Cynthia Holt: 00:00:00.000
Something we say a lot in our company is that you’re not running out of time. And we continually tell people that because we want them to lift that guilt off that they need to learn everything or that their child needs to learn everything they need to know in 12 years of life. And that’s just so unrealistic. The fact is that we as humans are continuously learning.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:27.160
Afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. And today I have the privilege of having a wonderful conversation with two ladies that I have gotten to know. And I hope you find as much value in this conversation as I have found in getting to know Justine and Cynthia. Justine LoMonaco and Cynthia Holt had the Learn and Live Letter. And I am looking at their website here. It’s beautifully put together. And it is designed for today’s homeschool mom. We’re going to talk about unit studies today. And I’m really excited to do that. And ladies, will you all introduce yourselves and then we’ll get to know your story.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:01:08.969
Sure. My name is Justine LoMonaco. I have three children. They are eight, five, and almost nine months.

Cynthia Holt: 00:01:16.686
And I’m Cynthia Holt and I have three boys. I have a 22-year-old, a 19-year-old, and my 7-year-old is the only one I’m currently homeschooling.

Gretchen Roe: 00:01:27.040
Yes, but you homeschooled for more than just a hot day, so.

Cynthia Holt: 00:01:30.579
Yeah. So my oldest who’s 22 was homeschooled since kindergarten. And he–

Justine LoMonaco: 00:01:37.301
Just graduated college.

Cynthia Holt: 00:01:38.033
–just graduated college and he did dual enrollment for part of high school. So it was a really great combination of utilizing homeschooling and our local resources to get him to that associate’s degree.

Gretchen Roe: 00:01:54.413
And that dual enrollment thing is so valuable. Two of my kids did dual enrollment. And boy, was it a game changer for them because it allowed them to have the joy of homeschooling along with the experience of college. And that really does make a tremendous difference. You’ll get there, Justine. Eventually.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:02:11.021
I know. Give me a minute.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:14.700
It will pass much faster than you think, so.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:02:17.489
I believe it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:19.056
Ladies, I want you to tell your story. How did this adventure begin? And I’ll let you all take it from there.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:02:26.463
So for Cynthia, I mean, homeschooling had been a way of life for such a long time. And we had become really good friends before I had my first child. We were living in New York City at the time. And I had come from a very traditional school background, very academically minded family. Traditional school was all I really knew. And then I met Cynthia and her, at the time, two brilliant children. And I was just blown away at not only how smart they were, but how normal they were because that was not something that I had really experienced in my very limited homeschool window. But once I saw the way that they were educated, I just kept taking note because I joke often it was how I imagined rich people got to educate their kids. It was this very tailored schooling, very vibrant. They were rarely at home. They were always going out and doing museums and groups and co-ops and wonderful experiences that I never got to have having school in a traditional brick-and-mortar setting. So the more I got to know them, the more I started to think, maybe this is something we could do. And when I had my first daughter and she was ready to start preschool, I sat my husband down and I said, “Okay, I think I really want to go for it.” And he also knew her children. So he was probably a lot less scared than he would have been otherwise. And we started. We did preschool. We worked with a very simple play-based curriculum at the time, which was actually a unit study-based program. I just didn’t really know that at the time. And I was still working and doing that. So it was a busy time. And then 2020 hit. And with that came the COVID pandemic. And so many of my coworkers were suddenly homeschooling and terrified about that. And in our Slack chats, there was a lot of freaking out. And I had had the blessing of starting homeschooling with Cynthia on my side so I always had this voice in my ear telling me, “It’s not as scary as you think. You are perfectly capable of doing this. Look how simple it is. I can show you.” And I tried to be that voice to my coworkers.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:04:38.972
And so one day I started putting together what I know now as unit studies, which were just five activities based around math, science, geography, art, and something movement based with a theme. So one week it with oceans, one week it was the zoo. And I would send it to them and say, “Just do this. Just do one of these a day. By the end of the week, you’ve done everything and you don’t have to stress.” And Cynthia had been saying for years, “When we do our own curriculum– When we do our own curriculum–” and I would always kind of laugh her off and say, “Sure, when I also have 18 years of homeschooling, we will sit down and we’ll do our own curriculum.” And so she came over one day as part of my COVID bubble pod. “And so I was kind of thinking about something. What if we started putting together these little groups of activities with a theme?” And she goes, “A unit study.” And I said, “Mhm yes,” that is terminology I was very aware of before this moment in time. “And so what if we put it in an email and we just sent it to people as their homeschool week and they didn’t have to think about it?” She says, yes. I said, “Okay.” And what if we sold it as a membership or a subscription and then they would come to us and we would provide it?” “Yes.” “Okay.” “And what if we called it the Learn + Live Letter because we believe learning and life should float?” “Yes.” And I was like, “Okay, so should I buy a domain name?” She said, “Yes.” And literally two months later, we launched our company.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:06:09.446
And we started with one level at the time, which was our kindergarten, essentially, curriculum. It became a literature and play-based unit study program, all hands-on and project-based activities with themes that were really engaging to children in the three to five age range. And now we are going on five years of our company, and we have four levels. We now have activities for children ages 3 to 12. And we’ve broadened the themes that we offer. And we are now folding in even more education for the parent teaching the lessons, because that was also very important to us, that homeschooling should not be scary, should not be overwhelming, and you have everything that you need to teach your child. We just want to be there to support and empower you along the way.

Gretchen Roe: 00:06:58.479
I love that. Being able to support and empower you along the way is huge. And so Cynthia, you had all this and you made it look so easy for Justine. But what made you decide to homeschool? Because you just told me your 22-year-old was homeschooled from kindergarten on. So that was, I mean, 20 years ago to make that decision, 18 years ago, that that was a little bit out of the norm.

Cynthia Holt: 00:07:26.365
It was. We sent him to preschool and I just wasn’t really thrilled with just some of the rules of the school. Sending him to school sick was expected. And I was like, “Well, no, he’s sick. I’m just going to keep him home.” At the time, he had some food allergies. And I felt like even though preschool was only two or three hours, there were like two meals built into the time. And I was like, “That’s a lot of snacking.” And that just didn’t fit with my philosophy. So so it just felt like it wasn’t working with our life. And it felt very forced. I also had a second child that was only two and a half years younger, and I felt like his life was now revolving around the school schedule. And he wasn’t even in school. So it just didn’t feel like it was fitting our lifestyle. And at the time, I didn’t really think I was going to homeschool for a long time. I thought I’m just going to homeschool in kindergarten and I’m going to just try to apply to some of the charter schools that were opening up at the time. And I was like, “Maybe by the time he’s in first grade, it’ll work in our life a little better.” So kindergarten was very much an experiment. It wasn’t supposed to happen. And also, I didn’t know anyone who homeschooled. And I assumed a lot of the myths that I had heard were true. And so I started joining groups in my community. And like Justine mentioned, we lived in New York City. So I was like, “Surely no one in New York City is homeschooling. That is not possible.” And then I found this huge network of what I was like thinking, these must be all underground networks because this is a secret.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:09:11.745
A bunch of weirdos.

Cynthia Holt: 00:09:13.145
It was like we were– yeah. But no, it was amazing. I was so blown away by the people I was meeting, and I think that really helped me feel comfortable and confident because I was meeting so many people that were so open to telling me their stories. And everybody who comes into the homeschooling community for a different reason. But if you’re willing to learn from your peers, I feel like it really builds you as a homeschooler. And that’s what I tried to do that first year, was just learn as much as I could about how people homeschooled, the different ways that they were doing it. I joined every field trip I could. I joined a lot of the free programming that was available in New York City through their museums and their parks department. And I was just blown away by all the activities that we could do. And then, honestly, a lot of our unit studies are built around those initial few years that we spent going to zoo schools at the Bronx Zoo, going to the Met galleries. We did a program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called Start with Art. And every one of our units includes an art piece because of those lessons that my kids took at the Met. And I’m still friends with the docent at the library. And she contributed to our unit study program with her as a resource. So it’s just a lot of those years of experience in New York, my first few years, really built my foundation for homeschooling. And that’s so much of what we try to share in our unit studies.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:10:50.508
Yeah. Something Cynthia said to me often was, “I liked this about this, but I didn’t like this, or I liked this, but I wish it would have been more like this.” So when we were creating our curriculum, all of that went into what her vast years of experience had taught her didn’t really work for children of that age group, or didn’t really help the lesson, really stay with them a long time. And we were able to make exactly the curriculum that we wished we had for our own kids. Yeah.

Gretchen Roe: 00:11:17.912
Sure. Well, now you ladies said something just before we started this event, and I think it’s really important for us to have this portion of the conversation, and that is you all have created an opportunity to take the guilt out of the journey. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because so many moms that I speak to are like, “But what am I missing?” What if I’m missing something? And I realize that that is just a lie that has been instilled in them from culture. But how do we make that a doable enterprise for parents so that they feel like they’ve covered all their bases?

Cynthia Holt: 00:11:55.106
I think something we say a lot in our company is that you’re not running out of time, and we continually tell people that because we want them to lift that guilt off that they need to learn everything or that their child needs to learn everything they need to know in 12 years of life. And that’s just so unrealistic. The fact is that we as humans are continuously learning. So if you eliminate this unrealistic time restraint from learning, it opens up a whole new world. And with our unit studies, one of the things I remember thinking about when I was a young homeschool mom was that I wanted to do unit studies because I felt like they were the most fun way of learning. But I also had to do a writing program because they needed to learn how to write in this very particular way. And everybody says you have to practice writing every single day or else you’re not going to learn to write. And, oh, I should definitely put them in a typing program because they need to learn to type. This is the 20th century, 21st century. Like how can they live without learning how to type? Oh, and obviously they need to do math every single day, because if you don’t do it every single day, then you’re not going to learn it. And let’s not forget that you need to do spelling and you have to do creative writing. That is not an option. Like you have to write. So all of a sudden, I started giving myself all of these rules that had absorbed from well-meaning society and people around me.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:13:25.187
Sometimes. [laughter]

Cynthia Holt: 00:13:25.897
But at the end of the day, I was like, I don’t have enough time to do all of these things and also be authentic to my homeschool. And so what we just try to the messaging over and over is that you are not running out of time.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:13:43.251
I think we have the misapprehension that if we do it just right, our kids won’t have any gaps.

Cynthia Holt: 00:13:50.547
Right.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:13:51.337
Every kid has gaps.

Cynthia Holt: 00:13:52.825
Yeah, my kids still don’t know how to type. Even the 22-year-old who graduated college with As cannot type.

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:01.212
Well, as you were saying that, I was thinking one of the fastest typists in my family is my 25-year-old who is in IT. He’s a network systems engineer and he types about 75 words a minute with two fingers. And I watch him type and it drives me completely insane. But man, the kid can type and he’s more accurate than I am, so.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:14:26.632
I think there’s a funny thing with homeschool guilt where people feel like if they’re enjoying it, then it’s not working somehow. That if it’s too much fun, it’s not real school. And something that unit studies, at least the ones we strive to create, really bring to life is that the opposite can be true. And rather than starting with that list of things you have to do, you start with something that engages your child and makes them want to learn and love learning. And then you extrapolate that out into all of these subjects that you want them to know or help them just learn how to be a thinker and to dive deeper when there is something that interests them so that they become this lifelong learner that I think we’re all at our core trying to raise.

Gretchen Roe: 00:15:14.599
I love that that you all are also chasing your kids’ interests. And sometimes they think we have the misapprehension that if we chase their interests, then we’re not really engaged in real school. And I have spent the last 28 years saying, well, what is real school?

Cynthia Holt: 00:15:35.813
Yeah.

Gretchen Roe: 00:15:36.913
What does that mean? What does it mean for families? So tell us a little bit about how you structure your days now. If I wanted to be part of Learn and Live, what would I need to do?

Justine LoMonaco: 00:15:48.235
Sure. So all of our unit studies are a little bit different. You’re never going to be doing the same thing every single week. But generally, we break them up by the week, the way that we had initially sort of imagined in our first iteration of the company. And within each unit study you start out with a book list, because books are the spine of all of our units. And the books that you’ll find there are not textbooks. They are not workbooks. By and large, they are picture books or chapter books for older children, sometimes illustrated resource books specifically made for children, because we really want that to engage them and capture their interest and imagination right off the bat. And then as you get into the unit study, we’ve broken them down into five lessons. The idea being that if you are an everyday type of home-school family, you can do a lesson Monday through Friday and you can get your unit done in a week. But we always say that with the caveat that we put a lot in there. We want you to have plenty. I compared it once to that– if you come to a dinner party at our house, Cynthia and I are the type of people that we want to make sure the vegetarians have something. We want to make sure the meat eaters have something. We want to make sure the person who only wants dessert has something. So we try to think of everybody and all the different approaches they could take. So there’s a lot of options. But at the beginning of every single unit, we tell you, “If something in here doesn’t work for your child, doesn’t work for your family, skip it.” You don’t need to do every single activity to have successfully completed the unit. You can also stretch it into multiple weeks, if that’s something that works better for your family. If you’re traveling or you get sick, or your child is just really, really into that first day of activities and wants to keep doing the same thing over and over again, let them. Really strike where the iron is hot, where their interest is the strongest, and don’t pull them away from what has drawn them into learning. And within each lesson, you’ll find a variety of hands-on activities, games, projects, experiments, recipes to cook together, arts and music activities, life skill activities, but all with the goal of bringing whatever the topic that that book introduced, whatever it was, to life for them. Putting something in their hands that brings abstract concepts into a really concrete world that makes it more memorable and more meaningful for them to learn. We also include field trip recommendations for most of our units, because we know home-schooling doesn’t need to always happen at home, and it’s often better if it doesn’t. And we want to make sure that it’s as engaging for the parent teaching the lessons as it is for the child learning from them.

Gretchen Roe: 00:18:21.222
I think I told you, Justine, that I once upon a time had a bumper sticker on my car that said, “If a mother’s place is in the home, why am I always in my car?” More time away from home than we did at home. We became very adept at doing school on the road, so to speak.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:18:37.196
Yeah. I think, like we said, we always felt like learning should match your life, not the other way around.

Gretchen Roe: 00:18:44.519
I like that. I think that makes a difference as well. So you started with kindergarten curriculum and you said that your eldest daughter considers herself the third founder.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:18:56.070
Yes. She’s the original Learn and Live guinea pig.

Gretchen Roe: 00:19:00.324
Were you test driving the ideas with her and then moving on from that? And then when you started this, Cynthia, your youngest was a little young for unit studies, right?

Cynthia Holt: 00:19:13.872
Yeah, he definitely wasn’t doing the curriculum the same way that her daughter Vivian was doing them. I feel like he was doing a lot of the activities in a very modified way. And as we developed our company, we realized that there were probably a lot more families in that situation, where they had maybe like that five-year-old that was ready to start being in more formal lessons, but they may have a younger sibling that wanted to play along. So I feel like having Noah do the lessons helped us develop the modifications. And I think her younger daughter did also develop those modifications, where it was coming in with a younger sibling who maybe wanted more sensory development And I think also because hers are daughters, obviously her children are daughters and I have sons. Coming from that different perspective also really helped shape the unit lesson because there were some lessons that my son was more drawn to than her daughters. And then also their strengths, like every other person, are very different. And I thought that also brought some variety into the unit study, where my son just naturally is more inclined to numbers and counting. And he just loves that technical side. And her daughter is so artistic and so creative. And the storytelling that she does is just amazing. So again, I think it just brings this variety where it’s like, if you have these types of different children in your family, I think you’re going to be able to pick out which activities your children are naturally more drawn to.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:21:05.841
Yeah, so many times when we would be writing the units, we wrote them separately most of the time. We would kind of divide and conquer the levels. But we would see each other and be like, “I just wrote an activity that no one’s going to die for her.” And she’d be like, “I just wrote something that I think Vivi’s going to love when she gets to level three.” And I think having these two very different children kind of be our inspirations really helped us create something that can work for so many different types of children. And the modifications that she mentioned are something that we actually physically put into the units. So whenever we would be doing something with one of the older children and the younger sibling would be tagging along, if we came up with something on the fly that worked for them and helped them feel involved, we would write that into the unit. Because the majority of our members have more than one child and they want to be learning together, not only because it’s more fun, but it is what helps the parents sanity to not have to be doing so many different tracks. And even as we were developing the multiple levels, we have a lot of crossover units that will work in level three and level one or level one and level two, level two plus and level three. So if you have children in multiple levels, which you get access to with just one membership, you get all the levels you can learn together.

Gretchen Roe: 00:22:19.500
Oh, that’s wonderful. My sister only had boys. She had three boys. I had three of each. And I’m basically an only child because we’re 18 years apart in age. And she always said there’s no difference between boys and girls except how you socialize them. And I beg to differ.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:22:39.764
I was about to say; I don’t know.

Gretchen Roe: 00:22:41.250
Wild amount of difference between boys and girls. So I think this is wonderful that you all had the ability to see the world through each other’s children’s eyes to be able to see what worked and how that worked well together. So tell me a little bit more about the subscription then. If I wanted to participate, how would I do that? And we’re going to put your website in the show notes. So those who are watching this today will be able to go and explore some more there. But how often does a letter come to me? I think I heard you say weekly, but I want to make sure I understood that.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:23:22.352
So things have changed in the last four to five years as we’ve expanded. Now our memberships, we are sort of relaunching this August, but we have a year membership, which is 365 days of access to the units. One thing that is very different about our program is that all of the units themselves stay on our website. It’s not something that you need to download or print 1,000 sheets of paper and keep organized. Everything lives on the website and then you can download activity materials as needed, or you use the supply list that’s included in each unit to know what types of hands-on materials you need. But once you have subscribed, you start getting monthly emails from us. That is a check-in around a topical homeschool challenge that a lot of people either have top of mind at that time of year, or like the homeschool slump that tends to hit in January is usually the theme of that newsletter. But starting in August, we are also including a special online course specifically for the grown-up teaching our unit studies, and the purpose of that is not only to help you make the most of your membership, to really know all the ins and outs of how it works and how we’ve seen people use it best over the last few years but also going back to that homeschool empowerment and helping adults to sort of relearn and let go of maybe some biases about school and learning that they have internalized often without realizing it and start to think like a homeschooler.

Cynthia Holt: 00:24:52.622
Yeah, it was really important to us that we supported the parent through the process, and for part of our company’s history, a lot of that information was available to them on our blog, but we felt like it was hard for them to digest it all. They didn’t know what order to read things in or how to process it all, so the way our course is going to work is that they will get 16 weeks of emails that give them specific articles to read, and it just slowly gives them that information while they’re homeschooling, so it doesn’t feel all encompassing, all at once, overwhelming the way–

Justine LoMonaco: 00:25:33.658
There’s not a million more things on your to-do list.

Cynthia Holt: 00:25:35.192
Yeah, the way sometimes– I know I love going to homeschool conventions, but you go and you get everything at once and it only lasts you so long because then you start–

Justine LoMonaco: 00:25:46.045
Running out.

Cynthia Holt: 00:25:46.745
–running out of breath. So I feel like we wanted–

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:49.415
[crosstalk] a fire hose too, so.

Cynthia Holt: 00:25:52.015
Yeah. We wanted to just dispense the information to them in a systematic way that felt digestible and that felt attainable and empowering because we really feel like there isn’t enough people– or people aren’t told enough, “You’re doing a good job,” and that’s really a big part of our messaging.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:26:11.045
Yeah, we’ve seen time and time again, the happiest homeschoolers are the ones that feel confident in what they’re doing, yeah, and as soon as you are feeling motivated by insecurity or guilt or this fear that you are not doing enough, all the joy is gone, and when it’s gone for you, it’s usually gone for your child too. When you homeschool, you’re a family homeschooling, and it’s really difficult for your child to love it if you hate it, and so not only did we want the child to enjoy the activities and the lessons we were putting together, we knew we needed to get the parent to a place where they could enjoy it too. Otherwise, it was never going to have the same amount of success.

Cynthia Holt: 00:26:48.553
And our membership includes those units, and like we said, there’s a ton of information, and we never want people to be like, “Well, I’m not doing every single lesson, so I must be doing it wrong.” That is absolutely not the point. We give you too much so that you have plenty to choose from, but your membership also includes that mentoring, that support, that course, and then we throw in a few goodies in our membership also, so it also includes a planner so that you have ways to keep track of everything that you’re doing, especially if you live in a state requiring reporting. We try to keep everything– we provide you with resources so you can keep track of what you’re doing if that’s important to your homeschool, and then just little things that we try to include in our membership, also the variety of memberships, so you have a one-year option or you have a seasonal option, and that gives you some flexibility with how much money your output is at the beginning.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:27:47.444
And our year members also get invited to two coaching sessions with us per school year.

Cynthia Holt: 00:27:55.153
[crosstalk].

Justine LoMonaco: 00:27:55.153
It’s like this. We do a live session on Zoom where they can ask their personal questions, which, as we all know, tend to be the questions, really, everyone has and the problems everyone is dealing with. So they get the coaching from us, but also that community with the other members seeing that it’s not just them. We’re big proponents of getting out of your homeschool vacuum because that’s a scary place. And once they start to see that, “This is something everyone struggles with. It’s not just you,” and get all of those solutions they can brainstorm together, everyone usually leaves feeling a lot better about what they’ve done.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:30.046
Right. That’s huge. And I’m grateful for having had the homeschool experience prior to the social media generation. Because so often, we see curated content in social media of somebody’s best day, and we think, “Oh, what’s wrong with us?” And we’re not realizing that we’re only seeing snippets of their life. Life happens for all of us. Like, when your two-year-old walks through the house with a one pound container of cornstarch and goes [inaudible] [crosstalk], but.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:29:09.671
Sounds like you’ve [crosstalk] that by experience. That doesn’t sound so hypothetical. [laughter]

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:15.250
No, it was. We had cornstarch on flat surfaces for about three months, but [inaudible] parade she created. And they do grow up. She’ll be 30 this month, so.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:29:29.392
You let her live then.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:32.781
[inaudible]. I just thought about it briefly, but.Tell me what your closing thoughts would be for our families who are listening today.

Justine LoMonaco: 00:29:41.977
I mean, we always say we want to bring joy back to learning. And so if that is something that you are looking for, unit studies are a great way to go about it. And we’ve written ours very intentionally to help you have that goal. We are also happy to be sharing a 10% off discount code for anybody listening if they would like to try out a year membership with us. I believe Learn and Live is the–

Cynthia Holt: 00:30:07.161
[crosstalk].

Justine LoMonaco: 00:30:08.307
–coupon code, but I will confirm that with you, and we can include that. But in general, we’re here for you. We’re also very active on Instagram at Learn and Live Letter. We share a lot of encouraging, empowering advice, whether or not you decide to use our program. We love that to be a community where you can go for this type of support anytime.

Gretchen Roe: 00:30:29.251
Wonderful. Cynthia?

Cynthia Holt: 00:30:31.545
Yeah, we’re just so excited to support homeschoolers. And I love working with them in our mentoring sessions. I’m just so excited to be able to communicate through the navigating the Learn and Live Letter course that we’ve just written. I feel very honored to have been helped when I got started and just so grateful for the help that I got that I think it’s important that we give that back.

Gretchen Roe: 00:31:01.770
Wonderful. You can see why I was so excited to have the opportunity to spend an hour with these two ladies, because I thought what they are bringing to the table is something unique and amazing. And I hope you find it all to be the same as well. Ladies, thank you so much for your time. It has been my very great pleasure to spend this time with you all. Thank you all for joining us for The Demme Learning Show. We are so excited to have you here and to listen to these topics. We thank you for allowing us into your living room, and we look forward to being able to do that again. Be sure to rate, review, follow wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really liked it. And we’ll look forward to your joining us again soon. Take care, everyone. Thanks.

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