In this first official episode of The Happy Homeschool, I tell you how I think this blog and podcast will help you to have a happy homeschool, as well as a little bit about our family.
transcript of the podcast:
Welcome to the first episode of the Happy Homeschool podcast. My name is Laura Blodgett and in this first episode I want to tell you just a little bit about myself and what my goals are for this podcast.
First of all, I am the mother of seven children. The oldest is in her late 30s and the youngest is in her early 20s. One of our children died when she was 13, but other than that we taught them all at home through high school. When I say ‘we’ I am referring to my husband and myself as a team, because although I did the bulk of the day-to-day teaching he was a definite part of an important foundation for interacting with them and also for supporting me in doing this.
I’m not here to tell you exactly how to homeschool, but to hopefully, encourage and inspire you along the journey and to help you develop creative building blocks of thoughts or problem solving ideas. I don’t think that homeschooling is about a particular method or what you call how you homeschool. But it is about knowing your kids and bonding with them so that you can know how to teach them better, how to supply what they need in terms of resources and discussions and also in growing together.
I hope to help you evaluate exactly what education is. What are your expectations from it and how do you consider the results that you hope to get or think that you are getting? I hope to help you think in long term strokes and think about what is at stake and why it is so important to teach your own kids.
I also hope to help you learn to problem solve according to your own personality and strengths and weaknesses. To help you harness your talents in ways that meet your childrens’ hearts and minds and what they need to get them off to a good start in life.
I hope to help you see how frustrations can be chances at problem solving things that need to be dealt with or ways to brainstorm and bring better things into your learning experience with your children and not just as barriers or stress in the learning process.
I hope to help you see that the time and energy that it takes to spend this kind of intensive time with your children is worth it and really important and not something that should be avoided.
I hope to help you evaluate what you see others doing and what you hear others suggesting and take that information and meld it into your own mix of what needs to be going on in your home to make your home a place where you have a happy homeschool.
I hope to help you to be able to better respond both within yourself and out loud and facing someone when necessary to other people’s biases, misconceptions or interference.
I want to help you soak in the goodness of the days and rest in knowing that perfection, especially by other people’s standards or according to test results, is not what you are looking for. And it is not in the execution of a program. But the perfection is in the forging of bonds with your children and the girding of their minds to help them to be able to both think for themselves, to be able to function well as adults, and take care of themselves.
Although this is my first official podcast for the Happy Homeschool, I have had some other recordings about homeschooling from my previous website The Happy Libertarian and a lot of them have to do with homeschooling, particularly the series 52 Weeks to a Better Relationship with Your Child. I’m going to be moving that series completely over to this podcast.
I want to also mention that I am a Christian. Our family is Christian. And I feel that while you can apply many of the things that I am talking about in very useful ways without being a Christian, being a Christian family in the true sense of the Biblical freedom that you get from that is an advantage.
And in tandem with that I will mention that I also have another website that along with the Happy Liberatarian has been subsumed into the Happy Homeschool. It is a sub website or a subcategory on thehappyhomeschool.com and that is biblenewspress.com.
For Bible News Press, I have written many articles that have to do with dissecting religious vocabulary, as well as delving into matters of heart and mind and how we evaluate biblical truth. But it all started with a series of short, pseudo news articles that I wrote like I was a time-travelling reporter in the Old Testament. And that’s how it got the name biblenewspress.com. Those will all be on their own podcast stream.
I’m also going to mention that one of the reasons I started writing more about this on a blog and starting a dedicated blog to homeschooling is because both my own children and my children-in-law, my children’s spouses have encouraged me to get this information out there because they can see what a difference it has made in my own children’s lives. And because they get so many questions about how they turned out the way they did, and they wanted someplace to send people so that they could get answers directly from me, since I was the main coordinator of all of these efforts.
I plan to start a course on thehappyhomeschool.com where I will very specifically delve into how I taught each subject and what resources I used and how I evaluated how I was going to teach each subject. As well as what activities we tried getting involved with, how we stayed involved with some and why we didn’t stay involved with others.
So, I hope you will continue to join me at the Happy Homeschool podcast. You can subscribe on many podcast apps, this will be on iTunes and on Stitcher, and I will also get it going on Spotify. Meanwhile, you can go to thehappyhomeschool.com and you can get on my email list to get my Best 25 Homeschool Tips. And when you do that, you’ll get on my newsletter, which one of my children helped me name (I say children, but she’s 28) and we call that The Dangerously Helpful Homeschool Dispatch. There are many subtleties to that title, many people consider you dangerous when you do something that’s considered out of the norm. And in some ways you
are, because you challenge the status quo and some lazy ways of thinking and some other ways of doing things that are actually harmful to society.
Ah, but there I have used the term ‘society’, and I discuss that some in my blogs that are dedicated under the subcategory of The Happy Liberatian. So I hope you will also visit that to get a better idea of some worldviews and perspectives that can help you teach your children because they are so foundationally important to really understanding the world and they cut through some of the government or social propaganda that is out there.
Another thing that I have available for you already are my three children’s read aloud books that are very family supportive, family oriented. I know from experience that it can be challenging to find books that don’t make the father look horrible, or aren’t so child-centered that they completely disregard the parents. These books are called The Blue Fish, that’s the first one. The next one is A Million Rocks, which is subtitled A Book of Almost Counting Words. And the third book, the most recent one, is Four Frogs in a Glass Pond, which I was able to get illustrated in some beautiful watercolor illustrations by a friend of the family. These are all available on my website either through the store on my website or through Amazon.com.
So, that’s all for today, it was great talking to you. Thank you for listening and please, send me things that are on your mind, questions, and such. And I will be happy to use them as things in the podcast that we can discuss that can encourage and inspire you. See you next time!