 Hey everybody, welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica. Today's video is a homeschool show and tell. The homeschool show and tell is an open collaboration by Abby from Rooted and Rest and Myself. Our goal with the homeschool show and tell was to bring homeschoolers together from around the world to really showcase that there wasn't a one size fits all when it came to homeschooling. And you guys, I really feel like that is what we have done this year. We are now closing in on the end of our first year of the homeschool show and tell and I just have to say thank you. Thank you to everybody who has joined in when they collaborated with us. Thank you to everybody who's watched the videos. It has been an amazing journey. It has been a blessing and I'm humbled to have been a part of it. So thank you so much. If you want to join us and collaborate with us, there will be a link in the description box that will give you all of the details on how to do that. That same link also lists all of our past collaborations. So if you have missed one of them, you can catch up by clicking that as well. We have discussed things each month, ranging in topics from planning, organization, our favorite educational resources, our morning times, how we do nature study and this month's topic is how to finish the homeschool year strong. So we're all coming together to give you our best tips for how to do just that. The link to the playlist will be in the description box too and you can click that and watch everybody's tips. I know you're excited because let's be honest, we are all sitting there looking at that finish line thinking, oh my gosh, I just can't do that. So hopefully some of these tips will bless you and help you finish the homeschool year strong. Now before I give you my homeschool year tips, I kind of wanted to talk about finishing the year period because we kind of homeschool year round, we live what we call a learning lifestyle so learning never actually stops here at the Walduk Way. We are always learning, we're always doing something. Now we do get a little more relaxed in the summer but it never actually stops. We wanted a stop date for a couple of reasons. Having a stop official end of this school year gives us a time to celebrate. It gives us that last day at school, that hey hurrah, let's have fun and then it also makes my life easier for kind of the, I don't know what you want, the accounting part of homeschool. So in the state of Florida, we have to keep a portfolio that's evaluated or do standardized testing. So having a last day of school makes it easy to say, okay, this is the last day of school. Everything that was done previous to this date, it's part of this year and can go in this portfolio. Everything that's done after this date is part of next year. And so that just really makes it easy to distinguish what was third grade versus what's gonna be fourth grade because if we just never had a stop date, it would just all blend together and it would make the bookkeeping side of it, the accounting side of it really frustrating for me. So we tend to stop our homeschool year around Memorial Day. So that's the end of May. And that means we are about four to six weeks out at the time of this video going live. And so this is a time when I really like to sit down and say, okay, what's left? What do we need to do before the end of the school year? Notice I said, what do we need to do? Not what do I want to do? In past years, I have always sat down and said, okay, to finish strong, we need to finish our must use, our things that need to be done. And so that's what I'm gonna be talking about today, the tips for doing just that. Now I set goals at the beginning of the school year. If you've been around, you've probably seen that video where you got to plan our third grade goals with me. If you haven't been around, I'll give you kind of the cliff notes. And that is I use the home learning year by year book. And I will go through for the previous grade, her current grade and the following grade. So for instance, when I sat down, I looked at second grade. If there was anything she had and mastered that one on my list first, for a third grade, I make the list for third grade. And then if I don't have 10 to 15 things yet, I will go ahead and look forward to fourth grade. I only make goals based in math and language arts. Now I will write down things for other subjects that maybe I want to expose her to, but I only ever make goals that I actually wanna meet our master in the language arts and math subjects for a few reasons. One being that language arts and math are the only two subjects that we are not interested in child-based, led, learning, whatever you wanna kind of refer to it as. I feel like those things kind of build on top of each other and you have to learn certain things in a specific order for them to make sense. Maybe I'm wrong in that, but that's just our personal opinion in our homeschool. And so those things, while I don't necessarily have a specific way that we learn them, it could be with curriculum, it could be with printables, it could be with games, it could be in the kitchen. There's tons of different ways we can learn it. I do make goals for those specific subjects. The rest of them, she gets a whole lot of saying, they're part of our life. We do unit studies, which means we're gonna come back and back to those topics over and over and over again. So I might make a list of things I wanna introduce her to or expose her to or maybe shrew, but I don't make a mastery list. I don't make goals of where I want her to be in those subjects. So this is the time of year when I will look back to that list that I made at the beginning of the school year, the goals. I'll sit down with Kevin, I'll sit down with Emily and I'll be like, okay, what have we mastered? What are the things that we've done to the point that I know you know them, front words, backwards, inside, out, left and right? And I check those off. What are the things that maybe aren't important to us anymore? Maybe I made the list at the beginning of the school year and all of a sudden we're like, eh, we don't really necessarily think that she needs to master her math facts. I'm not saying that's what we feel, but let's just pretend. Maybe we don't think she, she knows the concept, maybe that's not important to us anymore. So we would cross that off the list because it's just not important. And then we would look again ahead to the next year in home learning year by year because let's say that mastering multiplication facts is something that's gonna come up again in fourth grade and it's also in third grade. So maybe because we know we're gonna be doing it again next year that we can kind of roll that over to next year, it's not important. So cross that off. All right, so now what's left? Whatever is left is the things that we need to do. Maybe not master because maybe that's not realistic, but they're the things that we need to work on. And again, no necessary, like no specific way we're gonna work on them, but those are the things that we're gonna focus our time and attention on for the next four to six weeks before the school year ends. And that is my number one tip for you guys, is to sit down. Maybe you didn't make goals. Maybe you, maybe you just have all this curriculum. You know, maybe you're just following the curriculum from front to back. Sit down with your curriculum, sit down with your planner, sit down with your goals that you made, sit down with whatever you have and make a list of what you need to do. Not what you wanna do, what you need to do. With a few different things in mind. Keeping in mind that 99% of curriculum has built in review. Like for instance, math next year is going to have five to 10 lessons. It's a review of the previous year. So keeping that in mind. Keeping in mind that there is probably no homeschool mom in the entire world who has ever finished every piece of curriculum that she started in the fall. It's just very improbable. And that even public school kids do not finish textbooks. Like you can ask any public school teacher. Think back to your public school. Like nobody ever finishes the textbook. So keeping all of that in mind. Write down your must do's. Maybe you are just kind of like, man if we could just finish these next 20 math lessons I will feel like we have had something accomplished this year. Then write that down. Write the 20 math lessons down and get rid of everything else. We don't throw in the garbage, but get rid of it. Only do the 20 math things. And then when you're done, you're done. Only do the things that you feel like you have to do. Get rid of the fluff. Pair it down. Get down to the basics. The must do's. The things that you have to get done. Maybe your state has laws that you have to do specific things. Ours doesn't. Remember we only have to do the evaluation and or the standardized testing. But maybe your state does. Maybe your state says you have to have X amount of hours or X amount of this. We'll then put those on there and do that. And get rid of all the fluff. Anything else. All the extra. Get it down to the bare minimum. The things that you have to do that you must do. And then focus your time and attention on doing those. That way when you're done, you can have finished the school year. You've strided across that finish line and you're like, man we did everything we had to do this year. And then give yourself grace on whatever you didn't finish. Because there's going to be something. Even if you finished everything you're going to be like, man I really wish we had given more time to that unit study. Or I really wish we had done this project when we learned about this. Or man I really wish we had read that book. There's never, I promise you, ever going to be a time when you're like, man we did everything I wanted to do this home school year. There is nothing we didn't do. It's not going to happen. It's kind of like being a parent. There's always something else you want to do. Even as a person. Like man really wish I would have done this before I went to bed. Whatever. There's never enough hours in the day. There's never enough days in the year. So do what you have to do. To abide by the laws. To get that foundational stuff done before you move on to the next level. And to make yourself feel accomplished. Whatever it is. Maybe you're like, we did the whole year doing the basics. We did reading and we did nothing fun. And I really wish we would have done fun stuff. Okay so spend the next four to six weeks doing all the fun stuff. I mean if that's what you are thinking and that's what you wish you had done. You've got four to six weeks before the school year ends do that. And then maybe that will make you feel like you finished the school year strong. So maybe that's what you should do. But either way just make a list. Make a list and start checking it off. Get through the basics. Do what you feel like you have to do. And then don't pile anything else on top of yourself. Just try to look away from all of the new stuff that's being shown and everything else. Cause piling more on top of your already along to your list is not going to help. Now I have a secret to tell you guys. What I just told you is my top tip. It is what we have done every year in the past. Write the list, finish your must-dos, move on. We are not doing that this year. We are not finishing the school year strong. And I have reasons and I will tell you what we're going to do instead. But I'm not going to tell you in this video because it's not what this video is about. So if you want to see why we're not finishing the school year strong and what we're going to do instead, there will be a link in the description box of a blog post where I'm going to go into detail about all of that. And if you're looking for even more tips on how to finish the year strong, don't forget to check out the playlist with all of the other mamas sharing their tips for how to finish the school year strong. Now I would love to hear from you. Tell me in the comments, are you finishing the school year strong? Are you throwing your hands up like I'm just done, I don't even care? Or are you limping across the finish line? I would love to know, maybe you're not even close to, maybe you're like maybe we just started because I know some people that live in different hemispheres like we just started in January. So maybe you're not even close to finishing, but I would still love for you to tell me your tips and tricks for when you're getting close to your end of the school year, how you finish strong or how you close out your school year, whatever that might be.