My second summer class got postponed until August so I find myself with a little more breathing room now, which of course my mind is working to fill as fast as it possibly can. It’s amazing how quickly my brain is like: oh, you have time to reflect? Great, let’s do that. Lol. Ai yi yi.

It’s mainly taking the form of reflecting on our first year of homeschool/unschool/life school/home education whatever the eff you want to call it. I won’t speak for all homeschoolers because I can’t, but I know I - personally - resort to calling it homeschool just because that’s the framework most people understand when they see your kids at the playground during a school day. However, with that framework comes a whole lot of bias and baggage that actually isn’t what we’re doing at all…so I still struggle with how to define it and get frustrated that I feel like I have to justify it all to begin with. We aren’t recreating school at home, nor are my kids running feral through the woods…we are just learning all the time, and as a result it’s sort of hard to qualify. 

I’ve been having some long Marco Polos and in-real-life conversations with fellow parents on the journey and I don’t know - I keep wavering on whether or not I want to share more of our journey publicly. There’s a little fire in me that wants to, mainly because there are so many misconceptions, and it is not one size fits all, and I know how helpful it has been for me to witness others defining, and continuously redefining their experiences. When you dig into the community, you realize just how varied it is, which is why people started coming up with these other terms- unschool/lifeschool/worldschool/a total aversion to the word ‘school,’ etc. - in the first place. How do we define what we’re doing in a way that other people will understand? But, I also feel protective. And aware that, especially for mothers, sometimes the last thing we need is other people’s choices all up in our face. Ya know? Like me doing me/my family shouldn’t look like you doing you/your family. And yet, it is so, so helpful to find kinship with folks especially when going off the beaten path, and sharing is a way to do that. All this blathering to say, I’m slowly making peace with the fact that it doesn’t matter what I call it (nothing fully encompasses it anyway) and so to satisfy society’s needs I’ll call it homeschool and people can think whatever they want. Or maybe I’ll just say, “my kids aren't in school” for the shock factor :p. 

We didn’t have any sort of ceremonious end to our Kindergarten year. Honestly, the more “formal” learning we were doing (with our curriculum) just sort of fizzled out when I was in finals for grad school because - quite frankly - I didn’t have the bandwidth to do the planning I needed to do. So for the last two months it’s been lots of outdoor time, meet-ups with friends, free play, self-led things, potions and painting, mental math games, board games, baking, cooking, gardening, trips to the library/museums/our other favorite places and finishing up group classes for the season. At first I was feeling sort of guilty for not providing some beautiful ritual on the last day. I had every intention of letting summer be summer and letting go of homeschool until the fall. But all the learning we were doing is still happening, and I’m sensing that my kids are actually missing the rhythm we had established. Case in point: E already asking for homeschool stuff (which to her just means more formal structured learning). She’s literally looking for it in her day. So now I’m rethinking summer as a continuation. I would say, but “more free” than the school year, but…it’s not really cuz it’s all pretty free. But even that is interesting - that it’s ingrained in me that anything we do has to feel lighter because it’s summer. 

Homeschooling is many things, but one - I’m learning - is a never-ending discovery of where school lives in me, what I think school is, what education and learning are, and the ways I’ve been conditioned to think about it. I was resistant to continuing lessons over the summer only because that’s not what I grew up with. Summer was freedom. The school year was structured. But when you are creating a life that is a mix of both all the time, that doesn’t apply. I think I worried about how my kids would feel - E is aware that kids go to school and she doesn’t. That mainly came out this year in the form of her wanting to ride the school bus (our house has a really good view of it ha), and sometimes wondering what kids do all day. A cool/proud moment for me was when one of her school friends asked, “What did you do all day in homeschool?” and E got to share her experience, and I got to hear her take ownership over it. Heart explosion. Anyway, I figured summer would put them on the same page. But she’s teaching me what education is to her. The learning doesn’t stop, even when summer starts. So I’m rediscovering summer, and together we’ll be rewriting what it means and how it feels.