Hey there, I’m Amanda. One half of the Board & Quill team. The home with the kids, struggling through math half.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we first started homeschooling I had no idea how I wanted to homeschool. Charlotte Mason, Waldorf, Unschooling, Traditional and on and on. They throw so much at you! However, I did know we never wanted to tell our kids what to learn. I wanted them to be thinkers, and to teach them How to learn. Sean and I both went to public school where the model is “Learn this, pass the test, now move on,” but that isn’t conducive to inquisitive learning at all, especially once you’re out of the educational institution, and learning must continue all throughout a person’s life. I want to raise adults that love the adventure of continual learning!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here’s how we currently homeschool; for 7 months of the year, we’re organized(ish). There are certain hours we plan learning, curriculums we use, activities we do, planned books we read together, and the plan is mostly stable. However, from November to about March my amazingly hardworking blue-collar hubby is home from his (mostly) seasonal job. Our schedule gets flipped. My planning is out the window, because all we want to do is spend time with Sean. He’s home, and we love it! We want to soak it all in, and have as much family-time fun as possible. So we do that and because it’s winter (and it’s just a passion of ours) we do that by playing A LOT of board games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet at that same time of year, like clockwork, our homeschool facilitator wants to set up the first fall visit to come see what we’ve been up to! Now I don’t know about you, but my anxiety hits the roof. I go into a panic. “Is the house clean enough?” “Do I have enough to show them?” “Will the kids be behaving that day or will it be a day they’re all acting up at the same time!?” It’s my exact biggest fear, in one very unavoidable situation… my worth and abilities as both a mom and an educator are about to be judged by someone so much better at it than me, and all we’ve been doing is playing games for 2 months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I feel like I should mention that for the last 3yrs I’ve had the least judgemental and most wonderful facilitator in the universe. She’s retiring this year and I literally don’t know what I’ll do without her in my corner. The anxiety was all on me, and my fears not because of anything she had done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So anyways, then the sit down happened. I showed the work from the months where we’re organized and tried to gloss over the fact that we hadn’t been doing much lately other than board gaming, and I think she could see me doing that and she’d be wonderful and say things like “Kids can learn so much through games,” and “I heard another mom talk about these games…” and she’d give me a few suggestions. The next meet up would come in the spring though, and again I’d be in that same tailspin of anxiety feeling like I didn’t have enough to show, we weren’t doing enough, that I wasn’t enough…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s why Board & Quill exists. I needed the structure and the physical evidence that we were teaching our kids… and I want to round off the story and tell you that what I was doing was enough all along. At face value that’s the truth, but it doesn’t change the feeling, and I know that so very deeply. I want to encourage you that you are doing enough. That even if you struggle with this feeling, like I do, you’ve got this. Use the supports that help you be successful. Find your people, the people that will have your back and when you walk away after talking with them you feel encouraged to keep going, people like our facilitator. People who know you can do it, and know that parenting is educating, and that’s how it was designed. You’ve got this, even if you’re having a tired, messy bun PJ day, like I am today. \u2665<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Hey there, I’m Amanda. One half of the Board & Quill team. The home with the kids, struggling through math half. When we first started homeschooling I had no idea how I wanted to homeschool. Charlotte Mason, Waldorf, Unschooling, Traditional and on and on. They throw so much at you! However, I did know we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-our-table"],"yoast_head":"\n