Sarah Mackenzie (00:05):

Hello, hello, Sarah Mackenzie here with another episode of the Read-Aloud Revival podcast, the show that helps your kids fall in love with books and helps you fall in love with homeschooling. In today’s show, I want to share with you something from my other podcast. Did you know I have another podcast? I do. It’s called Circle with Sarah, and it’s a weekly coaching podcast for homeschooling moms to help you teach from rest and become the peaceful, joyful mama you’re called to be. A new podcast episode arrives in your podcast app every Monday morning. It’s a short podcast, about 10 minutes usually, to get you on track for the week, a little short something you can listen to at the very beginning of a new week to get you on track and help you keep your eyes on what matters most in your homeschool. And it’s only available for RAR Premium members.

(00:59):

Now, if you’re a premium member and this is news to you, head to readaloudrevival.com/circlewithsarah and you’ll see how to get that podcast to show up in your favorite podcast app, because like I said, it’s only available to members. If you haven’t become a member yet, don’t worry. In today’s Read-Aloud Revival, I’m sharing two recent episodes from Circle with Sarah right here and right now. I’m sharing them here because I think they apply to a lot of us. So many of us have this funny little habit of focusing on getting done with whatever the thing is we most want to do. Getting it over with, I think might be more prevalent in our homeschools than we realize. And I want to invite you to think about how this focus on getting things done instead of on doing might be impacting your homeschool, how it might be easier and more joyful for you to homeschool if you are just aware of this tendency we all have.

(01:59):

Like I said, the Circle with Sarah episodes are really short, so I’m playing two weeks for you here, one in which we’re talking about how the point is the doing, not the getting it done. And then the second half is very practical and that’s usually how we do things at Circle with Sarah. I invite you to think about, or reframe, or think about something and then in the following episode, we put it into practice in your homeschool. So by the time you get to the end of the episode, not only have you been invited to think about something a little differently, you also know how this can make a difference in your homeschool tomorrow. So I’m going to play two weeks for you here, back to back. Here you go.

(02:45):

Welcome to Circle with Sarah, RAR Premium homeschool coaching, where we become the peaceful, joyful mamas we’re called to be. I’m your coach, Sarah Mackenzie.

(03:05):

Welcome to a New Year. First, I want you to know that I always find it much, much harder to get back into a school groove in January than at any other time of the school year. I mean at least in September, we’re sort of buoyed by new school year energy. I guess some of you in the Southern Hemisphere might actually have that going for you right now, which is awesome because I think a lot of you do start your new school year in January. But if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere and it’s dark and cold and everyone’s feeling a little post-holiday blues, just know you’re not alone, totally normal. It’s a hard thing to get all the wheels spinning again. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you’re not cut out for it. It happens to all of us.

(03:42):

Now, today I want to talk about a funny habit we all have. It’s the habit to focus on getting done with the thing that we most want to do. So take reading for example. I love reading. It’s one of my favorite things to do on the planet. I love losing myself in well-written words and I just love everything about snuggling up with a book. And still, I have to fight an urge, especially at this time of year, not to set a goal for the number of books I want to finish this year. Let me tell you why. You might have a goal like that, which is totally fine if it works for you. But I can tell you that for me, as soon as I say I’m going to read X number of books this year, my focus moves from enjoying the reading itself to the getting done of each book.

(04:27):

So subconsciously, I’ll start selecting shorter books, avoiding longer ones because I know they’re going to take me longer to read, right? And every time I finish one I’ll think, “Ha, another one down.” But it’s weird, right? Because reading is the whole point of reading, not getting done with the book. The actual act of reading, like being a person sitting in a chair reading a book, or taking a walk with my audiobook in my ears, that’s the point of reading, not getting done with the book. Another example is puzzles. I don’t know if you’re into puzzles. I’m a puzzle person. I love doing jigsaw puzzles, especially on cold winter evenings while usually listening to an audiobook. There’s a running theme here. But here’s the thing about puzzles. Nobody does a puzzle in order to get done with it, right? If you wanted to get done with it, you’d just buy the poster. If the point was to look at the end puzzle, you would literally just go get the picture and look at it.

(05:26):

The whole point of doing the puzzle is in the doing of it, not finishing it, not the getting done. Knitting is another example of this. These days, nobody knits because they need a scarf. If the whole point was to get a scarf, you’d go buy yourself a $5 scarf instead of spending a lot more than that on gorgeous soft yarn and then spending hours knitting it. Now the point is not to get done with knitting. The point is not to finish the project. The point is actually the knitting. The doing is the point, not the getting done. And this is true of learning too. In our homeschool, we could really do well to remember this, you don’t learn more by closing the math book at the end of the year, you learn by doing the math every day. You don’t learn more by finishing the five-page essay. You learn by writing the five-page essay, by working on it, by doing the actual essay, by writing the essay, by doing the math problems, not by finishing them.

(06:28):

The point of reading is to read. The point of knitting is to knit. The point of learning is to learn, not to be done learning. And yet so often we put our eyes on the prize of finishing a math book or finishing a spelling book or finishing a read-aloud or completing a unit of history. And by doing that, we send a clear message to our kids and ourselves, even if we don’t mean to, that the point is to be done with it. The goal is to get done with math, to get done with history, to get done with the read-aloud, so we can get on with something else. I don’t know. It reminds me of the old parable about the Mexican fisherman. You’ve probably heard it, but I’m going to tell you anyway just in case you haven’t or in case you’ve forgotten.

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So here’s this parable. Once upon a time in a small coastal Mexican village, a content fisherman lived a simple and happy life. He would wake up, fish for a few hours, spend time with his family, and then leisurely sip wine and play the guitar with his friends in the evenings. Life was good. One day an American banker arrived at the village. Seeing the fisherman’s catch he complimented the fisherman’s work, but couldn’t resist offering advice. He urged the fisherman to work harder, catch more fish, and save for the future, explaining that with more wealth, the fisherman could retire comfortably and enjoy life even more. “You could buy more boats, build a fishing empire and become incredibly wealthy. Then you’d retire a millionaire,” the banker told the fisherman. The fisherman pondered this and then asked, “How long will all of this take?” “Perhaps 15 to 20 years,” the banker told him.

(08:10):

“But what then?” The fisherman wondered. The banker smiled. “You would retire, move back to this village and enjoy this simple life. You’d wake up, fish a little, spend time with your family and stroll to the village in the evenings to sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos. The fisherman, perplexed, said, “But that’s what I do now.”

(08:36):

So often we work harder and harder in our homeschools thinking that we’re working hard now so we can rest later. But we can rest now. We can enjoy now. We can do the thing now and enjoy the doing. Understanding that the doing is the whole point. The point of learning math is to do math. The point of reading is to read and to spend time reading. The point of our history unit is to spend time engaging with history, not to get it done. The point of a science experiment is to experiment with science, right? The point is the doing, not the getting done.

(09:18):

Next week we’re going to put some practical feet on this. How do you actually transition in a practical way in your homeschool from focusing so much on the getting done to on the doing? We’re going to talk about it. For now, remember that you’ve got everything you need to teach with peace that transcends all understanding. You were made for such a time and such a homeschool as this. I’m praying for you.

(09:56):

Welcome to Circle with Sarah, RAR Premium homeschool coaching, where we become the peace filled, joyful mamas we’re called to be. I’m your coach, Sarah Mackenzie.

(10:15):

Last week we talked about how the point is the doing. The point of reading is to spend time reading, not to be done with the book, right? The point of doing a puzzle is to actually do the puzzle, not to finish the puzzle. The point of knitting is to knit. And the point of learning is to learn, not to be done learning. We do math not because our goal is to be done with the math book, but we do math so that we can do math. It’s funny, it makes so much sense to us when we stop and think about it. Because we don’t read so we can be done with a book. We don’t want to just get it over with already. That’s like equating reading or learning like cleaning toilets. I can admit, I clean the toilet, not because I enjoy the cleaning of the toilet, but because I want to be done with it. I want to have a clean toilet, but that’s not the same thing as learning.

(11:05):

That’s definitely not how I am with reading. But when we make the goal, the getting done, it’s probably the message we send our kids about their schoolwork, that they should just get it done with so they can get onto the better things in life. But reading, learning, crafting, experimenting, engaging, thinking, writing, doing, that’s what the good life is made of. These are the better things in life. So how do we shift in our homeschools to focus on the doing rather than the getting done? I want to share with you today a little trick that might help you here. It helps me anyway, just pick one goal you’re working on in your homeschool right now so we can run with it.

(11:49):

So it might be something like memorize the states and capitals, lots of kids are doing that, right? Learn long division or read aloud this particular book, let’s just say, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. So there’s a thing that you’re doing in your homeschool and that’s what it is, right? You’ve just got one thing. Now what we want to do is we want to reframe it so that we’re focusing on the doing and not the getting done. And all we have to do to do this is shift our goals slightly. So if my goal is for my kids to memorize the states and capitals, for example, instead of making that the goal, memorize the states and capitals, at which point my goal is to get done with it, right? As soon as I’m done with it, then I’m like, “Whew, got that done. Better to be done with that.”

(12:33):

Instead, if I said, “My goal is actually to spend five minutes per day memorizing the states and capitals,” now I’m going to measure my success not by whether the thing is done and over with, but by the actual doing. I’m successful when I’m doing it, not when I’m done. Does that make sense? It’s a very subtle shift, but it can be very powerful in your home school. Let’s take another example. Let’s do math, right? Learn long division. You’ve got a kid that needs to learn long division or maybe finish X through Y units in your math book, whatever, these particular lessons in your math book. That makes the goal getting done. The whole point of doing math is to get done with the math. But instead if we said, “Actually what we’re doing is we’re spending 30 minutes per day working in our math book.” Now we’re measuring our success not by getting done with math, but by doing it. Really all I’m doing here is, I’m shifting the goal from the completion of the thing to time spent doing the thing because time spent doing is actually where all the goodness comes from.

(13:36):

Let’s do this with reading because this one really hits home for me because it’s very obvious to me. It’s less obvious to me with math, honestly, but it’s more obvious to me that my point when I’m reading aloud to my kids is not to get done with the reading. I don’t read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH because I just want to get it over with. All the good stuff happens when we’re reading, right? So instead of saying, “Finish Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH,” my goal can be, “Spend 20 minutes each school day reading aloud.” And then no matter how long it takes, you’re winning by doing the thing. This really strikes me with my high schoolers. All my high schoolers have gone off to college now, so I’ve got three at home left that we’re homeschooling that are 10, 10 and 11.

(14:21):

Our older three, we homeschooled all the way through and they’re all in college. But when they were in high school, especially my son his last year, one of the things we did is we were reading books together and we would read them through twice. So a good example of this was The Screwtape Letters, which I know I’ve talked about before because it was so impactful for us. We listened to the audiobook of The Screwtape Letters, and then we went back and we started it again and read it again. That second reading was so powerful. It made such an impact on us. We had better discussions about The Screwtape Letters the second time. There were all kinds of things that Drew and I both missed the first time around that we caught the second time. So we started doing that with a lot of the books we read. We read the book and then we’d read it again.

(15:05):

Now, if your goal was just to get the thing done, then there’s no merit in going back and doing it again. But instead we shifted on, “We’re going to spend 20 minutes a day reading aloud together, listening to this audiobook together,” and now even if all we read was The Screwtape Letters over a long period of time, all that goodness counts. Do you see how powerful that change can be? I tend to be a really big proponent of assigning time and not actual titles in your homeschool. So I very, very rarely assign an actual book, like say to this child, “You need to read this particular book.” I do, however, assign my kids, we call it QRT, Quiet Reading Time, every day. Depending on how old they are, it might be a different length. So for my 10 and 11s, it’s 30 minutes and they can read whatever they want to read. A lot of times my 11-year-old daughter is reading books for her history class at co-op, and then my sons are reading whatever they want off our shelves.

(16:06):

We can talk more about this soon if you like. Just let us know in the forum if that’s something you want to talk about. But I’m a big proponent of assigning time and not titles, because it’s the time spent reading, not the number of books you finish. If you give time every day for reading and you assign that time for reading, you’re telling your kids, “In this house, we value time spent reading.” If you give your kids a particular book list or you make it a goal to finish a list of books by a certain date, we accidentally send the message that, “In our house we value being done with reading.” Do you see how that’s different? It’s subtle, but I think they pick up on it. Do we value learning? Do we value reading? Do we value doing? Of course we do. I’m going to give you several minutes of music to think through how you can make some of these subtle but powerful shifts in your homeschool.

(17:04):

Just think through the things on your lesson plans right now. What’s happening in your homeschool day? What are the things your kids are working on, whether that’s science or history or read-alouds or math, what is it, spelling, whatever it is. And think about how you can shift from making the goal to finish the lesson or to finish the book and switch it instead to a focus on doing the thing, time spent doing. Really just make your goal time spent doing it rather than focusing on getting it done. So here’s a few minutes of music. Go ahead, get out your journal or your notes app and just see where you get in the next, let’s say four minutes.

(17:38):

Do you feel a difference in your body? Do you notice a difference in how it feels to focus on the doing and not just the getting done? I really hope so. I’ll be back here next week. For now, remember, you’ve got everything you need to teach with peace that transcends all understanding. You were made for such a time as this and I am praying for you.

(22:05):

What do you think, can a tiny shift in the way that you think about doing versus getting it done, can that help you find more ease and joy in your homeschool, in your parenting? I hope so. Like I said at the beginning of this episode, new Circle with Sarah podcast episodes drop every single Monday morning in whatever podcast app you already use, if you’re an RAR Premium member. If you’re not a member yet, but you think you’d like this encouraging boost each week, get RAR Premium and you’ll actually get not just access to the new Circle with Sarah episodes, but you’ll also get instant access to all of the previous ones, and I think they’ll help make a difference in the peace and the joy that you experience day-to-day in your everyday homeschooling life. So join us by going to rarpremium.com.

(23:07):

Now let’s hear from the kids about the books they’ve been loving lately, shall we?

Leanna Breeden (23:15):

Hello, my name’s Leanna Breeden. I’m 12 years old and from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and I suggest the Giver series. Most people think that it’s only one book, but there’s really four. I like it because it’s a dystopian series and it’s very fun to read. It’s very different, and I enjoy them a lot.

Nora Breeden (23:32):

Hi, I’m Nora Breeden and I am nine. I recommend the Keeper of Lost Cities series because there’s a lot of adventure, action and sometimes it gets a little sad. I really enjoy them very much.

Kyla (23:50):

Hi, my name is Kyla and I’m five. My favorite book is Anna Elsa, Frozen.

Sochi (23:59):

Hi, I’m Sochi from Las Vegas. I’m 12 years old and I recommend Nancy Drew because they’re really good mystery stories and they have a lot of suspense.

Sal (24:08):

Hi, my name is Sal. I am 10 years old. I live in Las Vegas. And the book I recommend is Unwanted because it is full of action and a lot of suspense.

Lincoln (24:22):

Hi, my name is Lincoln. I’m seven years old. I live in Texas. And my favorite book is Quest for the Golden Apple.

Owen (24:34):

My name is Owen. I live in Texas. I’m eight years old. My favorite book is Magic Tree House and I like it because they go on a lot of adventures outdoors.

Sarah Mackenzie (24:53):

Thank you. Thank you kids, for your messages.

(24:58):

Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new one for you. In the meantime, you know what to do. Go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.