Learning By Doing and Other Confessions

What's my homeschool style? Great question, let’s see if I can find an answer.

A quick note, because this turned into a very lengthy piece, and I know you are a busy, so I’m releasing it in two parts, one today and one next week.

Part 1:

As I’ve mentioned, I didn’t set out to homeschool, it was a one year COVID pivot. My plan was to will my way through it with a little grace and a lot of Chardonnay. Because I had never thought I would home educate, I didn’t have a Pinterest board at the ready, I hadn’t googled how to homeschool. I didn’t read the how-to books. Spoiler alert, I still haven’t. I’d never heard of Charlotte Mason, and I thought Waldorf was just a famous salad. I started homeschooling so quickly, I didn’t have the time to research and plan. I just winged it. How bad could it be, it was just one year.

So, I did what was easiest and quickest. All-in-one curriculum box, scope and sequence already mapped out, no prep required, basically traditional school shipped to my door. I wasn’t crafting an educational journey, fostering a love of learning in my offspring. I didn’t know homeschool philosophies were a thing you could choose. I just thought you did school at home, so I chose whatever looked most like school as I knew it. Just learn by doing. It’s only one year.

Well, it sucked. We burned out super quickly because it turns out running five subjects like five separate class periods, at home, for three separate kids who knew perfectly well it was still just mom playing “teacher,” was not sustainable. Now that one year was turning into permanent homeschool, we needed a plan. So I’d like to tell you I got my act together and researched the crap out of homeschool, Pinterest boards and all. Nope, not even a little. So I’m not an all-in-one box kinda gal, fine. I went the complete opposite direction instead. I started to piece it all together myself, a curriculum here, a unit study there, subject by subject, kid by kid. It was like some kind of misguided recipe, a little of this and a little of that, and tah-dah homeschool. It was exhausting.

So, here I am today typing this out like some kind of internet confessional. Forgive me, for I have educated by the seat of my pants. Honestly, it’s not that I’m morally opposed to the idea of subscribing to a particular philosophy. In fact it’s probably advisable. It can be helpful for self-accountability, keeping on course when life gives you detours, and making you feel less disorganized. I’ve just, truthfully, never gone back to do the research. I’m still learning by doing, making all my plans, seven years later. Why label anything now?

Well because, at 3 am, like most perimenopausal women do, I started thinking. I thought about the community of women I’m writing for, and it occurred to me that there might be a mom out there right now who is considering homeschooling someday. She might be approaching from a different situation, not as a quick pivot, but just a legit option when her kids reach school age. I think that’s fantastic. That’s why I like to show up here and write about what homeschool life really looks like. The good, the bad, the crazy.

So friends, let’s learn together. I want to preface all this with a warning. I am not a homeschool expert, nor do I play one on this blog. I did a very broad overview search on these philosophies. Every homeschooler I know takes these labels and does something a little different with them. You might read my take on a style, decide I missed the point entirely, and go do it your own way. Good. I’m not handing out membership cards. I’m not even sure we need to name any of this. But if you need a quick overview, I’ve got you. Hopefully I saved you a little time in researching. Let’s get to it.

Classical

What it is: Learning built on the three stages of the “Trivium,” timed to how a kid’s brain changes as they grow. Little kids are sponges, so the grammar stage is all soaking up facts, memorizing, chanting, building the raw material. Around middle school they get argumentative on cue, so the logic stage leans right into that and teaches them to question things, analyze, and take an argument apart. By high school comes the rhetoric stage, where they learn to gather all of it up and actually say something clear and convincing. Great books and often Latin run through the whole thing. The book everyone points to is Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well-Trained Mind.

What it looks like: In a homeschool, this usually kicks off your morning at the kitchen table with memory work, you and the kids chanting math facts, timelines, and grammar rules together, the same songs on repeat until they’re stuck for life. As your older ones come up, you swap the drilling for discussion, sitting together over a great book while you ask why a character did that, or whether the argument actually holds up. Latin gets worked in as vocabulary and translation, usually with a program carrying it since most of us are pretty rusty in Latin. Writing builds year over year, from copying good sentences when they’re small toward real essays later on. And a lot of classical homeschoolers lean on a weekly co-op for the discussion and the accountability, so some of it happens at your table and some with a group working the same material.

Where I land: I wanted to like this one more than I do, because the core idea is honestly great. Teaching a kid how to think instead of just what to think? Yes please. And matching how you teach to how their brain is actually working that year is the kind of intentional that makes my planner heart flutter. Here’s where it comes apart for me. I figured I was already doing a version of this, since I map out our years within an inch of their lives. Classical wants you to change how you teach at each phase, not just what’s on the shelf, and that is a much bigger lift than I’ve got in me this far in. Pile on the heavy Latin and the Western canon, which is a whole lot of very specific content my kids are not exactly begging for, and it lands as a pass. Also, seven years deep, I still cannot tell you what a declension is, and I have made my peace with that.

Charlotte Mason

What it is: A gentle but surprisingly rigorous method from British educator Charlotte Mason, built on the belief that kids are born persons, whole people with real minds, not empty jars you pour facts into. Instead of textbooks she used “living books,” books written by someone who clearly loved the subject, and she had a name for the dull, watered-down alternative: twaddle. Lessons stay short on purpose, capped by age, because the theory is a young brain can only truly pay attention for so long, sometimes grown up brains too. Kids show what they learned by narrating it back in their own words instead of taking a quiz. Around all of that she wove in regular nature study, poetry, and art and music appreciation, plus a big emphasis on building good habits early, what she called laying down the rails.

What it looks like: Your morning is a string of short, quick lessons, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes each for the littles. You gather the kids on the couch and read aloud from a living book, then have each of them narrate it back to you in their own words, no quiz required. There’s a little copywork or dictation pulled from a beautiful passage, a short math lesson, maybe a poem or a few minutes of a composer while everyone’s still sitting. Afternoons open up at home for a nature walk with a nature journal that, let’s be honest, gets used more some weeks than others, plus handicrafts at the kitchen table and time out in the yard. Your formal school day usually wraps sooner than people expect, because each lesson is so short even though you’re touching a lot of them.

Where I land: Turns out I’m more Charlotte than I knew. She talked about “living books” versus “twaddle,” and once you can spot twaddle you cannot unsee it. The short lessons changed our whole day, twenty focused minutes beats an hour of me talking while their mind quietly leaves the room. And I’d been having my kids narrate for years, because having them “teach” me back was easier than quizzing them. So maybe I’m not classical. Turns out I’m a little bit Charlotte fancy over here and didn’t even know it. The only thing for us, the nature walks, the cuddling on the couch with the book in hand, well I tried, but in the end we missed that boat. So I can’t say this is truly my method, but there are some commonalities.

Montessori

What it is: A child-directed method from Dr. Maria Montessori who built the whole thing on watching how kids actually learn when you let them. The room, the “prepared environment,” is set up so children can move around freely and choose their own work off low, open shelves. The materials are hands-on and often self-correcting, so a kid can feel when they’ve got it right without a grown-up hovering. Children get long, uninterrupted stretches to work on what they’ve chosen, inside clear limits, and ages mix a few ages together in three-year spans so the older ones model and the younger ones stretch. The adult is more guide and observer than lecturer, and the unofficial motto is “follow the child.”

What it looks like: At home the heart of the day is a long, open work period. You set up a corner or a low shelf with the materials, and a kid pulls one down, carries it to the table or a mat on the floor, and works through it at their own pace, sometimes alone, sometimes with a sibling doing their own thing right beside them. Instead of running a lesson from the front of a room, you pull one kid aside and show them a new material when they’re ready for it, then back off and let them practice while you start something with another kid or fold a load of laundry. With the littles a lot of it is practical-life work, pouring, buttoning, helping in the kitchen, that looks like play but is quietly building focus. Math and language come through objects they can hold long before they turn into symbols on paper. You won’t see many worksheets or tests, and your school corner stays weirdly tidy, because putting the work away is part of the work.

Where I land: Lots to love here, and I see how it could work for the right kind of family. The mixed-age idea makes sense for homeschooling, because if you don’t have twins, your kids are different ages. The self-direction, the tidy homeschool corner, it all sounds idyllic. That’s where I’m not sure it would work for my crew. I wouldn’t described us as quiet, diligent workers. I used to have myriads of educational games, sensory boxes, and art supplies at the ready. The kids enjoyed them for a while but grow board quickly. It just felt like too much work for too little structured learning for our home.

That will do it for Part 1, more to come next week. I’d truly love to hear your thoughts because I’m learning along with you!