporting families on their homeschooling journeys.

Today, I really asked them to come and have this conversation as a follow-up to a conversation that I had less than a month ago with a colleague of ours. Her name is Laurie Wardle. We talked about the homeschool brain reset. Laurie’s information was absolutely fantastic. I promise I’ll include that information on our show notes. We wanted to talk about the reset of your brain as you approach the end of your academic year, or you restructure where you are in your year now and you don’t finish the year.

Now, don’t panic. I know there’s a percentage of you all that are in the audience who are homeschooling Type A mamas like me, and what do you mean not finish a year? Now, I’m going to let Amanda and Lisa introduce themselves. Amanda, I’ll start with you.

[00:01:47] Amanda Capps: Hi, I’m Amanda Capps, and I have been in the customer support role here at Demme Learning for a long time, almost as long as I’ve been homeschooling. I’ve graduated two out of this program. I currently have six in the program. I’m married to my first responder husband, Justin, who is a firefighter EMT. We are used to chaos and very different schedules than a traditional family, but this job has always worked around that schedule well. Education has always become a lifestyle for us, so it just feels very natural. Being a second-generation homeschooler, I call it my unfair advantage because I’m not coming at the educational experience and making it look like a school. I’m homeschooling, and there’s a big difference, and we’ll talk about that today.

[00:02:45] Gretchen: Absolutely. The other thing, Amanda, I think it’s important is you’re the ringer in the room because I particularly ask you to come because you homeschool year-round. Frequently, we have the attitude when we come to the end of the year, we really want to be done. I can get back in touch with those emotions, and it’s been a long time since I was homeschooling my own kids. I wanted you to be here so that you could talk about the fact that you have structured your year differently. We’ll go into some detail about that in a moment. Lisa, welcome.

[00:03:23] Lisa Chimento: Thank you. My name is Lisa Chimento. I am a customer support specialist. I do placement and advanced support here at Demme Learning. I’ve been with the company just a little over nine years. Before that, I did a lot of work with the homeschool conventions, and I got a chance to meet lots of families there at the booth, which is always a joy. I homeschooled my own four children for 25 years. They are all adults now and out of the house. This job actually, in some ways, gives me my fix. [chuckles] I miss them. I miss that time with them. Getting a chance to do support with students is really a joy for me. My husband and I live in Florida, and I work remotely here from my home. I’m really excited about today’s conversation.

[00:04:12] Gretchen: I’m delighted to have this conversation with the two of you as a follow-up to our conversation with Laurie because I think it’s really important as parents, for us to check our own attitudes at this point in the year. What have we put on our plates that maybe we can reshuffle, reframe, revisit to think about a little bit differently? Amanda, because I have alluded to this that you homeschool year-round, you don’t homeschool 365 days a year. Can you explain to our audience what your homeschool journey is like in a year and why you chose to do it this way?

[00:04:56] Amanda: I didn’t choose it, it chose me, [chuckles] if we’re really being honest. Because here’s the thing. I do work, so I am a career woman, but I also very much saw the benefit and the excellence in homeschooling and a curated environment, time freedom, all the things. I love to point out to my children when the school bus goes through our neighborhood at its time in the morning and then again in the afternoon, that look at the time that they’re committed to and then think about how different our schedule and our lives are because of this choice. Sometimes I might threaten to send them on the other school bus if we’re having a particularly rough day, but for the most part, it goes smoothly and they are aware and they are appreciative.

Back to choices. When you’re having babies, when life happens, when you’re in the throes of growing your family, and then as the children come along and you learn their learning styles and you learn how they tick and how they’re wired and how they learn best, we have neurodivergence in our family, we’ve got a lot of different moving pieces and people, and so this was the calendar that just made sense for us because we could be more flexible. We could work around things. If I wasn’t trying to make it look like a traditional conventional school day based on the convention of public or private school, then suddenly, I had an amazing amount of options.

[00:06:53] Gretchen: Tell us a little bit more about that then. Do you school a semester and then take a break? I know the answer to this, but I want you to explicate that for our audience.

[00:07:04] Amanda: Absolutely. We pretty much school seven days a week, except for Sunday. Sunday is always going to be a day that we are not picking up academics. We may do things early in the morning. Depending on the day, we may do things in the afternoon. Because of where I live, which is northwest Arkansas, the summers are beastly. No one wants to be outside in Arkansas from about noon to 4:00 PM through the summer. That is a great chunk of time where I know my kids are going to be indoors and we’re going to be all together that I can utilize. If we don’t get everything done Monday through Thursday, we utilize Friday, we utilize Saturday.

Sometimes my husband’s coming in and out because he’s a shift worker. That allows him to jump in and contribute and be a part of it. We take breaks when we want to. In Arkansas, the springs are beautiful and the falls are beautiful. Then about the time you’re getting sick of winter and about the time you’re getting sick of summer, things are switching up. We take more time during the holidays around things. I don’t do school from Thanksgiving to the New Year. That is our break, typically. It’s not as long of a break because I find if we go more than about two to three weeks of break, we’re struggling to get back in the swing of things, and my neurodivergent kiddos are then floundering with losing material we’ve already covered.

[00:08:35] Gretchen: Lisa, for you, for your family when you all were schooling, was it summers off? Because I know that there were some things that you maintained.

[00:08:44] Lisa: Yes. We did a lot of moving, and so sometimes our breaks were we’re moving. We’re packing and we’re moving and we’re settling into a new place, and that ended up being a break from the school, and then we’d get back to it. We lived in very extreme different places. When we first started, I was on Long Island. Then we moved down to South Florida. I discovered very quickly in South Florida, you do not want to be outside during the day in the summer. Unless you’re going in the pool and running back into the house, it’s an oven. Why not be inside and doing schoolwork in the air conditioning?

At the time, my husband was working for a place. They gave him off three weeks in December around Christmas, so we took off the whole month of December, and that was a wonderful break. There are other things to also consider when you’re doing things like unit studies. If you are taking advantage of unit studies in your home with your kids where you’re working on themes or whatever, you can plan four or six or eight-week unit studies and then take a week off after you finish one before you dive into the next. You still are getting breaks. You still are getting rest. You’re getting time to recap and rethink and get your brain in gear for the next thing, and that’s helpful.

I also found very soon when we had moved to South Florida and I was nine months pregnant, I had no idea I was embarking on this new thing of homeschooling. I had a new baby and I found out that when you have a new baby, expect about three years of transition in your schooling schedule. By the time my fourth came along, I was ready for that. I think it’s helpful for homeschooling parents to get as much information, share your questions with other veteran homeschoolers, ask those questions. I have found veteran homeschooling parents to be very generous with their wisdom and their experience, and ask those questions.

How did you do it when you had a baby, when you had an infant, when you had a toddler? How did you do it? Because by the time I had to do it a second time, I was much better prepared and I wasn’t blown away by the shock. With my third child, when that first new baby situation happened, it ended up in a lot of stress at times because I had plans on doing certain things with my two older children, and then a baby’s nap or a sick baby or a throwing up baby, or a toddling child getting into everything threw everything off. Once I knew what to expect, I was able to plan around that, work around the naps or work around whatever, work around meals.

I discovered that, and I’ve shared that before here very quickly. This was one of the best pieces of advice I was given by a veteran homeschool mother. She said, plan your day around your meals. When you have four Italian hungry children, you find how valuable that is because you get towards lunchtime, and if you aren’t paying attention to the clock, you’ve got four hangry children. I learned not to go there, and I planned my day around that.

In terms of the year-long schedule, yes, it did vary. It varied when I had a new baby, and it varied when I made moves, and it varied according to where we were living. When we moved up to New Hampshire, the winters, we were inside. The snow was 12 feet outside our front door, and we stayed inside and did school. We took time off maybe in the spring before the black flies showed up. There’s different things you have to deal with depending on where you live, and so we worked around that.

I think it’s one of the beauties of homeschooling that parents don’t have to get locked into this August or September to May, or June schedule, you have freedom and work with it. Your day with your children, your life with your children can be different and flexible. Be at peace with that and take advantage of it rather than feeling like you’ve been constricted into something because the public school system is doing a certain thing. You don’t have to.

[00:13:14] Gretchen: Ladies, one of the things that I asked you about when we were planning for this is, because you are placement specialists here, because you are often in the position of supporting parents who find themselves at the deep end of the pool of frustration, tell me what kinds of conversations you’re having this time of year and what you’re saying to people. Help our audience start to reframe what they’re thinking as far as pushing the panic button. Lisa, I’ll start with you because you had talked about reimagining the length of lessons, reimagining the way in which you’re structuring lessons so it wasn’t overwhelming to the parent or the child.

[00:14:05] Lisa: Yes, and Laurie brought this up in her talk. I thought it was really brilliant. A lot of these things I discovered organically while I was homeschooling, listening to Laurie verbalize it and give language to it was really refreshing to me. I just loved the way she said this. Again, I think a lot of this comes from parents who have never been homeschooled themselves. Their only experience is in a classroom where you’re there for hours and hours and hours a day, and you’re working on these maybe one-hour blocks of subjects. You have to imagine that a classroom setting is a very different thing than what you are experiencing, which is a one-to-one tutorial setting. It’s not going to take that long.

If you were teaching 25 kids, it would be a different deal because the bulk of that time would be crowd control versus actual instruction. I asked a teacher about this. I said, I have a theory, do you agree? She said, yes, about 15 minutes out of every hour really is their instruction. Think about it in terms of 15-minute sessions with your kids. Even if you felt like you needed to accomplish more in a day than you could do in 15 minutes for a particular subject, you could break it up, 15 minutes in the morning and then leave a nice long break of two hours or more, or later on in the afternoon, and another 15 minutes. You’d be surprised what you could accomplish in those short, focused times.

For a very young child, you might have to make it a couple of 10-minute sessions. Maybe 15 is even too long. One of the things that we share often on these webinars is that you can add two to three minutes to your child’s age. That’s pretty much their optimal time for understanding and retaining new information. Even if you had a very compliant child who was willing to sit there and work, there’s no guarantee that that’s going to be remembered for the next several days. It’s taken in today, but you’re going to have to hit it again. Think about reworking your time that way.

In terms of the kinds of conversations we’re having, there are some panic calls because we’re getting to the end of the school year. Maybe mom has taken an overall look at what they’ve accomplished and realized, they didn’t get done everything they wanted to. Listen, you are busy people. We understand that. A homeschooling parent is not just homeschooling. They’re doing everything else they also do as a parent and as a spouse and as a homemaker. There’s got to be some grace, but it should also compel you to think about your time and your scheduling and whether or not maybe you’re taking too much on in given school year.

I know we all want to have our kids doing all kinds of groovy, extracurricular things, and there certainly is time for it, but maybe you need to reconsider how much you’re doing for each child and where that’s taking you. Amanda just posted something on Facebook the other day about a math problem. If I have this child going to a baseball game at this time and that one’s got football practice at that time in this direction, how much time will you as parents have to get there? It’s hilarious because sometimes you are split that way. Consider all of this together and work together as a family to determine what are our priorities and what can we allow for, and what might need to be cut out of one year or another.

[00:17:47] Amanda: This is the time of year where I feel more like a therapist than customer support, to be honest. I’m having a lot of conversations with moms who are beating themselves up because they’re not as far or they’ve just made a curriculum jump and so they’re feeling very stressed out and under the gun because we’ve had to switch gears or we had gaps that we weren’t expecting that have been discovered and now we’ve got to address those. I would say probably some of the deeper conversations that I’m having right now is, one, comparison is the thief of joy.

Everyone on social media, you are seeing a highlight reel. My friend, you are not seeing the dog throwing up. No one’s filming that. You’re not seeing the toddler throw a tantrum in the target aisle. You’re not seeing the things that don’t look good on these people’s platforms. I’m guilty of it too, of only posting the highlight reels, and yet that’s not real life. There’s a lot more life happening behind the scenes that isn’t making it out there than we want to admit. First of all, comparison is the thief of joy. Your family, your children, where you’re at, what you need, what they need, that is entirely in your realm. Don’t sit there and take on things.

The other thing that I have been just repeating over and over and over again, because these moms are just struggling with guilt, they’re struggling with condemnation, is there is therefore now no condemnation. That’s not coming from a healthy place or a healthy internal critic. That is not going to help you or benefit you or your kids or your family. Just accept where you’re at, set a plan for where you want to be, and then take manageable steps to achieve and get there. What I can encourage you as a 17-year-old homeschool veteran is, with actionable steps, with a plan, you can get there.

[00:19:59] Gretchen: Both of you had said, because I brought this up in our planning conversation about there is a point at which you are behind. I want to be as honest as we possibly can in addressing this with parents. If you have a teenager and they have goals that go beyond high school, and their high school path is behind that curve, what are the things that a parent can do?

[00:20:34] Lisa: Yes, that’s true. We don’t like to use the word behind, especially when kids are young, because that is a comparison issue. If you’ve got children coming into high school or already in high school, and there are either state mandates, or maybe you’re part of a charter school that has certain mandates or requirements, or your student has goals and aims that they want to accomplish. First of all, sometimes you have to think about this. Education can go beyond senior year of high school, and it doesn’t necessarily mean college, but even if it means a year or two between high school and a secondary education, that can be accomplished. There is nothing that says they have to go directly from high school into college or directly from high school into a trade school, or whatever.

If they have lost some time, and life happens, illnesses happen, and family births and deaths and moves and changes of jobs happen, that sometimes throw that schedule off. Or if you have children that have had learning challenges, and there’s been struggle that has caused things to move more slowly than you would have expected. Those are realities, and we want to help you deal with those. I would say, first of all, please give us a call. We love to talk to parents, and we like to just listen to what’s going on there, and then try to help you develop some sort of a path to success. Maybe recognize that sometimes the timeline can be pushed out a little bit.

Yes, you might be calling your student a junior or senior, whatever, but that doesn’t mean they have to stop learning. They can continue learning, and if they need to take an extra year or two to do that, that might be a solution. For other parents, when you stop and ask them, they realize, oh, we weren’t even looking at college. My child wants to go into this trade or this field. Well, then that’s going to look very different than maybe a student who’s looking to be an engineer or a doctor. You won’t have the same requirements for math or science or whatever other subjects, and so we can help talk through those things.

I think sometimes it’s just really helpful to get this all out. Sometimes just dump it out, whether it’s on paper or in a phone conversation, and start to look at the realities of things from a place of peace rather than panic, because panic is going to cause you to make impulsive decisions that you may regret later on. Give yourself a chance to talk this through, and talk with somebody who will listen to you and ask more questions. Sometimes just the prompting of additional questions will help you get there.

[00:23:36] Amanda: When I have this conversation, what I really encourage parents to do is, especially if you’ve got an older child, they’re at the point where they should have some opinion and some buy-in. I know with the two daughters that have graduated, neither one of them, at 18 years old, graduating from high school, knew what in the world they wanted to do. I would say that’s probably pretty common. I would say the kid that has known since they’re four that they want to be a doctor, that’s the exception, not the rule. Sometimes you need some of that time and that flexibility.

Both of mine have entered the workforce, and one daughter has gotten into more managerial and medical transcriptioning and insurance and things like that, and she’s thriving in that environment, and then my other daughter is a full-time nanny. Both of them are being wildly successful in what they’re choosing to do with their time, and they’re supporting themselves, but neither one of them was ready to commit to a four-year degree or even a general degree and feel like they were just spending money just to continue the education process when they didn’t really have a clear direction as to what it is they wanted to do. That would be my first question or my first thing there.

Secondly, you need an end goal. If graduation is end goal, we need to look at our specific state, county, graduation, school district requirements. That’s a good guide to go off of. It can be general. You can tweak that as you will. Here in Arkansas, we’re very blessed. As a homeschooler, I can set the graduation requirements. I’m not obligated to follow the state graduation requirements, but I use it as a guide. I want to just keep an eyeball on it and make sure, hey, are we hitting all of these things? Are we ticking all of the boxes or at least the majority of them? Then work backward from there.

I had a mom come into chat the other day who was just in a panic because, oh my goodness, how are we going to get through calculus? I’m like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold up. Do you need to do calculus? Do you need to do pre-calculus? Are those requirements for your child to graduate in your state? Turns out they don’t have to do anything past Algebra 2. That automatically buys you two years of cushion right there for if you’ve needed to fill in gaps or you’re a little behind. Behind being not the word I would use, but on their track, on their journey.

Those are the things that you really need to look at. Then if you are noticing a lot of attitude, a lot of pushback, something that is just not jiving with a particular course, start asking some questions. What is it that you don’t like about this? Why are you resistant? Sometimes it’s the parent. The parent’s going, oh my word, I don’t like this. This is so, I’m avoiding it. I would say consistency over quantity any day.

[00:26:52] Gretchen: I like that. Consistency over quantity. That does make a tremendous amount of difference in the long term for being successful. I also think it’s really important as parents, we need to reframe our expectations. I’m sitting here listening to you all talking. My eldest daughter just turned 40. When she was 18, I said, I don’t care if you go to college to get a degree in underwater basket weaving, you’re going to go to college, but the world has changed in the ensuing years, and I did not say that to my youngest child when he said, I don’t think I want to go to college. I said, great, what do you think you want to do? We explored in a great deal of depth.I have to be honest. If I looked at my six kids, I have five college graduates and one electrician. If you ask them job satisfaction-wise, who’s the most satisfied? The electrician is, which I find very amusing. He’s having a blast. He just got a promotion. He just finished his last semester of college for his AA degree toward being a certified electrician. He was thrilled to pieces. He said, I didn’t get as high a score on the paper exam, but I got an almost perfect score on the practical exam. He said, I figure it balances out, and five years from now, no one’s going to ask me that.

That is an important takeaway for us all to have because that brings me to the next thing I want to talk about, which is the other parental panic that you all are talking about right now, which is testing. Parents are really coming unwrapped about the fact that their children maybe aren’t performing as well on a test, or maybe the test is coming and they’re like, I don’t feel like I prepared them well. Would you all please both speak to that?

[00:29:05] Lisa: The first thing I want to mention is I spoke to a mom recently who said, they were using Math-U-See, I don’t remember which level, and their child was doing great through every single lesson, was doing great on the workbook pages, could teach back each concept at the end of each lesson, really understood it, did great on the word problems, and was bombing the tests one after the other. I said to her, how important are those tests? Are you required by your state to turn in test scores? She said, no. I said, then who cares what the child did on the test? Do you have in your mind that your child is understanding this work and is progressing in their knowledge and in their understanding and growing? She said, yes.

I said, some kids just do not do– You say the word test, there’s a word at the top of that page that says test, and they go into anxiety mode. I know Laurie talked a lot about this, and there might be some solutions for that. It might be worthwhile working through that because at some point, that student may have to take a test that will be an important thing. If you know that your child is doing well, then consider how important those tests are.

The same is true for end-of-year testing. Now, I’m not talking about SATs right now, just talking about general testing for the elementary and middle school grades. We’re talking about one or two days on a test, and it’s supposed to reflect how well that child has done for an entire school year. It’s absurd to me that we would give it that much importance, and we mustn’t, we really mustn’t, because so many things can affect that school that day and that test score. How well they slept the night before, whether or not they ate well that morning, and how their food is sitting in their stomach. I remember when I was in school, every single year in the spring when we had to do our standardized tests, I thought I had the worst cold in the world. I would take a box of tissues with me, and it was on my desk, and my nose was pouring all day during the testing. I had allergies. I didn’t know I had allergies, but it happened every single spring. It’s miserable. Your nose is pouring, your head’s clogged, and you’re having to take tests all week. It was just the worst. That might be what children with seasonal allergies have to deal with. I don’t know.

There’s so many things that can affect a test score. One day when they’re just not thinking as strong, or the anxiety possibly that the idea of a test produces. First of all, if you can make it less important in your own mind and communicate that to a child. When my kids were taking tests, I said to them, there’s going to be things on that test that we haven’t studied yet. We’ll get there. That’s not the sequence I’m using, so don’t worry about it.

If you want to give it a shot, go for it. If not, skip it. I don’t care. You do your best. When we’re done, we’re going to go and get some pizza and ice cream and celebrate that you got through the test. I refused to make the score on the test be what was going to determine a reward or a punishment. It’s just not reasonable. It’s just not. I just let them know you’re fine because there’s a whole bunch of stuff that you do know that’s not on the test. It doesn’t reflect how well you’re doing.

[00:32:52] Gretchen: I do have a memory of having a conversation with a mom last year who said that every time she pulled out a test paper, she had a child who just absolutely came unglued. What she learned from that is that she took a black marker and colored out the word test. She went so far as to color out the word systematic review. All she had was 1A, 1B. There was no other words at the top. She said the difference between the year of, oh, no, you’re going to make me do a test, and the next year when there were no words at the top was phenomenal. A little bit of it is attitudinal.

[00:33:46] Amanda: I think I’ve never walked into a doctor’s office and asked them where they graduated in their class or what their SAT or ACT scores were. I’m way more interested in bedside manner if they’re actually listening to me, if I feel validated based on my interaction with them. Do they really seem to have empathy and to care about what I have come to see them about? Those are the skills that I’m looking for from a provider in a field. I could care less how they tested. I think that is one thing as a second-generation homeschooler, I could rant for a long time about how I feel about testing and tests and teaching to the test. It’s such a flawed system. It doesn’t accurately represent what our kids are learning and how they are even as a well-rounded person.

My job as a parent and my focus is, yes, academics is important. Yes, that is a piece of this puzzle and a piece of this journey, but it is only a piece. It’s not the full picture. It’s not all that I’m concerned about with my child and how they conduct themselves in the world and as a human. I think we can get so focused sometimes on academics or what we’re producing academically that we can really not put the practices and the habits and the things in place that are really going to make a difference to whether our kids launch successfully or not. We need to be looking at a much larger pool of skills than just academia.

[00:35:39] Gretchen: Right. When my youngest son was in middle school, he was the top of his class mathematically until it came to the end-of-grade assessment. He bombed it so spectacularly that the school sent me a letter and said he had to go to summer school. Now, he was homeschooled up until middle school. I flipped out. I called his teacher, who was a personal friend of mine. She had been a friend of mine before he was that year in school. She said, Gretchen, it is a snapshot of one day out of his life. Don’t worry about it. Just move on. We’ve seen his grades all year. We know he has performed well. This just was not his day. We moved on with that.

I think the way we as adults project that toward our children is excruciatingly important because if they get the idea that it’s all about the test, and if they don’t perform well on the test, then perhaps their worth is involved in that, then we really have made a mistake in that process.

Both of you had said, and you’ve both alluded to this in separate places in the conversation thus far, but can you talk a little bit about facilitating a collaborative conversation with your children about how the school year has gone, maybe what they would change, and those kinds of things? Amanda, I know you have this conversation ongoing with your teenagers. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:37:32] Amanda: The nice thing is at this point in the process, I’m very comfortable with my curriculums and what we’re doing. I feel so much more confident about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it than I did when I was 20 and had my brand-new baby girl and was thinking about her future and thinking about academics. At that point, I knew I was using Math-U-See, but we hadn’t even evolved into Spelling You See and some of the other offerings that we have. It’s been a really interesting and natural progression, and I tend to gravitate towards Open and Go curriculums because that fits our lifestyle.

There have been times, like I did Apologia Science in high school, and it was brutal. I didn’t really enjoy science, and I barely made it through those courses. Then in my head, I was just like, well, of course, that’s what I’m going to do with Cassie, my oldest daughter. I get the book, and we get going, and poor child. She was a soccer player and sustained a concussion when she was in middle school, and we lost pre-algebra. First of all, we were scrambling because we were doing that and trying to rebuild those skills. Then I hit her up with this really robust science curriculum. She got three or four, and I just noticed her attitude just started. Then I noticed she was avoiding.

Finally, I sit her down, and I’m like, what’s going on? What’s the problem? What’s going on here? She was just like, this is too much. It is so much vocabulary. It is so many definitions. It is just, and I don’t even enjoy this. This isn’t my subject. This is just not even an area where I really feel like I want to go this deep of a dive. I was like, okay, you are heard, valid. We did some looking around. We found an alternate science program. Apologia is fantastic if you are wired that way, if you are that type of a kid. If you’re going to be a marine biologist, by all means, go at it guns blazing, that’s fine, but that’s not every kid.

A lot of times, we have made adjustments based on what a specific child needed curriculum-wise. I have found the more hands-on, the more multi-sensory, the more engaging mastery, skills-based learning, that method seems to work really well for my kids, and so we have stuck with several that are like that. Yes, it was an aha moment when it was like, why am I making her do that? I didn’t even like this. Just because I muscled through and didn’t complain doesn’t mean– and I had raised her to have a voice and to say, Mom, this is crazy. I can’t do this. It’s too much of a load. I’m not enjoying life.

[00:40:38] Lisa: As Amanda was talking, I’m just going back in my own memories of different times and conversations that I had with our kids and where they were able to input. I think the one thing that I didn’t do, which I wish that I had, and I recognize now how valuable it would have been, was to sit down at the end of each year and say to them, what worked, what didn’t? What curriculum did you love? What curriculum did you hate? What part of our schedule really worked for you? What part of the way we do our day was really rough on you? I think those kinds of conversations, it just didn’t occur to me. It really didn’t. I think that I would encourage it to any other mother now, especially if some things, you know in your gut, we got through this, but I don’t know that it was a great experience. You can take that and ask that question of your child.

Even very young children can answer those types of questions. I do remember my kids at times saying, I don’t like this, or, I really like this. When we first brought Math-U-See home, it was a demo VHS. That’s how old I am. Matthew was my oldest and he was in 1st grade. We had done this other math thing through kindergarten and it was just fine. It was sweet and cute and it worked. We got to 1st grade and it threw the kitchen sink at him. He was such a bright and eager learner. He was a sponge. He asked a million questions a day. I watched this child shut down and I panicked.

Somebody gave me that demo VHS and we put it in our VCR and turned it on and there’s Steve Demme demonstrating with the blocks. My jaw was dropping at what I was learning in that whatever it was, half an hour. Matt turned around and looked at me and he said, I love this mommy. I understand what he’s saying. We got Math-U-See at that time and I used it with all four children. They don’t all learn the same way, but they all liked it for different reasons. Some of them really needed those manipulatives. Others used them, but it wasn’t as necessary for them possibly because they just had their different way of thinking.

That was true with some other things too. When we did unit studies, we’d finish a unit study and I remember I did say, how did you like that? Some of them were like, eh, and others were, that was really good. Then I say, well, we’re going to start another unit study. What would you guys like to learn about? I had some resources at home, but then they go, car engines. I just thought, okay, I guess I’m going to do that.

[00:43:39] Gretchen: I’d have paid money to see your face. [chuckles]

[00:43:40] Lisa: I know nothing about car engines. My husband is more knowledgeable and he helped us out a bit, but it forced us to go to the library and look up resources. Then I looked around town and found that there was actually an old car museum there and we went and visited it. It was a field trip. You can find those kinds of things because your kids will inevitably come up with things that you never thought of, that weren’t on your radar. That you hadn’t imagined, but they have interests. They have things that maybe they’ve seen and they’d like to go explore.

As homeschooling families, you have the space within your framework to do that. You can follow those kinds of interests. Even beyond curriculum, to ask them for their feedback at the end of each year and talk with them before you make decisions. About scheduling or what extracurricular activities you’ll do or what curriculum you’ll use to be able to say, okay, this is what I’m looking at and this is what the kids have said to me, and let me take their participation in this conversation into consideration.

That collaboration can be really, really useful because then they’ve got buy-in. They’re invested and it’s going to be less likely– You know what I mean? That they’re not just going to go, oh, well, I don’t want to do this anymore. Well, you know what? You said you wanted to, so we’re going to need to follow through for at least this long and set an end time. Getting them involved, I think there’s an aspect to taking responsibility for your education that’s going to have to come at some point along this spectrum of homeschooling. I think that kind of a thing will really help encourage that and facilitate it.

[00:45:40] Gretchen: My vivid lesson in that was my eldest son. We had a curriculum that I had put all four kids into because my eldest had outgrown the curriculum we had loved and used. The curriculum we had loved and used only went through the 8th grade. When she became a 9th grader, I transitioned everybody into the curriculum that was offered through the curriculum she was going to use in 9th grade. Frankly, it was for my ease. He just set his heels and spent pretty much the whole academic year pushing back against it. I have to admit that I cranked the screws tighter and he set his feet harder. We went around and around for four months.

I finally, in exasperation, instead of inspiration, exasperation said to him, what is it that you want? He said, I want to go back to the materials we were using before. I said, yes, but I spent money for these materials. He said, I’ll pay for those materials myself. That was a $1,200 purchase. That kid raked leaves, threw newspapers, mowed lawns, did whatever he had to do to raise the money for that, and started his 7th-grade year over in April, and he was ready, I’m sorry, 6th grade. Started his 6-grade year over in April, and was ready for 7th grade in September because he was doing something he appreciated.

It was a hard one lesson for me because I could have saved us months of agony if I would have asked him sooner, but I was looking at it from a discipline perspective. He should do it because I said so. Yes, I’m a good German. You should do what I said, yes, and now, right away.

[00:47:55] Lisa: You just mentioned something that I think needs to be considered, especially for those parents who are thinking maybe this curriculum isn’t working and we need to change. I remember when I was in my senior year of high school and I had a math teacher who was really, she was a brilliant lady and a really super woman, but it was like she was speaking a foreign language to me. She just didn’t speak my language. The way she put things, her sentence structure, the way she communicated made no sense to me whatsoever. I’m so grateful because one of my classmates saw me and she just was like, don’t panic, don’t panic. She came over and pushed her desk next to me and it was like she was translating the whole semester everything that that teacher said to me in her words that made complete sense.

There are aspects of curriculum, whether it’s a video or written instruction, that sometimes they just click with you. This person speaks my language and I get it. Then somebody else can be teaching the identical material using different words and it makes no sense. There is an element to that. Evidently, your son recognized that somebody spoke his language and somebody else didn’t, and he wanted to go back to a program that he could actually understand. I think there’s value in that, even asking the student about those kinds of things. Sorry to interrupt.

[00:49:32] Gretchen: I think it’s really important, and I’m glad that you said that, because I think not every key fits every lock. We say that often when we talk about parents when they’re looking for curriculum. We say that. I would like each of you to give us your final thoughts. Amanda, we’ll start with you.

[00:49:50] Amanda: Don’t underestimate the power of listening to good literature. It works just the same. If you have a child that maybe the grade level of a particular work or the writing style is just difficult for your child, get it on audio. There are so many amazing resources available now with the technologies that we have that can really, really help.

I tell parents all the time that I think of education, core education, as a three-legged stool. Holding up that platform is a child who can express themselves well compositionally in writing, a child who can read as fluently as they are able or listen to and take in that literature and those ideas and be able to have their own ideas and thoughts and things about that grow, and then mathematics.

If you’re really worried about anything, those should be the three things, the three core subjects. If you’re hitting those consistently and you are working at those, pretty much everything else subject-wise can fall under the reading and the writing category. You really can take a lot of pressure off of yourself, off of a child, and really have a more enjoyable experience if you’re not trying to fit too much in and getting everybody overwhelmed and frustrated and struggling. Keep that in mind, keep that picture in your mind, and I think you’ll be glad you did.

[00:51:33] Lisa: Well said, Amanda. I agree completely. I’ll just repeat myself that if you have questions, if you’re in this place where you’re at the end of the year and you’re not sure about something, we’re here to support you. Please give us a call. We’re here Monday through Thursday, 8:30 AM to 6:00 PM. Eastern Time. Anybody that picks up the phone, I will tell you this right now, their first mission is to support homeschooling parents. Whether you buy any of Demme Learning’s stuff or not, we’re here to support you. We love coming alongside parents and being that support if we can be, and sometimes just being a listening ear when you need to have somebody to talk to because sometimes you have those days. We’re here for you. Absolutely.

[00:52:24] Gretchen: Ladies, you can see how much wisdom both of these ladies have. You can see why I wanted to have this conversation with them. I hope you’re stepping away from this conversation today encouraged. I want to thank you all for joining us today. We don’t take it lightly that you welcome us into your living room. We have lots of things we’d like to share and support you along the way, and we appreciate the fact that you take a little bit of time to allow us to come and share with you. I want to say thank you to Lisa and Amanda. I appreciate them more than you possibly know because they teach me something every single day. Thank you all so much for joining us today.