(soft music) - Welcome friends to this episode of the Everyday Educator podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Bailey, and I am excited to spend some time with you today as we encourage one another, learn together, and ponder the delights and challenges that make homeschooling the adventure of a lifetime. Whether you're just considering this homeschooling possibility or deep into the daily delight of family learning, I believe you'll enjoy thinking along with us.

But don't forget, although this online community is awesome, you'll find even closer support in a local CC community. So go to classicalconversations.com and find a community near you today. Well, listeners, I am excited to welcome you to this wonderful fall day podcast here at the end of October. The end of October has always, at our house, been a special time in homeschooling.

I remember when my girls were really, really young and we had just started homeschooling. Late October was that time when I began to get a little itchy. I began to think, yeah, this is going pretty well, but am I doing everything I'm supposed to be doing? Or some years, man, this is getting sort of hard and I feel like we might be in a rut and now I'm wondering, is this what I'm supposed to be doing?

Am I doing everything I'm supposed to do? Are my girls getting everything they're supposed to get? I also know that this time of year is when folks who have kids that are maybe three or four and they're not officially homeschooling yet, but as the fall rolls on and the new year approaches, they began to think, what am I gonna do with my kids?

Am I really gonna try this homeschooling thing? And what would that really look like? And am I able to do that and where do I even go for advice? And so today I have invited a good friend, Katie Beth Pearson, homeschooling mom with some experience under her belt to join me today.

And we are gonna talk about advice, right? For getting started as a homeschooler, advice for those of you with young children who are wondering, am I doing it right? Am I doing enough? What's a better way to get started and prepare our family to love learning together so much that we can stick it out till the very end.

Katie Beth, thank you so much for joining me today. - Oh, thank you for inviting me, Lisa. This is quite the honor. I appreciate it. - Well, every time I talk to you about homeschooling, I feel like our enthusiasm feeds off of each other. And I thought, what better way to encourage some moms and dads who may be having a few qualms or even if things are going great.

And this happened to me sometimes in the early years, things would be going along really smoothly and I would begin to think, but as there's something else, this seems too easy. Something must be wrong. Is there something else I'm supposed to be thinking? So I just thought we would put everybody's mind at rest and hey, maybe give people something new to think about to boot.

- Absolutely, yeah. - Let me ask you this. How long have you homeschooled? - I love that question because I like to say I've homeschooled since I became a mother, right? Because education is not just about the academics. So I absolutely take credit in teaching my daughters to walk and in potty training them because I was teaching them, teaching them table manners.

But how long have I taken on the sole responsibility of educating my children academically was six weeks into pre-K for my first child. I always knew the second we found out we were pregnant and we were starting our family, I always knew I wanted to homeschool my kids. But I did not feel equipped to teach them the basics.

The squiggly line here is an M or this bumpy shape right here is the number three and what that meant. So I felt like I could just outsource their academics for the first few years and let somebody else take control of giving them those foundational bits of knowledge and then I could take it from there.

You know, the Lord just grabs you by the heart and tells you, "Ma'am, when I convict you of something, "I don't mean for you to outsource that." And so about six weeks into pre-K, I was humbled and utterly exhausted from the routine of taking my child to preschool and I had a brand new baby on my hip at the time and it was just, I was putting in more work emotionally and time-wise just for her to go to a preschool and I wasn't seeing any kind of emotional return from my daughter.

She was exhausted. She was not necessarily enjoying the time. I wasn't enjoying it and I missed her 'cause she was a cool person and it was that time when I was like, "Okay, I guess I'll share you with somebody else now." So my husband and I had a conversation over dinner and we regrouped and we decided that if I was gonna homeschool, what better time than to do it in the moment that I felt convicted about it.

So we unenrolled her from the public school and just took time to figure it out. So my oldest daughter is 17. So I'll claim 17 years of homeschooling but I think if I were to do the math, I think she might've been four when she was in preschool. So 13 years of academics.

- Oh, that is so cool. And let me ask you this and it can just be a short answer. We're gonna dive into it more deeply, I'm sure. Has it always been easy, Katie Bess? - Oh, no ma'am. I've done so many things in my life and I think homeschooling my children has been probably the most humbling job I've ever had.

So no, but it has been rewarding. It has been beautiful moments of watching things click with my children that I would've missed out on, that I would've had to forfeit if they were in a classroom. But then there were those terrible times of watching them wrestle and it's hard to watch your child wrestle with something.

You understand it because you're an adult and you've seen it and you had your own wrestling match with it. And so you just want it to come to them. And in the moment, I just wanted to fix it for them. And looking back and watching the reward of something coming together that they've wrestled through and clicking and that was worth so much more than them never having to wrestle through it to begin with.

So no, it's by no means has it been easy or simple, but it has been the most rewarding thing I think I've tackled as an adult. - One of the best things I think that you could ever say to encourage young families, you just said, wrestling is important for our children to do.

And a lot of times I think when we start out homeschooling, we want to make learning for our children, obviously appealing and fun and doable. And we feel like, we feel this, I know I did, I felt this huge burden to make school and learning easy for my kids.

Oh, I've got to make it easy and if it's not, if it's not easy, then probably I'm doing it wrong. And I wrestled with that so much. But your great wisdom is that wrestling is important for our children and that everybody is not gonna get the concept right away and that's okay.

Sometimes the deepest lessons that our children learn are in the midst of the wrestling to get through it, the wrestling to find the breakthrough that cements that idea in your head. And so that's a great piece of wisdom. - Because you fought for it, right? Because it didn't just get handed to you, you dug in, you stubbornly decided this was not gonna defeat me, this is going to be my triumph.

So it makes that so much sweeter when it didn't defeat you, even if it felt like it had defeated you time and time again beforehand. So yeah, when you wrestle with something, you're earning those stripes. You're not just giving, being handed them. - I think that's myth number one that we'll just bust right now.

It's supposed to be easy. It's not supposed to be easy. It's not supposed to be easy for the student and it's not supposed to be easy for us. What is something that you have learned in your, I don't know, either 12 or 17, however you count it, what is something that you, that is totally not what you expected about homeschooling?

- So a little background first. I was publicly educated my whole life. And then I went to college and when I went to college, I volunteered at our local school district in the high school. My neighbor was the only high school English teacher in the whole town. So she needed some help and I didn't mind it, I loved her.

But what I noticed was that the parents of these students that I was helping, they knew of their children, but they didn't seem to know their children. They knew, you know, my kid plays soccer or my child is weak in math, but they didn't really know their children in a way that I felt like I wanted to know my own children.

What I didn't expect when I decided to homeschool or when my husband and I decided to homeschool was that we wouldn't know of our children. We would know our children. - Yeah. - And it's a beautiful intimacy that I have with them where I just know what to expect when my kids wake up and they have a certain look on their face and I know, oh, today's gonna be a grumpy day.

Or they're just boiling with excitement because they finished that wrestling match and now they can't wait to show up to community day to boast about it, to present on it, or to have conversations with their classmates because they've won the wrestling match at home and now they're just bursting with energy because they want to share that excitement with their classmates.

And it just in the look of an eye when they're glancing at me or even more richly, they know me and they know when I need a hug and they recognize that I'm not just an ATM. I'm not a chauffeur. I'm a person that they enjoy spending time with and I didn't expect that 'cause the world will tell you, oh, little girls are great until they become teenagers and then they're tyrants.

And I've been waiting for that tyrant moment and it hasn't come yet, thank you, Jesus. I don't think it will because we have this great relationship with each other because we spend so much time together. - Yes, that's beautiful. The whole idea that when you're homeschooling, you're not just guiding their academic growth but you're shepherding their heart.

And like you said, you know each other intimately because you spend a lot of time together and you see each other in the waking moments and in the sleepy moments and in, like you said, in the triumphant moments when they've gotten something and they're eager to share, but also in the wrestling moments when something is coming hard or when something has broken their heart.

- I'm glad that you said that. I feel like when we talk to people about homeschooling, we don't make enough of that. We don't celebrate that enough. Here's the truth, you guys, about homeschooling your children. You won't just know if they're good at math or can really translate Latin without looking at the answer key.

You will also know how they deal with disappointment. You will also be able to see what hurts their heart. You will be able to see that on their faces because you're with them. The Lord will knit together the hearts of your family. I know we homeschooled our girls the whole way and when our oldest left to go to college, it was very strange.

My husband cried for a week. It was so hard. It was so different because as a pastor, his office has always been in our home. And so we have literally all been home together all the time forever. And so we saw each other in the happy times and in the sad times and in the get along together times and in the struggle to find peace in our home time.

But God had given us the gift of one another. And so it's a heart knitting that is also a beautiful outgrowth of home education. - Absolutely. One of my daughters, when she's wrestling, it's a public affair. She needs to talk it through. She needs to bounce ideas off of each other.

She needs to hear other perspectives and it's very out in the open. And my other daughter needs to be alone. She needs to go in her room. She needs to close the door. She needs to privately wrestle and then think that she might have come up with her train of thought to gather her words, to gather her language.

And then she'll come out and discuss it with us still with a loose grip on her opinions. But it was interesting to me how differently my children wrestle with a hardship. One is very public and very open to the noise and the other one, the noise is clutter. And she needs to have that Jesus praying on the mountain top kind of solitude to gather her own peace in the storm before she can tackle it outwardly.

And I don't think I would have known that about either of them, had I not spent 24/7 shepherding them to find out how the Lord made them as fully formed people. I'm not molding my children. They have already been molded. I'm just guiding them down the paths the Lord has called them to.

- That's lovely, that is lovely. And so much of what we are privileged to do as homeschooling parents is not academic. People start thinking, when people begin to consider whether or not they want to homeschool, what we mostly consider is, can I teach my child to read and what will I do when they get to calculus in high school because I hated math?

We think about the academics. We don't think about helping to fine tune their character or help them develop good health habits or guide them as they learn to manage a life, not just a mind. And so that's something for all of us to think about. Homeschooling is more than just book learning.

I am sure that you have changed something that you have changed some things about your homeschooling style over the year. What would you say, what are the biggest changes in your homeschool style from the early days to now? And it might be because the age of your children, Katie Beth, or maybe it is because of something that you learned about better ways of teaching.

Hit us with that advice. - Man, we were just talking about this a few weeks ago, my husband and myself, when we first started out, we didn't know what we were doing. I only knew public school. So I knew the classroom model with the desks and the chairs and the very regimented time hacks.

And so in my mind, I needed to do school at home with very individual desks for each child and a regimented schedule of reading time and math time. And there's goodness and beauty to that, but it was militant in my homeschool. And it was unforgiving and it left no room for curiosity or interests.

I did not know about classical conversations when we first started out. So we were going it alone. We lived in an area where there weren't a whole lot of homeschoolers. So I didn't have that big sister wisdom that you get in community. I didn't have a family that I could say, I like what I see when I'm looking at you.

Can you teach me your ways? What did you do wrong? What did you do well? And I didn't get those community days of lunchtime chatter and things like that. And it was like I was an isolated island winging it. And so we tried a variety of options. This was before social media.

So I just Google produced certain things, but not a whole lot of things. And so we tried unschooling, we tried eclectic, we tried a whole lot of different things. But today we have found beauty in knowing a few core things. We spend more time valuing the process than the product.

The product is good. I don't want you to give sloppy work. I don't want you to not pour yourself into it, but I also care more about how you got to your conclusions well before I ask, what is your conclusion? So I want to hear your thought processes. I want to hear how you got to this answer, whether it's math or Latin declensions or even science fair project.

I want to know what led you to this. And it's more conversational in my homeschool now. We spend a lot of time, I have teenage girls, we still cuddle on the couch and read a book together. I don't, I think there'll be 30 years old and come visit my house and we'll cuddle on the couch and read a good book together.

You will, I bet. I just hope so because it's such a precious time for us, especially as the weather cools off and it's blanket season. So we have a favorite blanket that we like to cuddle under. And then we spend more time instead of opening a book with the intent of filling in answers.

We do open our books, but it's more of a curiosity driven thing. Whereas before I was a check box person, I liked to have my to-do list and I like to check all of the boxes off on that to-do list and then I felt accomplished. So we've changed quite a bit over the years.

And I think that's okay. I think it's okay to look at what you're doing, decide it's not what's best or it's not working the way you had envisioned and then pivot and try something else. - Right, that's really smart. I'm glad that you said that. I feel like they're probably listeners who started out homeschooling in a certain way and maybe it was working or maybe it's never worked and they're afraid to change lanes.

Because as parents, we feel like, well, I should just commit to, I should commit to a lane in my homeschooling and stay there and jumping around is not helpful and it makes me look wishy-washy or like heaven forbid, I don't know what I'm doing. I think what Katie Beth and I would say to all of you guys is that it is actually not just okay but good to change your method or change what you're pursuing, especially how you're pursuing it if something doesn't work anymore.

Or if you have outgrown a certain method or if you see it really is not serving your child's learning style well. - Absolutely. - That's a good encouraging thing, Katie Beth. Change is okay and it can actually be good and you should not be afraid to change what you're doing, especially in those early years.

You are not gonna mess up your child. - Oh, no. - You are learning, in essence, in the early years, you're actually learning along with your child because you're learning how do you learn, how do they learn, what are the options out there for us and like you said, most of us try in the beginning to bring our public school experience home and we have a lot of checklists and we have a lot of seat work maybe or desk work or lessons to do.

And then as we relax and think, but what am I trying to teach my children? I'm trying to teach them to know God and to know his world and to love it and maybe a book or a list is not the best way to do that, at least not every day.

So make a change. Katie Beth, you and I have a friend who has been seeking advice on getting started for her sister, her sister who has a little four-year-old and lots of people have weighed in with some awesome suggestions and I would like to get your take on these first and then I want some of your best ideas with your years of experience under your belt.

What are some of your best ideas for getting started? Okay, so one person said take lots of naps. How do you feel about that? Lisa, I have never taken a nap I regretted. Can I just put that out there? I have avoided naps and I have regretted those, but I have never regretted a nap in my adulthood that I have taken and some of my best naps were right alongside my babies when we were just too tired to keep going and we just cuddled up and dozed off for a little bit and the rest that you get from it and the precious moments of being still and silent, especially with your wiggling littles that just never stop moving, you get that precious time together to take a nap.

So please prioritize nap time with the little ones. Yeah, I agree, especially when your children are little. So many of us feel like, oh, when we start, we've got to teach them to read and we need to know all about numbers and I want to teach them to draw and we're going to learn about science and we're going to do experiments every other day and we're going to learn to draw maps and we're going to read about people in other countries and it just makes you tired to think about it and think about how that feels to a little four, five, six year old who has not been designed to sit for long periods of time in one spot.

They need to get up and run around and they need to run around a lot and it will make them tired and so taking a nap is a great thing. Taking a rest is a good thing and following the rhythm of your body is good. Lots of people weighed in on things like reading a lot and collecting books and going to the library and availing themselves of the Copper Lodge books, the old world echoes and the new world echoes and all kinds of stories.

How do you feel about reading with your children? - Oh man, we love reading together and I'll tell you it's not always age appropriate books. Not that they're inappropriate but there were times when my husband was working on his master's thesis and the girls just wanted time with daddy and he had deadlines for papers and so instead of being holed up in his office and working on his paper, he would read some of his textbooks to them and they would be curled up in his lap and listening in and killing two birds with one stone but and then we would pull out poetry books and story books and books that tug at your heartstrings and teach you to cry and it's okay and then books that help you to laugh and what a beautiful way.

I don't think it's possible to own too many books. I think it's possible to not own enough bookshelves. - Yes, yes. - I think you can never overdo a book. So absolutely bring books everywhere you go. Have one at the ready for the time at the bank when you're waiting in line to make your deposit or if you need to go get your oil changed, pull that book out and start reading to your babies 'cause it models for them that wonder and curiosity of what mysteries lie within those pages.

- I love it, that's great, great ideas. Okay, somebody else said, get rain boots to play in the rain and a shovel to dig in the dirt and a magnifying glass to search out tiny wonders and a blanket to lie in the grass to search the wonder in the sky and a bucket to fill with rain and dirt and wonders.

What would you say to all of that? - Oh man, where was that knowledge and wisdom when I had littles? Those were things in my mind at the time that were clutter and messy. - Well, and extra and if we have time and when we're done with school, we will do all that.

- Let's do our history, let's work on our math and then if we have time before we have to make dinner, we'll go splash in the mud. Ma'am, let's make some time to splash in the mud, put it in your schedule. If you're a schedule-based person, you schedule messy time because those are the times that they will outgrow and then you'll find yourself in a park one day looking at a mama who does prioritize it and go, oh, I wish I could be part of that right now.

- Yes, and the whole idea that that's how little people learn by moving their bodies out in the world and getting their hands dirty and touching things that you as a grownup go yuck about, that's important. Helping them to search out the beauty and the wonder in the world is the best way to begin teaching them and I'm with you, I wish somebody had said that is not extra, that is the beauty.

And you know, I was lucky enough that, especially when my older daughter came along, I feel like you do, that we started homeschooling the minute she was born 'cause we would name everything and I would carry her around. We had no close neighbors and so my daughter and I were each other's only companions.

My husband was there too but he was studying or visiting shut-ins or visiting in the hospital. But we were each other's everything and I talked to her absolutely all the time. I named everything in sight before naming was a core habit that I didn't do anything about. Yes, so we would go outside and I can remember my mom calling one day saying, well, what have you been doing?

And I said, well, we're putting on our boots to go outside and we're gonna play in the rain and she said, that's the silliest thing I've ever heard and I said, mom, it's warm and it's not thunder and it's not lightning and we have some great puddles in the driveway and we're gonna go and stomp the puddles and that was wonderful.

And so, Katie Beth, if you and I can give moms and dads permission to do that extra stuff and recognize that it's not extra, that's actually how your children are learning, then this will have been a good podcast. - Yeah, my husband said something wonderful last night. He said, those types of activities give you the opportunity to interact with your environment through your children's eyes.

- Ooh, I like that. - And it just struck me, what brilliance, right? Dads really can swoop in with a win. So-- - That's so good. We forget what the world looks like from their level. - Yeah, from their perspective, when they get to see the tiniest bug that we step over, right, or a really cool pattern on a leaf or a gnarly twisted twig and they find those things so fascinating and I'm too busy as an adult doing adulting things, so I had to remind myself, slow down and realize they are seeing this for the very first time and enjoy it because your first time is over.

So enjoy their first time and watch them in their world interacting through their eyes. - The beauty of it, and that's attending. We've been talking about NCC, the five core habits for a while, and that's attending. And little children attend. They pay attention to what's in front of them way better than we do naturally.

And I don't want to breed that out of them. I don't want to hurry them through the world not giving them time to attend to all the little things that they see and all the differences they might perceive and everything that their senses could tell them. One person suggested to this thinking about it mom to go outdoors as much as possible.

In fact, to even use the outside as the classroom whenever you can. And I thought that was a very inspired suggestion. Just getting back in touch with nature is a great thing. - There is just something beautiful and grounding about a blanket on a beautiful park or a grassy yard under the shade of a tree and just watching, watching the clouds in the sky, watching the bugs go past, watching the ants marching in a line and the simplicity and the silence of it, even if it is a noisy environment that just calms your soul and reminds you that the Lord has made more than just you.

And he's built this world with you in mind. And so we should enjoy it and soak it up, right? - Yes, that's great. That is very, very good advice. - All right, somebody else said, this is what you need to collect as you begin to homeschool. Crayons, paint, a picnic blanket and sidewalk chalk.

What do you think about those suggestions? - I loved those suggestions. Again, where were these ideas when I first got started? I wish I would have had a notebook in my daughter's hands at all times to just draw what you see. Come home and tell daddy about your day when you're done with your day.

And he's getting off work and taking off his shoes and sitting down for dinner and tell him a story about what you drew and be more of a participant in your own world, rather than a bystander, engaging fully with what it is that you do and how best to do it, but with some crayons.

- Yeah. - With some crayons and sidewalk chalk, draw big, draw small, just draw. - Yes, yeah, I love that. It gives our kids a way to express what they're seeing, what they're learning about, but sometimes also what they're feeling. I can remember watching my girls draw and I could sometimes tell when they were disturbed, when they were angry or sad about something, by watching the way, sometimes by what they would draw, but watching the way that they would draw.

It just gave me a window into their emotions sometimes. So I loved that. We have, at our house, we have always had a craft closet. And so we put, we called it plain on one side paper. My girls were very prolific drawers and writers and we could not afford to keep them in paper.

So we recycled the pages that my husband created of sermon copies. And so we called it plain on one side paper. So we had a box of plain on one side paper and we had beads and clay and glitter, which was strictly monitored, I must admit. And markers and crayons and string and stray pieces of cardboard.

We kept all kinds of things. And I will tell y'all, my girls are grown now. They are married. I have a grandson now, but we still have a craft closet and the girls will still call home and say, "In the craft closet, is there any orange yarn? Or do you still have plaster of Paris?

And do we have any sun stickers?" And almost every time I'm able to say yes, because the craft closet is something that we added to over the years. In fact, one person said that a craft closet that you keep adding to is a great idea for holiday gifts. Like you could tell your in-laws or your kids' friends who say, "Well, what's something I could get them for Christmas, art supplies, craft supplies?" I loved having, both of my girls had their own box that had colored pencils and tape and scissors and a glue stick and a ruler.

One of them, one year, asked for a hole punch, a little hole punch, and I thought, "I don't know why you want that and it's probably gonna make a mess. We're gonna do, I'm gonna let you have that." They had their own box. So that kind of stuff was super important.

It gave them their own materials that they had charge over that they could use to make whatever their imagination dreamed up. - Oh yeah, and just being able to work their little fingers, right? Crafting is working your brain and your fingers. So when they're trying to sew together two pieces of a material for a blanket for their doll or they're cutting up scraps of colored paper to put on a montage of some sort or a collage, it just, they're working their brains and their fingers and it's fun to watch my daughters crinkle their little faces up as they're trying to make something happen that they have a vision but they just can't figure out how to execute that vision.

And sometimes I join in on the craft time and sometimes I just sit back and it's better than watching television because it's unfolding, it's like live entertainment for us. - I love the experimentation that happens and they do, they learn a lot about cause and effect that way. They learn try, try again if something doesn't work out or sometimes the thing that you envision in your mind comes out much differently through your fingers but that's a great lesson to learn and it is a lesson that is caught more easily than taught and so for them to have that experience, it's really good.

And one friend and I thought this was a lovely piece of advice, I was kind of high strung as a new homeschooler and as a type A person, this friend said, "Don't fret over the mess." - Yeah. - I had a hard time with that in the beginning. - You and me both, I felt like I wasn't doing a good enough job as a homemaker if my home didn't look like an Etsy board or a Pinterest board or it didn't look magazine ready and I had a couple extra loads of laundry or a few dishes in the sink and I'll tell you what, like when I told you I never took a nap that I regretted, I will take a messy kitchen and especially if it comes with some scraps of paper and some strings that are from a recent craft project over a well-tended two paper but board children any day and there's ways to incorporate education with not just academics but your education with keeping a tidy house.

I'm not saying live in utter disgust but there's ways to dance and sing and practice your memory work or practice your times tables, things like that while you're putting away the clean dishes. - Yes, absolutely. - Don't let chores rule your schedule. That's what I would tell 25-year-old Katie Beth.

- Yes, oh, I love that. I love that and you don't want your children to feel like keeping your house clean is more important than playing with them or exploring with them or reading with them or really almost anything with them. You don't want them to feel like that your house is more important to you than they are.

- Indeed, yeah. Some people were very specific and the things they were telling this new person to begin to accumulate math manipulatives, did you guys have manipulatives, Katie Beth? - Oh, and you know what, if I'm gonna be honest with you, I think they were used as like building blocks and toys more than math manipulatives.

And that was okay because they were seeing something and using it in a different way while still playing with math and realizing this block of eight can only go this far. So I'm gonna need to add these blocks of fours to get what I wanted with it. But yes, we have more math minutes.

Even today, I can't let these go. I think I'm gonna keep them until I have grandkids. - Oh yeah, yeah, I know. I still have all my Cuisinair rods and all my little snap blocks and the girls. We used them. We use them sometimes even when the girls were older because they helped with percentages even.

So anyway, I never regretted those things either. Somebody even said a laminator. Did you have a laminator? - I took forever to buy a laminator and I don't know why. I think my older daughter was in challenge A before I ever bought a laminator. And I remember after that year, I looked at my husband and said, "What took me so long?" - Isn't that funny?

- And we still have things from that year that I had made and laminated that she still uses. So it can be dangerous though. Watch out. You'll find yourself wanting to laminate everything. Yes. - That's hilarious. That's hilarious. Well, I am like super shocked to look up and realize that we've been talking for about 40 minutes already.

I know. And so I actually may ask you to come back another time, Katie Beth, if you will. - I would be honored. - Because one, I had several people who when we were asking about, what would you tell this mom who is considering homeschooling and is not really sure if it's for them or how to get started?

I had several people say, "Oh man, she really needs to get hold "of a Scribblers at Home resource book. "The Scribblers at Home Recipes from Lifelong Learners." Somebody said, "It's a lovely book of vision "for moms of young ones "that Scribblers helps us find joy in the journey "and helps us find a gentle rhythm of family learning." And I would say as moms and dads start off on this homeschool journey, you've heard Katie Beth and I say, don't be too married to a routine and don't just bring public school home and make your kids sit at a desk all the time.

I tell young moms, if you pray together, play together, read together, explore together and serve together every day, then you've had a good homeschool day. And that really is, that's what Scribblers encourages parents to do and equips mom and dads to do. So I'd really like to talk about how Scribblers can help parents pursue those ideas from the very beginning.

So would you come back and talk to me about that another time? - I would be more than honored, yes ma'am. - I would be so glad to do that with you. I wanna ask you one last question before you go. Katie Beth, what makes you an everyday educator?

- Oh, what a wonderful question. I would say curiosity. I think modeling curiosity for my children is the starting point, but then pausing and watching their curiosity take hold and watch their investigations helps to guide our homeschool more than anything else. Just having a sense of wonder and curiosity about our world and about our place in the world, but more importantly about our relationship with God.

- I love that, I love that curiosity. That's awesome, that's awesome. Well, listeners, I hope that this has been helpful to you, either for you as you are beginning your homeschooling journey, or as you're thinking, oh, I wonder if I need to make some kind of shift. I wonder if there's some other way that our family could grow together as we learn about God's world together, a way to build a family culture of learning.

I hope this has been good for you, and I do hope that you'll join us the next time as we talk a little bit about how scribblers can help families, not just families of four to eight year olds, but families of every age build a culture of family learning together at home.

I also want to give you guys another heads up about a great event where you could perhaps find a homeschool mentor like Katie Beth was talking about earlier, our National Events Weekend for 2024 will be here before you know it, even though that's not till May, but what will really be here before you know it is the registration opening for National Events Weekend.

Registration opens soon, November the 1st. So if you are curious about National Event Weekend and what you and your family could do if you traveled to Southern Pines at the beginning of May next year, then I would encourage you to learn more by going to classicalconversationsfoundation.org. It is a great weekend.

We've got our regular national conference where you get to hear talks from homeschool leaders like Lee Bortons and Robert Bortons, where you will meet other homeschoolers and hook up perhaps with a mentor of your very own national commencement happens during that weekend. And this year, the National Memory Master Championship will happen that weekend and you could see some of those events.

So if you're interested and you want to find out more, go to classicalconversationsfoundation.org. We hope to see your family there next May, but I for sure hope to see you or hear you next time on the podcast. Katie Beth, thank you for being with me and I'll look forward to our next conversation.

- Thank you so much, Lisa. - Bye guys. (gentle music) (music fades)