3 Steps to Create a Learning Adventure that Allows You Both to Thrive!
So you’ve decided to homeschool…now what?!
First off, congratulations! I believe that by choosing to create a unique learning experience for YOUR child, you are helping heal humanity, truly. But that’s a topic for another day. Second, I only use the term homeschool because it’s popularly accepted. I don’t actually want to recreate “school” at home and neither should you, so for the remainder of this article I will be using the terms learning adventure/environment and homeschool interchangeably. With that said, let’s get you on the right track to design YOUR child’s unique learning adventure.
Step One: Know thyself…and thy child!
The first step to any new endeavor in life is first checking in and remembering who we are at our core. What do YOU value? What personal values do you want to pass on to your child? What do you believe, based on real-life experiential evidence, is important for your child to leave your nest knowing, feeling, and believing? Pause here and truly consider this. By choosing to homeschool, you have admitted that some parts, or many parts, of the current status quo, do not align with your values. So take the time now to reflect on what you do actually value and how your home learning environment will support you living in alignment with your values thus providing an example for your child as he/she develops his/her own values. What I find tragic is when parents recreate the exact thing at home that they were trying to replace due to fear of inadequacy, social pressures, or a lack of awareness.
As an example, I value personal freedom, authenticity, adventure, connection (with people & nature), and personal integrity. I have three children who are all very different, but they each thrive in the outdoors and are all creative and naturally curious (these are traits that could describe most kids). Therefore, the compulsory public education approach that was heavy on monotony and indoor inactivity, and discouraged art outside its 45-minute time block, did not align with my values or what I knew to be best for my kids’ overall development. So when I designed our first year of homeschooling, it didn’t look like school at all. It also didn’t happen at “home”! We embarked on a gap year journey of full-time RV travel coupled with an extended stay with family in a foreign country where my children were immersed in the language and culture there for three months. I didn’t know it then, but this was our season of deschooling and it naturally prepared us for our next learning adventure in a new home. We still lean heavily on an “unschool” approach, which basically means student-interest-based and self-initiated learning experiences. This does not mean that I just ignore my kids all day! It just means that I come in as a coach and facilitator to their chosen learning endeavors.
Step Two: Dream Big
What do you want your typical day to look like? What do you want it to feel like? How many outside activities do you want to commit to? Now that you are no longer a slave to the traditional school calendar, when will you travel? Are you able to be at home with your children everyday or do you need them to be involved in some kind of outside activity so that you can work/recharge/pursue your own interests?
The options here are endless and I think that this is where a lot of us who were raised in the traditional school system with parents who went to traditional 9-5 jobs get stuck. A lot of the entrepreneurs that I work with even have a hard time conceptualizing what their schedule could look like. We don’t have a true frame of reference for this level of personal freedom, so we can’t even imagine what it would look like. Or if we can imagine it, we’re at a total loss for HOW to pull that dream out of the ethers and manifest it into the world of form and matter for US…because although examples of how others made it work for THEM abound, we all know that our unique situations are different (only slight sarcasm intended there, but with no judgment, because I too fall victim to this same forgetfulness.) We can create our reality, but it does take time and some planning which leads us to step 3.
Step 3: Plan for Adventure
Once you have a solid awareness of your values, your child’s needs, and the dream of how your life adventure could look, it’s time to start reverse engineering the outcomes you desire in order to create a step-by-step plan to get from where you are today to where you want to be. To do this, you must first acknowledge where you and your kids are now. Take into consideration the age of your child, how many years they have been in a formal school environment, your current living arrangement, level of support, and personal capacity.
Now, what is the one thing that you could focus on over the next 30 days that would get you closer to your goal? Be careful, because this question is where I see so many of us get trapped, myself included. I have often fallen into the trap of thinking that if I just focus on making more money, then I will be able to afford to [insert dream]. What I realized before I took the leap and left public education was that what my heart wanted most and what my children needed most was the connection that can only happen when we are fully present together. To this day, I attribute the practice of mindfulness, being present in this current moment (not trying to capture it in a perfect picture to admire later, but fully capturing it right now by being present and embodied in this exact moment) to being the catalyst for living a life that is literally a dream come true.
So as you begin to create your plan, keep in mind that the next best step is the one that aligns you with your highest value and actually might not seem like the most powerful step at all, but that’s the great paradox of this life…the least of these is actually greatest. So think, what are the simple daily habits that when applied to your life will create the greatest ripple effect? Once you have identified yours, commit to them one by one, but be prepared for the “adventure” that may follow. Life is an adventure after all and by definition adventure is “an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity.” (Oxford dictionary online, 2024) Therefore, prepare accordingly now because life inevitably will throw you some curveballs. What can you do to prepare your mind and your environment now so that you continue advancing toward your goal despite the inevitable setbacks? This is another reason that I advocate for an unschooled approach to crafting your family’s learning adventure because it removes the idea of there being this set timeline of academic milestones your child “should” meet by a certain date or age. It’s a lot easier to relax into the process of learning and living when we aren’t pressured to feel like we have to meet someone else’s arbitrary standard, especially since most of those standards aren’t developmentally appropriate for children to begin with.
Finally: Enjoy the Ride of Your Life!
You are alive and you have made the decision to honor your aliveness and your child’s aliveness by remembering who you are so that they don’t ever forget who they are. That in and of itself brings me great joy and I hope it brings you great joy too! You can do this! You were fully equipped the moment you became your child’s parent. The beauty of this experiment we call life, is that each day is a new beginning, and that has never been more true than when you decide to remember that you get to do life with your kiddo in a way that allows you both to thrive! When the uncertainty and fear arise, acknowledge them, breathe deeply as you allow yourself to feel them fully and then smile as you remind yourself that you were created for this moment.
What else would you like to know about designing your child’s learning adventure? Click here to get a FREE customized set of next steps to get you started down the right path for YOUR child’s unique learning adventure today!
