Being Intentional, Rather Than Passive, In Your Life- Part 4

My daughter went to preschool at a local church. I foolishly thought she needed the social exposure before heading to kindergarten. Like the rest of America, I figured preschool was the way to accomplish this. However, after our time with preschool and the kids she’d end up going to Kindergarten with, I realized that the public school model was probably not for us. I have an aunt who homeschooled all 4 of her children, so I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the concept. However, she did it living a few time zones away from us, so I had never seen it up close. Just like with my marriage, and parenting, I quickly pulled my library’s website and typed in, “homeschool.”

The first book I stumbled upon was Better Together by Pam Barnhill. This was a wonderful first read to get my head in the right space for home educating rather than recreating school at home. After a few years, a fellow homeschool mom talked about the Brave Writer curriculum, and ended up recommending The Brave Learner by Julie Bogart (creator of Brave Writer).

Again, another area of my life had to become about intention. It was easy enough to order curriculum, do what the curriculum level says we should, and get through it. We might fight about fractions for 2 years before she gets her head around them, we could do handwriting before the hand development was complete in such a way her muscles could actually grasp a pencil correct and learn writing without creating tears. We could take tests and do grades and spend 8 hours learning, just like they do in public school. But, was that what I wanted? Is that what she wants? Or any kid for that matter?

So, I sat down again, with a notebook and pen, and started to consider what I wanted our homeschool to look like. Did I want her to just be able to spout off facts, or to love learning? Did I want her to only memorize her math facts, or know WHY those were the answers, and why we performed that operation? Did I want to spend 2 years fighting for her to get fractions, or spend 2 weeks teaching it when she was finally at a place she was ready to learn?

Homeschool will look different. Different kids thrive in different environments. Some love structure and knowing what comes next. Predictability. Some love the free nature homeschooling can bring, doing something different each day. Some love a mix. There is no one right answer for what path to choose. The right answer, if you’re looking to live intentionally, is to make sure that the school you’re doing facilitates your goals. If they learn fractions in 2nd grade or 4th, do they still learn fractions? Yes. So can you set aside something they’re having a hard time grasping and switch it for perhaps time, money, graphs, word problems, etc and double back to it with fresh eyes in 3 to 6 months? Yep. You can. At the end of the day, you goal is met. Maybe your timeline is different. But, in the time you were fighting about fractions, maybe they went so deep down a rabbit hole of interest, that when science or social studies rounds that topic a few years down the road, they’ll already be so familiar with it, you’ll hardly need to spend any time on it at all.

Intentional living is all about setting goals and looking at the big picture. If your goal is to have a deeper relationship with your child, then maybe berating them for the angle that they keep their paper at while they write isn’t going to be the thing to accomplish that. If your goal is that they love learning, pushing them to learn something they’re not yet ready for isn’t the way to do that. If your goal is that they follow their dreams, then picking the curriculum yourself without talking it over with them and asking what they want to learn about isn’t the way to do that.

I have a friend who started homeschooling due to the pandemic. Our daughters are the same age, and spent their 3rd grade year so engrossed in dinosaurs. While mine trailed off a little earlier than hers did, she found a way to keep dinos a theme the entire year. Love dinos and hate math? What if it’s dino math? What if you need to calculate how long ago they lived, who was older, how much bigger was the t-rex than the velociraptor? If the t-rex can travel 20 feet in one step, and the velociraptor can travel 5 feet in 1 step, how many steps does each dino have to take to travel 1 mile? Now, math doesn’t seem so boring. Because it’s not math, it’s researching dinosaurs. And for a mama who started homeschool more out of need and less out of desire, she crushed finding ways to use their interest to pull them into all the other subjects around too. Because her goal was to make them WANT to learn. But not amount of nagging makes a child want to learn, anymore than it makes you want to fold laundry.

Is it extra work being intentional? You betcha. But, it’s only extra work on the front end, as far as I’m concerned. You’re either going to spend that time and effort nagging, fighting, someone crying, disciplining, dealing with melt downs and talk back, etc. Or you’re going to spend it planning and facilitating, and talking things out with children as if they were rational adults, but at the end of the day you’re also pouring into your relationship with your child, teaching discernment, and meeting the intentional goals you have for raising them and the person they’re going to grow into.