Kara S. Anderson

Homeschool connection, not perfection.

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10 ways to start easy this homeschool year

by Kara S. Anderson

I’ve been homeschooling for 13+ years, I haven’t graduated one kid, and I switch things up ALL THE TIME.

So let’s face it — I don’t know everything about homeschooling.

On the other hand, 13 years is a fair amount of time, and I’m still at it, and I am really good (if I do say so myself) at starting well.

So here is what I recommend to parents starting out homeschooling this year:

  1. Go to the library and get your fines in order. We currently owe $28 for two books that took a summer vacation under my daughter’s bed. It’s super cute when your kids get their first library card, and they are so excited! But then they want to use them, and you’re trying to keep track of books checked out on three different cards, and it’s like your brain is trying to juggle flaming library card batons. So start with a clean slate.

Planning

2. Plan out extracurriculars for your first “semester.” My rule is that the kids can pick one activity at a time — music lessons, sports, Brownies, whatever. More than that, and we start living on frozen pizzas. Make a rule that works for you.

3. Figure out what your weeks are going to look like. I am a big rhythm fan. I like to know what’s going on so that I can talk and argue less. So I like the idea of having set days to do things — Mondays are library days. Friday is co-op. Or whatever.

4. Know that your plans are going to get screwed up some weeks. Other cool stuff will come up. People will need to visit the dentist. This is just your general plan.

5. Figure out what you want your days to look like. I’ve seen this described a lot of different ways in the homeschool-verse: make a schedule, find your rhythm, create a flow-chart, whatever … but write down a basic idea of how you want things to go and when you are going to do things. Focus on the big stuff (in our house that’s reading together, math and allowing the kids time to pursue interests) and go from there.

6. Schedule some down-time every day. Even when you have big kids and especially if you have introverted or sensitive kids.

Purchasing

7. Buy some new stuff. Because it’s the start of school and it’s fun. And you want to begin again. And you’re all full of beans.

8. Don’t buy too much new stuff. Don’t buy stuff for the whole year. Instead, take some money (I’m serious) and put it in two envelopes: label one November Slump, and pull it out the day after Halloween when you have a sugar hang-over and are questioning your sanity.

Label the second one February Hell, and pull it out around Valentine’s Day when the weather feels like it’s trying to kill you and your kids are climbing the walls and you just want to hide and eat those Dove chocolates without bothering to read the inspirational messages inside.

Set Yourself up for Success

9. Plan something fun. As more and more school buses start clogging up your neighborhood, hit the drive-through for donuts or have a backyard waterpark day.

Take a picture and put it somewhere you’ll see it all the time, and when your child is whining during math, or breaks a pencil out of frustration because writing one sentence is JUST SO HARD, look at that picture, and pack everyone up and go for ice cream and start over.

10. Make a plan to take care of you. Right now. Think about what makes you feel good. Do you love good books? Do you love at-home spa treatments? Do you love fancy coffee?

Write down 9 or 10 things that make you feel good and commit to doing at least one every month. Do not feel one bit guilty.

This is how you’re going to fill your bucket, so you can fill everyone else’s. It’s important. It’s vital. Please — do it for your kids, your husband and because you deserve it.

That’s it!

Happy homeschooling!

Kara

Affiliate links included. 

The cactus method of homeschool planning

by Kara S. Anderson

I find that when you call something a “method” it sometimes accidentally gives it street cred.

So last week, when I started talking about The Cactus Method ™️ of homeschool planning on Instagram, mamas started asking me what book it was from and where I had gotten the idea.

So I’m going to tell you that it’s from me, and I just made it up one day.

There. The truth is finally out.

Hold on loosely …

Anyway, the “cactus method” of homeschool planning is simply an idea I have that when you plan your week or day, you need to hold on to those plans loosely, like how you would hold a cactus.

(Originally I said a porcupine or cactus, but it quickly occurred to me how little control you would have if you were holding a porcupine.)

The porcupine is really more in control in that specific scenario, and so it doesn’t work for the metaphor.

But a cactus – that’s all about you, baby. You can hold a cactus however you want, but I suggest you hold it gently.

Certainly don’t squeeze – my goodness.

So with that in mind, I go into my homeschool days with a plan, but not a schedule. And I guess I kind of figure after 12 years that things are going to come up, and plans might change, and there will be days when things just don’t really work at all, i.e. the kitten gets insane diarrhea on the FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL.

(This is how God/the Universe likes to keep me in my place – by reminding me that YES! I am in charge! But also, not really!)

How to use The Cactus Method

So every morning, I look at my planner.

And then I figure out what we can realistically do today, and then still think we can do more than we can.

But, I write a general plan on our desktop chalkboard.

This is saving a lot of sanity around here, because:

  • it forces me to plan the day, at least loosely
  • I don’t have to keep our plans in my head
  • everyone can see what we need to do
  • everyone isn’t asking me what we are doing every 8 minutes

Planning for your personality

Now, if all I had to do was follow the plan, I think that would probably be easy.

Easier.

But I am squishy and sensitive.

I’m an INFJ – and INFJs take everyone’s feelings into account ALL THE TIME.

I’m also an Enneagram 9.

Our tagline should basically be, “I don’t know. What do YOU want to do?”

This used to mean that sometimes my kids would wake cranky, or out of sorts and I would start making up special breakfast plates and filibustering in order to get our day going.

But now I have a tween and a teen, and when teens and tweens get “out of sorts” that can be surly AFF (as fancy Frenchmen.)

So yikes.

My whole strategy for getting people to the table this year has been “delicious breakfast food.”

 

Because just like how they say the biggest thing with exercise is just putting on your gear, or the biggest thing with yoga is rolling out your mat, the biggest thing with surly wildebeest tweens and teens is just getting them to the table and putting some protein in their face-holes.

(Also maybe avoid eye contact.)

 

via GIPHY

 

You can see how all of this is a recipe for The Cactus Method©, right?

Also, Margin

I’m also going to share one other tip, and that’s to CREATE MARGIN. Because kids have interests and passions, and if we make time for those things, everyone is happier.

So another key component of the cactus schooling method (#copyright #trademark) is asking your kids, “What do you want to do today?”

In order to be able to fulfill those requests/dreams, however, you can’t have your day packed full of things YOU want to do.

I’ve long believed this to be true, but recently I was talking to a friend who has graduated two kids, and those kids are now pursuing their passions via college and thriving, so even though I made up the cactus method (#allrightsreserved), I think there is something to it.

Planning loosely

Finally, you may be asking yourself how to keep track of things if you are “planning” so loosely.

  • Write them in your planner in erasable pen.
  • Use your chalkboard (it has an eraser for a reason).
  • In your bullet journal, or planner, or any notebook, you can create a Big Picture Planning Page. (BPPP)
  • Then, each week, as you sit down to plan, you can mark out what you would like to do each day.

Remember – this is a general idea, and you are not tied to these things.

This is not a blood oath situation.

Stop chanting.

  • Then, leave room for margin. Leave room for emergency kitten vet visits and leaky toilets and surly AFF kids and hobbies and interests.

What’s important

Then, repeat after me: We don’t have control over what our kids learn or retain.

We do have control over the tone of our days, and how we treat our people, and those things are more important anyway.

So hold that plan like a cactus. Put it down entirely if you need to. (Some days you WILL need to.)

Thank you for coming to my Cactus Method TEDtalk.

#thecactusmethod #cactusschooling #stopchanting

This post contains affiliate links.

The 3 things to-do list and homeschooling

by Kara S. Anderson

For a long time, my solution to overwhelm was a brain dump.

I needed to get that stress-tornado out of my head and on to paper so that I could create a plan of attack.

Just the process was helpful, but it was hard to know where to start fixing.

Usually, by the time I need to do a brain dump, I am in pretty deep and think I need to fix it all at once.

And that doesn’t work. (Trust me.)

A while back, I was feeling very brain-dumpy about school. I was worried that we weren’t doing enough.

(Enough is a real stinker. When you get really wrapped up in Enough, it makes you feel like you’ve had too much caffeine and not enough deep-breathing.)

And so as I thought about what would really feel like Enough, I decided maybe it was a good idea to pick up my copy of Essentialism, and this time read it specifically as a homeschool mom.

Reading Essentialism is an antidote for that yucky Enough feeling. So are all the things my friend Melissa writes.

(Melissa makes you feel like you’ve been breathing with monks and drinking nothing but herbal tea and fresh spring water.)

Asking myself WWMelissaD, I recalled a post of her’s from a while back about her 3 thing to-do list, and I started to feel a little idea forming – was it possible to homeschool for the rest of the year and only do three things?

Would I be neglecting my kids’ needs if I did so?

Would this plan make me feel worse?

It turns out, that the answer is no. It made me feel so much better.

For the past few months, we have been focusing on 3 things in our homeschool: math, reading aloud, and games.

That doesn’t mean that that’s all we’ve been doing. Instead, those became the things we made sure to do every day. (Because there were only 3 things, that part became easy!)

And anything else was a bonus.

To keep track of all of it, I marked it all down each day AFTER THE FACT in my bullet journal, and let me tell you – those lists were packed with good stuff.

But on the hard days? The sick days? The gloomy days? The Ladies Holiday days? The three things made me feel like we had done enough.

The guilt and worry fell away. They were beaten out by a feeling of accomplishment; a warm, fuzzy blanket of reassurance.

And slowly, I started adding back other things.

Because doing just enough gave me some energy back, some time to think, and a much-needed deep breath.

This post contains affiliate links.

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Bringing hygge to your homeschool

by Kara S. Anderson

For many years, winter and I were not friends.

I would get terrible winter blues and struggled with the cold.

It made me cranky.

Our windy old Victorian was so architecturally interesting and so, so terribly drafty and miserable.

It was built in 1905, and remodeled many times. The last time, right before we bought it, some genius put the bathroom right by the back door, so all was OK unless anyone opened or closed the door at any point – then the bathroom became frigid for 4 hours and there was nothing you could do about it.

And a cold tush is enough to make anyone grumpy.

I was so Waldorfy then you guys – my kids wore woolen hats and long underwear all day … and I knew the cold and dark were getting to me every minute, but I always got through it until one day when the snow would thaw and I’d spot green again.

Eventually we moved, and I started to notice right away that first winter that I didn’t want to hit things anymore, and it was like the beginning of something.

And then around that time I started learning about hygge.

If you aren’t familiar with the idea of hygge, my favorite definition is from hyggehouse.com:

“The Danish word hygge (pronounced hue-gah) is a feeling or mood that comes from taking genuine pleasure in making ordinary everyday things simply extraordinary; whether it’s making coffee a verb by lingering over a cup, to a cosy evening in with friends to lighting a candle with every meal … Words like cosiness, security, familiarity, comfort, reassurance, fellowship, simpleness and living well are often used to describe the idea of Hygge.”

Cosiness.

Security.

Familiarity.

Comfort.

Reassurance.

Fellowship.

Simpleness.

Living well.

Sounds pretty good, right?

***

Things are different now, friends. Sure – winter days are still hard some times, but I know what to do. We make cocoa and pull out library books and we turn on all the twinkle lights.

That reminds me – a few things that make me feel all hygge-ish:

  • Baking bread. I’ve recently learned to use the dough function on our bread maker, and pretty much every day I make some kind of warm, fresh bread.
  • Rice pudding. My Swedish aunt used to make rice pudding and it makes me feel so cozy. It’s perfect for breakfast, lunch, snacks and right before bedtime. I’m mastering it in my Instant Pot.
  • My tea collection. My tea collection is a little out of control. I love our happy little tea kettle, and my favorite varieties for winter at Trader Joe’s Cinnamon Vanilla and Republic of Tea Vanilla Almond (they have a decaf version too).
  • Beeswax candles. No scent except melting beeswax. Bright. Warm.
  • Battery lights – you can put these in any window, any little table, any little holder and you don’t have to worry about the cat lighting himself on fire.
  • Twinkle lights everywhere.
  • Warm socks.
  • Cozy blankets.
  • Good books.
  • Chocolate.
  • Cats.
  • My people.

The End.

Oh – except two quick book resources for you if you want to learn more:

  • The Danish Way of Parenting
  • The Year of Living Danishly
This post contains affiliate links. For more information, please see my disclosure statement. Thank you!

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I’m Kara – writer, tea drinker, yoga-doer and girl with the overdue books.

 

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