Episode 1 - Meet Karen and Michelle

Karen and Michelle, sisters and homeschool moms, discuss how they started the Layers of Learning podcast and their homeschooling journeys. Karen has six boys and Michelle has four children, with her oldest attending college while still being homeschooled. They both live in North Idaho and enjoy the outdoor lifestyle. They began homeschooling because of a rough experience in traditional school and the encouragement of each other. They started with kindergarten and gradually learned and grew into homeschooling. They love reading and buying books for their homeschooling journey. They struggled to find a curriculum that was cohesive and saw the need for one that provided a master plan. Their mom suggested they create their own curriculum, so they started a blog and eventually created Layers of Learning. The program is informal and flexible, catering to their individual needs and interests. They combine their strengths in different subject areas to create an interesting and comprehensive cu I'm Karen and I'm Michelle. We're sisters and homeschool moms. Welcome to the Layers of Learning podcast, where we talk about family-style homeschooling. Hello, this is Michelle and I'm here with Karen. Hi. We are just going to introduce ourselves today and tell you about how we started Layers of Learning. First of all, I want to introduce my family a little bit. I'm married and I have six children. They're all boys. Six boys, that's important. Six boys. Yes, boys. And now my oldest is, well, my oldest two are graduated from our homeschool and they're kind of out in the world. And I still am homeschooling the four younger ones. And I have four kids. They're all still at home. My oldest is 16 and he's actually going to college, to our community college nearby, but he's still very much a part of our homeschool, too. He does some online classes, some on campus, and then also still some learning with us. And then I've got a daughter who's 14, another daughter who's 10, and then my youngest son is 8. So, fun ages. Yeah, and we both live in North Idaho, which is the most beautiful place in the world. We're pretty partial to it. We both live on acreage, kind of in the country, and really enjoy the full-on homeschool, homestead type life. Yeah, and just the outdoorsy lifestyle of this area is beautiful here. Trees, mountains, lakes, that sort of thing. What's not to love? So, I started homeschooling when my oldest was in kindergarten. We took him out partway through the year. He had just had a really rough experience, a bunch of different factors that went into that. And I thought, well, we'll put him back in school in a year or two. But it turned out I loved homeschooling, which you would not have thought, because I never, ever, ever in a million years wanted to be a teacher. Which is different from Karen. I always wanted to be a teacher. I had an awesome second grade teacher, and from that moment on, I knew that I wanted to grow up and be a teacher. But it still shocked me to become a homeschool mom, because that was not the teacher plan that was in my mind. But truthfully, I started homeschooling because you gave me courage to do it. And, you know, when your big sister can do something, you feel more empowered to do it. So, thank you. You gave me a lot of courage in that. You're welcome. I didn't even really, it's not like I pushed it or anything. I was just sort of doing it, and you went, oh. I'm not sure I would have thought of it, though, if you hadn't. Your kids are older, because you're older than me. And so you started first, and then when it came time for my oldest to go to kindergarten, I actually looked at the bus stop of the school that he was supposed to go to, and I looked over at all of these kids. It was a bus stop for kindergartners all the way up through high school all together. So, these big, rowdy teenagers at the bus stop, and it wasn't the best of schools anyway, and I started to feel a bundle of nerves about it. And I thought, you know what? Michelle is homeschooling her kids. I could totally do this. And I did. Yeah, it actually surprised me. I was so intimidated at the beginning. Oh, my gosh. It's a massive responsibility. Yeah, and how do you even begin? I mean, how do you teach math? Where do I even start? But, like, little by little, as we learned things, I realized I was making it too complicated. It's not as complicated as you think. I think we had it a little bit easier than some homeschoolers who are starting out, because we started with our kids in kindergarten. Our oldest boys in kindergarten was our starting place. Yeah, and I think it can be hard to jump in when they've already been to school, or they're older, or you're all of a sudden starting with a lot of kids at once. Yeah, one of the things that I think was an advantage starting with a younger one is that, for example, the math. I'm not strong at math. I never thought I was. Now I do, but that's because I was able to learn with my kids all the way through the years, so I learned with them. But if I had started in junior high math, you know, I would have probably been at sea. Yeah, it would have been harder. Yeah, so we were really fortunate the way that we started our homeschool journeys, and we got to grow into it a lot. I think it helped us to not only learn a lot with our kids, but also we learned a lot about ourselves as we began homeschooling in less scary ways. Once they're older and you're doing it with a lot more kids, you feel a little bit thrown in. So we got a gradual introduction to homeschooling. Yeah, and we both are really into reading, and we're just curriculum junkies in general. My favorite thing about homeschooling at the beginning was probably buying books. I was so excited to have an excuse to fill up my bookshelves, and my husband's main job in life is just to build me more bookshelves. It's a school expense, honey. Okay. That's right. We're both massive book lovers. We've always been readers, and so that really has contributed to the learning environment that we've created in our homeschool. And then I think that also, besides buying books, our favorite hobby was reading homeschool catalogs, probably. We read homeschool catalogs like crazy in those early years. Oh, yeah, both on the Internet and physical catalogs. I got the Rainbow Resource Catalog, and I read that thing cover to cover. Me too. Because I wanted to choose the best things for my kids. Some of the curriculum I bought was spot on, and some of it wasn't, but I learned a lot through the process. My number one big problem for me was I wanted a curriculum that would take my kids clear from first grade all the way through and be cohesive. I was so worried, oh, there's going to be these big gaps, and I don't know, you know, after I'm done with this book, what do I do next kind of thing. That's part of the reason why Layers of Learning, that we started to do it, is because we were like, we need to make a curriculum that's cohesive. It needs to make sense. It needs to be orderly. It needs to go, okay, you do A, and then you go on to topic B. We are both super organized type of people. We like to see the big picture. And early on, we were having a hard time finding a curriculum that we could see the big picture with. In math, it's easy to find curriculum that begin at the beginning and end at the end, even begin in kindergarten and go all of the way through high school. But in other subjects, that's really hard to find. You don't see a progression of, oh, here's the big picture, and here's how we're going to look at it all. Yeah, and I had an obsession to find that, and I searched and searched and searched, and the first place was really with geography. I was like, I can't do this. I need to know, you know, what country am I supposed to study next, or what are the geography skills that my kids should know? I couldn't find that. You needed a master plan. I did, and I'm a master plan kind of person. Me too. We were both looking for the same things, and as we were looking and reading these catalogs and trying things out, we were constantly on the phone with each other or chatting, and the more we chatted, the more we hatched this plan, this idea, hey, maybe we could create a master plan. When it really came together, we had gotten together for a family reunion, all of the siblings and everyone, and we were complaining a bit in front of our mom, and we were like, oh, I wish that we could do this, and I want a curriculum that does A, B, and C, and she just said, well, why don't you write it? What? My mom? Could we do that? Maybe we could. Yeah, and we kind of looked at each other like, really? Yeah? Okay, let's try it. Let's just see what happens, and so we started a blog because we thought, well, that's going to help us kind of solidify our thoughts and help us figure out, okay, what direction are we going with this and practice writing and practice putting together lessons, and we kept it all informal. Layers of Learning is a really informal kind of program. We don't have lesson plans with objectives, and the child will learn. It's not like that. It's really informal. I think we intentionally made it informal because we had different needs between you and I. The way that my homeschool is set up and my personality is so different than yours, Michelle, that we saw that and we realized, oh, we're going to need to incorporate a lot of flexibility if this is going to work, and really when we started Layers of Learning, we were writing it for ourselves. Yes, because, again, we wanted that cohesive curriculum that would take us all the way through to graduation in an orderly way, but, again, it had to have flexibility because Karen loves doing projects and crafts. I don't so much. That's not my thing. You are incredibly good with discussion questions and especially discussing books, and mapping is an important skill to you. You have your kids do maps a lot. Yes, and your strength is really in the writing area and in, I think, the hands-on stuff. You are also a scientist, and so you are incredibly good with the science experiments, and I lack that focus. So, together, when we looked at what we were interested in and what we wanted in our homeschools and we put it together, we thought, wow, when you put us together, this could make a really interesting whole curriculum. Yes, let me give an example. Because of my science background, maybe, I was thinking in the Layers of Learning curriculum, we'll have biology come first, and then we will do chemistry, and then we will do earth science, and then we will do physics. It was going to be one subject each year, and you went, no. No, I can't do it that way. And you just thought, I'm going to be bored, and I went, but that's how it's done. But then I went, okay, well, let's see if we can work up a different way of doing this. I was having a hard time imagining my first grader spending a year of chemistry and a whole year of physics. And so we divided it instead and made it so that each year has a physics, a chemistry, a biology, and an earth science component. Yes, and it's still topically sound. So, for example, in the fourth year of biology, it's ecology. So, those topics are still all together. It's not like it's random and just placed here and there. It still is orderly, which, again, is important to both of us. It does keep it mixed up, and one of the nice things is that science isn't really compartmentalized. We do that for the purpose of education. And when people start studying deeply into a science topic, it can feel compartmentalized. But really, when you're studying biology, you have to know chemistry and you have to know earth science. In some respects, you need to know physics. They work together. It's all related. Yeah, and so when you learn the topics each year in that way, it fits, it works. And so the point is that the two of us together had different strengths, different desires, and somehow it just made this cohesion that just really came together well. We were really happy with the way that layers of learning is so flexible but still so orderly. Our differences also ended up dovetailing in a unique way that I haven't seen in some other curriculum. I incorporate writer's workshops, and you incorporate lots of printables. I incorporate lots of hands-on projects and art, and you incorporate lots of thought questions and discussion items. And so it ends up feeling a little bit more eclectic than a lot of the other options out there that we've found. And it makes me have the discussion questions even with my kids, even though that's not a natural talent of mine, it enables me to do that. And it enables you to let your kids do projects without it killing you. Yes, we actually do art now. For years we didn't do art because I didn't have a curriculum for art, and I wasn't just going to do art projects every day. That felt like a waste of time, and I don't like it. But now that we have an art curriculum that, oh, there's a point, now we do it. So that's one thing I like. You can see the value, and hopefully your kids can do it without creating a massive mess that will rub against your personality the wrong way. Yeah, and I often have to walk out of the room when they're doing an art project. But we do it, and that's a massive improvement. You can tell them, just channel Aunt Karen. She's your teacher right now. Do the project. I'm just going to go over here while you play with glitter. That's what I do. And I bust out the glitter and say, go, kids, go. But it really has been interesting to watch how our two personalities and our different strengths have really been able to come together. And like I said, we wrote this for ourselves, and we weren't sure that it would ever become anything, and we were okay with that. We were okay with let's make our homeschools the very best that we can by creating this. And then we've been really fortunate to be able to share it with so many other people and have had just a great response. Yeah, I'm really happy with it too. I'm excited for the coming year and the years ahead. We're still developing some new curriculum items, and we're working on our website and putting out more resources, so there will be more and more things for layers of learning going forward. We're also really excited for the upcoming podcast that we have. We're going to be talking about creating a learning culture in your homeschool, how to have a family school, blending learning styles and teaching styles, and just a lot of things that we hope will help you to have a stronger homeschool and give you confidence to do this. I know this homeschooling is a really big thing. It's a big responsibility, and ideas and knowledge are just power, and we're hoping that this podcast can give you some of that. Yeah, and we're really glad that you joined us. Thank you very much for coming along with us and listening to us, and we will see you next time. We'll be talking about creating a learning culture in your homeschool, so we'll see you then. Thank you for joining us today. Come and visit us at layersoflearning.com and on our Facebook group. Make sure to tune in next month for our new podcast. In the meantime, we wish you happiness in your homeschool. Have fun learning!