Wind Rose Homeschool Academy Blog

Teaching and parenting are not simple, easy tasks for anyone, including us. There has been a lot of change in our lives and the lives of our children over the last few months.  We are all adjusting to the change from public school to homeschool. We have changed our primary location for our learning time, which led to less time for the adults to collaborate and less opportunity for all our children to feel connected to their adults.  I’m not going to paint a perfect picture of our homeschooling adventure. We have had some seriously rough days so far this year, and I recently found myself questioning, “Is homeschooling really right for us?” and, worse, participating in harmful self-talk: “This isn’t working.  I’m failing.”  I reached out to some great friends and colleagues, who reminded me that we are all going through some major transitions right now, and that we need to make time and space for the big feelings we are undoubtedly going to experience during this ...

Names matter.  Names are important.  They communicate our values and hopes.  They are a choice.  They are how we say, "This is what this thing is and what it means to us and what we hope it means to you." The weight of choosing the right words carries into all of our work with our children.  In his book Choice Words , Peter Johnston shows the power the language teachers use have in the way children learn and think about themselves. He writes, "Teachers play a critical role in arranging the discursive histories from which these children speak.  Talk is the central tool of their trade.  With it, they mediate children's activity and experience, and help them make sense of learning, literacy, life, and themselves."  Naming our group was a responsibility of much consequence; we were naming ourselves and our children, setting our roles in place.  Thus, we weren't going to take the naming of our homsechool group lightly. A wind rose is very simila...

Our first day of school as a homeschool group is just 5 days away, and we planning our first few weeks of mini-lessons, discussions that will set the tone for the first year of our learning together.  We are reading and organizing ways to introduce engagement, passion, curiosity, and growth mindsets. We will begin our collaboration time each day with a morning meeting, as many classes around the country do.  And that first day, there was a time in my past when my main goal for was to make sure all the rules were clear: No interrupting lessons, no getting up without permission, no late work.  I once started off the year with a lot of "No's".  I can only imagine my former students going home after that first day, plopping down on the couch, and feeling completely uninspired. This year, day 1, I have nothing planned.   Inspired by this Spring 2014 article from Teaching Tolerance, I am planning nothing for our morning meeting, other than asking the students two ...