Which Kind of Homeschool Mom Are You? Part Two

Pam Barnhill [00:00:01]:
Are you ready for homeschooling to feel joyful again? Do you long for support as you learn alongside your kids? Welcome to Homeschool Better Together, a podcast about building a homeschool experience that works for your family. I’m Pam Barnhill, and it’s time to step out of the overwhelm and into the wonder. Let’s do this. Oh, my goodness. It is June. And historically, June has been such a busy month for us. And it’s really not changing too much simply because my youngest is doing quite a bit this much. I think he’s gonna be gone as much in June as he’s going to be here at the house with various camps, all good stuff that he loves Morning, and he enjoys going and and taking part in.

Pam Barnhill [00:00:57]:
But it it makes for a kind of a weird month. It feels really busy on the front end, but then it gets crazy quiet and relaxed because one of my kids is gone. So when we were homeschooling and my kids were little, we pretty much homeschooled year round. We did take the month of June off because that was when our church had vacation bible school, and then as my kids got older, that was when my kids started going to camp and things like that. It all usually happened in June or right after Independence Day. And then we would begin school about midway through July. And that was perfect for us because it was so hot down here in the south. It was so humid, and it was just perfect for us to go ahead and begin school because it was too hot to do anything other than be in the pool.

Pam Barnhill [00:01:49]:
And honestly, in the middle of the day, it was still too hot to be in the pool. So we would just go back to homeschooling and then we could swim in the evening when we were done. Even though we considered ourselves year round homeschoolers, we did take the month of June off. And that’s one of the things I love about homeschooling is that you can really flex that schedule and make it work for your family. You don’t have to follow the traditional school schedule. You can really make it work for you. Camps, VBS in June, and then right after the 4th July, get started. And then that way, when the weather was really nice in October or December or February, we could take more time off and enjoy getting outside and having breaks and not worrying about having to put our noses to the grindstone the entire year long.

Pam Barnhill [00:02:39]:
So it worked for us. What do we do now that my kids are older? We still take June off and we take July off because he actually does more activities now. He has a camp that he’s going to in July as well. And we will probably start back to school, I would say, around August 1st, maybe midway through August. I don’t see any reason for us to wait any longer than that because it is still hot. All the activities will be over, and we might as well just get back to it. So that’s probably what our year looks Time. This year, unless something changes, unless something new and exciting comes up that we wanna take the month of August for.

Pam Barnhill [00:03:17]:
So what about you? Let me know. When are you taking off? How do you school? Do you take a big summer break or do you pretty much school year round and take a smaller break in the summertime? Let’s dive into this week’s topic. Now, if you were here last week, I introduced you to four different homeschool mom types, carefree Cathy, best intention Becky, strategic Susan, and overwhelmed Olivia. If you were not here, you might want to go back and listen to episode 3, last week’s podcast, where I outline the four different types and give a thought to which one of these sounds the most like me. So today in part 2 of our four homeschool types podcast, I’m gonna go through and I’m going to talk a little more about each one of these types and some places where that particular mom might struggle just a little bit with homeschool planning and how we can help that mom get over some of those struggles because the whole purpose of this entire series is just to make mom’s life easier. Actually, that’s the whole purpose of everything we do here at Homeschool Better Together, is to inspire you, yes, but also to make mom’s life easier because there’s nothing more inspirational than an easier life. So let’s dive right into this. And we’re gonna start off by talking about carefree Cathy.

Pam Barnhill [00:04:52]:
Now, if you remember, carefree Cathy was the person who really loved spontaneity. And one of her biggest concerns about doing homeschool planning is that it’s going to restrict her freedom. It’s going to make her homeschool less enjoyable because she’s not going to be able to follow the rabbit trails. She’s going to feel like she is confined by these plans that she has made. And that is an understandable concern. I would not want to create a plan or a situation for myself that I would hate every day, that I just wouldn’t want to follow, that I wouldn’t want to get up and do. And this is why I think it’s so important to be realistic about what we do and don’t enjoy about our homeschooling, what our kids do and don’t enjoy when we start making those plans. I knew that my youngest, Thomas, he does not like anything that even hints at craftiness.

Pam Barnhill [00:05:54]:
And so if you have a curriculum that is wanting him to make something, yeah, he’s probably just going to push back at that strongly. He’s mom. I don’t like to do crafty things. I myself really struggle with a lot of hands on stuff. So I know where he gets that from. So we don’t want to set ourselves up to hate the thing that we’re doing. And that’s what Cathy worries about. She really worries that she’s going to feel boxed in by these plans that she’s made.

Pam Barnhill [00:06:25]:
On the flip side, Cathy also really struggles with an emotional toll from the uncertainty of am I covering the core subjects enough? Am I covering everything that I’m supposed to be covering with all of this fun that we’re having? Now if you are a Carefree Cathy and you do not have this uncertainty, don’t adopt it, please, just because I mentioned it. If you don’t feel that uncertainty, you keep right on living your Time, and don’t let anything I say cause any doubt in your mind. But having been a carefree Cathy myself at times, and I’m going to talk about that in a few minutes, I do know that for some people, this uncertainty can come up. And so some of the benefits of creating a plan for your homeschool is that you can reduce some of the daily chaos and stress and worry of, am I doing enough of these core subjects? So I’m just gonna tell you, carefree Cathy is probably the one type of homeschooler that I am the least like. I was not a born carefree Cathy. Having said that, I did go through a period of time with my kids where I really wanted to do child led learning. And I really wanted to do a project based homeschooling. And at that point, I was not making plans because I did want to follow my kids’ interests.

Pam Barnhill [00:07:56]:
And so this was when Olivia was about 6 or 7 years old, and we spent a lot of time doing things that she was super interested in. She was my only one at that point who was officially school aged and I really wanted to give this a try. And so as such, I was using that Carefree Cathy role for myself. And one of the things that I found that was a struggle for me was I felt like I was constantly on this hamster wheel of trying to stay just in front of my kids when it came to having something to do. So for example, we did this entire butterfly unit. And honestly, it was a thing of beauty. Olivia was really into butterflies, and we grew butterflies from caterpillars, and we watched all of that, and we released them. We observed them every day.

Pam Barnhill [00:08:49]:
Olivia made a butterfly puppet show. I still have the little videos of the puppet show that she made that showed the butterfly in the cocoon and emerging. She colored this great big butterfly wings and she would dance around the house as a butterfly. We read all these books about butterflies. We went to butterfly gardens. It was just a fabulous, wonderful unit. What I remember most about this though was it ended. I was absolutely exhausted, and it took me like a month, 4 or 5 weeks to figure out what it was we were going to do next.

Pam Barnhill [00:09:25]:
I felt like I couldn’t stay ahead of my kids and their interests, and that we would get to the end of something that I had planned that just was great and wonderful and that we love doing. And then nothing would happen for weeks until I got the next thing ready to go. And so I don’t know if this is something that other Carefree Cathy struggle with, but this was definitely something that I felt that it was a constant scramble for activities. And there is that fear, will planning ruin my spontaneity. But I think you could set up plans in such a way that you have something to do and you’re not constantly feeling like you’re trying to plan just a little bit ahead of your students, but it can still be flexible enough. So it’s like a framework is what we’re going for here. And one of the ways that we do this with a couple of different things, we do this by focusing on the vision. So what do you want education to look like for your family and outlining that, and then looking at the goals that you want to achieve for the year, and then creating some lesson Morning.

Pam Barnhill [00:10:37]:
And I’m making air quotes here. That kind of support spontaneous learning so that if you do go off and follow a rabbit trail, if you do sit down in the middle of October and say, wow, we really wanna study fall leaves and you go off and you create Time a whole 3 week thing on fall Laney, that the rest of what you have planned is sitting there waiting for you to get back. And I always like to think of planning as possibilities. Anytime you’re creating a homeschool plan, you’re simply creating a list of possibilities so that when you wake up and you’re like, we need something to do today, you can go over to your list of possibilities and pull something from that list, but it’s ready to go. You don’t have to spend all Sunday afternoon while your family’s having fun and playing, making a plan for the week because you need something to do, you just simply go to the list of possibilities that you made while you were doing your homeschool planning in the summer, and say, oh yeah, this thing looks interesting. This is the next thing that we’re gonna do. And that’s why we teach you in our autopilot planning program to plan in lists instead of putting lesson plans on grids. And you can feel really secure that you have the next thing to do.

Pam Barnhill [00:11:58]:
You can feel really secure that when there’s a lull in all the wonderful things that you want to do, that the basics are all lined up. And you can check a couple of those off your list until the next great thing comes along that you want to do again. And so instead of looking at planning as a way to paint you into a box, look at it as a tool that you can use in order to help you just have more peace in what you’re doing. Anna Brown is one of our autopilot Time, and she said that before going through the program, she would spend so much money on planners that she never ended up using past the initial setup. Oh, yeah. I could totally relate to this. And that her year was chaotic and she would change curriculum multiple Time, but now with her teacher binder, with all of her lists, that she was able to enjoy her curriculum more instead of constantly panicking, if she’s on track or doing enough. And that’s what we love to hear is that moms are no longer in this panic mode, constantly spending and looking for the next best thing, but they’re able to hone in on what is really going to work for their family and only make changes when they absolutely need to.

Pam Barnhill [00:13:17]:
And that is so awesome. Okay. So our next homeschool mom type is strategic Susan. Oh, yes. I have some best intention, Becky and me, but I also have some strategic Susan as well, because Susan loves to think about planning so much. If you remember, Susan was the planner who was born organized. She loved to plan. She liked to have tabs and laminate things, and she would lay everything out meticulously for her homeschool planning.

Pam Barnhill [00:13:53]:
And she was just dedicated to creating a really good plan for her family and for herself, because that’s the kind of thing that would bring her personal peace. Except she would end up frustrated because life is unpredictable and it likes to disrupt our well laid plans. And so things would come along, throw her off schedule, and then causing her subjects to get misaligned. And because Susan was planning in a traditional teacher planner grid, when these life things would happen, she would end up flipping back and forth, trying to find her place in all the different subjects until she would just end up so completely overwhelmed that she would stop, take time to replan, and print everything out again. And And we know that this inflexibility of life is not going to go away. We know that the uncertainty of life is not going to go away. And so as much as we like to plan, I think one of the things is we need to create a plan in a flexible way so that we can have a plan that will deal with the uncertainties of life. And there is totally a way to do that.

Pam Barnhill [00:15:06]:
You just have to step out of the box of what we’ve always had in our mind as to what lesson plans were. Cause I don’t know about you, but I can remember being a kid and standing at my teacher’s desk in the school room and looking down at her lesson planner and thinking, oh, wow, look, she’s got everything planned out. I will tell you as a classroom teacher, as a former classroom teacher, it doesn’t work for teachers either. Those lesson plans were constantly having to be changed. And if you had to turn them into your department head, you would have to rewrite them again. So hats off to all of you teachers. You former teachers know exactly what I’m talking about. So it didn’t even work for them, even though that was what they had to do to turn into the scope.

Pam Barnhill [00:15:49]:
So let’s talk about what can work, because we want more confidence in staying on track with our educational goals, despite the disruptions that come up. And we want to save ourselves the need for rewriting our plan. So we have to have a way to plan that can be flexible and address some of these challenges. And once again, I’m gonna go back to that idea of the lesson plan list. So when we teach you how to plan in autopilot, we don’t teach you to use a grid or any kind of folder system or structure where you’re putting dates on your plans. There are absolutely no dates put onto the plan. So you’re saying Time going to do this first and this next and then this, and I’m absolutely going to be prepared to do those things. And And I’m gonna have all the supplies that I need, and I’m gonna know exactly what I need to do when I sit down to do that lesson number one, lesson number four, lesson number ten.

Pam Barnhill [00:16:48]:
But I am not going to put a date on it. So when something crazy happens and I have to stop for a week or two weeks and we don’t get school done because that does happen. Y’all we get sick or family members get sick or we get displaced for some reason and lessons don’t get done for a week or two, when I come back, I can simply pick up where I left off the next lesson on the list. And I don’t feel behind because I haven’t put a date on it. And then the other thing that we teach in the course is we teach you how to set up a very flexible schedule. So that you’re not sitting here anticipating that on week twenty-eight, we’re going to be on this lesson. Or by November 7th, we’re going to be on week fourteen of our homeschool plan. Instead, we use techniques like magic number scheduling.

Pam Barnhill [00:17:50]:
So many homeschoolers like to do what they call Sabbath schooling, where they go six weeks on and 1 week off. And I have a lot of friends who do this and really have a lot of success with it, and so more power to them. But that was something that I was just not able to do. But I needed some way to keep me on track with the number of days that I needed to do in a school year. And so I came up with magic number scheduling. And this is a way that I keep myself on track so that I know that I am meeting my required number of days for my school year. But I’m not trying to follow this very set structure of homeschooling exactly these weeks. And so anytime I can create a framework that I can work within, but is also flexible, that is going to be a win for me.

Pam Barnhill [00:18:44]:
A few years ago, I got an email from Alicia Brooklands, and Alicia was telling me all about her family’s experience after hurricane Michael. They lived in Panama city. I live actually not too far north of Panama City, and we definitely felt some of the effects of hurricane Michael. We had a couple of trees down, but nothing like the devastation that went through Panama City, Florida. And Alicia wrote me to tell me that the work that she did with autopilot was the only thing that really kept them afloat after hurricane Michael. She said, this is the only way that we have been able to accomplish even the most minimal of schools since the hurricane. If I had to take the time to figure out what we needed to do, it would not have happened. She didn’t have the brain cells available, she said, to come up with lessons for her children.

Pam Barnhill [00:19:37]:
And that returning to schooling was a huge part of restoring normal for her kids. And so this is so important. Like, even after a hurricane, Alicia was able to pick up the plans that she had made and follow them without feeling a lot of despair over being behind, but giving her kids the structure that she needs. She said, while the year looked absolutely nothing like what she had planned for it to look like, Having spent the time over the summer, working through autopilot saved her school year. And so I just love hearing that. I love hearing that the planning process that we teach was so helpful to, Alicia. And then finally, our final kind of homeschooler is overwhelmed, Olivia. And more and more since COVID, we are finding ourselves meeting overwhelmed Olivia homeschool moms.

Pam Barnhill [00:20:33]:
These homeschool moms, god bless them, have decided that it is absolutely the best thing for their children to be at home and homeschooling, either because they didn’t like what they were seeing during pandemic schooling or because while they were doing pandemic schooling, they realized they just love being around their kids, and home was the best place for them that their kids were thriving. So they never really intended on being a homeschooler. We decided to homeschool when my oldest was very young, and I had years to spend time researching and planning. And a lot of times, Olivia just finds herself not having had that luxury. And so she really wants to do what she feels is best for her kids, but she never really intended to homeschool. And so she loves her family. She’s committed to doing this, but she’s feeling a little overwhelmed by the entire thing. And it’s not just the demands of homeschooling that are overwhelming her, but it’s also the daily chores and the fact that there is just so much to do.

Pam Barnhill [00:21:37]:
So she’s struggling to keep up with her household task. She’s feeling a little bit guilty about some of the things that maybe she buys thinking they’re a good idea, like science or history, but she hasn’t had time to get around to doing them yet. And she fears maybe she’s not really cut out for this whole homeschooling thing. And so what she really needs to do is find some time to put some of these simple structures, these flexible frameworks in place, and she’s struggling to do this. So some of the benefits that Olivia would feel from planning is it’s gonna reduce her stress. She feels right now unprepared and disorganized. And so having some of these flexible frameworks in place is going to help her feel less. And that’s so important because she’s also gonna then find that she has more quality time to spend with her kids and less time spent worrying on what needs to happen next.

Pam Barnhill [00:22:34]:
And Olivia is definitely the mom who feels beat down by the daily decision fatigue that can come from homeschooling if you don’t have a plan. Waking up and deciding, what are we doing first today? What are we gonna do next today? What am I gonna make for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? What kind of books are we going to be reading? What subject needs to happen now? All of those little decisions that you make throughout the day. I think research has shown that most people make about 30,000 decisions in any given day. If you’re a homeschool mom, I can guarantee you, you’re probably making three times that. And the number is getting close to a 100000 decisions. And so what we wanna do is use our time planning our homeschool to eliminate as many of those decisions as possible with putting some of these flexible frameworks in place so that when we wake up, we know what it’s possible for us to do this Dawn. That we can pull off the shelf over here and do because we have it prepared. So planning is preparation.

Pam Barnhill [00:23:41]:
That is exactly what we’re after. And autopilot does this autopilot can really help parents. Olivia have days that are more peaceful because they have these possibilities. And one of the big things that we teach in autopilot is this concept of procedureless. We want to take every possible curriculum out there and turn it into an open and go curriculum. And we do this by spending a little bit of time up front, which I know can be hard to get. But it’ll be so worth it in the end. Spend a little bit of time up front making some simple lists, so that every single curriculum becomes open and go, and you don’t have to make decisions daily or even weekly in your homeschool.

Pam Barnhill [00:24:30]:
Sometimes Olivia probably thinks, what’s the use in making a plan that you’re never gonna have time to follow? And you’re just not gonna make that kind of plan. And so one of the things that we do in autopilot is we start by looking at ourselves. What do we have time to do? What are we willing to do? That’s the plan that you wanna make. We don’t want to try to make plans for our aspirational selves, but our actual selves. And we dive deep into what does that look like in creating our homeschool vision and in creating our goals for the year and in choosing our curriculum, because quite honestly, the best curriculum is the one that’s going to get done. So I was talking to one of the members of my community about this, Lisa Barman. And Lisa, she likened it to improvisational dancing. So she studied improvisational dance when she was young.

Pam Barnhill [00:25:22]:
And she’s like, with improvisational dance, that’s the whole point of it is to get up and to do something that you did not plan ahead, that you did not choreograph. But what she found is that with improv, there’s a structure or a limit that supports making things up as you go along. And she says, sometimes this structure was like a gentle suggestion. Sometimes the structure was a clear defining boundary. And she said for her, that’s exactly what autopilot offered. Were some gentle suggestions or some boundaries that she could put in place for herself that gave her the space in the middle to do all of the improv with her homeschool plans that she wanted to do. And so it helped her so much. It gave her the freedom to be more present and more accountable and more flexible, in meeting the realities of her day.

Pam Barnhill [00:26:20]:
And she says, I was able to see and claim the teachable moments as they organically and spontaneously arose because she had set up those boundaries and that structure for herself. So I thought that was really an interesting take on it. So our next homeschool mom type is best intention, Becky. So if you remember, best intention, Becky loves planning. And she loves creative Morning, and she really loves the thrill of finding new resources, sometimes to her detriment. Because, because she loves planning so much, she tends to over plan. And sometimes she overspends a little bit. And sometimes she does that because she’s just really optimistic about how much she’s gonna get to for the school year.

Pam Barnhill [00:27:08]:
And she’s just so excited and wants to do all the things. And sometimes she overspends a little bit because she’s seeking out that next dopamine hit. She’s, this subject is going really horrible in my homeschool. Maybe I can buy the solution. And guys, I am 100%. There is a lot of best intention Becky in me. I have done this before. Now, best intentions Becky, propensity to over plan, doesn’t always make her feel bad.

Pam Barnhill [00:27:40]:
Sometimes it makes her feel bad. She’s, oh man, I’m just never gonna get to all of this wonderful stuff. But she rarely sits around going, I wasted my time planning. Because Becky loves to plan. She really does. And so she doesn’t feel bad about planning too much in that she’s wasted time. She’s had fun while doing it. She feels bad in planning too much when they don’t get to all the things that she had planned because she’s, Oh, there’s something wrong with me.

Pam Barnhill [00:28:10]:
I can’t get to everything that I’ve planned. When really, she probably could take a step back and say, maybe it would be better for me to plan less. There’s a lot of stress here. There is a lot of stress from trying to juggle a bunch of different resources. And by doing a little bit of more effective planning, as opposed to just all the fun planning, then you can be more consistent and have more enjoyable learning experiences for the kids. I feel like sometimes my kids were a little bit frustrated with all the ideas that I would come up with. And then also there’s a financial control that comes from creating a plan and saying, I’m not going to buy too much stuff. I can remember when I started taking my homeschool vision with me to the homeschool convention, and I would set Time a dollar amount and say, I’m not allowed to spend more than, $75 unless I walk out of the vendor hall and sit down somewhere and read my homeschool vision and decide if the purchase that I’m about to make actually fits with my vision.

Pam Barnhill [00:29:15]:
That was super, super helpful. And that’s one of the most important reasons for a best intention Becky to have a homeschool vision, is so she can test everything against it before she makes a purchase. And there’s just somewhat of a feeling of failure when you don’t get to some of the things that you’ve planned. And as part of the planning process, one of the things that Becky should really focus on is writing that vision statement so that she knows whether or not so writing the vision statement is very important for Becky. Having a good idea of what’s important and coming back to that, reading it often, and reminding herself often of what is in that vision statement really does help with so much of the chasing bright, shiny objects and trying to do too many things. The other thing is there’s a fear here. If I plan, does this mean that I have to give up on new ideas? And one of the great things about the autopilot planning courses we’ve worked in step ten is actually periodic reviews. And so we’ve created a framework where you can stop, take stock, and in a calm moment, as opposed to an emotional moment, sit down and say, can I make a change? Should I make a change at this point? And so I do use my periodic review times to take stock of some of the things that we’ve been doing.

Pam Barnhill [00:30:47]:
I usually do mine on about 3 months into the first part of the school year. Some of our autopilot planners do one every single month, but I like to do it after about 3 months. And I say, is this working? Is this really working? Should I change it? Should we stick it out? What should we do? But I don’t allow myself to make those knee jerk changes anymore until it’s a periodic review time. And I think that’s so helpful for Becky. Camilla Strand is another one of our autopilot moms. And she said that autopilot helps her to plan appropriately and be more consistent that she no longer feels behind chronically and that she feels empowered in leading her homeschool rather than feeling overwhelmed or stressed out about it. And that is exactly the feeling we want for all homeschool moms is that they feel empowered and they don’t feel overwhelmed. So I would just like to invite you to come on over and check out Put Your Homeschool Year on autopilot today.

Pam Barnhill [00:31:46]:
We’ll put a link for you in the show notes and check it out. I do think that our flexible framework for planning could be just the thing to help you feel more confident in your homeschool year. That’s our show for today. Be sure to follow, subscribe, and leave a review so you never miss out on the wonder of homeschooling better together. To stay connected and learn even more about the homeschooling better together resources and to join our free community, visit hsbtpodcast.com. Until next week, keep stepping out of the overwhelm and into the wonder.