The Great Homeschool Sweep: A Different Kind of Back to Homeschool Preparation

Remember that show, Supermarket Sweep? It’s the one that aired on Lifetime back in the 90s and featured contestants who answered random questions to earn as much time as possible to shop their butts off in a fake supermarket. The goal? Even bigger prizes! Or at least that was the idea. Most of the contestants, however, just walked away with their neon-colored sweatshirts — no turkeys, no hams, no cash.

Back-to-homeschool preparation feels a bit like that famed game show, with moms populating Facebook groups and online forums seeking recommendations and sneak peeks of books, curriculum, and supplies so that the power-shopping can commence. Everything gets tossed into physical and virtual carts so that learning spaces can be laid out Instagram-pretty with schedules carefully outlined on overpriced planners. An unbelievable amount of energy is spent preparing the external environment and very little on preparing the internal one only to find that by the end of the year your dining area is a wreck and your child still doesn’t know the difference between an adjective and an adverb. Families essentially exhaust themselves, piling their carts full with no real prize at the end.

This is not to say that gathering curriculum and supplies and outlining your homeschool year is not important. As the old saying goes, “those who fail to prepare, prepare to fail.” But the real groundwork begins in the mind and the heart, and it’s truly what determines whether your homeschool year will go well.

Preparing Your Heart First

Before a single item is added to your to-buy list or any entry written into that shiny new planner, intrepid homeschool parents should ensure that they’re mentally and emotionally ready for the upcoming year.

Homeschooling is a demanding job. Parents are asked to juggle multiple roles simultaneously: parent, teacher, administrator, counselor, janitor, head cook in the home cafeteria, and everything else in between. This arrangement would be a challenge for anyone on any given day, but this is a way of life made permanent by the choice to home educate. And though parents chose this path because they have put their children's learning and their families above other worldly cares, they are still human beings with their own needs, their own doubts, and their own fears about what they can and cannot accomplish and about whether they are capable of donning all the hats that homeschooling asks them to wear. If you walk into a new school year carrying all that weight — the burden of last year's failures, the nagging doubt in your own abilities — you have unwittingly stumbled onto the path to burnout before the year has even begun.

How does one avoid such a fate?

Start with your own mind and heart.

Instead of leading with fear and doubt, ask yourself what you are most excited about this year. List ways that you and your child can pivot or change course should your best-laid lesson plans go awry. And ask yourself honestly: what do you need to let go of before you can show up fully for your child?

This is the practical mind and heart-work that helps you begin the school year grounded and present, and it makes for a more effective teacher than any shiny new package or printable on the market. Your child does not need a perfect parent; they need a present one. And presence begins with you.

What No Curriculum Can Give Your Child

Speaking of presence…

As good and as thorough as a curriculum is at shaping your child's learning, none can fully attend to your child's needs better than you can because you actually know your child. You’re the one who can tell that your eldest is shutting down out of frustration. You’re the one who knows that by 11:00AM your son needs his millionth snack break to power through the last of his math problems. And you’re the one who figured out that your youngest learns best in the early morning  (too early) with at least ten minutes of movement after breakfast to get warmed up for story time.

There’s no curriculum and no resource that knows those things. But you do, or you have the capacity to know them, and that is the gift of home education. You get the time to grow in relationship with your child, to truly know the person with whom you have been entrusted. And the depth of attunement possible between a parent-educator and a child when that relationship is tended with care is immeasurable. A child who feels safe, loved, and valued as a person and as a learner will thrive with almost any curriculum you put in front of them, and a child who feels misunderstood and disconnected from the parent teaching them will struggle with even the most carefully chosen resources.

So, before you spend another dollar on curriculum this fall, commit to knowing your child more deeply. The return on that investment will outlast any curriculum you could buy.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Tend to the Learner Before Tending to the Lessons

Once you have done that inner work and turned toward your child with fresh eyes, there is one more question worth sitting with before the first lesson begins.

Is my child actually ready?

As a parent-educator myself, I believe that every child has the capacity to learn, so when I say “readiness”, I am not suggesting your child merely having completed a set of prerequisite skills, though that matters too. I mean readiness in a much deeper sense: emotionally, relationally, and physically.

A child who spent last year feeling frustrated or behind in the expectations they had set for themselves may be walking into this year with more anxiety than excitement. And that child may need more time than August's lesson plans allow.

Consider a later or slower start, focusing on just a subject or two for a few weeks before laying out the entire feast. This gradual approach eases your child into the school year without the pressure to perform. A slower start does not mean waiting for perfect conditions that will never come. It means pausing long enough to recognize what your child needs most to begin. And sometimes that time, that simple reassurance that this year will be different, unrushed and more intentional, is all that is needed to bolster a child's confidence and revive their motivation.

Tend to the learner first. The lessons can wait. The books can wait. Your child cannot. And when you do return to the academics, more grounded, more connected, and more ready, everything that follows will go better for having waited.

This is preparation beyond the homeschool sweep. And quite possibly the soundest.