Homeschool Help: How To Hit Your Stride

What IS My Stride?

While every homeschool is different, approaching the process as a new homeschooler begs for some type of format or system in order to lay some ground. With so many different approaches, you may be wondering,

How do I find our way?

How can I hit our homeschooling stride?

What is my stride?

Having the advantage of being able to look back, I can now recognize how I discovered our learning method, and how embracing this path has helped us to reach our homeschooling stride. I share our roots in hopes it will encourage you to flesh out your own style, or inspire you with ours.

Our journey with homeschooling began long before I filed any PSA or prepared any lesson plan, I just didn't know it. Being blessed with the ability to be a stay at home, full time mom, I had the privilege of spending each and every day with my kiddos.

From the time they were babies, we were playing, playing, and playing. As they grew into toddlers, we were spending our days outdoors, exploring and active, and when inside, we were imagining and creating. Fun, ease, and laughter was our everyday.

As the days mounted to years, I looked for ideas to occupy our time and entertain us.

Rockets, bubbles, kites, milk...any and everything.

By the time my oldest was five, I was creating "theme days", which to us at the time, was just for the sake of fun and play.

What I didn't realize at that time, was how much we were learning in these theme days- and how much more we could be learning within these topics.

I'm not suggesting I invented something new or profound, but the connection I made in that moment certainly was...

We were already doing homeschool,

I just didn't know it, because to us, we were just having fun!

Playing was our way of life, learning was embedded in playing, and our learning was thriving!

Having gone to public school myself, I was still in the thought that education looked the way that I had always been taught. Once I had my children, I deeply respected their learning styles, and desired so much more for their individual learning styles. My daughter had busy hands, full of energy, always eager to move to the next thing. My son was super imaginative, and patiently deliberated on how things worked. I wanted their individual learning styles to be tailored to them; creative, fun, playful- just as we had always done.

Recognizing this, along with realizing our theme days were the spark of a lesson plan, I had it!

Our learning style was thematic units.

Each new topic an invitation to engage in science, math, history, language, and more. With each new theme we could incorporate our core learning topics easily, because they were already present in the topic. Themed outings would be our playtime, learning activities and games would be hands-on and engaging, and lessons would be creative and unique to capture their interests! (I was, and still am, pumped about it!)

And so, our homeschool began to reach its stride. Each week we focus on a new topic, which leads us to engage in math, science, history, and more , just by examining the topic further.

Learning is all around us, in the everyday things, and it doesn't take a packaged curriculum to accomplish education.

It takes laying a foundation for a love of learning. If you've got that, then you've truly hit your homeschool stride.