Creatively Planning Your Homeschool Space [Show]

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Gretchen Roe: 00:00:04.581
Hi everybody. It’s Gretchen Roe and it’s my very great pleasure to welcome you to this episode of the Demme Learning show. Today we’re going to talk about creatively planning your homeschool space. And part of the reason that we think this is an important conversation is because we have it endlessly amongst ourselves about what’s an efficient way to do something. And so today I have invited my colleague Kathleen Calabrese to join me because she is the most efficient of homeschool moms. And like me, Kathleen is now a graduated homeschool mom, but I’m going to let her introduce herself and then we’re going to get into the meat of this conversation because I think we’ll send you away with some very practical tips today. Kathleen.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:00:53.653
Thank you, Gretchen. Again, my name is Kathleen Calabrese. I work in customer service at Demme Learning. And I have homeschooled two boys. They’re both now graduated, but I did homeschool for 21 years, and I used Math-U-See the entire time with them. My oldest son is now working in a financial career. And my youngest son is now in college.

Gretchen Roe: 00:01:19.405
And that’s pretty exciting. I have to say, Kathleen and I both homeschooled 21 years. We graduated our youngest in June. So we are too also at the end of that homeschooling journey. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t have some opinions to share. So I’m excited to have the opportunity to talk with Kathleen in the next hour. I have the opportunity to do this conversation about what you need to start and launch a successful homeschool experience in homeschool conferences across the U.S. all summer. And I have to tell you that Kathleen is my secret weapon. I have taken many of her tips and brought them along to many of you across the US today. So hopefully you’ll find wisdom in what we’re going to share. Let’s get into the meat of the matter, Kathleen. I think the question that is foremost in my mind and actually the only one that was in my notes after our conversation last week is, what’s the one piece of advice you think a homeschool mom needs to hold dear when she’s setting up for a homeschool year?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:02:23.969
As far as setting up, I would say organization. To just have that organization that things have a place. That you know where everything is and things have a place. So that when Monday morning rolls around and you had an extremely busy weekend and you didn’t even have prep time on Sunday, not a big deal. You can literally just jump in on Monday and just jump right into the work and get started because you know where everything is. If you have that little bit of time on Sunday night, which I tried to do, I would you know try to prep for the whole week if I could, but there were times when I just didn’t. But because I knew that everything was set up in such a way and I knew where everything was, there were many Monday mornings where we just kind of jumped in.

Gretchen Roe: 00:03:15.049
And I think there’s a little bit of that to be said. If you know what your week looks like, you know what you can hand off in the beginning if you need to play a little bit of catch up. But if you are like my darling husband who has to have two cups of coffee before his brain has jump started enough to have conversations with other people in the family, then maybe you need to either get up earlier or stay up a little bit later than night before. Because once you’ve lost your kids to the ether, it’s really hard to reel them back in. So if you have an inkling of, here’s where we’re going to start, it’s a lot easier to make that happen. And Kathleen, you gave me such a great tip. I would love to be– I’m going to put a slide up here. We’re going to make this a little bit interactive. And for those of you who are listening to this as a podcast, Kathleen and I have promised each other, we’re going to do our best to get you to be able to see what we’re describing when we’re having a conversation about materials. So what I want to share with you all today is many of you ask us, “How do I homeschool any small space?” And so Kathleen and I have talked about this. Actually, I emailed homeschool family that I know that is educating four children and they’re doing a two year drive across the United States. So they have four kids, I think their oldest is now 11 in a mobile home, and so that is the penultimate tiny space to be able to homeschooling. So their materials have to fit in a milk crate. And as you can see up here on the screen, that’s what Kathleen and I are showing you. A couple of you had asked, “Well, we are going to homeschool at the dining room table, but we also need to eat there. So what do we do?” If your students materials all fit in a milk crate, they can put them back in the milk crate and take them off the table. And Kathleen, I know that homeschool moved around in your household. So was there ever milk crate moments in your family?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:05:25.150
Absolutely. They’re definitely was. I was going to say, I feel like I’ve kind of hit all spectrums where I’ve had that extra room that I can homeschool in. But we didn’t always homeschool in that room for various reasons. Definitely around Christmas time every year. We are a family who hosts several Christmas parties. I want my house to be clean. I want my house to be organized. And I don’t want it looking like toys and schoolroom and everything everywhere. So during that time, I would really pack more stuff away and go to something like a milk crate or a cardboard box even where just what we need for today is in that box so that I could just use that. I had everything I needed in that and then I put it all the way at the end of the day just because that was a time where I didn’t want it all out.

Gretchen Roe: 00:06:20.432
And if you’re like another family that I know that homeschools in a tiny home. Mom uses the milk crate to organize each child’s tasks for the day. So this milk crate that you see that Kathleen and I are referencing what she does is at the end of the preceding school day. So today is Tuesday. In preparation for tomorrow’s day, she takes everything out of the milk crate, and she plans what order the lessons will come in and then she stacks them in the milk crate, the last lesson is on the bottom. So the first thing that she wants are student to do in the morning is at the top of the milk crate. And that way the student can move through those with some degree of efficiency. And I think that that makes a tremendous amount of difference because as parents, we have a limited amount of time. Kathleen actually has even a better idea than a milk crate. So Kathleen, I want you to talk about your work boxes a little bit. And I’m going to put a picture up here with the Carol of the work boxes.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:07:30.172
Sure. So the workbox is a rolling cart. And it has several boxes, picture. They’re bigger than the size of a book. And you can purchase them just one side where there’s 10 in them. I have the ones that are 20. And I happen to have two of the 20. And I did that because by the time my second son got into kindergarten, I wanted a little bit more organization. Also my boys are seven and a half years apart. So they have always been at very different points in education. What I was doing with one, I was not doing with the other.

Gretchen Roe: 00:08:12.912
You really didn’t have the opportunity to team teach a thing when they’re that many years ago.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:08:17.537
I really didn’t. I thought I would. But seven and a half years was just quite the gap. I attempted at times, but it was too big of a gap. So the work boxes helped me, and at the time, it was really helpful for my oldest son because he wanted to be able to move forward with his work. He didn’t want to wait on me when I was helping the youngest, even when my youngest was little, was a baby and I was nursing or changing a diaper or putting him down for a nap. My oldest son wanted to be able to do his schoolwork and not having to keep wait and wait and wait for me. This was a system that I discovered from another homeschool mom on how to be able to allow him to just keep moving. So I would put the subjects in the boxes and then I would label them with numbers. He, of course, didn’t have to do all 20, but if he had to do 8 boxes that day, I would label the 8 that I wanted him to do. In the beginning, I kind of thought, “Oh, he should do them in order.” But quickly that went away. And I realized part of the independence for him or part of just taking ownership for him was allowing him to pick the order that he wanted to do it. And for my oldest son, he loved that because there was times where there were certain things he wanted to get out of the way. First thing in the morning, or things that he liked doing more than others that maybe some days he wanted to do the things that he liked first. So it gave him the choice, do it in any order, just we’re going to go through those eight boxes today.

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:01.749
There was some picture up here with the individual things that you had in the boxes. And I think that in order for a mom to be able to really understand how these boxes could benefit her life, can you talk a little bit about how you organize the content within the box? Because here’s where I think the goal of this idea really lives.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:10:22.544
Absolutely. So if I had a box labeled math, I actually put the student workbook– the game of student workbook is in sitting in the box. I had pencils in there, I had erasers in there, and even his manipulatives would be in there. Whatever he needed to do the lesson that day, I made sure everything was in the box so that he didn’t have to go looking all over and try to find the supplies that he needed. Again, I wanted him to be able to jump into it, especially the subjects he could do without me. In the Spelling You See, I would make sure I had the pencil, the colored pencils, whatever he needed. If he was doing WriteShop, I had even more in there. I had scissors, glue sticks, construction papers, anything that I knew that he might need to get through the lesson. And some of the– I also would put stickers on them if it was something to do with Mom. I had a sticker that said, “Ask Mom.” So if it was a subject that I knew that he needed to do with me, don’t just jump in and do this, there was an “Ask Mom” on it. So he kind of knew that that was something we would do together. If it was something that he could just jump in on, and do on his own, then he would do that. Of course, as he got older, you know, he was more and more independent, and there was much less of that Ask Mom stickers on the boxes.

Gretchen Roe: 00:11:47.391
And I think that’s great. And not every child, I think it’s important for us to also say this. If you have a child who has that independent gene and is willing to work on their own, man, that is a golden gift. Not every child is going to be that way. But what I love about your methodology is that it gives parents the opportunity to test it. What are you able to do independently? So can we talk about how did that evolve for you? Because I know I’ve heard you tell stories about your boys. I know they’re not gifted in the same way. So how did that change between oldest and youngest?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:12:26.702
Sure. So, again, they’re seven and a half years apart. And honestly, with my oldest son, it came more from him. He was ready to be more independent before I was, which is okay. And which I realized that was wonderful, and that was great that he was able to voice that to me. I used Sonlight curriculum, which is a lot of sitting on the couch, reading books, reading literature. So he did get to a point where he said, “Mom, can I please just read the book to myself? Can I please just take it and read it?” And I kind of felt like, oh no, he doesn’t want to do school with me. I realized I had to let go and allow him to have that independence. But he then was able to then take his work and do it on his own. And we would meet back up and have the discussions and go through the comprehension questions, and I’d go over his math and go over his different things. But he showed me that he was ready to be more on his own. My younger student, who’s seven and a half years younger, he liked me doing schoolwork with him. He kind of would have sat with me for a long time. And was more side by side with me. He also was someone who needed a little bit more motivation. So he kind of needed me to get him started in the lesson where my older son loved the workbox system and would just kind of– there was times he would just get up in the morning and just kind of boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, wanna go through it. He was very self-motivated. My younger, I needed to really get into the subject with him before he could kind of take off and go on his own with him.

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:17.003
And I think one of the things that’s important for our audience to remember is every child is different. Every child approaches how they can embrace independence entirely differently. And I talk about my eldest son who taught himself to read at the age of four when he indignantly realized that I wasn’t going to teach him to read until I thought he should be able to play cooperatively. But he said, “Well if you’re not going to teach me, I’ll teach myself.” Great. Awesome. Have that at my friend. And he did. But he also could not have been left alone to do a single math problem until he was a senior in high school because he didn’t have a degree of affection for math. He didn’t have that sticktoitiveness desire to get it done. And each one of your kids is going to be different, that sticktoitiveness manifests itself entirely differently in every child. I had to wait to my sixth kid to get a kid that I could say, “Here’s a list. Go ahead and go do it.” And he was my kid who said, “Hey, how about you tell me what you want me to do, write it down on a list and I’ll let you know if I need you.” [laughter] Took a while to get to that kid. So I think it’s important. And one of the things that we say in every webinar is be the best observer of your children. Kathleen, I know that you, as a customer service representative, you tell families this all the time. But what does that really mean when we’re saying observe your children? Can you talk a little bit about what that means for the process of knowing where they’re at their best?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:15:59.777
Sure. So it’s understanding how they learn. It’s understanding what penetrates for them, what makes it work for them. Again, I said I use Sonlight curriculum. So if anybody knows Sonlight, it’s reading literature. There’s some years you’re reading 35 books, 40 books. My oldest son loved it, thrived, did Sonlight all the way through. Wonderful. My youngest son came along. I thought, “Okay, I spent all this money on Sonlight.” My bookshelves looked amazing. I had all these Sonlight books. I started reading the books to him, and I would ask him a question. He would say, “Mom, I have no idea what you just said.” And he would say that to me after I read the next chapter, “Mom, I have no idea what you just said.” So it wasn’t the curriculum. It wasn’t what I was using. It was, this child needed to learn differently. And honestly, at first, I resisted it. I kept thinking, “Okay. What? Is he not paying attention? What is going on here?” And I eventually realized he needed to learn differently. One of the things that I learned about him was, if he was moving, he listened better. We had the huge bouncy balls in our homeschool room. My husband actually put a swing up in our homeschool room. We had that for many years. My son could swing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth as I was reading to him or teaching him something, and afterwards, I would ask him, “What did I just say?” And he knew exactly what I said. So he needed his body to be moving. He couldn’t just sit at the table, or even just sit still on the couch. That didn’t work for him. So that was something that I had to learn, this child learns differently. Even as far as workbooks, I couldn’t hand him a workbook and say, “We’re going to do page 17.” I had to rip out page 17 and put it in front of him. He could not– handing him a whole workbook was overwhelming to him. He wanted to focus on what am I doing right now? And that’s it. And then move on to something else.

Gretchen Roe: 00:18:08.466
And I think that makes a tremendous amount of difference. I do have a picture of Kathleen’s swing. So I’m actually going to put it up here because I think this is a brilliant idea. And as parents, it sounds laudatory and crazy to erect a swing in your classroom. But if that’s what it takes to get your child to pay attention, then it’s worth it. It is absolutely worth it. And the interesting part is, I asked Kathleen when she sent me this picture, I said, “W/hat does he think of the swing now?” And what you said to me– well, let me see if I can remember this correctly. You said that it was a difference maker for him, and it helped him stay focused. Can you talk a little bit about that? Why was that a difference maker for him?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:19:01.549
I guess for him just realizing that school didn’t mean that he had to sit still, that he had to sit at the table. I think it gave him comfort in the fact that school didn’t have to look a certain way, which is why even there’s times we did school at the couch. There’s times we’re at the dining room table. There’s times we’re in the homeschool room. There’s times we took school to the park. We were very flexible. And I was probably much more flexible with him because he was vocal about it. And he would say to me, “Can we go to the park today? Can I do my math at the park?” “Sure. Let’s go do that.” My oldest son, he’s the much more compliant type where kind of whatever I gave him, he would just do. But it helped me to realize that it doesn’t have to be scripted and look a certain way. What you expect school to look like may not be exactly what it looked like. And I know people in the podcast can’t see the picture. But if you see in that picture, he’s probably about 10 or 11 in that picture. We got that swing when he was four years old. He was on that swing [laughter] for a very long time. And he would literally– he would use that swing daily. He needed to move. That is what he needed. Even when he got older and he got beyond the swing, the thing was Rubik’s Cube. Then, he would sit and he would do Rubik’s Cube while he was reading, or I was reading to him, or we were doing– and he would sit there. And he got really, really good at it where he learned to solve them quickly, but it’s– that’s the way that his brain worked. He needed to be moving as he was listening. That’s what worked for him.

Gretchen Roe: 00:20:47.814
And I think that this is really a valuable idea. Another thing – I’m going to share this picture – is because– and what we’re looking at right now for those of you who are listening auditorily is we’re looking at a traditional office chair on five wheels. And we’re looking at a yoga ball. And in my household, I thought it would be terrific to have these office chairs with five wheels. And the only thing they were were amusement devices for my kids. They would sit in them and they would lean back. And they would kick [laughter] their feet up and spin each other around and they would jump off them. But to ask them to actually sit in a chair, the movement never stopped. Somebody was moving all the time. And it finally occurred to me not until my 5th child started school that maybe a yoga ball would be a better deal. And I have to be honest with you all, a yoga ball has been an extraordinary experience for me personally because I have attention deficit. And I am a very wiggly person. And so to be able to take my yoga ball, which is over here on the floor, and substitute my chair for a yoga ball for an hour or so a day, I can focus. I can get my wiggles out. And the funniest part is now, if I’m writing something or I’m studying something and I’m on my yoga ball, my kids will peek in the door and go, “Oh, she’s on the yoga ball. She’s thinking. I shouldn’t interrupt her.” So there’s benefits there. So the reason I wanted to bring that up is for you to recognize that if you observe your children well, Kathleen figured out that a swing was going to be the way in to connect with her son. So Kathleen, I want to flip the script now because we’ve talked about homeschooling in a tiny space. But you reached out to our coworker Amanda because she has eight kids that she homeschools. So Amanda gave you some tips on what do you do when you’re homeschooling a whole bunch of kids in maybe not the largest space? So can you share some of that wisdom from Amanda?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:23:05.457
Sure. So Amanda said organization is key, kind of what we said right back in the beginning knowing where everything is, having a place for things. With her eight kids, she can’t be running looking for things. The kids can’t be running looking for things. So everyone needs to know where everything is. Everything has a place. You put it back to where it goes so that it removes that hurdle. Some of the other suggestions that she said was teamwork, delegation, having the olders help with the youngers, buddying them up so that it give– allows her time to be able to maybe focus with a one-on-one with a student and there isn’t seven kids just going harry, not knowing what to do. You actually work out the buddy system so that they’re supporting each other, helping each other.

Gretchen Roe: 00:24:01.496
I have a caveat for her for that buddy system too. [laughter] She says, you have to know your kids well enough to know who works well together. [laughter] Because I understand intrinsically when she makes that statement. A couple of my kids are like oil and water and it would not have been a combination for me to pair those two kids up. So that comes back around to that theme of knowing your kids, knowing who you can pair up together that it becomes a profitable enterprise, right, Kathleen?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:24:35.513
Absolutely. Yeah. And one of the other things that she had to say about older students was that she always makes the older students the top priority in her homeschool. So because the way that she looks at it is, you have the least amount of time with those children. You have the least amount of time left with them. So they’re her top priority. She makes sure that what they need to do academically is being met. And then works her way down the line with the youngest. And that’s a good way to look at it because– that’s why a lot of people– by the time their kids get to high school, they go, “Now what? Am I prepped? Am I ready? Have I done enough?” If you try to keep the focus on the older student and making sure that they are getting everything that they need, it usually filters down and then it works out for the whole family together. And then one more thing that she said was meal planning. That that’s been a lifesaver for her. That she makes sure that she has that done so that meal times, again, are not a big chaos thing. Everything is ready to go.

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:45.527
Right. I think that that is wonderful. And I think the other thing that she says that I think is great. I know we use this in my household as well. We involved the kids in meal planning. And as parents, we sometimes tend to think it’s only when we’re sitting with a book that we’re doing academics. Amanda does a wonderful job of talking about sort of reverse engineering the things you do as a family and finding where the educational opportunities were lying around in that process. So that meal planning, that’s everything from portion control to maybe doubling a recipe, having to use fractions, having to learn how to read with detail and content. Those are skills that extend well beyond the classroom. Those extend into adult life. I laugh because I think about your workbox theory, Kathleen. My granddaughter last week was looking for a pair of scissors, and I told her where in the kitchen they would be. She opened the drawer. And there’s like 11 pairs of scissors in there and she said, “Why do you have so many scissors?” And I laughed, and I said, because they get laid around the house, somebody takes them, and uses them, and then sets them down wherever. And we don’t find them again. So if I had your workbox theory where scissors were put in the box ahead of time, maybe I wouldn’t have 11 pairs of shears in a drawer now. [laughter] I think that makes a difference.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:27:28.282
Yeah.

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:28.282
Kathleen, we had a great question about how do you transition from middle school to high school. And I know that you and I have talked about this, how you transitioned responsibility, and Dorinda Wilson has a phrase that I just love. She says, “You can’t expect what you don’t inspect.” And so, how did high school work for you? Particularly with an older student who was an independent learner. How did you set yourself up for success to know what he was working on and things like that.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:28:04.204
Well, some of the best advice that I thought that I got going into high school was have the end in mind and work backwards. So for both of my children, I took the advice of whether they say they want to go to college or not. As a parent, do you want to have them prepped for college? So for both of them, I did. I thought, “Okay, I want to have them prepped.” My oldest said going into ninth grade that he would go to college. He didn’t. My youngest said all the way up until he graduated and even after he graduated, that there was no way he was going to college. He’s now in college. So I’m glad for both of them that I did that, but as far as prepping, I looked at what would they need to be able to have everything that they needed to get into college. And then I made sure with both of my boys that they were a part of it, that they were a part of the conversation. I made sure of it. So I said to them, okay, you need this many sciences in high school, which ones do you want to do? Which ones do you think are more interesting for you? That gave them that ownership, ownership helps so much with independence. When you have a child who you’re looking for them to be more independent, at least I found with both of mine, that when I asked them, “Well, what do you want to do? What do you like?” They really then were able to– they just felt more comfortable that well, I picked this subject. I asked to do it. So I’m going to have more invested in it, right? So that worked with both of mine. And I had times probably with my youngest more, where he would come and say, “I know I said I wanted to do this subject, but I’m not really liking it. Can we switch? I thought I would like astronomy. But nope. It’s not jiving. Can we switch?” “Okay, let’s look for something else then. You tried it. Let’s look for something else.” I also had conversations with him where he said, “I picked this and I don’t want to do it.” And then I said to him, “Okay. But Michael, you need that. If you’re going to go to college one day, you need that course.” So what can we do to help, but you do need to have that course. And he did have that understanding of, “Okay, so just because I kind of don’t like it, I can’t drop it.” And we figured out how to not necessarily enjoy it because sometimes all subjects aren’t enjoyable. But how to get him to understand the importance of the fact that he needed to learn that subject.

Gretchen Roe: 00:30:51.458
And I think it makes a tremendous amount of difference. I often have these conversations at homeschool conferences where parents will come up to me and they’ll say, “This is my daughter, Kathleen. And she is in high school and we’re trying to figure out how to approach high school math.” And I will say to that child, “Kathleen, what do you want to do after high school?” And most of the time, I hear, “I don’t know.” And it’s up to us as parents to help them figure out what I don’t know might look like. And it doesn’t mean that you have all the answers. It means that you give your kids the opportunity to do things and experience things and maybe they realize, “Oh, this is not something that I want to do.” I’ll give you an example. I learned from a homeschool mom this summer, her son had said for a number of years that he wanted to be a physical therapist. And when he reached high school age, she arranged for him to do an unpaid summer internship with a physical therapy practice. He was there for a month. And she said, she was so excited. She just knew this was going to be the answer for her son. And at the end of four weeks, she said, “So what did you? What does this mean for us?” And he said, “I’m not interested in being a physical therapist.” And she was like, “Wait, what? What?” He goes, “I thought being a physical therapist meant I would be interacting with people all day long and really helping solve their problems.” And he said, “I realized about 70% of the physical therapy practice was documenting on the computer.” “Well, the things you did.” And he said, “That’s not what I thought it was at all.” So here’s a perfect opportunity as parents for us to frame, not just our homeschool classroom, but our homeschool thought process of, how can we help my child prepare themselves for their future? I had Alice Reinhardt as a guest last week and we were talking about changing that mindset from what a public school looks like to what a homeschool experience looks like. And one of the most valuable things that she said in our conversation was the fact that as your children get older, you really need to be present and available to tap into what their thoughts are. And if they don’t know what their thoughts are for the future, it’s up to us to help them explore options. So Kathleen, can you talk about what that looked like when your boys got to high school? How did you change your expectations? I mean, you’re sitting in a beautiful homeschool classroom, did class still go on there for high schoolers or were they more in their own rooms and just came to hunt you up when they needed you?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:33:51.237
Yes. So for my oldest, by the time, definitely when he was in 9th grade, the first year of high school, that’s when he was, “Mom, I just want to go in my room and do it.” And I would check back in with him. We’d have meet ups at the end of the day. So if he was 15, then my youngest was about 7 or 8. And I was busy with him. In the homeschool room, I was with one child, my other child was in his bedroom doing most of his work, and then in the afternoon, we’d meet up. And then he really– for his high school years, he did most of it on his own in his bedroom, except for the times that we met. My youngest, he was probably more in the homeschool room until he was maybe an 11th grade. There were times that he would do his work out here on his own, but he actually liked to be in the middle of everybody. Because again, he likes movement and likes action going on. So that worked better for him. And it probably wasn’t until about 11th grade that he started just, “Okay, I’m going to go do this in my room.” And then we’d meet back up and have the conversations and you know discuss the things that we needed to discuss just to make sure that he was comprehending what he was learning.

Gretchen Roe: 00:35:08.050
And I think I love that that you are connecting to make sure that his learning connections are strong. I think that that makes a tremendous amount of difference. Kathleen, we had a great question. And we didn’t talk about this question, but so I might be catching you a little bit flat footed, but I’m sure that you have a good idea here. And it was, what are some of the must-have products to have in a homeschool space that make a learning environment fun and functional? And I wanted you to think about that because your spaces are so organized. This will be an interesting answer.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:35:46.695
I think, well, with this one, it definitely depends on the age of your children, what you’re talking about. When you have littles, quite honestly, preschool all the way up through elementary, you can not have enough artsy supplies. You really can’t. Construction paper, crayons, glue. I mean, I can’t imagine how much paper I went through over the years because I allowed my kids to doodle, to make airplanes, to tape 42 pieces together because I want to make it look like the Great Wall of China. I allowed them to just use the paper, have all of that available so that when they wanted to be creative, they could. I mean, so much learning in homeschool comes from them applying what you’ve learned. Not just reading about it but applying it. So I always wanted to make sure that they had all those resources available so that whenever they had an idea to do something, they could. And now I’m thinking one of the things that we had for a very long time in our homeschool room was the cardboard blocks that are– you put them together and they would use them for building blocks.

Gretchen Roe: 00:37:10.339
Like bricks. The cardboard bricks [crosstalk]. Yeah.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:37:11.908
Yeah. They look like bricks, exactly. My kids would constantly build things out of. I’d be reading a story about knights in a castle and all of a sudden, they’re over there and they’re using the blocks, the bricks, and they’re building a castle and they’re making that. And then I’d be reading another story. Again, like Great Wall of China, and there they are and now it’s the Great Wall of China. But they would just kind of start. Because I had stuff accessible to them, they would just kind of grab things. And I was always very open to use whatever you want. Take whatever you want. It’s here. When my youngest was really small, there were things that were up high. The scissors were up high. I would give him child scissors when he was old enough. But everything was there and accessible. So I would say it depends on the ages of your children as to what you need when they get a little bit older to upper elementary. Even into middle school high school, paper, pens, pencils, you don’t need much more than that as long as they have what they’re going to use in high school. If you’re going to be doing the experiments, then you need that kind of things for science experiments. I had one son who we were in a co-op. So his experiments were in co-op, but then another son, he did the experiments at home. So I had all that stuff. I had the test tubes. But you can buy all that stuff in kits through science supply stores. But I had all that accessible so that when it came up that it was Thursday and that was time for him to do a science experiment, he knew just to go to the shelf. There was all the boxes of the science stuff and jump in and grab what you need.

Gretchen Roe: 00:39:03.887
And we had talked early on about knowing in advance what you would need for a day’s lessons. That was probably the most valuable piece of advice I got with regard to science because I always thought the experiments were fantastic, but then, okay, do we have hydrogen peroxide and then you spend 20 minutes looking for it. If you are proactive enough in your organization to know on Thursday, we’re going to do a science experiment that involves hydrogen peroxide, then perhaps maybe Wednesday night, you can make sure that you have that so that you’re ready for that science experiment on Thursday. I think that that makes a tremendous amount of difference. Now, Kathleen, I’m going to ask you another question, and you’ve kind of answered it tangentially, but a parent asked us how, in the process of organizing their homeschool, can they help their children get interested in writing? And you talked about your kids were actually building the Great Wall of China as you were reading about the Great Wall of China. So can we elaborate a little bit on maybe how you can take the reading experiences and translate them into writing experiences?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:40:17.003
Sure. So with my youngest son– my oldest son probably was more willing to write, I would say, where maybe sometimes he needed help with the topic, but he was more willing. My youngest son didn’t want to write at all. He always told me that he hated writing. And he was a late reader, which I think adds to it. But he didn’t want to write. And I did what I learned to do. And, again, I’m sure I got this tip from another homeschooling mom was if I was reading and then he did start building things with the blocks or using paper or drawing things, I then learned to start turning those into stories. I would actually then write down. I would start writing. And then I would say to him, “Let’s make a story out of this. Tell me, who is in that castle?” And he would say, “Oh, well, it’s me and my cousin Mikey.” “Okay, great. So Michael and Mike–” and then I would kind of start writing that. And what I was doing was I was modeling for him how you can take your imagination and transition that to writing. And he needed quite a bit of that modeling at first before he eventually realized, “Oh, so you mean whenever I’m thinking about when I’m playing, I can take that and make it a story?” “Yes, exactly. That’s how we then turn that into a story.” That helped with him a lot.

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:43.564
One of the things I think that we do as parents is the most difficult thing we ask of our children is to do compositional writing. And it’s not just hold a pencil in your hand. It’s organize your thoughts, think of what you want to say, think of how you want to say it, how do you want to spell it, do I have it punctuated right. And the list goes on and on. If we can remove some of the burden like you had scribed the beginning of those stories, then you had a framework to build from. Another tool that I think is enormously valuable is your phone. You can open up an email on your phone and you can hit the microphone button and you can say, “Tell me your story.” And now what we’ve done is we’ve had the opportunity to then capture a draft of an idea. And we can, as parents, move into the role of editor as opposed to, “I need you to give me 75 words.” One of my daughters was like Lucy from a Charlie Brown book report. She would go 67, 68. [laughter] And it’s hard. And as a parent, you’re like, “That’s not what I said.” And as far as homeschool organization is concerned, maybe if you make one decision and one change this year, when you give your children instruction, then pause and say, “What did you just hear me say to you?” That’s always the source of endless interest throughout the homeschool year. And even now with my adult kids, sometimes I’m like I’ll say something and they’ll get a look on their face. And I’m like, “Pause, please. What do you think I just said to you?” [laughter] Oh, that’s good advice to bear in mind. Kathleen, this question maybe you can help us with because we had a couple of parents say, “How do you navigate when the only space you have for your homeschool room is also the dining room table?” And so I think that goes back to a place for everything. I remember a homeschool family friend who literally had another board that fit their dining room table and that board leaned up against the wall. And when they were ready to eat a meal, that board would come out and lay right across all the books and everything on the table and then they’d throw a tablecloth over the top of it. And you didn’t know there were school books underneath it. That way, they didn’t have to clean them up, which that’s always a brilliant idea, so. I want to circle back around to what you said that Amanda said about meal planning because Lisa Chimento, another coworker of ours, talks about planning your meals in advance so that you have not reached the point in a school day where your children are hungry and angry or hangry as Lisa says. So how did that work in your day? Did you have set times that you paused or did you just sort of read the room? Or how did you plan your meals around your students?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:44:57.837
I would say the biggest thing that helped me was teaching them how to make their own meals, actually. Was helping them to do that. Again, because my boys are apart. And we’re a house where I would say, except for dinnertime, we don’t have set meal times. We never really have. People eat breakfast in the morning when they get up. And lunch maybe is an approximate time. We do sit in a dinner together. But I did find because neither of my kids– and I guess myself and my husband, they didn’t need cereal or any cold, quick type of foods. They want a meal. They want eggs and bacon and toast. They eat a meal. So we were doing whole meals. There were times where I realized I was breaking up the momentum of school– or not even the momentum, but I was taking too long of a break and I was causing distractions by then going in and making this big meal and then, oh, there’s dishes in the sink. Now I have to clean those. And where I was getting, it was taking up too much that I had to realize that that wasn’t serving all of us that well because then my kids didn’t want to be doing school until 3 o’clock because I took so long on lunch. They didn’t want to still be sitting there waiting for me. So I had to learn to have things prepped ahead of time. Or when my older son got to a point where I said to him, “Okay, this part you can do by yourself. You can take this food and heat it up in the microwave. And this is how you do it. And this is how many minutes.” We had a whiteboard on the kitchen table, and I would write down if it’s this food, you heat it up this many minutes, this food, this many. If it needs to go in the toaster oven, this is the setting. I would actually put those notes on there for him so that he was then able to prep his food and be able to do that without me having to do every single meal. And then when my youngest was old enough, again, I got him in there and got him helping with it too. It helps because as adults, they now are completely self-sufficient and cook a full meal in the kitchen. And I realized that’s because I was prepping them earlier. Again, I did it because mostly they started saying, “We don’t want to still be doing school at 3:00.” I was taking too long. I needed to change what I was doing. And in the end, it helped everyone.

Gretchen Roe: 00:47:33.969
Absolutely. I think that is always valuable ideas. I just recently talked to a parent who said one of the things she does. She has three children still at home. One’s a high school graduate and off at college, and then she has three children still at home, but her Saturday mornings are taken up with prepping the kinds of things that they would need for a week. So if she knows that they’re going to use onions in food three times in that week, some kid gets the assignment on Saturday morning to cut up six onions and then they put them in a mason jar with a paper towel on top, and those onions she says will last all week. So it cuts down on her kitchen prep time. So it’s not necessarily a classroom organization tip, but it’s definitely a life organization tip. And I think that means a lot of things. Kathleen, you ran extracurricular activities. You were the goddess of extracurricular activity. So talk a little bit about organizing extracurriculars and academics and how you keep all of that together. Because I think that is a place where particularly new homeschool moms get quickly exasperated with scheduling.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:48:56.035
I think in one word, organization. The more organized that you can be, the less chaos that you have. So for so many years, my kids were heavily involved in sports. My husband and I ran the soccer league in our town, which was a very large league with over a thousand kids, and we ran that for eight years. And I was homeschooling them and doing that through all of it. It was a full year roundly, but organization. That was the key in both areas where, again, for so many years in homeschooling, I would prep in August for the school year. That would be my first big prep time where I would try to– if I needed to order supplies, I was doing that in August. Like I said, if I knew my son was taking biology that year, and I was going to need science experiments, I was taking care of that in August so that I had it on hand. But then every Sunday Night, if I could, there were times it had to be done at other times, I would prep for the week and make sure that I had everything ready for the week. And then there were times that even at the end of a school day, maybe not every school day, at the end of the school day, I was there making sure I was prepped for the next day. I was grading what needed to be graded for the– again, meeting back with my older son, making sure that we were on track so that the more that you can organize and the more that you can do it ahead of time, the smoother everything flows. And then that helped me to be able to know that the homeschooling part wasn’t chaos and then I was able to go and do those extra things. Again, I’m an organizer. So have that organized as well. But it gave me the comfort that Monday morning wasn’t going to come around and I was going to say, “I have no idea what I’m doing with these kids this week.” I knew. I had lesson plans, tentative lesson plans. I had everything done. Now, I will say the other key thing is you have to be flexible though because, of course, we all know with homeschooling. I had everything organized and everything set, but I also learned you have to be flexible. And if it doesn’t go according to plan, you have to learn to roll with it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:51:18.622
Blessed are the flexible for they shall not get bent out of shape, right?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:51:22.487
Yeah.

Gretchen Roe: 00:51:24.292
Now you said something here. Kind of in passing, but I want to reiterate it because I think it’s really important. You talked about being able to check work on a daily basis. And I think one of the things that as parents, particularly as we get busier and busier, we have more kids in the mix. There’s more going on. It’s easy to sort of say, “Oh, I’ll check that tomorrow.” But we’re setting our kids up to be really frustrated if we don’t check it on a regular basis, particularly in something like math where it because it’s sequential in its cumulative, if you have a misapprehension in the first of the week and you’ve carried that all the way through the week, it can create an enormous amount of frustration. So did you have a set plan for checking curricula on a daily basis or, hey, it’s 3:00, bring me your math, that kind of thing, or–?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:52:25.619
Well, I tried to check it on a daily basis. And with my work boxes, I had a box on top for finished work, and they knew anything they had completed that needed to be checked went on top, so that I was able to just grab out of there and do that. And it’s funny because math was a big one. Math-U-See, when I was using it with my oldest son, I didn’t know you didn’t have to do every problem in every page. I didn’t get that part. So I gave him every page, and he would do every single problem, every single page. Now, he was, still is, really gifted in math. So he never struggled. And he, for the most part, just would kind of do them and do all of them. And go through it. And I would check and he got them all right. So, okay, he learned it and move on to the next lesson. With my youngest child, probably right from the beginning, he would ask me the daily question, why do I need to do this? Why do I need to do this? Why do I need to do this? So I had to have those answers for him of why. But I learned with him that I needed to check his work because I needed to be able to see whether he was understanding it. And then I needed to even have him teach it back to me, to show me that he was understanding what he was learning, because there were times that from checking his work, I could see, okay, he got number six and seven wrong on the A page. He also got number six and seven wrong on the B page. If they were having to do with the same part of the concept, he was missing that part of the concept. And then I was able to see that and say, okay, Michael, explain this to me, teach this back to me. And when I realized that he was missing that part, we either would pop the video on again and he’d watch the video again, or I’d pull out the instruction manual and say, okay, see in that particular part, that’s where you need to whatever, flip the fraction, or whatever it was. That’s where you need to do that. And he’d say, oh, okay. I missed that one part of it. Now, if I hadn’t been checking his work every day and having him teach it back to me, I wouldn’t have known that. And he may have gone through the whole lesson and he may have done the test and got about an 80%, and I could have assumed he got most of it and moved on, but because I was checking it, I knew there was actually a part that he was not getting. And that was important.

Gretchen Roe: 00:54:51.200
Yeah. Lisa Chimento, who we mentioned today says, if you’re consistently have a child– we as a culture think, oh, 80% is good enough. But if that 20% is consistently the same errors, it’s up to us to figure out what we need to do to correct that. Kathleen, I can’t believe we’re five minutes to the top of the hour. So, man, I had a bunch more questions I wanted to ask you. But what would be the best piece of advice you could give a homeschool mom going into this year? Because this is sort of like riding a Bronco. So you’ve got to sit down, buckle up, you’re going to be here for a while. So what advice would you give?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:55:34.929
I would say just to try to have a plan in advance. To try to have a plan and organize and completely understand that you can have that plan. You can have everything organized, but be flexible enough to understand that it’s not going to go exactly as you have planned. But the more that you can prep ahead of time, the more you can get things organized ahead of time, the less chaos you will have in your homeschool day. And not only for moms. Sometimes we think about it just as parents, that, “Well, I don’t want to be running for this and I don’t want to be–” We want to take that stress off of our children too. The more that we are calm and we’re prepped and we’re ready and we can say, “Okay. Great. We finished science. Now we’re going to go and we’re going to move on to history and this is what we’re going to do for history.” When we can just flow like that because we know what we’re doing and we’re prepped, it makes it a lot easier on our kids. And that’s the part that I think that we just need to remember, to just be as organized and prepped as you can, and then once you get into your homeschool day, enjoy the day.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:46.489
Right. Enjoy the day.

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:56:47.942
Enjoy the time.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:48.768
That’s very good advice indeed. I did want to bring up one thing that Alice Reinhardt said last week in our conversation about changing your mindset from a public schooler’s thought process to a homeschooler’s thought process, is to remember that your curriculum is a tool. It’s not your master. And you alluded to this earlier so I want to circle back to this before we finish our conversation. You talked about the material was perfect for your older son and then the second child came along and that material wasn’t perfect for him. I think it’s important for us to talk about how do you evaluate if you’ve got the wrong material in front of a child. So can you talk a little bit about– how did you realize that the way that you had taught your older son wasn’t going to work with your younger son?

Kathleen Calabrese: 00:57:46.006
Right. And I think that goes back to what you said about observation, about observing them. Thankfully, my youngest son is very vocal and he would, again, say, “Mom, I have no idea what you just read,” and he would tell me when he wasn’t understanding. But I was able to see certain areas where it just wasn’t sinking in. It wasn’t working so I had to tweak it. I had to do different things. Again, the Sonlight, the 35 books was fine for my oldest son. For my youngest son, I still used a lot of the Sonlight books, great literature. It’s not that there was anything wrong with the books. The books still worked, but did we cover 35 in a year? No, because that didn’t work with him. So I just went through and I pick and chose which ones I thought would appeal to him, which ones I thought wanted to cover whatever topic we were looking to cover. So I just had to go in and kind of pick out what was going to work with him, but there was no way he was getting through 35 in a year. I had to do that with other curriculums as well that I had to– he learned differently, so just trying to open up the workbook and say, “Well, it says you need to do this, and it says–” nope, that didn’t work for him. Again, with the youngest child, he did not do every single problem on every single page in Math-U-See. He did enough to master the concept and then we moved on because he didn’t need to do every single problem, every single page. He got it. He taught it back to me. We moved on to the next lesson.

Gretchen Roe: 00:59:23.840
And I think that that’s a very valuable lesson for us as parents, is if we are observers of our children, we know when they understand and what they understand. And I’m a good German girl, “I bought some materials so you’ll do all the pages because I spent some money, ja?” But we don’t necessarily have to do that to make our homeschooling experience a profitable one. We hope you found wisdom in what we have shared with you all today, and we hope you’ll join us again for a coming adventure. If you listen to this as the Demme Learning Show, there might be merit in going online and taking a look at some of the pictures that we’re going to post up there in the show notes. You can do that at DemmeLearning.com/Blog or you can see it on our YouTube channel as well. Thank you so much for joining us today for the Demme Learning Show. This is Gretchen Roe and we would love to have you join us again sometime soon. Wherever you’re hearing this information be sure to rate and review it, especially if you liked it, and we hope you’ll join us again soon. Take care, everyone. Have a wonderful afternoon. Bye-bye.

Kathleen Calabrese: 01:00:29.364
Bye.

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