I’m taking a little break from the summer reading program today to make a small announcement. I am trying to contain my excitement here, because for me this is huge – HUGE, I tell you! (To quote my four-year-old.) My ebook is almost ready!!

Homeschool Planning eBookPin

See how pretty. And I promise it is practical and helpful too. I filled this book with all the information I usually give to a good friend who asks me about homeschool planning. It’s a topic I get geeky-excited about, and since excitement is usually infectious and I have no problems spouting advice or spitballing plans for hours at a time, I get asked about planning quite a bit. Now, it’s all in the book! Some people sing. Some people dance. Me? I talk planning.

I took some of the material from my homeschool planning series from this spring and then added about 60% more to flesh out the planning process.

Here’s a sneak-peek from the introduction:

Knowing you want to homeschool early on in your children’s life is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, I had years to research and plan for the first day of kindergarten. I had years to obsess over the perfect method of instruction, the perfect curriculum, the perfect day.

As you can likely guess, once we started homeschooling, my children did not fit neatly into my perfect plans. They had their own ideas, their own agendas, their own developmental timetables. It was a struggle to get them to sit for long stretches and soak up my carefully constructed units. My oldest did not read easily. She hated math. My second child was either clamoring to be a part of what we were doing and needing my attention or destroying another part of the house.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I had missed a very vital part of the planning process. In considering the vision I had of the perfect homeschool day, I missed the fact that my children are not perfect and neither am I (though I’m pretty close). My perfect plan ignored the most important factor of all: the person in front of me.

Make no mistake, I am not advocating totally child-led learning. Planning is a triad: the plan, the child, and the mother. Why was I creating an expectation for myself to spend hours outside studying nature when I hated being outdoors? I hate the heat, the bugs, the possibility of snakes. Ick. I don’t know a woodpecker from a warbler, and yet I felt guilty for not checking off my scheduled nature study box each week. The same goes for elaborate crafts, piles of cute printables, and morning calendar time. While these things work great for some homeschooling families (maybe even you!), they were simply not me.

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Dear Self: Why you stink at homeschool consistency

My planning epiphany came when I decided that I was no longer striving for the perfect homeschool plan. Instead I would strive for the perfect plan for us: the plan that I would actually implement and the plan that would work for my children. I threw out all of the things that were not working, shut out the noise from the homeschool “experts,” and blocked out the voices from my public school past. I took a long, hard look at who we are, what we will do, and the things we actually enjoy. Then I scheduled in those things, became a happier homeschool mom, and started to feel successful. Funny thing, my children thrived as well.

Bonus Material

The eBook, which will be available in PDF and Kindle formats comes bundled with some helpful bonus material:

  • All of my planning pages from the planning pack and the expansion pack plus a few new ones requested by readers.
  • Two audio interviews: one with Sarah Mackenzie on “Planning from a State of Rest” and Mystie Winckler on  “Overcoming Barriers: Working Your Plan in Your Real Day-to-Day.”
  • Several video tutorials and a folder of sample completed planning forms from homeschool moms.

My goal for release is July 1, but secretly I am hoping to have it out before then. 🙂 I will keep you posted. The special launch price for the book and bonus material will be $7.99 until July 18 and then $9.99 after that. If you want to be notified of the book’s release, be sure to sign up for my email list. Doing so will also get you an immediate download of some of the planning forms from the bonus pack.

Now, I am back to the salt-mines. Believe it or not, writing the book was the easiest part of this process, and I have work to do!

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