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[00:00:00] Lisa Chimento: I’d never heard of most of these things. Especially for some of you who are brand new to homeschooling, and you’re going to get overwhelmed sometimes with so much different information and people bringing up terminology that you’re maybe unfamiliar with, so I just really wanted to make this information available to you so that you could go in and make informed decisions and ask informed questions as well.

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[00:00:32] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. I’m so excited to have the opportunity to sit down and have this conversation with my dear friend and colleague, Lisa Chimento. There are so many ways to unpack homeschooling, and Lisa brought this idea to me a couple of months ago because we had parents who were trying to figure this out, and we wanted to create a resource for you. This conversation today is going to be that resource, and I think you will learn a great deal from it.

I think you’ll also find merit in looking at the show notes this time. I don’t always really recommend that, but in this instance, we want you to go to the show notes because Lisa has created a powerful document that will sort this for you. This is a little bit like drinking from a fire hose. We’re here because you all ask us to be here with these kinds of topics. I’m going to have Lisa introduce herself. Lisa.

[00:01:30] Lisa: Thanks, Gretchen. My name is Lisa Chimento, and I am a placement and support specialist here at Demme Learning. I’m coming up on eight years working full-time with the company, and many years before that, working the conventions over the summer, which is where we are right about now, too. My husband and I have four children whom we homeschooled K through 12. They’re all adults now and out of the house, and it is really a pleasure.

I put this before Gretchen a couple of months ago because I recalled early on in my own homeschooling journey seeing, I think it was called the Elijah Catalog, came out. It’s an older publication. It’s not around anymore, sadly, because it was a wealth of information. They did an article just like this where they ran through the different approaches or styles of homeschooling. It was completely news to me because I was fairly new in the game, and I’d never heard of most of these things.

Especially for some of you who are brand new to homeschooling, and you’re going to get overwhelmed sometimes with so much different information and people bringing up terminology that you’re maybe unfamiliar with. I just really wanted to make this information available to you so that you could go in and make informed decisions and ask informed questions as well.

[00:02:59] Gretchen: In truth, when I began my homeschooling journey, everyone gets to their journey differently. Lisa was an intentional homeschooler. She decided early on she was going to homeschool her children. I was an inadvertent homeschooler because there was a situation that I decided would best be resolved for my daughter by homeschooling. Then we found that we loved the journey, so we ended up staying 21-plus years. I think it’s important, no matter how you get to the journey, decide a path, or maybe look at a variety of paths and choose from that what works best for you.

I tried to imitate my homeschooling friends in my first year of homeschooling, and it actually took probably two or three years to realize that I wanted to do it my own way and a little bit differently. I’ll be honest, I’m grateful that I homeschooled before the advent of cell phones because more information comes to us in a day than came to our parents in their lifetimes. Because of that, it’s important for us to recognize and sort the noise. I think that’s our attempt today, is to sort the noise a little bit. Lisa, before we begin, tell me what kind of a homeschooler you were.

[00:04:21] Lisa: I wasn’t even really sure until I actually saw this Elijah Catalog article, and I realized, “Oh, I guess I’m an eclectic homeschooler.” I hardly even knew what that meant. What I discovered was it didn’t happen right away because in the first couple of years, I just went with the only thing I’d ever heard of. That’s typical for a new homeschooler. You might’ve heard of one approach or one particular curriculum company, and you just go with that. Then, once you get a couple of years under your belt, it’s a good idea to be able to start to look around and ask questions, and you start to feel more confident. That’s what I did.

I was using Math-U-See all 24 years with the children, my four kids, but we did jump around from some other things. For language arts programs, I used Learning Language Arts Through Literature, which was lovely and gave me great literature suggestions, oh my goodness. They even did book studies. I did some Daily GRAMS and Easy Grammar at certain times. I popped around to lots of different spelling programs here, there, and everywhere. We didn’t have Spelling You See back then, unfortunately. I really could have used it. I used Apologia Science for many of my school years.

Some years I just winged it. We went to the library and did some things. I did a Days of Creation kind of a study. I checked out Magic School Bus videos that were appropriate. It was neat that way. Then for social studies or history or geography, I used different things. Greenleaf Guides was out at that time, and they also had excellent literature lists, and we read a lot of their books. It really worked out well that way.

[00:06:22] Gretchen: That’s awesome. In my journey and my experience, I became an overnight homeschooler. I started with Sonlight, and I loved the literature richness of Sonlight. It was amazing. For my first two and a half years, we used the Sonlight curriculum, and I just loved it. I was looking for something that was more structured, and I found my way to a classically based curricula. I’ll be honest with you, looking back on that, my children were wildly well-educated. There were nine subjects that my kindergartner started with, and we used that curriculum through eighth grade. Then they would matriculate into a co-op high school, where we got to pick and choose.

On this list that we’ve referenced a couple of times, you’ll find a lot of the curricula that my hands touched. It wasn’t until I had been homeschooling eight years that I found my way to Math-U-See. Once I got here, I knew I couldn’t leave because I’m not a strong mathematician, and Math-U-See was a major game changer for me. I would never, even to this day, say that I love math, but I understand math much better than I did before I found my way to Math-U-See. As we begin, Lisa, let’s run through the styles, and then we’ll talk a little bit about what people can find with that. Tell me about a traditional homeschool.

[00:07:52] Lisa: Traditional is basically school at home. I know a lot of people start this way. Some people have even gone out and bought little school desks. They’re so cute. They want to set up a schoolroom and put up the-

[00:08:04] Gretchen: The flag, which we did [crosstalk].

[00:08:05] Lisa: The flag and the alphabet and the things that they remember seeing in their own classrooms when they were younger. There’s nothing wrong with that. The thing to remember, though, is that you are not a classroom at home, and you have one or two or a few children, and you don’t have 25. You don’t have to be dealing with crowd control the way that a classroom teacher does. A lot of homeschool curriculum builds a lot of that busy work in there for classroom teachers.

Just be aware that if you are using a traditional approach and you’re using a curriculum that was designed that way, you can tailor it to what works best for you. You don’t have to do all of that work in terms of hours and hours a day because you’re not dealing with a classroom full of children.

[00:08:54] Gretchen: One of the things we always tell families here at Demme Learning is regardless of the age of your child, they have an attention span for new information of their age plus two to three minutes. Many of these traditional homeschool curricula are designed to be utilized in a classroom. There’s a lot of busy work there that’s always necessary. The other thing that is important is I did believe that I needed a classroom environment. That’s what I envisioned homeschool to be. My children schooled me in the fact that it wasn’t school at home. Let’s talk a little bit about eclectic, Lisa. You’ve pretty well described it because that was your experience, but define it for our audience today.

[00:09:48] Lisa: Just briefly, it’s very flexible. There’s no set style or approach. You can mix and match and cherry-pick curriculum. I remember when we were doing– I was wanting to teach my kids handwriting, so I used Abeka’s handwriting books, even though I didn’t use the rest of the Abeka curriculum. I didn’t use that traditional style or approach to my homeschooling. You can pick. We’re going to be going over many different things, and many, many homeschooling families will adopt and utilize different approaches, different curriculum from these different styles. That’s perfectly okay because you’re wanting to make it work for you and your children and your family and the way that you guys live your lives. That’s basically what eclectic is.

[00:10:39] Gretchen: I also think that it’s important to recognize you’re going to choose some wonderful curriculum and somewhere along the line you’re going to choose what we laughingly describe as a stinker. It’s not going to work out the way you want it to. What I want you to understand is you’ve made the best decision you could with the information you had at the time. I want to be very careful to have parents understand that you didn’t make a bad decision. Don’t beat yourself up for that. You made a good decision, and now you have the opportunity to make a different one.

One of the things we recommend is to take a notebook and observe your children as they’re using the materials you’ve chosen. If it’s clear that one isn’t working, then revisit that. Have a conversation with your child and figure out why. They pretty well can tell you, even the youngest, what works and what doesn’t work. Lisa, before we go into the next style, can you talk a little bit about parents of littles? Do we really need a curriculum for a three-year-old?

[00:11:47] Lisa: [laughs] You don’t need a curriculum for a three-year-old. You might not need it for a four or five-year-old. You really need to study your children and see. So much learning happens with young children in play and getting them to move their bodies and explore different things and put their hands on things. I know that’s dangerous for some. My firstborn put his hands on a lot of my things and broke them, so you need to be wise about that. Yes, let them explore. They’re learning.

They’re learning their own bodies and their balance, their coordination. They’re developing fine motor skills, but they also have developing little tiny eye muscles and hand muscles. You don’t want to put them in a situation where they’re doing a lot of close work for long periods of time because that is stressing those muscles. Little boys, in particular, who just don’t have the necessary fat on the bottom portion of their bodies, do not want to be sitting still for very long. Let those kids move. They are learning so much as they move. Let them explore. Get them outside. Let them use all of their senses. You’d be surprised at how much they are just learning by osmosis that way.

Read aloud to them. Get to the library. Find lists of great literature for different age groups. You can read books to your children that they’re not able to read for themselves, but they can still understand them as you are reading aloud. Don’t just put in front of them the books that are at their own reading level. You read to them books that are beyond their reading level because they’re capturing so much from that.

[00:13:33] Gretchen: Let me also say that many times, a child will have a beloved book. They’re going to ask you to read it over and over and over again. You’re going to think this is designed to drive you crazy. It’s really not. It is actually a neurological function that they are ordering their brain by listening to that story multiple times. We just want to let your kid off the hook and tell you that it’s okay to read the same book. Each one of my children had a different book, but now, as adults, most of them can still recite their favorite book because it really does help them order their brain.

[00:14:20] Lisa: It really does. Also, they’re learning aspects of language receptively before you begin teaching them formally grammar. The ear for beautiful words put into beautiful sentences is developed here. When they begin writing, they will learn writing so much by the quality literature that you present to them just reading it aloud for sure.

[00:14:49] Gretchen: I will say in my classical approach to academics, we did grammar with first graders. What I have learned in the 18 years since is that when you approach a grammar experience before a child has fully emerged as a reader, sometimes you impede that emergence. One of the things that I have particularly appreciated is the approach that our analytical grammar takes. We’re looking for a child to begin that around the fourth grade when a child is a fully emerged reader.

I know my kids, every one of them are in fields where they have to write copiously, all of my adult children, but they would’ve had an easier time emerging as readers if we weren’t also working daily with grammar. Know that one thing at a time is still a good thing. Lisa, speaking of good things, can you explain Maria Montessori and the Montessori method? I think that’s so wonderful.

[00:16:04] Lisa: Yes. Maria Montessori was an Italian educator in the 1900s. She wanted to make children the focus of her educational philosophy rather than the instructor or even the content itself. She felt that students would learn at their own pace and explore topics that interest them as you make them available to them. She created this system where she would have different stations. She used a lot of hands-on materials and activities. She was very much in the way that our products work, too, very much multisensory. The parent really just acts as a facilitator and a provider of these different activities.

It’s very popular with young children. There are a lot of people who will contact us even and who will say, “I’ve had my child of seven, eight or nine years old and they’ve been doing Montessori up through now. Now we’d like to get into maybe more formal or structured learning.” It is less structured. It is more putting things out there and letting kids explore and trusting children that their desires and their interests would lead them in the way that they’re going that way.

There are some actual real curriculums. I know that there are Montessori schools that people do bring their kids to, but then there’s also a separate curriculum. SHEILA Learning is one Montessori for everyone. Then there’s something called the Global Montessori Network. There certainly are many books written by Maria Montessori that you might want to read if that sounds appealing to you. The Montessori Method and the Absorbent Mind are two titles that I found offhand.

[00:18:06] Gretchen: One of the things that I find remarkable about Maria Montessori is she created a child-centric curricula in an age where we didn’t even see the value in educating children. She was well ahead of her time. [unintelligible 00:18:22]

[00:18:22] Lisa: She really was. That children should be seen and not heard did not go well with her. [laughs]

[00:18:28] Gretchen: Absolutely. Let’s talk about someone else who had that same background, and that’s Charlotte Mason.

[00:18:36] Lisa: This is fascinating. This is a movement that has grown exponentially in the years since I first started homeschooling. I had never heard of Charlotte Mason when I began, and it wasn’t until I was probably halfway in that I started to hear people and they began to network with each other. Charlotte Mason was a 19th century British educator and she was a governess. She just began to document and chronicle her work. It focuses on the child’s natural love of learning, emphasizing really quality literature.

She had a favorite term that she used when people were using textbooks and other things that weren’t quality. She used to call them twaddle. She just said, “Avoid this. This is nonsense. They can learn the things they need to learn with beautiful literature.” She very much emphasized nature studies and nature walks and getting kids outside and letting them explore nature. She wanted them to use those living books rather than textbooks.

She also was very much a proponent of developing good habits. She agreed with us in short, focused lessons rather than spending hours and hours on things, trying to get stuff into kids’ brains. She really wanted to make learning be a joyful experience. There are many examples of curricula that used today, Charlotte Mason, and they’ve put it together in nice packages.

[00:20:21] Gretchen: The one thing I want to say about Charlotte Mason is we had an opportunity last year to have a guest on The Demme Learning Show who talked about using Charlotte Mason methodologies all the way into her high school years for the students. We will include that webinar as part of the show notes as well. Lisa, classical, boy, I tell you what, this one is a hot topic. Give us a little bit of background into what it means to be a classical curriculum because that’s my experience, at least with my children through 8th grade.

[00:20:56] Lisa: This was another one that I had never heard of in my early years, and I put my foot in it for a little while. We dabbled in it when Steven, my youngest, was about halfway through, we spent a little time in classical conversations. This is an ancient educational philosophy. We’re talking about back into Greek and Roman times, and it focuses on what’s called the trivium, which means literally where the three roads meet. It covers history, science, literature, English grammar, writing. It might include learning Greek or Latin or Hebrew languages.

It’s taught in three stages. The grammar stage for young children where they’re inputting a lot of information, a lot of memorization going on. The dialectic stage is the logic stage where kids are taking that information that they’ve taken in and they are now analyzing it. Then the rhetoric stage where they are ready to begin presenting, they are– We’re focusing on writing, writing persuasively, doing oral presentations and things like that. It’s very rigorous and uses a lot of classical source material. You’re getting to look back on some beautiful and classical, ancient literature.

[00:22:21] Gretchen: I’m going to say one thing about a classical approach, because in the grammar stage, we, I placed a lot of emphasis on what my children could memorize. Often we find that song is a wonderful way to memorize things. However, what we know now about the neurology of learning is that music is perceived in the subdominant hemisphere. If you have a child who can beautifully sing a skip counting song but can’t step away from that song and repeat those same facts without having to sing the song, then that’s not a memorized fact set.

We want to caution you as parents to be fully engaged in that process so that you know that your child is absolutely committing those facts to memory. As a homeschool mom told us, this is one of my favorite phrases, “Your mind can’t focus on higher-order tasks. It’s focused on those lower-order skills.” That’s really important to remember. Lisa, I know you have a fond love for unit studies, so explain this one to us.

[00:23:36] Lisa: I do have a fond love because I used these for a number of years. When my two older boys were probably in 1st and 3rd grades, and we did this for several years. They were close in age but you could do this with a whole family of ranging ages. It’s where you are selecting a theme or a topic or a piece of literature, and you’re building all of your learning around that. You can be learning history and geography and science and reading and literature all with this life skills, phys ed. You can just incorporate so many things with a unit study. The good thing is that you can tailor different activities for kids of different ages, but they’re all learning those same things at the same time.

If you wanted to have your children write something about what they learned, your older children would be required to write something more advanced than a young child would, or maybe the young child would just dictate to you what they had learned. You can really tailor it that way. It’s really fun. It’s really, really fun. You still are going to have to teach things like reading and phonics, spelling and math individually, because that’s not going to work as well with unit studies.

There are some whole package curriculums. Some of them have gone out of trend over the years, but there are some really great websites where you can read how to create your own unit studies so you don’t have to be dependent on a curriculum. Find yourself a great reading lists and utilize those.

[00:25:25] Gretchen: Can you elaborate for me on why you have to teach math individually? You mentioned several things, but I’m just going to pick math out of the pie for expediency’s sake.

[00:25:37] Lisa: [chuckles] This is a tough one for families with large number of children. We sometimes get these calls, “I’ve got kids in this grade, this grade, and this grade, and I really don’t have the time to teach math separately, so I want to do them all together, but kids aren’t all at the same level.” Because math is a sequential subject, it builds on itself cumulatively. If you’re teaching children who are actually at different levels in their skills and you’re trying to teach them all the same content at the same time, you’re going to have kids who don’t need to learn that because they already know it and they’re going to be bored and they’re wasting time not learning.

Then other kids at the other end of the spectrum there who aren’t ready for that material yet because they haven’t learned the prerequisite skills, and so they’re going to be totally exasperated. Unfortunately, that’s something that goes on in a classroom, so we don’t want to do that. For those kinds of skills where they need to be working at their own level, you really need to teach those subjects individually.

[00:26:45] Gretchen: I don’t know why this happens, but I think we can both say it’s placement. I was a former placement specialist. You’re a current placement specialist. Invariably, the younger student has more going on mathematically than the older student and with any subject, if it’s not working for us, we say, “My history curriculum,” or “My science curriculum isn’t working.” With math, we think it’s our fault, and it’s not. We want to encourage you to make sure that you’re teaching those subjects individually. Lisa, how about the Waldorf method? I knew about this sort of tangentially, but you’ve educated me in the last two weeks more about this.

[00:27:29] Lisa: Yes, I educated myself, too, because I had also heard of it, and we’ve even had some people that have called in and have said, “I’ve used the Waldorf method and we’re looking at some other things now.” I did a deep dive and did some research. This method was created by an Austrian. We’re just getting the whole world here in on us.

[00:27:49] Gretchen: It’s a Geography lesson here. [chuckles]

[00:27:51] Lisa: An Austrian philosopher named Rudolf Steiner, and so the Waldorf approach is sometimes also referred to as Steiner education. He was a 19th-century philosopher, and he based this on a holistic approach to students’ intellectual, social, and spiritual needs. He was coming at this from three phases of child development, body, mind, and spirit. He was trying to match those different stages of child development with their education, early, middle, and late is sometimes referred to. He featured a lot of storytelling, fairytales, fables and myths and legends. Then also pursuing artistic activities, fine arts, music, dance and movement, imaginative play and nature and field trips.

It was very much on experiential learning. That’s another term that I started to realize as I was going through these different approaches. Many of them focus on experiential learning. Others are more literature or even textbook-based and less of that experiential learning. Knowing your children, and moms and dads you know your children better than anyone on this earth, take advantage of that knowledge. If you haven’t made note of it, write it down. Look at the way your kids learn. You’re going to have those kids that just have to touch everything. Get them the kind of instruction where they can touch because they’re learning so much that way.

[00:29:38] Gretchen: Lisa, I’m glad you brought up art because sometimes as parents, we are so focused on the academic experience that we forget that art can be an academic experience. You can study it in the guise of history, you can study it in the guise of geography. The other thing that’s really important, and I think often parents forget is we’ll have parents say to us, “Oh, my daughter is very artistic. She’s not terrific at math.” It’s important to note that there’s no such thing as a math brain. If your child is an artist, they’re using math in an integral way. They’re studying it spatially, they’re studying it in detail, that you need to encourage in that process. Don’t assume that because you have a creative child, that child is not a mathematical child.

[00:30:35] Lisa: That’s right. They’re using math intuitively, and maybe will need more help procedurally with the actual processes of solving math. Our colleague Sue Wachter, who is a wonderful artist and a teaching artist, she shared with us that when she struggles with math, the use of manipulatives, she can almost feel it clicking to the other side of her brain. It brings it more into that analytical part where she can deal with math more analytically there and less imaginatively and getting lost in the word problems. [laughs]

[00:31:13] Gretchen: Absolutely. That makes a tremendous amount of difference. This would also be an important place to say, if you have a child that’s struggling mathematically, the likelihood of that struggle is not where they’re struggling, it’s something that has happened earlier that they don’t have a solid foundation with. We need to unpack what that is, but this is not our goal today. I just want to say that as an aside. Lisa, we’re going to go to the opposite end of the spectrum. Tell me about unschooling.

[00:31:46] Lisa: This gained a lot of popularity, too, over the years. When I first heard of this, I thought, “What do you mean you’re not doing any school at all?” That’s not what it is. There are certainly different levels of unschooling. Some people even bring a little bit of unschooling into certain subjects, but others are using it across the board. Basically, what this is is letting the student direct the learning. This is particularly good if you have a very focused and self-directed student. They know what they want, they know where they’re going, and allowing them to explore the fields of study where they have tremendous interest is a great thing. It’s driven by a child’s curiosity. It tends to reject defined curriculum and instructor-led learning and strict schedules. It emphasizes a child’s freedom to make their own educational choices.

Now, parents, you need to be mindful here because you have obligations. Your state’s going to want to know that you’re educating your children, and you want to know that you are preparing them for adulthood and life. You don’t want to let it go to the point where a child decides he wants to play video games all day. That’s just not going to cut it. There are certainly ways to unschool, and there are great resources to help you and guide you in this.

There are handbooks put out by Mary Griffith, Peter Gray, Ben Hewitt, and a woman named Danielle, and I’m going to slaughter her last name. Forgive me, please. Danielle Papageorgiou. She actually has a website called lifeschoolingconference.com. She refers to it as life schooling even more so than unschooling. I think that that’s because she’s taking into account all of those areas where children learn as they’re living their lives normally and taking advantage of those life application learning.

[00:33:57] Gretchen: I had several friends who unschooled alongside us when we homeschooled, and sometimes my children would say, “Hey, they get to do,” whatever that is. We would take a different approach and say, “Okay, you drive this train. How do you want to do this?” It gave us the opportunity to experiment. I think one of the things that’s important is this is going to be a grand experiment for you because how Lisa schooled, how I schooled is not going to be how school because it’s going to be tailored to your family. Lisa, talk to me about if a parent is looking to begin a journey and their child has already started an academic process, what about deschooling?

[00:34:50] Lisa: I think that this is a helpful thing for any family who has pulled kids out of school and it has been a negative experience for that family. If you’ve got children who have been bullied, if there’s been a very negative experience with a particular teacher, or something else has gone on that’s around that child being at school, and you’ve decided to homeschool them, I really want to encourage you to not jump right in and start because you’re afraid of losing time. Take some time. We will call this loosely deschooling, but basically it’s an opportunity for you to take a breath. You’re transitioning to a very different experience, and sometimes healing needs to happen.

Sometimes you just all need to decompress a while. I remember, and this was not my experience, of course, because we homeschooled from the beginning, but there was one time where we made a move and I was moving to a different state. I had a new baby. I had just started homeschooling. I’d only done it for a year. We knew nobody. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just went out and bought all this curriculum.

Fortunately, I met wonderful people where we were. You got a chance to meet my beautiful friend Barbara. She said to me, “Put this stuff aside, go to the library, get some books, read to the kids. I’m going to go and do some research for you.” What a blessing that was because it gave me the chance after the move and the new baby and all of the changes I had experienced, to just take a breath. That reading out loud, I had no idea how much benefit it was to them, but it was a benefit to all of us.

[00:36:39] Gretchen: Now, that reading out loud, Dr. Karen Holinga, who developed our Spelling You See program, which is on the shelf behind me, says that your child needs up to 1500 hours of input in reading before they’re really ready to give you output. Bear that in mind. I don’t say this as an admonishment if you are not reading that often for your children. You know there’s audiobooks too. Some of my kids’ fondest memories are audiobooks. In fact, one of those, I remember we were listening to Mark Twain, and we had driven 13 hours home from a summer vacation. Here we are sitting in the driveway, all of us, waiting for the cassette tape, so you can tell this was a while ago, waiting for the cassette tape to finish before we would go in the house because that’s how enraptured my children were with this story. That’s what you really want. What would you have to say in closing to our parents who have joined us for this episode?

[00:37:52] Lisa: I love something that you say to us often, flexibility is the sign of intelligence. I think of that often. You need to be flexible if you’re going to be a homeschooling parent because things happen, life happens, and you’re home, living life while you’re homeschooling your children. Be ready for those interruptions. Be ready for new babies, new jobs, new homes, new cities, and things that do occur in life, and be flexible. We all need breaks from time to time. You, as a homeschooling parent, will need breaks. You’ll need time for some self-care. Your kids need breaks. Their brains sometimes need breaks. Be willing to take breather times as you need to.

If you have never visited a homeschool convention and there is one near you, I really recommend it because as you are exploring these different learning approaches and the examples of the curriculum that focus on those approaches, you have the opportunity to go to a homeschool convention and put your hands on that curriculum. Go and look at it. Open the books. Talk to the person in the booth and say, “How does this work?” Ask the questions that you need to ask. Network with other homeschoolers. Find a support network for yourself. It is invaluable. It was a lifesaver for me, especially having just moved out of my state and knowing no one. That homeschool group set me off on such a healthy path, and I was so grateful for it forever. Lastly, if you have questions, please give us a call. We’re here to support you.

[00:39:28] Gretchen: Absolutely. I have enjoyed this conversation. You all can see that Lisa has a tremendous passion for sharing information with parents. She wants you to be able to know everything you need to know to be a successful homeschool family. For that, I love having the opportunity to spend an hour with her. We don’t take it lightly that you ask us into your living rooms. Thank you so much for joining us today. Let me say in closing that we are getting ready to launch a series of webinars about different careers in adulthood. It’s called the Career Connections Series. Periodically, throughout now until the end of the year, we’re going to interview different adults, young adults, more mature adults,-

[00:40:15] Lisa: [laughs]

[00:40:16] Gretchen: -you can define that any way you want, who are applying STEM careers in their work pursuits. As you have a child who begins to go into the high school years, it’s important for them to be able to parse and understand what those different pursuits might look like. One of my children had said his entire life that he had a career pursuit that he was absolutely intent on following, until he had the opportunity to do a three-week internship. Then he said, “Oh no, this is not what I want at all.” Without that opportunity, he would not have known that.

I encourage you to join us in the coming weeks for these endeavors because I think you’ll find them really tremendous. Lisa, thank you again for your time this afternoon. We wish you the joy of the journey. Believe me, some of the days are really long, but the years pass very quickly.

[00:41:15] Lisa: Thanks.

[00:41:15] Gretchen: Take care, everyone.

[00:41:16] Lisa: Bye-bye.

[00:41:16] Gretchen: Bye-bye.

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[00:41:19] Voiceover: Thanks again for joining us. We’re glad to be a part of your educational community. You can help us grow our community even more by rating, reviewing, and subscribing to the show wherever you may be hearing this. Don’t forget that you can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. We’ll see you again next time. Until then, keep building strong foundations for lifelong learning.

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