The Sequoia Breeze

Rebecca: Listeners, hang on. Today, I have got Pam Barnhill on the line and I can't wait for you to hear our conversation as we dive into talking about the Plan Your Year book that she has written and all of the wonderful things and helpful tips that it has inside of it. So stick with us and feel much more prepared to tackle this coming year. Welcome to the Sequoia Breeze Podcast, a breath of fresh air for your homeschool. I am your host, Rebecca Lasavio. Thank you, listeners, for joining us today. I'm so excited to introduce you to Pam Barnhill. And if you've been in the homeschool world for at least a couple of years, you've probably come across her and her website and podcasts and books, and I'm going to let her tell you all about those. But she is joining us today to talk about her book, Plan Your Year. So welcome. Pants. Thank you so much for being here today.

Pam: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Rebecca: So tell us a little bit about you and the things that you offer the homeschool school world, because you've been working hard at this for several years now.

Pam: Yeah, I have been. Thank you so much. Yeah. So I am a homeschooling mom of three kids. I am a recovering public school teacher. It has taken me years to claw my way out of the public school mindset and start to adopt a homeschooling mindset. I work on it just a little bit every single year. I've graduated my first child, our daughter Olivia, and she's actually working part time now, getting ready to start school in the fall. And she hosts a podcast with me, the Wonder World Podcast, that is for families and kids. And then I have another child who will be going into 11th grade, so I guess I can't call him a child next year. That's John, and then I have a 13 year old who will be in 8th grade next year. That's Thomas. I've been married to my husband Matt for 29 years this October, and we've been homeschooling since the very beginning. And I have a number of books and podcasts all to help homeschooling parents just kind of relieve some of the overwhelm of homeschooling. And you can find all that@pambarnhill.com.

Rebecca: That's what I was going to ask. Is your morningbasket.com the main website or Pambarnhill@pambarnhill.com?

Pam: Because we have your morning basket, we have ten minutes to a better home school. We have all of the planning stuff, so we've just sucked it up all under that Pambarnhill.com umbrella. So if you know you need me, you know where to find me.

Rebecca: Perfect. So, Pam, you've agreed to talk with me today about one of your books, which is called Plan Your Year. And this past spring, I was able to host a book club for some of our families to go through this book together and to think through kind of what worked the previous year and what needs to change and how we want that to look for the following year. And this book is chock full. There is so much information in here while it's called Plan Your Year by the end, I thought this is kind of Homeschooling 101.

Pam: Yeah, that was really my hope was to make something that would be kind of a Homeschooling 101 for homeschool families. And so, yeah, we cover a lot of different information in there from planning to how to set up and organize your space and then also how to make sure that the plans you make in the summer actually get done during.

Rebecca: The school year, because that's a big leap. All the beautiful plans and then actually doing them.

Pam: Exactly, yes. It's almost two different things, but we understand the need to make sure that you can implement those plans, for sure.

Rebecca: So how did plan your year come to be? What was the inspiration in the process of that?

Pam: Yeah, so like I said, I was a public school teacher, and so I was used to organizing big projects. I actually was the yearbook advisor for a couple of different schools and managed to get 40 kids together to do to create a 300 page yearbook in the course of about four or five months each and every year. So I kind of had these really great organizational skills where I was planning out these big projects, and I knew that planning homeschooling was kind of along that same path. And back in oh, goodness, it was 2012, 2013. My husband got deployed to Afghanistan for the year and left me at home with like, a seven year old, a five year old, and a three year old at that point.

Rebecca: Oh, man.

Pam: Yeah. And so up until that point, we had been dabbling in homeschooling. I obviously had started with my daughter, and we were learning to read and do math, and we had done preschool for years at home. And it was just very enjoyable. But I was faced with this year where I was going to be home by myself with these three little kids. I had my second child coming into kindergarten, and I knew that I needed to hold it together, and the only way I was going to be able to hold it together for that next year was to kind of have a plan in place because I had been planning and fits and starts. Like, I would plan some really fun stuff. We would do it for a while, and then we wouldn't for a while. We would just stop doing homeschooling while we waited for me to plan again. And we went year round. But the fits and starts, the little spurts of productivity, I was feeling stomied by that. And I was like, if I fall into one of those downtimes while he's gone, I'm probably not going to crawl out of it. And that was the thing that made me realize I needed to get all of this planned before he left and at least be prepared for the good days that were going to happen and have something ready. Like if bad days happened, that was okay. We could take a day or two off, but if good days happened, I wanted to be ready for those good days and not have good days and then not have a plan in place. And so that was when I sat down and kind of mapped out the ten different steps that we use in the planning process to get ready for that school year. And it worked beautifully. And then I did it again after he got back for the following year. And I just realized that I really love having all of the preparation steps done ahead of time, but we do it in a very unique fashion. We do it without assigning dates to things. We don't put our plans in grids because we don't know when we're going to be, quote unquote, ahead and when we're going to be behind in particular subjects. So we don't tie these subjects to each other. We do it in a very flexible way.

Rebecca: I found that really freeing as I was reading through the fact that to be prepared for this coming year, I don't need to put which math lessons are happening, which day on a date, right?

Pam: Yeah, 100%. All you need to know is what math curriculum am I using? What am I going to do when I sit down to do a lesson, and then what supplies do I need to do that lesson? And once you have all of those things in place, then when it's time to do math, you have everything you need to do it, whether it happens this Tuesday, this Thursday, next Tuesday, you can just move along at the pace you need to move along, but you are completely prepared. And you'll find that by being prepared to do the math lesson, they happen so much more often and so much more consistently.

Rebecca: Isn't that the truth? So how did you get from you, like, being organized to actually publishing a book about it?

Pam: I realized that there were other homeschooling, moms homeschooling, parents out there who needed this information. They were coming to me. And even locally, I had a lot of moms who would say, okay, Pam, how do I get organized with this? How do I get ready to teach this subject? How do I plan this out? And so I was just answering all of those questions for friends and for other people online at this point. I had a blog I was writing about homeschooling and talking about homeschooling and was just getting so many different questions. And so that was when I knew other people could use this information and I could kind of break it down for them into manageable chunks. And so I did that and plan your year first came out in its very early days as an ebook and a set of planning forms that you could get and download. And it's been revised a couple of times but the process was still the same. Here are the ten steps and here are the action items you read about the step and here are the action items you need to do in order to get yourself prepared.

Rebecca: And it's become, I think, a very popular book. Like you said, it's gone from a downloadable to an actual published book. And I think there's so much meat to it.

Pam: We really have added to it over the years. And one of the things that we did when we revised it and turned it into a print book was we started adding other viewpoints in there other than just my own. And so now the process is still organized in the way that I organize it. But we asked other people to contribute how they do things for the book because one of the things we realize is that everybody does things differently. And just because you do something differently than me doesn't mean that my way is right and your way is wrong or vice versa. It just means that you have different insights and you have a different take on things. And so by adding in some different insights, we could show people how the basic foundational premise is the same, but somebody might do it a little bit differently. So we never try to pigeonhole anyone into planning just the way we plan. And then often people will say, well, what method of homeschooling do you use this with? And the fact of the matter is you use it with any method of homeschooling. It really kind of supersedes whatever method of homeschooling that you might do. And also, even if you have a box curriculum, there are a number of things that you can learn, a number of different tips and hacks that we teach in the program that's even going to make using that box curriculum so much easier to use.

Rebecca: So the first couple of chapters talk about casting a vision and setting goals. The chapters that follow that are real sort of nuts and bolts, practical, this is how you put these things together. But the vision and goals part which set the tone for all of it, are the less tangible things that need to be set out. And I really found those to be the hardest part for me. I have a hard time, I just kind of want to do all the things. So it's very hard for me to narrow down my vision and my goals. But talk a little bit about why vision and goals are so crucial to be able I'm just buying a box of curriculum, what do I need a vision and goals for?

Pam: Right? How do you know you want to buy a box of curriculum unless it's laid out your vision and goals? I have actually never bought a box of curriculum before. Well, okay, I take that back. I did one time. I bought a box of curriculum for preschool. I ended up never fully using the box, gave it to a friend of mine. She used it and absolutely loved it, had a great time with it, with her daughter. But I've never really done a box of curriculum, and I know that the box of curriculum doesn't work for me because of the work that I've done on my vision and goals. And casting a vision for your home school, you really start thinking about when I say vision, I'm not talking about kind of pie in the sky, what I want my kid to look like in 20 years. That's not what we're talking about at all, because, honestly, we have no control over that. As homeschool parents, we can influence our children in the day to day growing up, but homeschooling is not going to fix all of the problems that happen with our kid, and homeschooling is not going to control who they become as an adult. We can only influence that in the day to day atmosphere of our home. And so that's what a vision is all about. It is about what do we want the atmosphere of our home to be? Like, what is important to us about education? Where do we want to spend our time, money, and energy as homeschooling parents? Because you said, I want to try to do everything, but the fact of the matter is, I'm sorry enough time, money, or energy to do every single thing. And so by focusing, by really defining what is important to you, your spouse, your family, and then that's going to allow you to focus on those things and do those things really well. Because if you're trying to do everything, you're just going to gloss over most things and kind of be dissatisfied. You're never going to feel completely satisfied with the homeschooling that you're doing. And I think feeling having some satisfaction is really important. And then the same with goals. If you have three or four or five children in your home and think about school subjects, every kid does five or six subjects a year. Well, multiply six subjects times four kids, that's 24 subjects. So one human being cannot focus on managing 24 subjects with equal intensity and equal energy for a whole school year. It's just not going to happen. And so by focusing on two to three goals per children or per child, then that gives you much fewer things to focus your time and energy on. Now, if your child is doing well with math, math may not be a goal for that year, but that doesn't mean you're not doing math. It just means when things get tough, when you have to choose priorities, you're going to choose reading, because this child really needs help with reading, and math might not be the main focus for a few days at a time. And that's okay because we're trying to do a good job with the things that we need to do a good job on the things that are really important to do that year. And only by setting some goals can we define what those things are.

Rebecca: So the vision and goals don't hem you in, they set you free to accomplish the things that really need to be accomplished?

Pam: I think so. I think so. I think they give you a lot of freedom to do some things well and then to do what you can with the other things.

Rebecca: Yeah, that's pretty freeing for somebody who really wants to check off all the boxes. That sets up a lot of boxes that can be checked well.

Pam: It just kind of makes you focus on the most important boxes and realize that these really are the most important boxes. And then once you have that vision and once you have those goals, then you can decide what curriculum is going to best meet your needs. And so it also saves you a lot of money from making curriculum mistakes.

Rebecca: So over the years that you've been sharing these ideas with friends, talking about them, blogging about them, or talking about them at conventions and things like that, what have you sort of learned from sharing about the book or from the feedback that you've gotten from parents?

Pam: Well, I would say that's one of the biggest things right there is that I can save so much money on curriculum. Once I've got my vision in place, it keeps me from over scheduling myself. It keeps me from trying to do too many things. It keeps me from making mistakes, buying curriculum because I can evaluate something. I call it the wall for your home school spaghetti. To know if spaghetti is done or not, you throw it at the wall and see if it sticks. Well, that's what your vision is. It's the wall for your home school spaghetti. So throw it up against that vision. Does it really match what we're trying to do here? Is it a priority? Is it something that we think is important? And then if the answer is no, then you start feeling really confident in leaving it and walking away from it. And so I always encourage moms to take their homeschool vision with them, too, if they go to a home school convention, like, print a copy of that out and stick it in the front of your little notetaking binder and take it with you so that you can read it. Often when you're by these bright, shiny things that are just supposedly going to solve all of your problems.

Rebecca: So many bright shiny things, conventions, it's so fun. But at the same time, sometimes those bright, shiny things, if like me, you're somebody who really has a tendency for FOMO, it's really overwhelming. So that's I think where I say the vision and goals can set you free in that you don't have to have FOMO because that's not right for us.

Pam: Exactly. That is not right for us 100%.

Rebecca: So in our book club, a couple of the highlights that came up, things that really the moms were really lighting up about a little bit as we went through were one of them was the procedure lists. The idea that you don't have to schedule out in a calendar when you're going to do things, but when you open up this subject, this is what you're going to do. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Pam: Yeah. So procedure lists were just to reduce my own decision fatigue. I had this little three year old and this five year old and this seven year old, and it would be time to do science, and I would be like, oh, what are we supposed to do for science? I don't know. And so by making the procedure list, this was the thing that told me exactly what I needed to do, and it was just all written out, and all I had to do was open the book. I call it taking any curriculum or any set of resources and making it open and go. I love open and go curriculums, and I'll just name a couple that I love, but there are lots of them out there. So like an all about reading or a math, you see, and they're almost scripted, right? You just open them up and it just tells you exactly what to say and exactly what to do. By making your own procedure list, you can make any curriculum or any resource open and go. And it takes maybe 20 to 30 minutes up front to look at some resources and say, okay, every time we do a lesson in geography, we want to do these five things and gather your resources and write down those five things. And so every time you study a state, we're going to do these five things, then it's so easy.

Rebecca: And you're not talking about an extensive list. You're talking like, identify the capital, find it on the map, read this picture.

Pam: Book, color in this notebooking page, that kind of stuff.

Rebecca: Things that might take 15 minutes. But you've done a day of geography and you didn't have to think about it beforehand because you knew what the plan was.

Pam: You knew what the plan was, and you've made all the copies and everything, and they're sitting there in a folder and you just grab what you need. It makes it so easy.

Rebecca: The other thing that came up as being kind of a favorite was the spiral notebooks idea. I came upon this a little past the halfway mark in the year when my freshman and I were trying to still figure out how to make sure she knew what she needed to do and I could make sure she was getting it done. And it saved the end of our year. We will continue to be doing spiral notebooks this coming year. We even tried like, fancy apps and things online, and it really was too much. It was too complicated. So talk to us about those spiral notebooks.

Pam: Oh, I love the spiral notebooks. Now these are the brainchild. My friend Sarah McKenzie turned me on two of them, and she actually learned about them from a veteran homeschooling mom who goes to her church. So it was fun. I actually traveled to Sarah's hometown last fall and got to meet this mom, and I was like, oh, goodness. Like, you saved my homeschool all these years ago with the spiral.

Rebecca: Fun.

Pam: Yeah, it really was fun. It's fun how you just kind of pay things forward in the homeschool community. So Sarah taught it to me about seven or eight years ago. And quite simply, you just make a list every day. At the end of the school day, you make a simple list of what you want your kids to do the next day. And honestly, it takes about 30 seconds to a minute per kid to make this list. And the beauty of making the list every single day, well, there are a number of different benefits to making the list every single day because some people will say, I don't have time to do that every day. I'm just going to make a list for the week. And you can, you can do that. But there are some benefits to doing it daily. And one of them is you're on top of what your kids are working on and what they're doing. And, you know, do they need more practice with this concept? I'm going to put it on their list for them to practice more tomorrow, or have they mastered this concept earlier than what I thought they would? We're going to skip the next practice page and go on to the next concept. They're done with it. And so it's a way to keep you involved and on top of your children's education. The other thing is it allows you to flex with what's going on in your life. So if I made a spiral notebook list of five or six things for each one of my kids and something happened that our day went off the rails and we didn't finish that list well, when I sat to make the list for the next day, it was super easy to just transfer some things over. And I have to be honest with you, there were days where I was like, oh, yeah, we got to none of that. We had to go to the pediatrician, take the toddler, go get the medicine. It was just like, it was a bad day all the way around. Cross off the date at the top, put the new date tomorrow. Allows you to be in the moment with your homeschooling and crossing off that date and writing a new date never made me feel bad. It never I never had this messy week long calendar. Every day was a fresh new day and we would just adjust as we needed to. And then my kids were not asking me what do I need to do? Right? They knew exactly what it was they needed to do and they knew that when they were done with that list they were done for the day. And so I never tried to add anything to the list once the list was made. So we built up this wonderful trust and they were willing to do what was on the list because they knew when they were done, they were done.

Rebecca: It's so helpful when that list is really visual. It's not just guessing what's in mom's mind or worrying that oh, I finished that fast, now mom's going to give.

Pam: Me extra and you're never the bad guy. The list tells them what to do.

Rebecca: So the other tool that to me was a whole brand new idea. And I'm super intrigued and looking forward to using this tool as I'm getting ready for this year. Was the idea of opening a textbook or a curriculum and using the table of contents as a jumping off point for covering a topic, not necessarily using the actual content, but using the table of contents and then filling that in however you wanted to.

Pam: Oh yeah, I wish I could take credit for that idea, but that was not mine. It was Shelly Sangrey's idea. She was a homeschool blogger and YouTuber and I actually discovered her talking about this and I thought this is genius. This is one of those ideas that has to be shared in the book. And so basically a lot of times as homeschoolers we don't want to have to use a textbook, but we worry how do we know that we're covering everything we should be covering if we're studying 8th grade, US history or biology in high school. So we want to use great living books but we need to know what it is that we need to study. And she just had this idea of going into a textbook for high school biology and that gives you the list of topics and then from there you can seek out the living books that you could use in order to study that topic. Now I will tell you, since the publication of the book, this has gotten even easier with the advent of Chat GPT. Because now you can use Chat GPT, do the same thing and not only will it give you a list of topics, you could go in and say tell it that it's a biology teacher, it's teaching 9th grade biology and what is a comprehensive list of topics that you would use to study to teach a 9th grader about biology? And it's going to give you a really good list of topics. And chat GPT sometimes gets things wrong. But most I would think in this case, that this would be a place where it's going to be pretty safe. You could also ask it at the bottom. Is there anything else? You could compare it against another list and then you could ask it for resources, websites, help in finding some of the things that you could use to teach those topics. And it's going to give you some books from Amazon and different things like that. So since the advent of Plan your year, this part has even gotten easier now.

Rebecca: Wow, that's an interesting idea. I bet you could even say something, add to it, like based on California standards or something. As yeah, yeah. Wow, that's an interesting idea.

Pam: You always want to verify the information that Chat GPT gives you, but you are going with a set of state standards. And I think Chat GPT was trained on information up through 2021. So if the state standards changed in 2022, then obviously the information is going to be outdated. I've asked it to help me write some procedure list for different curriculum and I have noticed that some of the curriculum was developed since 2021 and it doesn't do a very good job with that. But an older curriculum that's been around for a long time, it actually does a pretty decent job.

Rebecca: Oh, that's really interesting. I'm going to have to play with that a little bit. Despite my very mixed feelings about Chat.

Pam: I know 100% people worry about Chat GBT. I have mixed feelings too. But I'm like, you know what, if it's going to be around, I'm going to use it to save you.

Rebecca: So one of the attendees for the book club, I told them I was going to get to talk to you and I asked if they had any questions. And one gal asked, once you've got this beautiful plan and you're getting ready for your year, you figured out your schedule and all of that. Now you throw in into the mix the actual children. And so she was wondering how do you ensure cooperation from your kids, whether they're just having a bad day or perhaps a rather strong willed yeah, well.

Pam: Okay, so I would approach it differently if they were having a bad day versus if we're talking about a strong willed child. But the first thing I want to say is all the home school planning you do is not going to fix character issues and relationship issues in your home. So you can't plan your way out of having to parent is basically what it boils down to. I wish you could because I make beautiful plans and so it would all be really pretty, right. But no, we're dealing with humans here and we're going to get up and butt heads with them. And so it all boils down to you have to be the parent. You have to be the parent and take a look at the situation. What am I dealing. With? Am I dealing with a strong willed child or am I dealing with a child who's having a bad day? Because if you're dealing with a child who's having a bad day, sometimes the best thing to do is just close the book and walk away and pick up again the next day. If you're dealing with issues where the child wants to fight you on everything, then you're going to have to figure out how to fix those character issues first before you can get to the homeschooling, even if that means taking a little bit of time off of homeschooling. And then the other thing that I would really encourage you to do if you have a child who is constantly pushing back and balking against homeschooling is ask yourself honestly, how consistent am I being? Am I getting up every day ready to do some school with this child or do I let things slide? Do I let them weasel their way out of doing things? Do I let them talk me out of what we're doing? And so as a result, we're just super inconsistent because what I have found is consistency breeds consistency. It's not easy to get started with this, but if you give it like six good weeks of being super consistent and we have a tool that we use that we've kind of developed since plan your year. It's called the Minimum viable day. And with the minimum viable day, what you do is you ask yourself, what is the least amount of school that I can do on any given day and still feel good about having done school. This is your backup emergency plan for those days that just go crazy or you just don't feel like it or even they just don't feel like it. I'm not talking about meltdown days. I'm talking about just the don't feel like it days. Do that every day for six weeks so they get the expectation that school will be done. There's no sense in asking. There's no sense in trying to get out of it. We are doing school every single day. And a lot of times you can fix some of the pushback just by being consistent because they realize they're not going to get anything by pushing back anymore.

Rebecca: Well, and then the parent is also sending the message that we do school whether we feel like it or not. Me included.

Pam: Yes.

Rebecca: When you're inconsistent, the message is, well, I don't feel like it, so we're not doing school. So then the kid can reasonably think, well, I don't feel like it today, so why do I have to do school?

Pam: There's so many different things that come into play with that. But we run something that we call the home school consistency Boot camp. We run it in the fall and we run it in the spring. And what I find with moms who struggle with consistency a lot of times is they struggle with consistency because they're idealist, because they're perfectionist doesn't have anything to do with being lazy or anything like that, but it comes up as like, I'm not going to get the perfect school day done, so I might as well not do school at all. And I was like this myself. I struggled with this a long time ago and kind of overcame that struggle by using this minimum viable day concept along with a few other mindset shifts. And I just realized it made the biggest difference, that even though I wasn't going to get the perfect day in, I could still do a really good day. And our home school really is it's not a sum of perfect days. It's a sum of really good days or sometimes the sum of mediocre days, but it's still getting the job done, even if they're not perfect.

Rebecca: As you were talking about that, I realized I think you did a podcast episode about consistency, right?

Pam: Yes. Multiple.

Rebecca: I came across one not, I don't know, a couple of months ago and was like, oh, this is good because it's also I think you even said in that episode that it's sometimes the thing we don't really talk about. Let's talk about planning better. Let's talk about motivation. Let's talk about all these different strategies without just dealing with we have to be consistent, right?

Pam: Yeah, we do. And it's not something that people want to hear because there's a lot of shame tied up in being inconsistent with your home school because you feel like you're failing your kids. Right? And so it's something that we don't want to admit and we don't want to talk about. But I've had moms come up to me at speaking events and things like that, just crying because they're thank you. Thank you for saying this. I didn't feel like I could talk about this with anybody. And like I said, it really is because these moms are idealists. They want to do such a good job, and they feel like, well, when I can't do the job, I can't reach that bar that I've set for myself, well, then I just give up and I'm not going to do anything. And they just don't realize that it becomes a constant struggle. And so by kind of letting go of some of those expectations and setting a realistic plan, then it helps us to build that consistency muscle. And it really is a muscle that.

Rebecca: We have to build those habits that have to become automatic instead of optional. I think at times I've needed to think of homeschooling as my job.

Pam: 1%. Yes.

Rebecca: When we talk about helping kids be cooperative and when we talk about the parent being consistent to a degree, I feel like we're setting up that at the base of homeschooling isn't curriculum. The base of homeschooling is a little bit of backbone in.

Pam: You know, it's actually funny. My friend Misty Winkler has a fabulous blog post on this, and I could send it to you so you can put it in your show notes. Perfect there. But everybody is always looking for character curriculum. Like, I need character curriculum to help me teach my child patience or teach my child good habits or help my child be of stronger character. And misty points out in this blog post that the math curriculum is the character curriculum. By getting up and being faithful and doing the math, doing the math every day, that's where you build the character. You don't need to lay something else on top of it. And so, yeah, 100%. So much of what we do is about character and about relationships, and it's.

Rebecca: Not just the child's character, because it takes a lot of character for me to get through the math lesson without losing my cool.

Pam: Yes.

Rebecca: What is the highlight of if somebody got one concept out of plan your year, what would you want it to be? What is the highlight for you?

Pam: That you can be confident in making your choices in your home school, that you don't need anyone to tell you what to do. And even if you're sitting under the authority of a state with regulations, that you can still be confident to choose the things that you feel are important for your family and do those things and then be confident that they're the things that are going to work for you.

Rebecca: That's great. I think there's a lot of new homeschoolers within our charter schools that are worried about that precise thing. What do I choose? How do I do this? Is it going to be enough? What if somebody says I'm not doing enough? And it really can feel like you're in a fishbowl when you're homeschooling, because instead of blaming the teacher at school or blaming the curriculum the school has provided, it's now kind of on you. And grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends might be looking at you, and you shouldn't feel that pressure, but it can be very real for a lot of people.

Pam: It can, but this is why creating that vision and being able to articulate what is important to you about education and it might be really different than what they're doing in the public school, and that's okay. The public school model of education has only been around for less than 200 years. And so educating humans, people have been doing that for millennium. And so don't take the new, modern way necessarily. Go back and look at what people have been doing forever and ever.

Rebecca: Figure out what works for you and.

Pam: What'S important for your family and know that it might look different, and that is sometimes a good thing.

Rebecca: And even within that 200 years, some of the people we admire most in our own history didn't get formal education. They may have read books in a log cabin, and they still were able to make great impact on our country. And our world.

Pam: Yes, 100%.

Rebecca: Well, Pam, this has been a fabulous conversation. Is there anything else you would like to tell our listeners before we go?

Pam: No, just that we have a couple of podcasts. So if they would like to find us at Ten Minutes to a Better Home School or the Your Morning Basket Podcast where we show you how to combine your kids and have an enjoyable start to your day, you can find all of that@pambarnhill.com.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for being here today. And again, it's really been a privilege to speak with you. Thank you, listeners. I hope that you were able to enjoy this great conversation that Pam Barnhill and I were able to have about her book Plan Your Year. And guess what? I have a really exciting opportunity. If you are wishing that you could be a part of that book club, you are not too late. HST Mindy Hobson and I are going to host that book club again, starting in just a few weeks. So if you would like to be a part of that, check yesterday's Sequoia Scoop. Check the Sequoia Scoop that went out on August 22 and look for details about when that book club will be taking place and how to sign up for it. You can order the Plan Your Year book with your students funds as part of our allowance for parent education. So go ahead and get that book ordered right away, so that is on its way. Whether you decide to be a part of the book club or not, that is a resource that you can get. And if you would like to be a part of that book club, we really encourage you to sign up for that and come on in. And even though the year has started, as Pam said, it's kind of like a homeschool one on one. So if you're still trying to get your feet under you, if you feel like you know what, we're going, but we could do this better, join us. We'd love to have you. We'd love to get to know you. We'd love to help you brainstorm solutions to the things that are stealing your peace and joy in your home school. So join us and please reach out if you have any questions. Podcasts@sequoiagrove.org. Or you can always go to your school's website and find the podcast page and hit that button and ask me questions. Talk to me. I'd love to hear from you. I love, love, love feedback and interaction. So please contact me whether through email or the talking button on the website. Let's get together. Let's get to know each other and let's help each other out. Thanks again for being here today. I always love hanging out with you. This has been the Sequoia Breeze podcast. I am your host, Rebecca Lasavio. I hope this has been a breath of fresh air. Your home school.