I’m talking to you, homeschooling parents! It is so easy to be exhausted from the home-school year, slam the textbooks shut whether you completed them or not, and focus on summer fun! However, before you move to the fun, sit down and reflect and evaluate the past 9 months. This helps you to be honest, take some of the pressure off of feeling like a failure, and helps you to have a game plan for next fall.

I have found this helpful not just because everything is still fresh, but it also helps to give perspective. Make a list of highs and lows with pros and cons. If your overwhelmed mind can’t come up with any highs, just all the lows, then this is needed even more! Think through each child, each subject, each activity. Make a list of what was good and what was a struggle for each child. Academic struggles for some can make it feel like the whole year was a failure. But my children that had a more difficult time with school, often had amazing success stories throughout the year in music, crafts, character, or even socialization improvements!

NOTE: You could even do a condensed version of this each month throughout the school year and then just look at those lists.

I think there are two parts to this exercise. One is to help you gain courage for the journey that is homeschooling. For many of us, this is a life-long commitment and sometimes we can feel like we are not doing it well. The other thing that this does is offer valuable perspective for what did work and what did not. Maybe you need to drop a few activities for the next year or switch curriculum if you notice all your children struggled with science. That is the beauty of the choices you have as a homeschooling parent. Finding the tools that are beneficial for the child/ren you have! What works for your friend’s family, might not work for yours. And that is actually awesome!

So please take a moment and take notes and take courage! You won’t regret it.

P.S. This is the face of my home-schooled student who actually finished 10th grade at the end of March! He scheduled all of his assignments and did extra so that he could be more free to help with farming this spring. This is the goal to work ourselves out of a job and have them take ownership of their goals!