All the Mistakes I Made in My First Year of Homeschooling

My biggest mistake in our first year of homeschooling was expecting homeschooling to look like school at home.

I had made this huge decision to pull my kids out of a system that wasn’t working for them. I had already firmly decided that I did not want them shoved into that box anymore.

And then I brought them home and… tried to shove them into basically the exact same box.

Just, you know, at the kitchen table.

I Tried to Make Homeschool Look Like School

In my head, homeschool needed a schedule.

We would start at this time. We would do math at this time. Then language arts. Then this subject. Then that subject. We’d finish everything on the list and move along to the next thing.

Seems reasonable enough.

Except I was trying to keep four kids with ADHD on a strict schedule created and enforced by a parent who also has ADHD. Plus a tiny toddler terrorist, I was pregnant, we were selling a house, and moving 750 miles.

It was a mess.

Instead of taking advantage of the flexibility that homeschooling gave us, I was trying to recreate the structure we had just left. I hadn’t figured out yet that structure and rigidity are not the same thing.

We needed rhythms. We needed routines. We needed some predictability.

We did not need a bell schedule hanging on my refrigerator.

I Didn’t Prepare My Printable Curriculum Ahead of Time

This one is far less philosophical.

If you choose a printable curriculum, for the love of all things holy, PRINT IT.

Print the whole thing.

Do not be me.

I cannot tell you how many frustrated hours I spent trying to print lessons when we were already supposed to be doing school. Or how many lessons probably got skipped because I didn’t have something printed and ready to go.

I thought I could just print things as we needed them.

I could not.

If I could go back and do our first year again, I would print the entire year in advance, organize it by child and subject, and have everything ready to grab when we needed it.

There are enough moving parts when you’re homeschooling multiple children. “Where is page 47?” does not need to be one of them.

I Turned Unit Studies Into Another Checklist

This one is almost funny to me now because it completely defeated the purpose.

I wanted my kids to have the opportunity to actually explore what interested them. That was one of the things I loved about the idea of unit studies.

And then we’d start one and I’d see all the activities, worksheets, books and projects and decide…

We must do them ALL.

Instead of letting my kids get excited about something and follow that rabbit trail, I was worried about checking the boxes.

Finish the worksheet.

Do the activity.

Read the assigned pages.

Move on.

Which, ironically, was one of the reasons we left public school in the first place.

I had taken this beautiful opportunity to let my children explore something and somehow turned it into another list of assignments to complete.

I Didn’t Let Them Explore Their World Enough

I wish we had gone outside more.

I wish we had explored more.

I wish we’d spent more afternoons in nature, gone on more little adventures, followed more weird questions and stopped to investigate more things simply because somebody thought they were interesting.

But I was also very pregnant.

And very exhausted.

And trying to figure out how the heck to homeschool four children when I had never done this before.

Looking back, my kids probably would have learned just as much from an afternoon wandering around outside with me as they did from plenty of the worksheets I was so worried about finishing.

Probably more.

I wish I had understood sooner that learning didn’t always have to happen at the table.

I Thought I Needed to Find “The Curriculum”

I really thought there was going to be one.

The curriculum.

The one that would work.

The one I would buy, love, use with every child, and then confidently recommend to every new homeschool mom who asked me what curriculum she should use.

That has not been my experience.

I found things that I liked and then tried to make my kids like them too.

Sometimes I pushed a curriculum because I thought it was good instead of paying attention to the giant flashing signs my kids were giving me that said, “This is not how I learn.”

One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned through homeschooling is that the best curriculum in the world isn’t the best curriculum if it doesn’t work for the kid sitting in front of you.

I wish I had followed their lead sooner.

I wish I had paid more attention to how each of them learned instead of trying so hard to find something that worked for everyone.

I Didn’t Give Myself Any Grace

Nothing I did ever felt like enough.

If we didn’t finish everything I had planned, I felt guilty.

If we skipped a lesson, I felt guilty.

If we didn’t get outside enough, I felt guilty.

If someone else’s homeschool looked more enriching, more organized, more peaceful, or just better than mine, I wondered what I was doing wrong.

And somewhere in all of that guilt, I constantly felt like I was failing them.

Instead of reminding myself that this was exactly where we were all meant to be, I second-guessed my decision to pull them out of public school at least once a month.

Was I doing enough?

Were they learning enough?

Was I qualified enough?

Had I made the right decision?

I had brought them home because I knew in my gut that what we were doing before wasn’t working. But every hard homeschool day somehow made me forget all of the reasons I had made that decision in the first place.

And there were a lot of hard days.

I was homeschooling four kids for the first time. I had a toddler running around. I was pregnant and exhausted. We were selling our house and preparing to move our entire family 750 miles away.

And somehow, instead of looking at all of that and thinking, Maybe we’re doing pretty damn well considering, I looked around and thought, I’m not doing enough.

I wish I could go back and tell first-year me that homeschooling wasn’t going to look perfect because nothing involving this many children ever does.

A hard day didn’t mean I had made the wrong decision.

An unfinished workbook didn’t mean my kids weren’t learning.

A skipped lesson didn’t mean they were falling behind.

And not doing everything didn’t mean I was failing them.

Sometimes enough really was enough.

The Biggest Mistake Was Bringing the Box Home

When I look at all of these mistakes together, I think they really come down to one thing.

I brought my kids home because I wanted something different for them.

And then I spent a good portion of that first year trying to recreate what we had left.

The schedule.

The checklists.

The pressure to finish.

The idea that learning had to look a certain way to “count.”

The expectation that every child should learn the same thing, in the same way, on the same timeline.

I had taken them out of the box.

I just hadn’t realized yet that I needed to let go of the box, too.

Our first year of homeschooling wasn’t perfect.

Not even close.

But maybe figuring that out was part of the first year, too.