It’s here and is nearly gone faster than a racehorse: the merry month of May. Over the years I have learned May takes more schedule juggling than Christmastime. But, we love it, and not just because spring has sprung. Just like the kids, the relief of school being out, or nearly over, is a great weight off homeschool moms, too.

After 35 years of homeschooling, I have been done for a few years now. I thought some of my reflections on my long homeschool career might encourage you, a little like that coach on the sidelines that tells you the end is around the corner, or “just one more hill.” Before you pitch all the schoolbooks out of the way and turn to summer freedoms, I encourage you to take a quiet afternoon or evening to reflect on your own past year. Below are some personal memories of my homeschool journey and the varying results I have observed in the ensuing years. Indulge me in my musings, or skip to the end and read my thoughts on how you could benefit from a bit of reflection on the 2023-2024 year.

I’ll start with child number one. I think you all know her pretty well. I had no idea what I was about when I launched into teaching at home. No one else did either—no homeschool companies, no educational conferences, no permission to homeschool. She was an eager student, always ready for something new, very self-motivated. You probably can tell. I sent her back to school for third grade, where she remained, then went to Wheaton College. When she graduated, she was not a homeschool advocate. Far from it. She had no Charlotte Mason education—I hadn’t even heard of Charlotte Mason till she was in junior high. I think you have heard and seen enough from her to agree with me that it’s never too late and that you should not regret the choices of the past. Our children are the Lord’s and she is a model of diligent, self-sacrificing love and care for her own children. The atmosphere, discipline, and life of our home had good cultivation for what is beautiful fruit. What really put her over the edge was reading Charlotte Mason’s volumes aloud to me. Charlotte Mason is very convincing.

My daughter Lydia was homeschooled for a year, went to public school for two years, came home for two years, went back for six years, and came home her last year. In spite of this vacillation, she’s not a mess. Far, far from it. She’s been leading a Charlotte Mason group and teaching her boys for four years. She is the first to admit that teaching  is not her favorite thing in life to do. But, even her barely six-year-old is reading, they all love to read, and she has influenced many others to keep on keeping on. She is also a hard worker, a lover of beauty and all things nature and books. Her life is hard with four adopted boys, and she perseveres and lives up to her middle name, Joy.

Jonny could not let his older sisters outdo him. He taught himself to read. I took him to public school for kindergarten because we had started a business that was overwhelming me, not to mention an unexpected pregnancy that threatened to send me over the edge, and he said on the way to school, “Don’t worry about me, Mom. I am a giant.” He came home for two years, went back to public school for five, came home for the last three years of high school—with the Charlotte Mason method as much as I understood it to be at the time. In those last three years, especially, he became a lover of history. I might mention that I had no hope for this during his high school years as I so often found him asleep with his book on his face. At 20, he went into the construction business, went to college two years later, and his children are being homeschooled with Charlotte Mason’s method. I guess it’s hard to be a member of this family and not make that wonderful choice. You can’t argue with the results. His children are children of innumerable talents, crazy about books, always eager to serve others.

Grace was my Charlotte Mason guinea pig. I read For the Children’s Sake and pitched the workbooks. Thank goodness. She was always more interested in what was outside the window than on the table in front of us. She fell in love with crafts at two years old and now is the creative genius behind a thriving jewelry business. I’m wearing a necklace etched in gold she made by hand with three of my favorite flowers. That passion for nature developed a good eye that carried over to this skill and helped put her husband through college. (She went there herself for two years as a piano performance major. You probably remember me sharing about her narrating the lectures on her drive home.) She started her own ballet studio when she was 11, her piano studio when she was 14. 

Isaac was our gift through adoption. He was a terrified little toddler when we received him. My hectic, but happy life suddenly got really hard. Information on trauma and attachment was scant to nonexistent then. I’ve learned it all firsthand in the school of hard knocks. He could not sit still when school began, had been talking only a year at the time, and it took five grueling years to get him to read for himself. We bought a farm mostly for him and his younger adopted brother, and he learned to carry through with chores, care for chickens, milk a cow, chase pigs and sheep. I often felt our school mornings were completely fruitless and hopeless. I read him things he could not narrate. Yet, he could narrate things I did not understand. He loved Shakespeare, threw tantrums over math, fought me on French, learned to write with a calligraphy pen (his big sister Emily’s brilliant idea). By the high school years, it became clear he had some serious emotional problems. He sat sullenly over his books. I almost gave up in despair. It seemed he got nothing out of most lessons and my attempts to move through them was a joke. 

Yesterday, three books arrived in the mail. He’s 22 and it was his latest purchase. He reads all the time, history and geography mostly. He is frequently telling me things I am astounded to hear, only to say, “Mom, don’t you remember so-and-so book you made me read?” I didn’t know he was doing more than turn the pages. His boss says he is the most valuable employee at the company—always on time, always doing more than is asked, always respectful, has a good work ethic, and is reliable. He has a fulltime job, bought his own car which he maintains, organizes sports events for homeschool kids, is a quiet, responsible, gentle-hearted boy whose loyalty to his nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents is humbling. 

And then, last but not least, if you haven’t long since lost interest, there is Luke. Highly verbal and highly social, he rebelled against learning the names of letters, trying to read. If it wasn’t easy, he wouldn’t try. He loved ballroom dance, choir, basketball, and science experiments. That was pretty much it. I like to joke that I never knew what a teenager was till Luke became one. The behavior issues disrupted school. He was unmotivated, lazy, and gave up to the point that a year ago he said he would not do another lesson unless we let him go to public school. Obviously, our decision to allow this was based on more than this threat.

So he went. It was heartbreaking for me, but my heart was broken over more than just school with him. He barely was allowed to attend because his academic testing scores were so low. Ironically, due to COVID, he had to do his first nine weeks at home! When he went, we got calls from his teachers, his counselors, the coach, the principal. Sometimes it was about delinquency in school work in the beginning. Over the course of this year he has won student of the month, twice. His teachers say he is always respectful, helpful, willing, the leader, the kid others trust, go to, want for their friend. 

I got a call one day from the principal saying that a student had an accident in the hall and made a terrible mess and Luke immediately ran to help and started cleaning up the entire hallway. At last week’s academic award ceremony, he won “Most Improved Student in English.”  He chose to go to summer school to earn extra credits. 

What I most want to convey is that I was learning along the way. I didn’t know how anything would turn out. I can’t claim my children are who they are because of Charlotte Mason, but I know for a fact that her method expanded their tastes and horizons more than I even know. Even my youngest, who left homeschool behind said, “Mom, I appreciate this kind of education. I know you’re trying to give me many, many things, and that’s not why I need to go to public school.” He doesn’t have to tell me this. I hear him singing his old folk songs in the shower, and know his vocabulary in his classes now came from the rich literature he was exposed to. I have no doubt he will return to what he was planted in. 

So what is the point of this litany of memories? Just that it is that time of year when we wrap things up. This past winter I purged tons of old notebooks, written narrations, books and planners. My youngest went through all his own stuff and saved a whole box. I was in tears reading his second grade narrations.

So take some time out, choose some samples of their handwriting, or written narrations. Save some pictures of nature walks or projects. Write out some of the good memories you have from this year. Write a few things that were funny, a few things that were beautiful, and a few things that were hard. Tuck them all away. Next year, or ten years from now, they will mean so much more.

~Liz