Growing up, I was homeschooled from 2^nd grade through 12^th grade. When I was twelve years old, my mother had her third child and only son, Elijah. I had always wanted a little brother, so from the very beginning, I had a special love for the little guy. Being so much older than him created a unique relationship between us—making me something of a mixture between an Annoying-But-Loved Sister and a Cool Aunt.

As my brother has grown, I’ve done my best to meet him on his level and connect with him through play. One particularly dear memory I have is when I unintentionally introduced him to creative writing before he had even learned to write words on his own.

Creative Writing Before Writing Words?

One day when my brother was around three or four years old, I cleared a space on the floor of his bedroom for the two of us, pushing all the toys and shoes and blankets to the side. Elijah and I opened a new box of crayons and drew together, holding those one-sentence-per-topic conversations that happen with young kids.

“So, Bub, what’s your favorite color?”

“Blue.”

“That’s a nice color.”

“Velociraptors are my favorite dinosaur.”

“That’s cool. I like stegosauruses.”

“Uh-huh. I saw a dog eating a bug.”

“That’s gross.”

“I like baseball.”

And so on.

The previous Christmas, I had given my brother a little homemade storybook about a knight who saves his sister, a princess, from a dragon (starring ourselves because I’m adorable and sentimental like that). That must have been what brought the idea to our minds, for before long, our random colorings became a project to create a new storybook. I told him that he could come up with the story and draw the pictures, and I would write the words.

The project was on. He’d draw a picture, and then I’d ask him to tell me what it was. (After all, I knew his markings meant something, but I couldn’t decipher them whatsoever without his explanation.)

“Okay, so what’s happening here?”

“These are pirates!”

“Wow, that’s really cool! What else?”

“Um…they like PUPPIES! They love puppies.”

“So they’re nice pirates. Gotcha. I’ll write that down.”

I labeled the picture according to his description, then asked him, “What do these puppy-loving pirates do?”

“They…go on an ADVENTURE!”

“Brilliant! Draw the picture of their adventure.”

Back and forth we went. I kept asking him what happened next. It didn’t matter if it didn’t make sense. It didn’t matter if Elijah told me something that wasn’t in the picture he drew. No matter what, I wrote down what he told me for the story.

I wish I still had that collection of pictures we amassed, or at least remembered more of what we came up with. The only other details I remember of that afternoon are one particular image and my brother’s description of it.

The page had four small, clumsy squares drawn at the four edges of the paper. Lines connected the squares to a circle in the middle of the page, inside of which were several squashed and deformed figures I knew to identify as puppy-loving pirates at this point.

“What’s happening in this one?”

“They’re down a hole.”

I decided that we didn’t really need to know how they got down the hole for the sake of the adventure.

My brother continued, “And there’s smashing things.”

“Smashing things?”

“Yeah, smashing things.”

After scrutinizing the page, it dawned on me. “Oh! The squares! Those are the smashing things?”

“Yes!”

“And they are going to smash the pirates who are down the hole?”

“Yes!”

“Oh no! How do they escape?”

“They…They get away.”

In spite of this rather anti-climactic description of the dire escape, I knew without a doubt that the scene playing in his little pre-K brain was of Indiana Jones-level epicness.

What about you and your homeschool student?

What does this matter? How does this story affect homeschooling and writing at all? After all, my brother didn’t actually write anything that day.

Or DID he?

Even though my teenage-self was not trying to teach my brother a lesson, I realize now that I did. I not only encouraged creativity (“Let’s write a story! You tell me what happens.”), but I also demonstrated how you can express what is in your mind in a shareable manner. Elijah’s ideas became pictures. At my promptings, he had to explain the pictures to me verbally. That verbal explanation became written words at the bottom of the page—words that he couldn’t even read yet but still knew somehow communicated what he was thinking.

He wrote the story, even if he never picked up the pen.

Writing is one way to clarify and to express your ideas in a sharable format. Creative writing and story-telling are ways to learn to express what is happening in your brain. And in this form of writing/expression, you don’t have to worry about having “the right answer,” because there isn’t one.

Try it yourself! Whether your homeschool student is physically writing yet or not, you can teach them to be creative and put their thoughts into words!

Pull up a carpet and create a story with your young student. They don’t have to draw pictures if that’s not their thing. They can tell whatever story they want. They can tell the story of the Lego build they’re constructing, or the frog they caught on the driveway, or the plan they have to clean the kitchen. (That last one sounds strange, but I have a friend whose toddler is very, very scrupulous about keeping things tidy and loves to tell people about his processes.)

Write down what they tell you, and let them see you do it. Show them that writing is thoughts put into words put onto paper, and it’s as simple as that.

And have fun with your kid! That’s what I did with my brother on that random day when we wrote the story of the Puppy-Loving Pirates and the Smashing Things.

Athena Lester

Head of Curriculum

“What is summer vacation? We homeschool. We don’t do that here.”

Personally, I remember three or four years growing up where my homeschooled sister and I didn’t take summer vacation at all. I finished seventh grade on Friday and started eighth grade on Monday. We weren’t a super competitive homeschool family or anything. It was just a period of time when we needed to take the summer to finish up … multiple years in a row. Around that time, my mother had a new baby, we moved across country and then between a few houses, my dad started a new job, and there were many days when I was simply too much of a middle schooler to function properly, let alone write an essay. Life happened, and school didn’t fit neatly between Labor Day and Memorial Day.

Flexibility and following individual family and student rhythms is one of the benefits of homeschooling! Yet, when homeschool moms and dads start looking around to see how their schooling compares to the public or private school, they may feel insecure or even inadequate.

Today I want to slap a big fat NOPE on that negative comparison! You probably know not to compare yourself to others, but I know that even the strongest among us need encouragement.

I spoke with several homeschool mom friends of mine, asking them what encouragement they have for other homeschool parents or what they wish someone had said to them. These moms collectively have a range of homeschooled kids from preschoolers to high schoolers. I took note of how what they said overlapped and would like to pass it on to you all.

1) The kid comes first, not the work.

As a homeschool parent, your job is not just to teach your kid math or grammar. Your job is to raise the child!

That includes academics, but some days, the pencils have to be put away and you need to put off doing school to take care of the child’s mental health, help them deal with their emotional immaturity, or just make sure that they know they are valued even though they’re crazy right now! That may look like a four-day school week and a thirteen-month school year. It may look like taking off the entire month of December for the holidays. (My family did that growing up, and it was the best.) It may look like putting away the math books until tomorrow again because your kid did the assignment wrong for the fourth time, but they are NOT in the headspace to try again anytime soon.

Your child is worth the time you invest into who they are as human beings, not just how they perform academically.

2) You are enough, both with what you do know and what you don’t know.

You don’t have to be an expert in every field to effectively homeschool your child. It’s unreasonable to expect that! And it’s dumb when people say, “If you’re not a teacher, you shouldn’t teach your children.”

First, if you don’t know something about a subject, you will teach your kids how to learn by learning the subject yourself! This shows them how to learn, not just how to know.

Second, OUTSOURCE! Homeschooling does not mean kids are kept in a shed in Kansas with no electricity and everything is taught on a chalkboard from 1889! There are plenty of resources out there these days to help you educate your children at home for ANY subject you or your child struggle with. Search for them and use them! Science, math, history, reading, writing—by the way, I know of a GREAT writing curriculum that also offers a scoring service for middle and high school compositions—there are plenty of resources available for you and your student. Search until you find what fits you and your family.

You. Are. Enough.

3) You don’t have to be perfect to be good.

Each and every mom I spoke to said something to this effect. One mother in particular has a nine year old girl and a three year old boy, and they just started homeschooling this year. She said she was so excited and had been waiting to be able to do this for forever and she just knew it was going to be so great and they were going to love it—and it took exactly one meltdown to understand that things were not going to be bright and rosy for the rest of her life.

(By the way, she didn’t specify who had the meltdown: the three-year-old, the nine-year-old, or herself.)

Although you are enough, you are not perfect. Although your child is important, your child is not perfect. You may think that the perfect homeschool family has a pristine, set-apart schoolroom with postered walls and intricate record keeping and sharp #2 pencils and kids who are super enthusiastic for every subject they take—yeah, those people don’t exist. And if you are thinking of someone who has a life like that—yeah, they’re lying to you. Lying.

Everyone has meltdowns. Every student has a subject they are “behind” in and makes the parent think, “Oh no, I’m a failure because my twelve-year-old can’t write a complete sentence!” or something. Every family has a day, week, month, or year where things just don’t work smoothly at all. (Or a couple of years. Heyyyyy, middle school!)

You don’t have to have the perfect homeschool with the perfect students and the perfect teacher. Remember: you’re raising a child to be a holistic human being, and school is only a part of that. It’s okay if it’s a bit rocky.

I was watching an old episode of Frasier the other day in which the dad and (grown) son were bickering and not getting along in spite of all their efforts. When the son wanted to give up, the dad said, “Look, you want us to form some great father-son relationship, to make some connection? Well, that kind of thing takes a couple of years, not a couple of days!”

Remember: what you’re doing as a homeschool parent takes a couple of years, not a couple of days. Bear it out. Your child is worth it, and you are enough.

I hope this lifted your head today and as you continue on your homeschool journey.

What are some things that have encouraged you over the years, or what encouragement can you share with other homeschool parents?

By Athena Lester

Head of Curriculum and Scoring