Launching: 4th Year of The Little Way Homeschool!

Next time I decide to launch a Substack newsletter, I won’t do it right before I start a new homeschool year. Sorry, folks! I got kinda in the weeds for awhile there. I’m back!

We started our fourth year of The Little Way Homeschool last Monday, August 7th!

Obligatory front stoop first day group pic

Jane, 13

Walter, 12

Harry, 10

Dorothy, 7

Gloria, 4

Helen, 2

It was a fun first morning because we got to attend our parish’s 8:15 Mass as a family and meet up with other homeschooling families afterward on the playground. We made our way home to officially start our school day, and it went off without a hitch!

The year is off to a smooth start. We had a wonderful summer, but we were ready to get back into a regular routine. We are carrying on with our Charlotte Mason philosophy of education through a Catholic lens. 4 days a week we will be home doing our thing. We decided to join a weekly co-op with other Catholic homeschooling families the fifth day of the school week. No matter how hard we tried in the past, it was just too difficult to create reliable, ongoing opportunities for community without cobbling together a bunch of extracurriculars and living in the van. We had our first co-op meeting last week, and we are thrilled to be part of it! We really missed feeling like we were part of a larger community, and we feel very blessed to be joining so many wonderful families.

I’m getting better at flexibility and being the boss of our schedule instead of letting it be the boss of us. The biggest challenge has been fitting all of our favorite things into 4 days of instruction since we have 1 school day dedicated to co-op. We’re finding our rhythm, and the kids seem happy about all of our book selections.

The house doesn’t look like a *complete* disaster, everyone is getting fed, everyone (including me!) is getting plenty of rest, and I don’t feel like I got hit by a truck by the end of each day. I’m definitely not getting to everything, though. I’m just getting better at prioritizing and letting the things that can’t be top of my list go. If you want proof, check out my Amazon of a vegetable garden! Speaking of which: Who knows how to can homemade tomato sauce? I’m new to the world of canning and have about a million paste tomatoes ready to be canned.

I love our messy homeschooling lifestyle. It’s not easy, it exposes all of our faults, we get on each other’s nerves, but we have so much time together to turn things around and get it right. Begin again, begin again, begin again! I’d say that my only regret is not beginning homeschooling sooner, but I know I wasn’t ready to begin any sooner than we did. There was a lot of interior work God had to do before I could take it on. I’m so thankful for the amount of time I’m getting with the kids and the moments we have to connect one on one throughout the day. I had no idea we would have so many pockets of peace and connection amidst the chaos.

I’m excited to be back to writing more because this format will allow me to get into the nitty gritty of how we homeschool. I hope it will be a source of encouragement to other families. I look forward to sharing specific details about things like oral and written narrations, opening ceremonies, the beauty loop, teaching language arts (reading, spelling, grammar, dictation, etc.).

Homeschooling takes up a good chunk of my time and energy, so I imagine I’ll dedicate a fair amount of this newsletter sharing about that, but I promise that won’t be all! Just like when I was podcasting, I’ll muse about marriage, parenting, books, movies, conversations I’m hearing and having, and whatever else comes to mind.

Please let me know if you have specific questions or topics you’d like me to write about. I look forward to using this space to start conversations about the things that matter to me, and I hope I’ll get to hear from you!