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Season 8: Organize Homeschool Stuff We homeschool without a schoolroom. Like many homeschoolers, the kitchen table is where much of our work happens. We use our kitchen table, we use our dining room table, we use our couch, and we make due with the space we have. I could write up a great-sounding post about why we don’t have a school room on principle. Something about school blending in with real life and not being contained in a separate box. But the truth is that I’d rather have a playroom than a schoolroom, a place for the toddlers and preschoolers to freely set up a block city complete with railroad tracks, a place for the air hockey table we inherited, a place for the computers that are used both for work and for play. And our house layout doesn’t have the space for both a playroom and a schoolroom. Read the original post: Homeschooling Without a School Room Listen: Simple Sanity Saver: Morning Time Memorization Hacks The second thing you need to do for morning time memory is gather your memory work review material. What memory work have you already learned? What songs are already part of your family culture? Start a list. Morning Time doesn’t have to be long or complicated. We all start where we are and just take the next step. Even if you have no memory work at all under your belt just start with Psalm 1 and begin building. Whenever we set out to do something we should know what end we’re aiming for, what goal we are attempting, what point we want to make. I know when I think of memory work I’m tempted to envision my five children lined up in a row in perfect unison and cheerful voices reciting an entire Psalm. Of course, their shirts would even be clean at the same time and that just goes to show this is totally an imaginary scenario. But what I actually want is to be never done with a piece of memory work. What I want is for it to be planted within us, to grow and blossom in its time, for us to grow and love God’s Word and poetry and beautiful language more and more and more the more time we spend with it. If we desire to commit to memory whole thoughts, entire passages, whole chapters, we must commit to investing lots and lots of time. This is hard because in the short term we rarely have anything to show for it. With a handful of random verses memorized a child can stand up, recite them perfectly, earn a prize, and then empty his mind so he can learn the next set. Mom gets the moment of performance glory and the child gets some candy. But if we want to learn whole passages, if we want to learn the Creeds, the old hymns of the faith, and beautiful poetry, we will have to be content postponing seeing the fruits of our investments. It will take years, and not weeks, but it’s worth it to stick at that review and continue growing those seeds. It will be worth it. You can find my memory work binder tutorials here. Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!

Season 8: Organize Homeschool Stuff We are doing something new starting this season and that is kicking things off with a FAQ episode. Joining me to do this is Virginia Lee Rogers. Virginia Lee and I have known each other online for years and she is now helping me with customer support so if you send an email to Simplified Organization or Simply Convivial you might just get a reply back from Virginia Lee and I want you to get to know her as well because she is a great resource. She is the homeschooling mom of five children and also an ENTJ. So, we have a very similar approach which will be fun to talk about. Mystie: And so, Virginia Lee, you want to tell us a little bit more about you and where people can find you online? Virginia Lee: Yes, I’d love to. I live in Colorado and I’ve been married for 17 years. We have five kids and we are a Charlotte Mason homeschooling family. And just sort of all different personalities in our crew but I guess probably the best way to describe us is just joyfully chaotic, sort of organized chaos but lots of joy. It’s not quiet at our house. And online, I don’t keep a blog, but I am on Instagram quite a bit. You can find me on — I run an Instagram bookshop called “The Jolly Reader” sort of a play on “The Jolly Rogers” since that’s our family’s name. And then I am also one of the nine curators for Charlotte Mason in Real Life. That’s on Instagram at CMIRL, we share posts from the community that show how different families are implementing Charlotte Mason’s philosophies but in a practical, day to day life. It’s a really joyful community filled with a lot of encouragement but also just really showing how you can take Charlotte Mason’s philosophy and live it out practically day by day. * Jolly Reader on Instagram * CharlotteMasonIRL on Instagram Mystie: That’s fun. So this season, season 8 of the Simply Convivial podcast is going to be about organizing homeschool stuff. So I thought we’d just have a brief conversation about how stuff gets organized in our homes. I think it’s easy when you say “organized” to start thinking of the magazines or the Pinterest where organized means everything looks really pretty and looking pretty is nice especially if you’re a personality who’s good at that but I’m not. Really, being organized is about having a home for things and knowing where things go. So everything has a place so that then you can put it away because it has a place. So we’re going to talk about some of the ways that we give stuff homes in our homeschools. Virginia Lee, what kind of homes do you have in your homeschool? Virginia Lee: Well, I guess one of my biggest things is that I’m not a big stuff person so if I have the stuff in my house it has to have a home and if I can’t find a home for it, it probably means I don’t need it. So I guess that’s one of the biggest ways I look at stuff. In fact my kids give me a hard time, “Don’t throw this away, we’re going to put this here so mom can’t throw it away!” But the other big thing of what I think of when I’m going to organize stuff is I need it to be practical. I’m not very good, like you said, I’m not one of those personalities where everything is pretty and maybe always pleasing to the eye but with the way our crew works is that it needs to be practical, it needs to be sturdy, and it needs to be in places where we can actually use it. Mystie: Right. I think that’s key. Because we have a basement so I could reserve a shelf in the basement and put things away on the shelf downstairs where they’d be out of the way but if they’re too much out of the way I’ll end up not actually using them. Virginia Lee: Yes, we are the same way. We do school in all different locations in our home and so we don’t use a sc...

Season 7: Mom As Atmosphere We recite mottos during our Morning Time. I think the first place I encountered the idea was when listening to ACCS teacher training audio (back before there were CiRCE conferences or podcasts). The elementary classes of Logos School, at least back in the old days, had mottos they recited daily that then the teacher could call to mind when they were relevant. As a family, we already had a few little sayings – ways to keep a frequent command familiar, memorable, and pithy. Over the years I’ve collected mottos, adding to and subtracting from our repertoire, but finally settling down on a select few for this year. This year, these mottos are behind the daily tab of our binder, and most days we go over them quickly. We alternate this selection with a selection of pithy Shakespearean proverbs each term. These mottos are not only reminders for the kids. They are reminders for myself, as well. Read the original post: Morning Time Mottos for Moms & Kids Listen: Recommended Reading: Simple Sanity Saver: Repent. Rejoice. Repeat. To learn and grow ourselves, we must repeat our lessons. Knowing is not the same as doing, isn’t that the truth? Learning is not simply knowing. It is acting in accordance to what we know. Every day. So, learning is not a once-and-done thing. It’s daily bringing our actions in line with our knowledge. Yes, to learn and grow we have to expand our knowledge, but we also have to grow our capacity for living out the knowledge we have. Application – continual, daily application – is a part of learning. So when you have to do the dishes again, teach a math lesson again, put on a smile again, repent again, rejoice again, sweep the floor again, don’t pine for time to read more, thinking that’s real learning. It is, but so is the living it out. So embrace the daily repetitions, the daily opportunities to put into practice what we know. Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!