Written by Jamie Martin, editor of Simple Homeschool and founder of Steady Mom
Anyone else feeling a bit surprised by yesterday’s weather? We had a blast sledding down our very own hill and enjoying the first fire of the season.
On the blog front, we’re almost finished with our Biggest Homeschooling Mistake series. I hope you have enjoyed reading the honest words our contributors have shared–we can learn so much from each other, can’t we?
That’s why I want to invite you to join in as well. Over this week, write a post on your blog about any lessons you’ve learned during your homeschooling journey. Next Friday, November 4th, link up your post here, and get a little extra traffic sent your way. (If you don’t have a blog, you can still share your thoughts in the comments!)
Now on to our weekend links:
- Free Christmas Planning Ebook :: Life as Mom
- Program will help kids “sit still” in kindergarten :: CNS News
- Fun Math for Young Learners :: School Sparks
- 10 Reasons we are going back to unschooling :: Mattern Family Adventures
- Waldorf-Inspired Homeschooling :: FIMBY
Congratulations to the Playful Learning giveaway winner: Jen Logan! Take a moment to check out Mariah’s book, and there’s still time to sign up for her upcoming children’s e-course, Through the Lens: Explorations in Photo Journaling!
i loved this series. you should gather them and make them a (free) ebook. my biggest homeschooling mistake was buying wonderful curriculum that was inconsistent with our homeschooling mission statement. after realizing that i was just doing what was “good” but not what God called us to do, i ended up selling the curriculum or giving it away. it was a valuable but costly lesson. now i stop and really consider how a curriculum i want fits within our mission statement/homeschooling goals before i make any purchase.
Thank you for sharing my link on unschooling. I would love to know from other unschoolers how to deal with family or friends that just don’t get this type of learning. I have a hard time trying to explain it.
I have to just say, a big thank you!!! – I totally loved this series, I am thinking I need to respond with a post… hopefully it will get done this week!!! It has been so good to see where we think we are failing – even the best of the best of home schoolers “fail” and then how they succeed from their failures… life lessons learnt!!! It has been a brilliant read!!!
se7en’s latest post: Saturday Spot: The Scratch Patch…
This has been such a great series!!!! My kids are only 7, 5, 3 and 3 months and I feel like I could write several posts already!!! My biggest mistake (I think) has been to try too hard to do what others are doing, or to believe that what others believe is the “right” way to homeschool must be the way we should do it. I was a member of an embarrassing number of homeschool yahoo groups, followed too many homeschool blogs to count, and read every book I could get my hands on. In the beginning this was a great source of information, encouragement, and guidance. But somewhere along the way, when I wasn’t looking, it just turned into noise. Every time I read about a great new curriculum source, I had to buy it and try it, even if I already had a math (or art, or spelling, or history) resource. And the really, really sad thing is that with all the confusion and feelings of being overwhelmed, NONE of it got used.
I finally got all of those yahoo groups out of my inbox, and stopped following all but a couple of blogs. I’ve stopped trying to be someone else’s version of a homeschooling family. I’ve started (trying) to listen to that voice that directs me to the best thing for our family, and I’ve, quite suddenly, found a lot of peace.
Right now, at this moment, our homeschooling looks NOTHING like I thought it would or should, but it’s finally working. The ironic thing is that we work better as an unschooling/living books learning family!