We’re back with our Real Moms Plan series! In this episode, I’m excited to introduce you to Kristelle Larson, a remarkable mom from our homeschooling community who’s been implementing my program “Put Your Homeschool Year on Autopilot” since the beginning. Kristelle’s approach helps her handle her busy homeschool year efficiently while maintaining her sanity.
We discuss her strategies, balancing multiple kids’ educational needs, and how she streamlined her homeschool planning process. If you’re curious about homeschooling or looking for practical advice, I promise this episode is a treasure trove.
Key Takeaways
- Advanced planning of the homeschooling year can greatly reduce stress and workload during the academic year itself.
- Implementing the “Put Your Homeschool Year on Autopilot” system can be particularly beneficial, especially for parents with young children.
- A homeschooling vision or educational philosophy can serve as a guiding light for homeschooling families, helping them stay focused and prevent overwhelm from the myriad of educational options available.
- Homeschooling should adapt to the unique needs, strengths, and interests of each child. For example, incorporating arts and crafts for children who show a strong inclination towards art.
- Trusting your instincts as a homeschooling parent is crucial. Knowing when to say yes and when to say no can help balance a child’s learning journey.
- Being involved in supportive homeschool communities can provide helpful insights and tips, while also reinforcing that you’re not alone in this homeschooling journey.
- Making use of AI tools like Chat GPT can facilitate the planning process, for instance, in creating a homeschooling vision, thereby saving valuable time and effort.
Resources
Listen to the Podcast:
Homeschooling with Vision Podcast Transcript:
Pam Barnhill [00:00:00]:
Um for part two in our real mom’s plan series. Today I’m joined by a mom of young children. Hi everyone. I’m Pam Barnhill and I have helped thousands of homeschoolers create doable systems, beat, burnout, and bring more joy to their homeschool day. Welcome to episode 72 of the Ten Minutes to a Better Homeschool podcast. Yes. Today I am joined by Kristelle Larson. She is a member of our homeschool community who has been doing Put Your Homeschool Year on autopilot pretty much since the beginning of her home school career. She has some very young children. Her oldest is seven and she uses autopilot to help her get prepared for her school year. So I think you’re going to really enjoy this conversation with Kristelle, talking about how she kind of manages all the moving parts and cuts down her work to as little as possible for during the school year. If you are interested in Put your Home school year on Autopilot, it is not too late to get it. For this summer, we still have a wonderful Chat GPT bonus going on where we are adding modules for Chat GPT to the program to help you get your planning done faster. And so if you want to delve into dip your toes into the AI world and how it can help you with homeschool planning, we have got you covered. All of that, plus the regular ten planning modules and everything you need to get your homeschool year started. Great. You can find all of that@pambarnhill.com autopilot. And now on with the interview. Okay, so today I am joined by Kristelle Larson, who is a member of our community over at Homeschool Better Together. And you’ve been around a while, you came to the beach retreat back in January. So much fun. Yeah. So tell everybody just a little bit about you and your kids and how you got started homeschooling.
Kristelle Larsen [00:02:18]:
So I live in rural southwest Iowa. I have three kids. Charlotte is seven, almost seven and a half, daniel’s almost five, and Katie’s almost three. We had been homeschooling from the beginning with one small, like, two month journey into preschool for Daniel because he needed just some extra speech intervention. And we found that I or my oldest daughter were very quick to jump in and translate for him. And so he needed to be in an environment where he was truly on his own to kind of cross that hurdle. So it was purely for speech, not for preschool. Both my husband and I were public school educated and when I was in my twenty s, I kept meeting kids who were home schooled, who were teenagers, who were just amazing kids. Most of the kids I knew as a teenager before were those stereotypical eighty s home school kids that were off a little bit socially, unfortunately, but I probably meant three. My sampling was very small and so my husband at first was very against it, but right as we were about to start that 4K year. Is that year 2020? I don’t know if you remember that being anything special.
Pam Barnhill [00:03:34]:
I remember. Yeah.
Kristelle Larsen [00:03:36]:
So it was just really nice that by then I had already really been intrigued by homeschooling and just decided to go with homeschooling. And that removed so many decisions, the masking decision, needing to know what the schools were going to do, we just went with that. So I jumped in probably a little enthusiastically, as a lot of young moms do, when we decide to home school. Like Charlotte was four at the time, but we were going to have a full day of curriculum type mentality. So I followed your blog and your stuff, joined the community also in Sarah Mackenzie’s community with reading. Those are kind of my two gurus. I did learn really quickly to narrow it down. There were a lot of homeschooling voices out there. So that’s kind of how I ended up homeschooling, was just meeting amazing kids.
Pam Barnhill [00:04:25]:
That is fun and exciting and yeah, I’m so glad that I’m never glad about 2020, but I’m so glad that homeschoolers came out of it and people who are like, oh man, yeah, let’s do this. This is really the best thing for our family. So that is awesome. Well, so you fairly quickly came to plan Your year. You fairly quickly came to put your home school year on autopilot. So how did you find it? Were you searching for something? Did you feel like there was something inadequate or wrong or frustrating about your planning or did you just kind of stumble into it from the very start?
Kristelle Larsen [00:05:07]:
So I have only done one, maybe two years without the advanced planning. And granted, I had a newborn at the time and it was only preschool. So really the amount of planning was not intense. But I could see already that if I was just going to be going day by day or even week by week, by the time the kids were in like 1st, third and fifth grade ages, I was going to be in over my head. I could see the writing on the wall that this was going to get overwhelming really fast and I don’t remember how I found it. It might have just been an email of yours or I was already in the community. I don’t remember which came first. If I was in the community first, I don’t remember. It becomes all of that. Like I can’t back, back out of my rabbit trails. Yeah, but it was either in your community or through an email that I heard about it and I bought the book version of The Plan Your Year. Just because I can read so much faster than I can listen, I’d open my cupboard to see what the book was. I’ve got all my home school stuff just like right here above me. I’ve done it two years now and it is a lot of work on the front end. But then having the year roughly laid out is amazing. And it’s been amazing to start it with my kids being so young, where their level of needed curriculum and needed subjects and all of that is so small. So then as I’m improving and planning, they’re building together as opposed to jumping into this at 9th grade level.
Pam Barnhill [00:06:41]:
Yeah. And it’s interesting because I think that sometimes people really don’t believe me when I say I do really plan out the whole year in advance. Now, do I do every single thing that I’ve planned? No. And there usually comes a day in November or December where I’m like, we probably need to reevaluate some things. Maybe we need to add something that I forgot or something like that. But I don’t spend any time on the weekend or anything like that doing anything once the year starts. I think if I did, I would just absolutely go crazy. So have you found that to be the case for you as well?
Kristelle Larsen [00:07:18]:
So I do a weekly planning session just that covers life, and part of that, about 20 minutes of it is homeschooling. So I will go through and look at whichever morning plan time plans we’re looking at. Okay. Is there a craft this week? For example, today we did the make papyrus with the Egyptian Explorations Unit. That was when I could have skipped wet glue with a four year old boy. We had splatters of glue all over the schoolroom, but just stuff like that. So I do a quick 20 minutes of what’s this and the program I use for our devotionals, they release only two to three weeks in advance. So I know that I’m using this program for our devotionals, but I do have to get on and print the pages just because they’re not released all the even that’s really easy because I know I have my procedure list.
Pam Barnhill [00:08:14]:
Okay. I love that. Yeah. So you’ve eliminated basically the decision fatigue. And now I know why you have to spend the 20 minutes planning each week. Because I don’t do artsy craftsy projects that I have to go find supplies for.
Kristelle Larsen [00:08:28]:
My daughter loves art, and so it’s one of those push pulls of allowing her to express an interest in a talent. And my two year old especially, she loves to draw. My two year old has been holding a pencil correctly since she was 14 months old, and so she will sit in color for hours. Like, what is wrong with this child? So I have to work in a little bit of art for them. Normally the messiest we do is like the chalk pastels. So the glue was a stretch. Had I realized how messy it was going to be, it would have been in the kitchen instead of the school room. But luck. Elmer’s, glue and water cleans up. We did it.
Pam Barnhill [00:09:04]:
I love it. Okay, so you mentioned procedures list and it sounds like you’re really leaning into goals because one of the things that we talk about in goals is finding your kids strengths and planning for those. So you’re obviously doing that with your daughter and the art. Is there another part of the course that you find helpful? Like, what is your favorite part of the whole planning process?
Kristelle Larsen [00:09:28]:
I think the vision. The first time I tried to write the vision took forever because it was the first time. Now I love it because it really helped me put in perspective what I wanted my home school to be. Because, like I said, there are so many wonderful homeschool voices out there and wonderful people. And even when we did the beach retreat in January, like, listening to all of these amazing women and what they’re doing in their homes, it’s very easy to be like, I need that, I need that, I need that, I need that, I need that. And so when I compare it back to my vision of what do I really want our home to look like, it makes it a lot easier to look at somebody, appreciate what they’re doing and leave it on the table without feeling guilty or that I’m missing out. One very concrete example is at the beach retreat, we studied Shakespeare, and it was talked about how you can do Shakespeare at any age. You don’t have to wait for a certain age. And every time it came up, this little voice in my head said, charlotte’s not ready. It’s better for when she’s closer to ten. And because I had learned to trust myself with what my home school needed, it was very easy for me to be like, we’ll come back to this. I’m an English major. I am all about some Shakespeare. But I knew if I pushed my kids too early, it’d be too much. And so having that vision helped me to know when to say no and when to say yes.
Pam Barnhill [00:10:46]:
So it really helped you to be true to yourself? Yeah. Okay, so it’s funny because you’re saying, oh, it took me so long to write my vision the first time. So you haven’t by chance seen the new module that I released yesterday with using Chat TPT, have you?
Kristelle Larsen [00:11:01]:
I haven’t.
Pam Barnhill [00:11:03]:
Okay. It really kind of blew my mind when I did it for the first time. But we have a prompt now in the course where you tell it to act as a home school mentor. And it asks you, because of the way I’ve written the prompt, it’ll ask you one question at a time about your educational philosophy and what things are important to you. And you answer all these questions. And at the end it says, oh, well, by the way, based on the answers you’ve told me, I think this is your vision for your home school. And it writes it out for you. And then obviously, what we teach you in the course is, then you can go ahead and edit it or ask it, clarifying questions and things like that. And I’m thinking because you’re not the first person to have told me, the vision just takes a while. It takes a while to do, and now it’s just so much faster.
Kristelle Larsen [00:11:55]:
Well, I think two things caused it to take me a long time. The first time was one, just like you’re pulling from everywhere to get it. So the prompts, I think, would help. And being an english major, I probably spent too much time on getting wording just right.
Pam Barnhill [00:12:10]:
Yeah.
Watch on YouTube:
Kristelle Larsen [00:12:10]:
And so I spent kind of above and beyond. But what’s been nice is now last year I just kind of reviewed it, looked to see if that’s still where he was going forward. This year. Not that I can skip that part, but it definitely has become an easy on ramp to the rest of the planning rather than a really big hurdle to get over. Like, once you do it that first year, you just kind of reread it, make sure it still fits, tweak and you move forward.
Pam Barnhill [00:12:37]:
Yeah. So I’ve been following this same process. So I did it the first time, the year that Matt was in Afghanistan, because I was just completely losing my bacon, right. I was like, I’ve got to figure out how to make this work because I’m going to be by myself all year long with a seven year old, a five year old, and a two year old. And that was when the process really was kind of birthed. And so I’ve been doing it since then. And I think Olivia was seven. She’s just about to turn 18. And my vision has changed once in all of those years. So probably after I had been in about four to five years, I took a look at it and said, you know, there are really a few things that I would like to change. And even then, it didn’t change substantially. I went back to I tweaked a couple of things that had become more important to me as I loosened up as a homeschooling mom. And so I would expect that down the road, most people would take a major shift, maybe once or twice, but for the most part, that is something that stays the same. And I love so much the fact that you’re like, I can do just what’s important to me, and for me, too. It keeps me from buying curriculum. It keeps me from trying all the crazy things that everybody says are, like, the best and wonderful and newest thing, because I can just go back to that vision again and again. I love it. I love it so much. Well, Kristell, thanks for coming on and talking to me about how you plan and how you follow rabbit trails. That was awesome. And how you get everything done. I really appreciate it.
Kristelle Larsen [00:14:14]:
Well, I don’t know if I get everything done, but I try.
Pam Barnhill [00:14:17]:
Well, how you get everything that you do done? There we go. And there you have it. I hope you found a little bit of planning, help, and inspiration from this episode. If you would like links to any of the resources that Cristelle and I chatted about today, you can find them on the show notes for this episode. That’s at Pambarnhill.com Tmbh 72. Also, over there, you can find a link to our autopilot planning course as well. Now, I’ll be back again in a couple of weeks with another the third and final episode of our series of planning with real homeschool moms. And we cannot wait to have you join us then. Until then, keep on homeschooling.
- How to Transform Math Lessons without Changing your Curriculum with Denise Gaskins - April 26, 2024
- Homeschooling Boys with Durenda Wilson - April 12, 2024
- What About Lab Sciences? with Dr. Moon - March 29, 2024
Leave a Rating or Review
Doing so helps me get the word out about the podcast. iTunes bases their search results on positive ratings, so it really is a blessing — and it’s easy!
- Click on this link to go to the podcast main page.
- Click on Listen on Apple Podcasts under the podcast name.
- Once your iTunes has launched and you are on the podcast page, click on Ratings and Review under the podcast name. There you can leave either or both!