Reevaluating Your Educational Progress Before the Holidays [Show]

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Gretchen Roe: 00:00:04.774
Welcome to The Demme Learning Show. Our mission here is to help families stay in the learning journey wherever it takes them. This bonus episode was previously recorded as a webinar and was not created with the audio listener in mind. We hope you will find value in today’s episode.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:22.450
Hello, everyone. Welcome. My name is Gretchen Roe, and I am absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to have a conversation with you all today about evaluating what’s working or maybe what’s not working. I’m joined by my esteemed colleague, Amanda Capps, and I’ll let her introduce herself in a second. By way of introduction, I am the mother of six. I shouldn’t have had to hesitate and think about that, but I’m the mom of six. We homeschooled 21 years. Five of our children are now college graduates, and the youngest is a senior in high school. And I’m coming to you this afternoon from rainy Western North Carolina, and I am delighted to welcome my dear friend and wonderful colleague, Amanda Capps. Amanda.

Amanda Capps: 00:01:10.371
Hi, Gretchen. I’m thrilled to be here this afternoon. I am the homeschool mother of eight. I have graduated my oldest, and I have seven coming up behind her with our caboose being two and a very active toddler. I have been in customer service at Demme Learning for the last 13 years, supporting our customers and families. And these are topics that come up quite often in customer service. And so I’m thrilled to be talking with them– about them with you today. I am also a second-generation homeschooler, which gives me a little bit of a unique perspective. So excited to get this off the ground.

Gretchen Roe: 00:01:51.122
Absolutely. And one of the things I truly appreciate about getting to collaborate with Amanda is she has no presuppositions about what school would have been like in what those of us who went to public school remember. And so that actually, I think, gives her an advantage. So today, we have lots of things to talk about. We have talked about this subject before, but you asked us to reprise it. And so we’re excited to be able to do that. And so the first question is, Amanda, what do I do if I don’t think my curriculum is working?

Amanda Capps: 00:02:28.932
So this is typically the time of year where we’re getting a really good grasp on what’s working and what’s not. Being homeschoolers, we tend to want to be frugal and be good stewards of our curriculum and the funds that we’ve spent on it. But unfortunately, there are just times where we have to look at what’s happening with our students and ourselves, and we may need to scrap, modify, or change the direction that we’re going at this point.

Gretchen Roe: 00:03:09.617
Absolutely. One of our colleagues, Kathleen, suggested the last time we did this, maybe you just need to look at what you’re doing in a different light. So for instance, if you have a student who’s giving you pushback about working math problems on a piece of paper, maybe you spend a week working them on a whiteboard on the wall in your office or in your schoolroom. Maybe you pull out big poster paper and you do them with markers and you work them that way. Before you throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, “This curriculum doesn’t work,” take a step back and evaluate, are you doing it correctly? Often we have parents who will reach out to us and say, I’m really frustrated with, and you can fill in that blank with any of Demme Learning’s products. And what our goal is is to get to the root cause of the frustration. Sometimes it’s because we as parents are so busy, we don’t read the directions carefully. Sometimes it’s because we’ve left our students to their own devices for an over long period of time. And Amanda and I are going to talk a little bit about that in more depth. Sometimes it’s because our expectations are too lofty. What do I mean by that? The truth is, sometimes as parents, we expect an eight-year-old to deliver like a teenager would deliver. And that’s not always going to happen. Amanda, I know you do a great job of explaining this, of being the careful observer of your students to figure out who’s capable of doing what by themselves. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Amanda Capps: 00:04:51.406
Absolutely. So one of the biggest things that we encourage parents to do here at Demme Learning is to really take and invest some time in figuring out what it is that really makes your student tick. What are their learning preferences? What are you observing that clue you into how they learn and function best in a learning environment? I think everybody or every parent has this vision of the one-room schoolhouse and everybody’s in their little grade and we’re all working together and there’s just harmony and learning happening. But then there’s reality. And typically we have a toddler who’s bouncing off the walls and we have a middle schooler that’s desperately trying to focus and concentrate while the atmosphere can be a little crazy at times. And the dog’s barking and somebody’s at the front door. I mean, life and chaos just kind of sometimes happen. And so we need to be gracious with ourselves and with our students. Some of the big things are, are they good at working in the morning, afternoon, or maybe they’re more evening? Some of my teenagers really prefer to work on their schoolwork when they get their second wind after dinner. And they may not really function very well before 10:00 AM in the morning. And if I decide, well, we’re just going to start school at 8 o’clock, and that’s just what’s going to work for everybody because I’m a morning person. While we might get things accomplished, we’re probably not going to really enjoy it very much. And I might get a lot more pushback to a kiddo whose brain is not fully awake and engaged yet. And so there’s a lot we can do in observing our students that are going to either set us up for success or set us up for a disaster.

Gretchen Roe: 00:06:55.286
Absolutely. And one of the things I want to encourage you to do as a parent is, first of all, all is not lost. We want you to know that everybody goes through these kinds of conversations. It’s how productive we make ourselves in the conversation that makes it a fruitful one. And one of the things you can do is just take a notebook and start writing down what are you observing. Before you decide the curriculum’s not working, spend two or three days and observe when you’re doing the curriculum. What your student’s behavior is when you’re doing the curriculum. What else is going on? Like Amanda says, the UPS driver rings the bell. The dog barks. You have two siblings who decide that they’re going to chase each other through the house at the same time. Is all of that going on and negatively affecting your student’s ability to attend? When Kathleen gave us the advice of switch it up, she took that to also mean do it in a different place. Do it at a different time. Ask your student. You’d be amazed what astute observers our children are of their own human condition. And sometimes you can say, “Hey, it appears as though you’re really struggling with this curriculum. Can you tell me what’s going on? What are your feelings? What are your thoughts?” And you might get some tremendous insight from your student in that process. One thing that I want to encourage you is, in any situation, you can take Math-U-See’s tried and true teach-back method and apply it. Now, what do I mean by that? You can apply teach-back in any course materials by having your student explain to you what they are learning. And often, when they do that explanation, you’ll begin to see the holes in their thinking or where things aren’t connecting the dots. Amanda, with regard to Math-U-See and the teach-back, I know as a customer service rep, this is one of the things that parents miss, and it probably is the most powerful component of a Math-U-See experience. So can you explain to parents how you would walk a parent through if they called and said, “We’re really frustrated, and I don’t feel like we’re making progress”?

Amanda Capps: 00:09:19.534
Absolutely. So usually, two things are going on in that scenario. One, I typically ask some very pointed questions, and I find out they’re not using the manipulatives. They’re not building it. They’re skipping the build altogether. And usually, that’s for one of two reasons. Either the mom is not watching the DVD and isn’t comfortable or familiar with using the manipulatives, or the student is giving pushback because, let’s face it, it makes math take a little more time. You have to concentrate a little harder. And if you don’t automatically love a subject, you typically want to get it over with as quickly as possible, and so that’s one of the easiest things to skip or eliminate. And sometimes I just hear from parents, “Oh, well, my student doesn’t need those or doesn’t want to use them.” And I just cannot stress enough what an incredibly amazing tool they are and how they help make the curriculum multisensory in the way that it was designed to be used in that visual, hands-on, and concrete way. Then as far as that part of it, usually they’re just doing the worksheets. Sometimes we get the question about, “When do I stop using the blocks?” Blocks are really only supposed to be used for the initial concept presentation and sometimes through the lesson practice pages if a student needs that reinforcement and that visual and that hands-on. By the time they hit systematic review, they should not need the manipulatives anymore, and they should absolutely not be using manipulatives on any of their tests. And then as far as the teach-back, that is the step that we should be doing as parents. We should be sitting down with our student. We should be having them teach that concept that they’ve learned for the week confidently back to us, walking us through that Build, Say, Write method to prove mastery. And that should always be done before administering the test because that’s really the place where if we need to spend a little more time in this lesson, we need to go ahead and do that. We need to utilize the extra practice sheets or work on it for a few more days to make sure that they are confident because we really don’t want them failing a test or struggling with a test. By the time we do that teach-back and we’re confident that they’ve mastered it, they should do very well on the lesson test.

Gretchen Roe: 00:11:50.215
Absolutely. And I am guilty as a parent of– because let’s face it. If we are a parent at home educating our children, we are managing in a household, we may be working a job, part-time or full-time, alongside our homeschooling endeavors. We have a lot of irons in the fire. And I am absolutely guilty of being the parent who said, “Oh, just go do the worksheet. You’ll know how to do that.” And that is not really the case. The worksheet is the tool by which you use the manipulatives to successfully understand the process. And you may also be that parent who says, “I don’t think I understand how to use these manipulatives, therefore we’re not going to use them, because I got along just fine, and I didn’t use manipulatives.” Those were the things the teacher pulled out on Friday. Well, that may very well be the case, but one of the reasons we’re homeschooling is we want to have a better experience for our children than we had ourselves. Now, Amanda can’t say that because she had the best experience, and she’s repeating that experience. She wants the same experience that she had for her children and that does make a tremendous amount of difference. I think Amanda made a really important point about recognizing who are the early birds and who are the night owls, because I was a little bit of both of those people. I must have some Spanish heritage because I wanted a siesta every afternoon. But the truth is there’s not a lot of time there. So one of the things I want you to recognize is when you’re observing who’s a morning person or who’s a night person or who’s an afternoon person, observe how you’re managing your time with your children. And sometimes our frustration over curricula is that we have not been prepared. So we come to the table with a degree of preparation necessary, and children don’t wait. So Amanda, I know you talk often about an Open and Go Curriculum, can you repeat that conversation a little bit for parents? Because maybe they can look at what they are doing and maybe adapt it to be a little bit more Open and Go, whatever they’re using.

Amanda Capps: 00:14:13.857
Absolutely. So this is something that’s kind of critical as far as criteria for a curriculum for our family because of our family dynamic. I work for Demme Learning almost full-time, so we school at very unconventional hours, and we work year round because that is just what works for our family and gives us the time we need to get everything done, even if it’s not on a more conventional 8:00 to 3:00 schedule, which honestly, let’s be real, that’s too long anyway. I mean, if you’re spending, really even your high schoolers, more than four or five hours on academics a day, you probably need to reevaluate and look at what things you can cut out or what things are taking up too much time or we’re not effectively time managing on. The other really important thing about Open and Go is basically it means no prep on my part. It means I can pull it off the shelf, I can sit down and log into the digital pack, I can really just pull things and we can just do it in the moment. If it’s going to require a bunch of pre-planning or pulling a bunch of materials together or 10 pages in a teacher’s manual that I’m going to have to review before we can get going into the crux of the subject, that’s going to sit on my shelf and it’s going to collect dust because that just doesn’t fit our lifestyle. And so that can be something you know that you can look at too and go as a parent and instructor. “Is this curriculum overwhelming me? Is there too much to do? Is there too much prep on my part and that’s why we’re not being successful?” Because I just, quite frankly, don’t have the time to invest. Eight kids, a husband who’s a first responder and I work, that’s just not realistic for our schedule.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:08.666
But by the same token, I am the cheap German. Gretchen is a good Deutsche namen. And the truth is if I bought it, you will finish it because I spent the money [laughter]. So how do you take a curriculum that’s less open and go and make it more open and go? And our colleague, Kathleen, had a terrific idea that I share at homeschool conferences and I want to share with you all. She had bins. And in her bins– in that particular bin was everything that was necessary for the student to do that subject that particular day. So if scissors, or a glue stick, or a pencil was a part of the process, she had enough of those that everything was in that bin that when her son pulled it out, everything was there. I cannot tell you, I wish I had had this methodology when I was a homeschool mom because I think I lost years of my life looking for the glue stick or trying to figure out where 1 of 15 sets of scissors had wandered off to. And so being able to have that hands-on, being able to think about that– maybe what you as a mom need to do is look at your week that’s coming up. Look at the overall schedule and do a little bit of pre-planning because that might help you be a little bit more effective in that process. I think we had some questions, Amanda, that we wanted parents to ask themselves at this critical juncture. You’re not quite but close to halfway through the school year. So now, it’s time to take a step back and do a little bit of evaluation. And if you feel like your curriculum may not be working, Amanda, let’s explore those four questions that we had talked about and collaborated about educational goals and priorities.

Amanda Capps: 00:18:06.184
So without a vision, the people perish [laughter]. We know this. And about this time of year, we start to kind of experience a little bit of burnout. And we’re just coasting to get to the holidays and have a little bit of a break. So I think it’s really important to take a look and say, “Okay. Where was our goal to be at this point? How close are we to that? What would we need to do or what would we need to change to reach the goal by whatever date we have set?” Typically for me, Wednesday before Thanksgiving through that Sunday is really kind of our break. So I look at when we stop on Tuesday and we pick back up the following week, “Where do I want to be? What’s really important? What isn’t working that we need to scrap? What things can I readjust?” And can I just say as a parent, it is so important– and Gretchen said this about mid-afternoon slump [laughter]. I have that. I start looking forward to my little ones going down for their naps and just the peace that that brings. Sometimes, that can be a good time to work with an older child. But sometimes, everybody just needs a break and needs a quiet time. And that is one thing that other homeschool moms and mentors who had paved the trail or [laughter] blazed the trail before me really encouraged me to make sure that I had at least 25, 30 minutes to recharge, to drink a cup of hot coffee, to pull out a book that didn’t pertain to education in any way, something to just kind of refill my cup so that I could power through after everybody joined back up together after resting. And that was just such a valuable tip and tool, and I just cannot recommend it enough. And even if a child is too old to sleep, this is a great time to quietly play with Legos or read some assigned reading or free reading, as my mom used to call it. We could pick the book. It didn’t have to be school-related, but it was just a great time to just kind of unplug, calm down, get everybody separated, and just recharge.

Gretchen Roe: 00:20:40.052
Right. Absolutely. One of the other questions that we’ve thought about is we all have sometimes eyes that are bigger than our stomachs. And so in September, we know that we can accomplish it all. And sometimes we bite off more than we can chew. So now is a really good time. That Wednesday to Sunday that Amanda’s talking about, is a really good time for you to look at, what do I have to do? What is necessary? And what’s nice, but maybe tripping you up in the process? And so I would submit to you that you have to do math because we need math literacy more than ever before in our society. You need to be able to read. I think you need to be able to spell because I know some of you have gotten emails that have misspellings in them, and you’ve automatically made assumptions about the people who have sent those emails to you. No judgment here, but I think as we live in a more and more written, literate society, we have to be able to communicate well and safely. And spell check is not the be all and end all to that. And we also need to learn to write compositionally to an audience under a time constraint. So those are the four things I think you really need. You need math, you need reading, you need spelling, and you need composition. Beyond that, you can fit other things around, but take a look at what you’re doing. Can you take your history curriculum and take what you’re learning in history and make it a part of your compositional assignments so that you get a twofer. Now, let me say, as an aside, when you are teaching composition, I want you to keep the thing, the thing. Because as homeschool moms, we really want our children to do well. So we want them to spell. We want them to write creatively. We want them to punctuate. We want them to do it neatly. And that’s an overwhelming amount of material to ask them to complete. Keep the thing, the thing. If they are writing creatively, use your phone and let them dictate into the phone and be able to explain their point of view, their idea. That’s where your first draft comes from. And that will eliminate a lot of your hassle. Then you’ve got a draft that you and your student can work toward to make it be successful. When they’re writing compositionally, let them do it on the computer. But I encourage you to let them write their final draft as a handwritten one, because the neurological connection that occurs with that hand writing is enormous. Amanda, as far as revisiting our goals, the goals we might have set or didn’t even conceive of setting back in September, what are some of the questions we could ask ourselves before we step into December and January, as far as what are we looking for as far as outcomes are concerned?

Amanda Capps: 00:23:57.278
Absolutely. So a lot of times we get questions about what are realistic goals. And it was interesting when I was preparing for my daughter to graduate, I was kind of stressing out because she hadn’t completely 100% every problem finished algebra two. And I remember calling my mother and being like, “I don’t even know what to do. I don’t feel like I can honestly put this on her transcript because, I mean, we’re not totally done.” And my mom was like, “Sweetheart, they don’t complete curriculums in public school. They do not have enough time.” And the number of students that they are– my grandmother was a school teacher, so she did have this on good authority. And she just kind of explained quit stressing. It’s okay. If she got the majority of the concepts and you feel comfortable that she’s completed as much of the material as you want to require of her, give her a grade point average and go. Put it on her transcript. It’s fine. And so I think sometimes we stress ourselves out thinking we have to dot every I and cross every T and every single problem has to be done. And when you do that times 3, 5, 8, 12 kids, I don’t know how anyone would be able to actually do that and keep up with that kind of volume. And so I think this is a great opportunity to kind of look at the big picture and go, “Did we get the majority of it done? Did we get the key things that I wanted us to accomplish out of this? And if that isn’t every little thing, did we still overall get the grasp of the subject? Are we good?” So I think that’s really important. Now, the one thing I would say in math in particular is because each concept builds on a previously learned concept, we need to do our best to at least address or overview a concept and make sure that we’re making mastery happen. But again, you don’t have to do every lesson practice page. You don’t have to do every systematic review page. There are things that you can trim or cut down and especially if you have a very bright math student. I mean, I think for years, I mean, even up until probably Algebra 1 geometry, you know my brother did a D test, and he was on to the next lesson. But he was a very naturally mathematically minded kid and a very gifted math student, and that’s just how he was wired. So again, this is that great opportunity of observing our student. Are they the kid that needs to do every page and every problem so that they’re getting mastery? Or am I bogging them down with stuff that’s wasting their time and stressing me out because I feel like we have to do everything in the book?

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:07.669
Absolutely. Amanda, you talk often about building your what did we accomplish from the back end, not the front end. So can you explain to parents how being able to observe how school unfolded in a day is as critical as being able to plan everything in advance?

Amanda Capps: 00:27:32.342
Absolutely. I mean, there are some things we’re going to plan. We’re going to try to get this book accomplished. We’re going to try to do this with this subject. But there’s also– and I think this is where the absolute beauty of being a second-generation homeschooler comes into play and really works to my advantage. There is so much that we may neglect to count as education that just happens on a daily basis because we’re not thinking inside of that, we’re we’re not in a textbook, we’re not sitting at a desk, therefore we shall not count it. And that’s just not true. If I have my daughter plan a meal, put together a shopping list, budget and do the shopping for what it’s going to cost. Price compare at some different stores to figure out if we’re getting the best deal. Nine times out of 10, whatever recipe I stumble upon, we’re going to have to triple or quadruple it so that it will feed our family, and I’m usually planning for leftovers so that it encompasses more than one meal, so that’s math right there. It’s planning. It requires incredible time management to get an entire meal, main course and side dishes on the table all at the same time, all hot and ready to go. Those are all life skills and things. How much money does it cost to run a little laundry? What are we spending in detergent? How much water are we using? There are so many things. I remember when we learned perimeter in beta, we took dad’s tape measure and we measured the rim of just about everything we had in our house. And my boys loved it because we took the concept off the page and we made it really apply to real things in their real environment. That’s where learning really happens and the magic happens.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:28.124
Absolutely. And so one of our greatest focuses here for you as a parent, if you’re watching this or you’ve joined us live, is for you to recognize that what happens in your household is different than what happens in Amanda’s household or my household. And so often we are very difficult on our own psyche because we read other people’s highlight reels. And I laughingly tell this story at homeschool conferences where you have a little eight-year-old girl that you know in your homeschool group and she’s taking Chinese, and she’s playing on a travel soccer team, and she’s doing ballet, and she swims on the swim team, and your child couldn’t find their shoes that morning, and you think it’s your fault. And that’s not true at all. And so we want you all to recognize that when you see somebody else’s highlight reel, you don’t know the whole story. And you may be the highlight reel for someone as well. So that’s really important.

Gretchen Roe: 00:30:33.201
Amanda, we had so many great questions this time. I want to make sure that we leave time for these questions. We had a parent– I’m just going to go down our list of questions. So the first one that I would like to explicate just a little bit was a parent who said she’s changing to math, you see any tips for the switch. And so I know that you have this conversation often. Can you give me a real brief suggestion on how she’s going to get the best out of the program?

Amanda Capps: 00:31:02.773
Absolutely. The biggest thing that I can tell you is what we’ve kind of already touched on. Make sure you’re using the manipulatives. Make sure that we’re doing the teach back. There is an incredible section right in the front of your teacher’s manual. It’s literally two pages. I’m not talking about a novel. It’s two pages. And it’s called How to Use this Program. It talks about what support options you have. It outlines our four-step approach. It talks about each of these pieces of the build, say right, the teach back, and things like that. And if you can just invest that much time, it will set you up for so much success with your student as you go forward.

Gretchen Roe: 00:31:43.296
Absolutely. And I also want to say as an aside that Amanda spends most of her day, every day on the phone, talking with families. And we are a unique company in the fact that if you’re having a challenge, we would prefer you to reach out to us. We want to make sure that your academic journey is a successful one. And so don’t ever hesitate to pick up the phone and give us a call or hop on live chat or send us an email because we want to see that you have success in your journey. And we’re a little bit unique in the homeschool space because we believe that we provide unparalleled support. So we’d like you to experience that. So if something’s going on in your household and things aren’t working the way you think they should with any one of Demme Learning’s products, please pick up the phone and call us. Sometimes, we are that we’re-going-to-talk-you-off-the-ledge conversation. And we’re happy to do that as well. So please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. The next question I have is– actually, I’m going to take two of them together. This was someone who writing is a new area for them, and they’re looking for writing ideas. And so in my conversation a minute ago about Keep the Thing, the Thing, use your cell phone as your draft. When you’re looking for writing ideas, you can take a cheap notebook and as your children have conversations during the day, you can write those things down. Now, I had a child who was the goddess of distraction. She would come up with the craziest ideas to ask in the middle of the homeschool day because she thought it was a good way to get us off track. And it took me a couple of years to learn to say, “You know what? That’s a terrific question. Let’s write that down, and we’ll explore that later.” And from there comes your writing prompts, because that will give you the opportunity to explore in a little bit more depth. We had parents who said, “Learning how to evaluate in a way that isn’t the way public schools evaluate.” And Amanda, I want you to talk about this because what we’re looking for is more of an evaluation of the spirit of our students and the character of our students than maybe even what the numbers say on paper. Can you talk a little more about that?

Amanda Capps: 00:34:10.011
I think that exactly goes back to what I was talking about where we talk about what we can count as academic. It’s looking for those out-of-the-box situations. But maybe we’re dialoguing and you have a kid who’s just gushing about the World War II book that they’re reading and they’re, without even realizing it, throwing out names and dates of people that you recognize as being important in those particular stories. And you’re going, “Okay, wow, they’ve got this.” They are able to articulate. They’re obviously having good reading comprehension. We call this narration. And sometimes, it’s really great to have the opportunity to ask some leading questions. What was your favorite character and why? What was going on in this particular chapter that really grabbed you and made you think about something from a different perspective? This often can be around the dinner table with Dad, which is a great way to kind of pull him into and let him kind of clue into what we’re learning and what’s going on. And then the dialogue and the feedback is happening and everybody’s sharing. And I mean, sometimes, that can be chaotic, but it can also be a really enriching experience for everybody. And you would be amazed when those conversations are happening, just how much your little ones are picking up through osmosis.

Gretchen Roe: 00:35:39.080
Absolutely. One of the questions that we were asked is, how do I know if my students are on the right track? And so there’s a couple of ways to do that. In writing, for example, I recommend that you keep every compositional writing experience that they have. Does that mean you need to keep a folder? No. Frankly, you can take a picture on your phone and put it in a file or keep those documents because when your student has a day that they’re just, “I can’t come up with an idea. And I don’t know how to do this,” you have a treasure trove of proving to them that they have done it before and they have the capacity to do it again. And sometimes it’s really fun and amusing to look in January at what they thought was a good product in September and see how far they’ve come. Remember, this is the longest long game you’re ever going to play. And you, as the parent, are investing time and talent and energy, and you might not see the results. I give parents this analogy when we talk about spelling, but I’m going to make it in a broader context. Picture my water bottle here as your academic experience. I’m going to ask you to take this and pretend it’s empty. And I’m going to ask you to take an eyedropper and fill it. Is it going to take some time? Absolutely. Is it filling? Yes. But can you see your success? No, not until it overflows. And that’s what I want you to think about as you sow into your children’s lives and their academic experiences. You may be with a water bottle that’s really big and takes a long time to fill. It doesn’t mean you’re not being successful. Amanda, what are some of the things that you do to record home progress? I know you’re a very busy lady. But tell us a little bit about how you document that experience of, “Okay. I made her budget and serve a meal,” and those kinds of things.

Amanda Capps: 00:37:47.604
So I keep things relatively general. I try to keep them under subject headings. But I just pretty much write a brief description of what it is that they’ve accomplished or what task they’ve completed and what proficiency rates. So I try to really gauge what has my student really invested as far as the time that we spent, what we were doing. So if I’m looking at doubling or tripling a recipe, I can say, “They worked with fractions,” because that’s exactly what they’re doing. So you can kind of look at the overall thing, and you can kind of break it into, “Okay. These are the categories and the boxes that it ticks.” And then I just try to keep– especially about middle school on– I’m not as concerned about keeping detailed records when they’re in kindergarten. That’s just not going to fit into my day. I just don’t have the time, to be quite honest. But fourth, fifth, and up, I want to see them showing their work. I want to see– I want to start investing in teaching them how to be good students. I think this is something that we sometimes, as parents, just feel like they just naturally do or know, and yet having good study habits, knowing how to look up a definition, knowing how to use a library catalog, I mean, those are all things that you are taught. They’re not necessarily something that you just automatically know. And so if our goal– and I would say my overarching– the ultimate goal is to create a confident, articulate, lifelong learner. Then I’m going to look at, “Okay. What skills do I think that child is going to need in order to equip them to reach that ultimate goal?” And I think that’s one of the things that I loved the most about my experience is that was absolutely instilled in me. And my love for learning continues to this day.

Gretchen Roe: 00:40:06.451
I think that if that is your overarching goal in any parent’s world, regardless of what happens, as my German father used to say, “[foreign] of the day,” in other words, in the middle of the crazy, I think you’re going to see progress. One of our parents said, how am I supposed to be content with the changes I make in the middle of the school year? And the truth is, you know more in the middle of your school year than you knew at the beginning of your school year. So giving yourself the grace to be okay with change. Now, by the same token, sometimes it’s us. It’s not the curriculum. It’s us. It’s how we’re approaching it. If you are not adroit at time management, and then you’re frustrated with your student because they’re not managing their time well, bear in mind that time management is a learned skill. And so maybe it’s time for you to fess up a little bit and say, you know what? I haven’t managed our time well. I’m going to make a better effort to do that. And we’re going to help each other to manage our time more effectively. Maybe you need to take a look at the curriculum you’re using and go back to the beginning of that curriculum. How Amanda talked a few minutes ago about How To Use is at the beginning of your curriculum. Maybe if you’re frustrated, you need to say, am I using this right? Am I doing this correctly? Because if you find yourself jumping curriculum to curriculum, and more than once or twice in an academic year, I hate to say this, but it’s probably the way you’re using it. It’s not what you’re using.

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:53.364
And we as parents, we live in a technology-driven generation. And so we make the misapprehension that computers are great teachers, and they are not. You are a great teacher. A computer is a tool. And if you’re putting your child in front of a computer and abdicating the role of mentor, and teacher, and helper, you might not have the outcomes that you want. And I think it’s important. I’m not giving anybody a hard time here. I’m just asking you to think about things that maybe you didn’t think about. Things that I have to confess. I say this because it’s the voice of experience, things that I didn’t think about.

Gretchen Roe: 00:42:38.608
We had a parent who said, how am I not going to stall out on Algebra 1? And I loved this question because it has broader implications. How do you not stall out on anything? So regardless of the math you’re using, regardless of the math level you’re in, it’s really important for you to recognize that math is a conversation and no conversation occurs in a vacuum. How discouraging it would be if you worked all week long on your math, and on Friday, you and your students sat down, and you’re like, “Well, this is wrong, and this is wrong, and you didn’t do this right.” I want to encourage you, particularly if you’re in Algebra 1– we have a colleague named Sue who provides us with tremendous support for students in Algebra 1. She says, “Those practice pages are exactly that.” We as parents miss the idea that they are practice. And so work through the first section. Do the first problem together. Ask your student, do you understand? And if they don’t, go back to the video, take a break, walk away, maybe give it a couple of hours, come back to it. The important thing to recognize in Algebra 1 is that is a different mathematical conversation than what you have done in the mathematics Greek series or any math that has preceded it because it’s as much about algebraic thinking which is a more sophisticated thinking than it is about computational math. Amanda, what can you add to that observation?

Amanda Capps: 00:44:22.142
I would say probably some of the biggest things that we hear in customer service in regards to Algebra I specifically is, okay, this is– Algebra I is the level where everything we’ve done previously culminates. And so 9 times out of 10 when we are working an algebraic equation, we are adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing and we have exponents and we have absolute value and we’ve got all of these things happening within a single problem. Algebra I is really the level where if we haven’t done a good job and we haven’t really mastered our foundation, this is where it shows up. And so a lot of times we have parents and students who call in because they’re frustrated or they’re struggling. And I can very easily, usually within just a few questions, determine, oh, well, we don’t really have fractions mastered, or oh, we’re making careless errors in our multiplication. And so it might mean we need to pause and we need to do some remediation. We need to take a little bit of time. We’re not behind. We’re not in a need to panic but wouldn’t you rather invest a little bit of time here and really get solid? And this especially happens for customers who do curriculum hop a lot. They don’t necessarily pick up on just how many gaps there are because a lot of curriculums use different sequences and stuff just falls through the cracks and it’s just part of the process. And so one of the things that we do really well in customer service and in our homeschool support team is we look for, okay, where are the gaps, what do we need to do to get the gaps mastered, and then how can we move forward successfully? And we’re happy to do that with anyone that reaches out to us.

Gretchen Roe: 00:46:20.087
And I think the important thing as a takeaway there is you’re not behind. You are where your student is. To quote Steve Demmei, there is no behind when you homeschool. Your student is where they are. But in order to move them forward successfully, you have to go back to what Amanda was talking about before. What are your goals for your student for that academic experience? Do they want a college experience? Algebra is the gateway to upper-level math. They have to not limp through it. They have to finish it strong. So they’ve got to be able to understand what they’re doing and apply that successfully. And maybe as parents, it’s important for us to not say, oh, they’re just not a math student. Maybe it’s important for us to say, let’s figure out where the gaps are and make this a stronger experience for you because I think that makes a tremendous amount of difference for our students. Amanda, I love this particular question which is there’s so much demanded of us as homeschool parents as we enter the December and Christmas season. So what tips do we have to make things simple and joyful? And I know that Christmas in your household is even busier than Christmas is in mine now. Mine used to be like yours. But what kind of tips can you offer to parents to make it joyful and make it a memorable experience in a positive way?

Amanda Capps: 00:47:53.858
Sure. So the very first thing I would say is if you’re evaluating and you’re feeling like you’re not really on track or you’re not where you want to be, don’t beat yourself up. As my grandmother used to say, you can’t should yourself. [laughter] I mean, you add the time you had and you’ve gotten to where you’re at. So let’s make a plan for successfully moving forward, but also don’t go, “Okay, well, this means we can’t take a break and we can’t go see grandma or we can’t do this.” Don’t let that become a negative. Reframe it and let’s look for ways that we can be positive. Sometimes we need to look at extracurriculars. I mean, this time of year is when all the recitals are happening and the performances, if they’re in dance or cheer, or whatever, there’s tournaments happening if they’re in sports. So sometimes I have to look and say, am I overextending myself? Do we have too many extracurricular activities going on? What can I cut? Do my husband and I need to divide and conquer? Do I need to pull grandparents or aunts and uncles into the mix to help get some things off of my plate so that I’m not burning out and getting overwhelmed and then losing my joy in the season and in the process? Those are all really important things to take a look at.

Gretchen Roe: 00:49:17.010
I want you to know that ‘no thank you’ is a complete sentence. And as somebody who is the Uber extrovert and loves to be involved in a million different things, being able to say no to something that even sounds really fun is a character-building experience. And in the holidays, maybe there’s some things that you need to say no to. Maybe this evaluation before the holidays needs to happen before Thanksgiving rolls around. And then maybe you need to take what you evaluated and wait until January to make changes. Why would I say that? Because you have a lot of demands on your time in December as well as your students do. And so if you look at it as the opportunity to, here’s where I think we’re going to make changes come January. Just like wine ages, sometimes thoughts age as well. And what you may think is the solution may not be the solution after you’ve had a couple of weeks to sit with it. And so that might do you well as you evaluate this process now. Amanda, we had a parent ask about clarity moving into another term. And I remember, well, taking a deep breath. We didn’t do school from Thanksgiving to the 1st of January. But when we started school again in January, we did school six days a week while the weather was still awful. So January through the end of March, we were doing school six days a week. And I had to plan accordingly and do a few mental gymnastics for that. What happens in the Capps household to plan for January?

Amanda Capps: 00:51:15.953
So January is the beginning of a new year. And so I always love that time of year. First of all, it’s my birthday, so that’s always kind of fun. And then I think it’s a great time to look and say, okay, what have we accomplished? Let’s pat ourselves on the back. What have we gotten done? What have we done well? This is a great time. We actually just did a little program with several of my kids where we brought the grandparents in and they read pieces that they had written. They had a play that they put on. They read some poetry. I mean, it was just a great, kind of almost like an open house of them getting to show off what they had accomplished in this first semester. And you would not believe just how excited they were to show off what they had learned and what they had accomplished. And then hearing that encouragement and that praise of, “Oh, wow, this is amazing. This project looks so cool.” Everything you’ve worked so hard, it’s obvious. You memorized all your lines. Especially for a kiddo– because I do have a couple that have some learning challenges and some official diagnosis. I will just leave it at that. And so for them, those types of experiences and opportunities are just huge because it comes at such a hard cost to them because they have had to work so much harder than their peers to get there.

Gretchen Roe: 00:52:57.039
Absolutely. I think it’s important for you to also take away that your children need cheerleaders too. And sometimes that’s not always our family members. I don’t want to cast dispersions, but choose carefully who comes into your children’s lives and encourages them. Because if you have family members who are going to be less than encouraging, if you have family members who are saying aside, “Don’t you think you should put them back in school,” those aren’t the people that you want sewing into your children’s lives in that real-time. The reason that Amanda’s experience was a positive one is because she chose to have family members there who were going to encourage her children. Sometimes when we have kids who are teenagers and we ask the question, “So what do you think you want to do after high school,” which I think is probably the single single most loaded question we ask of teenagers, maybe what you need to do is you need to find those trusted adults in their lives and ask those trusted adults to say to your children, “Here’s what I see in you. Here are the character traits that I see in you that are going to make you successful as an adult.” Because you know what? As parents, we’re not the prophet in our students’ land sometimes, particularly when they’re teenagers. So there might be the opportunity for you to sit and reflect a little bit of who could help me encourage my children along this academic path because that makes so much difference. Amanda, I can’t believe it’s almost to the top of the hour, and we’re almost at the end here. So I know that you have some thoughts. Your voice has stuck with us, which has just been amazing. What are the closing thoughts you would like to share with our parents today?

Amanda Capps: 00:54:51.589
I think the biggest thing that I would share is look for those opportunities outside of the classroom. There’s a lot happening within our communities. There are internships. There are families or family members who run their own businesses and have an opportunity to maybe have your kid shadow them for a day or come alongside them and try something out. My sister runs a grooming business. Both of my oldest girls have spent time working for her and learning just how hard that work is. And I have a daughter that particularly loves animals and she was like, “Wow, this is a lot more than I thought it was going to be as far as the intensity of it.” So anytime you can give them the opportunity for a real life experience or to experience something that they’re interested in– I took my daughter with me one time when I went to get a massage from a very, very good friend who happened to be a homeschool mom herself. And she walked her through and talked about everything she was doing. And we got done with that session and I got out to the car. And I’m like, “What did you think, Elsie? What did you think? Is this something you can see yourself doing in the future?” And she went, “You know, I can rub your shoulders, and I can rub– but the thought of rubbing on strangers just really grosses me out. I don’t think I want [laughter] to do this at all.” And that was so valuable because, I mean, up until that point, she had been kind of interested and excited about potentially that being a future opportunity. And now, she’s completely switched gears, and she’s really actually way more into the thought of doing something culinary, which I’m completely fine with and support her wholeheartedly. She does an incredible job with a lot of the cooking in our family. And that’s just something she loves to do and loves to contribute and never seems to really get tired of. So I can absolutely see how that could be something that she would embrace with her future.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:53.710
So here’s an opportunity for you, as a parent, in maybe this downtime as the holidays roll up upon us. Give yourself the gift of thinking outside the box of what are some opportunities that I could create for my children? I’ll give you an example of one that I did with my youngest son. He has, since he was about nine years old, said he wanted to be a lawyer. And he would be a perfect lawyer because he will argue about the color of black. But he had the opportunity to do an internship with a family member who is a criminal defense attorney, and he spent two weeks shadowing him this past year. And he came home from that experience. And I fully expected him to say, “Okay, here we go. Law school, yeah, I’m ready to go.” And you know what he said? I’m so glad I had that opportunity because now I know that’s what I don’t want to do. How valuable is it for our children to be able to know what they don’t want as much as what they think they do want? So have these conversations over the holidays with your kids. Enjoy the opportunity to reevaluate and make sure that, for yourself, your cup is half full. Amanda, I know you speak eloquently about how does a homeschool parent make sure that they are enough? And can you, in the closing minutes, talk a little bit about that?

Amanda Capps: 00:58:22.585
Absolutely. You cannot pour from an empty cup. You just can’t. And so I think sometimes we feel, especially as moms, we put so much pressure on ourselves to do all the things and to be all the things. And yet, we have to invest in some self-care for ourselves. And if that means, “Hubby, you’ve got dinner tonight,” and I’m going to go soak in the bathtub for 30 minutes just to chill and just to have quiet. And you lock the door so you don’t get interrupted. There is nothing wrong with that. And sometimes you have to have those intentional conversations with your kids like, “Hey, if no one’s dying, if no one’s bleeding, this is my time. Do not disturb this. I need you to respect that I need some time to recharge or that I need to be able to focus on this book or this task that I’ve been putting off or that I need to accomplish.” You would be amazed at just how often our kids– they’re learning way more through what they see than what we say. And that’s just the honest-to-gosh truth. The other thing that I would encourage you is build your tribe. Find a group of moms who are where you’re at, where you want to be, and then look for opportunities to invest in a mom who is who you were before you got to where you are now. And that brings the entire thing full circle. And you will find so much enrichment and so much value if you can build that community for yourself.

Gretchen Roe: 01:00:01.562
Absolutely. And you know we have so many more dads who are finding themselves on the homeschool journey than ever before. And it’s going to be different for you to find your tribe than it is for Amanda or myself to find a tribe. But it’s equally valuable because it’s important for you to come alongside other dads and say, “Hey, so this is what’s going on. Is this normal? Is this what I can expect?” Toward that end, is this normal? Is this what I can expect? We do these webinars on a weekly basis, and we have a whole treasure trove of information for you that can be found at demmelearning.com/blog. The webinars that we’ve done this year are posted there. Maybe in your downtime over the holidays, you find a couple of those and look at them with fresh eyes and look for encouragement because that is the whole purpose of why we do what we do. This is Gretchen Roe for the Demme Learning Show. Thanks for joining us. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or go on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it.

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