Tag: homeschool resources

Homeschool with Joy podcast cover art, a short homeschool podcast for busy parents
homeschooling

A Short Homeschool Podcast for Busy Parents: Start Here

Jessica Lovett

There wasn’t a podcast like the one I would personally want to listen to, so I made one!

Not because there’s a shortage. There are plenty of homeschool podcasts out there, and some are wonderful. But I kept wanting something I could finish before my latte went cold, and I kept running into episodes that ran long, drifted into small talk, or were built for a season of homeschooling I wasn’t in. (Science curriculum for toddlers, anyone? Not me! Not anymore!)

So I recorded the one I wished existed: 14 episodes so far, every one under 10 minutes, most right around 5.

podcast logo graphic, small

Practical, low-prep, and meant to help no matter how old your kids are or how long you’ve been at this.

I didn’t want the kind of podcast that you’d have to fish through episodes to find what actually applied to you. Hopefully, every episode can help you and was designed to address whatever age your kids are, whatever subjects you teach, whatever your homeschooling style…

The idea is presenting something manageable you can actually use, that gives you a feeling of accomplishment without adding another nagging voice to your head.

The kind of episode that makes you say, “Ooo, I wish I’d known that years ago,” or “That made my day easier!”

Think of it as help for crossing things off your list, not adding to it. This post is your start-here map. Find the episode that fits your week and press play.

Why I Made a Short Homeschool Podcast

I have nothing against a long conversation. I just don’t have time for one on a Tuesday, and I suspect you don’t either.

I want something that Gets to the Point and doesn’t waste my day. If I’m listening to a podcast, it is cutting into my valuable audiobook time, and I just want to get the info I need and get onto the stories.

Homeschool parents are already carrying a lot. We’re the teacher, the principal, the librarian, and the person who knows where the good scissors went. A long episode, even a good one, can start to feel like one more item on the to-do list instead of help.

What I wanted was the opposite. One clear idea. One useful resource. Then my day back. No wandering, no product pitch tucked into the middle, no guessing whether the episode applied to me.

That last one mattered most. A lot of homeschool content is built around a single stage: the toddler years, the middle school slump, the high school transcript. Those are real needs, and I’m glad someone covers them. But I wanted a show where nearly every episode would be useful whether you’re teaching a first grader, a seventh grader, or a senior. Or a mix of all of the above!

So that became the rule. Every episode has to apply to as many ages, stages, and homeschool situations as possible. If it only works for one narrow season, it doesn’t make the cut.

In addition, when I first started homeschooling, I was one of the only homeschool moms (actually I think the ONLY one) at our small church. Later there were a couple more of us, but I really needed to feel like someone was in my corner. I would have liked a conversational podcast like this that wasn’t trying to sell me something, wasn’t featuring a product, wasn’t trying to shame me – that just Was. Something friendly, not judgy, and with fun ideas.

What a Short, Sweet, Actually Useful Homeschool Podcast Looks Like

Here’s what you can expect when you press play:

  • Under 10 minutes. Most are right around 5.
  • Practical and low-prep. Think free curricula, clean movie lists, and book recommendations you can use this week.
  • No idle chit-chat, no high-pressure schedules, no product pitches. Encouragement from a friend, not a sales funnel.
  • Built for any stage. New to homeschooling or years in, little kids or nearly grown.

The TARDIS is bigger on the inside. These episodes are the reverse: small on the outside, with nothing extra packed in.

They’re also built to take things off your list, not add to it: one manageable thing you can actually do, and the small satisfaction of having done it.

The whole show is generally recorded from a clothes closet that I describe, generously, as soundproofed. Hanging dresses do a surprising amount of sound dampening work. It isn’t glamorous, but it keeps the focus where it belongs: on what you can actually use.

I never EDIT THE EPISODE. Except to add the beginning and intro jingle that I made, I’m just talking to you as an honest, one-take kinda person. This is not polished or perfect or manicured. In the age of AI, I wanted to give you an actual conversation that wasn’t too structured or formulaic. It isn’t that I’m not editing because I’m lazy, but because it was a decision to do it live!

And every episode has a matching blog post right here on the site. If you hear something you want to save, the links, printables, and details are waiting for you.

Start Here: Pick the Short Homeschool Podcast Episode That Fits Today

You don’t have to listen in order. Nothing is a prerequisite, so pick by what’s on your plate this week. And if it’s November or December right now, start with the holiday schedule episode below.

If you’re new, or feeling stuck:

  • Welcome to the Homeschool with Joy Podcast! The short version of what this show is (and isn’t).
  • Deschooling 101: The Step Almost Everyone Skips. For anyone just starting out, or anyone who jumped in too fast.
  • What to Do After You Name the Feeling. For the part that comes after you’ve put a name on what you’re feeling.
  • When “You Don’t Understand” Means “I Don’t Understand.” For the moments when a lesson stalls and the frustration lands on you.

If you want good books and movies:

  • How to Build a Reading List Your Teen Will Actually Use. A reading list built to get used, not just pinned.
  • Books That Made Me a Braver Person. Stories worth handing to a kid (or keeping for yourself).
  • Free Odyssey Unit Study for Homeschool High Schoolers. A free unit study for your high schooler.
  • How to Host a Project Hail Mary Movie Night: Themed Recipes + Film Study. Dinner, a movie, and a little film study on the side.

If you’re sorting out curriculum and learning styles:

  • Skip the Grade, Find the Real Level. For when the grade on the box and the kid in front of you don’t quite match.
  • Homeschool Curriculum for Siblings Who Learn Differently. One house, more than one kind of learner.
  • Teaching Critical Thinking to Teens. Helping your teen think well, not just think what they’re told.

If your home needs to find its own rhythm:

  • How to Manage a Homeschool Schedule During the Holidays. The timely one. Start here if the calendar is filling up.
  • How to Declutter Homeschool Materials Without the Guilt. For the shelves, bins, and boxes that have gotten out of hand.
  • The Playlist That Changed Our Homeschool Mornings. A small change to how the day starts.

How to Fit a Short Homeschool Podcast Into a Full Day

A podcast should lighten your load, not pile onto it!

A few ways to keep it that way:

Listen where you already have a gap. While the coffee brews, during the drive, while the dishes soak. Five minutes slips in almost anywhere.

Follow the show on Spotify. New episodes land in your queue without you having to remember.

Pass one along. If a friend is overwhelmed, send her the episode that helped you. It’s a very small act of encouragement.

Read the matching post when you want to dig in. The post has the links, printables, and details. If you’d like something to hold in your hands, the free 15-page planner lives in the Resource Library.

I started this podcast on a simple belief: help for homeschooling should be easy to find and quick to use. Homeschool moms should feel like we’re in this together!

You’re already doing the hard part. The advice shouldn’t add to it or make you feel guilty about not doing something the exact way someone else is…

The goal here is the opposite: to help you feel confident and glad to cross things off, so the important things get finished faster. To help you create the homeschool that is just right for your Unique Family!

If you’ve ever closed a podcast app because the episode was too long or just not quite for you, these 14 are for you. Pick the one that fits your week, listen to it on Spotify, and then tell me in the comments which one you started with. I’d love to know.

homeschooling

Why the World Needs Another Homeschool Podcast (And Why This One Is Different)

Jessica Lovett

There are a lot of homeschool podcasts out there!

I know. You know. We all know.

So when I tell you I launched one anyway – from inside a clothes closet with a microphone and approximately zero regrets – you’re probably wondering why. Fair question!

Here’s my honest answer: because I kept looking for the podcast I wanted to listen to, and it didn’t exist. And I’m stubborn enough to just make it myself.

That’s the origin story of the Homeschool with Joy Podcast. No dramatic calling. No business pivot. Just a homeschool mom with a love of books, lots of ideas about how to make homeschooling less boring and more fun, and a serious Celestial Seasonings tea addiction deciding that the gap needed filling.

What You’re NOT Going to Find Here

Let me be direct about what this podcast isn’t, because I think that matters just as much as what it is.

It’s not a product pitch with a conversation wrapper. You know the kind – twenty minutes of “authentic sharing” that leads inevitably to a curriculum you can buy for three easy payments. That’s not what this is.

So many podcasts are just shells trying to sell you something and I’m not going to waste my time listening to – or creating! – such a podcast.

It’s not a guilt-delivery system disguised as encouragement. There’s a whole genre of homeschool content that makes you feel like you’re failing before you’ve even hit play. Hard pass.

I don’t want to hear about all the ways I should have been doing something and have been failing this whole time, just because I’m not homeschooling Your Way.

It’s not chit-chat. Nothing against chit-chat – but I respect your time too much to fill twenty minutes with the conversational equivalent of styrofoam peanuts. INTJs like myself don’t do that – or listen to that.

And, it’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all approach telling you that your homeschool needs to look like someone else’s. (More on that in a minute.)

What the Homeschool with Joy Podcast Actually Is

Every week, you’ll get practical, low-prep ideas you can actually use – the kind that don’t require a crafting budget or a Pinterest-perfect home.

You’ll find free curricula, clean movie lists, book recommendations, ideas to try on for size, and resources that don’t cost a fortune. Because homeschooling already costs enough, and the best learning often costs nothing at all.

For instance, my 700+ page literature curriculum for high school students – that has been called “phenomenal” by the one, the only Cathy Duffy – is available totally free.

You’ll get encouragement from someone who has been in the trenches. I’ve been homeschooling long enough to have made most of the mistakes already. You’re welcome to learn from them.

And you’ll get a perspective that isn’t trying to sell you a lifestyle. Your homeschool doesn’t need to look like mine. Or your co-op friend’s. Or the one with the beautiful Instagram feed and the color-coded bookshelves. (Though I won’t pretend I don’t have organized bookshelves based on my own brain’s organization – I absolutely do, it’s a whole project I did – but they aren’t color-coded!)

Why Your Homeschool Doesn’t Need to Look Like Anyone Else’s

This is the part I care about most.

One of the most corrosive things in the homeschool world is comparison. Not the friendly, oh-that’s-a-great-idea kind. The spiral kind. The kind where you spend forty-five minutes on someone’s blog feeling increasingly inadequate about your perfectly good homeschool.

Every family is different. Every kid is different. The best homeschool for your child is the one that fits your child – not the one that photographs well or wins curriculum awards or gets approving nods from the co-op moms.

You are enough. Your instincts are worth trusting. And you deserve resources that help you build your vision, not someone else’s.

And, while we don’t want to copy-cat one another’s homeschool planets, we do need community! We need inspiration! We need to get ideas! We need to know the pitfalls that others have made along the way so that we can avoid them.

That’s what this podcast is trying to be. A weekly pocket full of joy – practical, encouraging, and actually useful.

Listen Now

Episode 1 is live on Spotify and at Homeschool with Joy. It’s the one where I explain all of this in my own voice, from my closet recording studio to hopefully muffle out kid-noises in the background, with genuine enthusiasm and zero scripted cheerfulness. I try to keep every episode at 5 minutes or less.

Come listen and let me know what you think!

homeschooling

Why We Stopped Reading for Prizes (And Started Reading for Joy) + Free Tracker

Jessica Lovett

She had a plan.

My daughter hadn’t even officially entered the library reading contest yet, but saw the flyers as we were pursuing books and she was already winning it in her head. She was eyeing the dinosaur excavation kit and the Mod Pizza coupons. She was mentally cataloguing every book she’d already read this summer, calculating her lead, confident in the way only a kid who reads constantly can be confident – because this contest was made for her.

Then I had to break the news.

I could see where this was going before she could. She hadn’t read the fine print yet – hadn’t realized that the prizes weren’t awarded to the kid who read the most. It was a drawing. Anyone who hit the basic reading goal was entered, and then luck took over from there.

I had to be the one to tell her. Before she sank weeks of strategic effort into a contest that wasn’t actually built the way she thought it was.

The look on her face – that split second of wait, what? – was something I will not soon forget.

The Reading Contest Betrayal (And Why It Was Actually Useful)

Here’s the thing about that moment: her reaction made complete sense. She’d expected the world to work a certain way – effort in, reward out, reader of most books wins – and it just… didn’t. That’s a genuinely surprising thing to learn, especially when you’re the kind of kid who would have won.

(I did not, for the record, find this the ideal moment to deliver a philosophical lecture. Sometimes you just let the feelings breathe for a minute.)

But once they settled, we had a really good conversation.

Because here’s what a parent may have watched happen, if they like me hadn’t caught it in time: the child would have started reading differently. Strategically. Shorter books over longer ones, faster reads over the novel he or she actually wanted to finish. When a child understands the rules of a system, and optimizes for them completely, it may have helped them have more entries to win but it just would have quietly turned reading into something it was never supposed to be.

A competition instead of world-exploring.

And that bothered me more than the drawing ever could.

What Happens When Reading Becomes Transactional

I’m not here to be the person who rails against all extrinsic motivation – that’s not realistic, and honestly, a well-placed reward has its place.

I reward myself for doing dishes or whatever to just mentally trudge through All. The. Time.

I read about that kind of cognitive highjacking of yourself in Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I don’t agree with everything in the book, but I do appreciate rule #2:

“[Say to yourself,] What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward?” Then you do what you have decided to do, even if you do it badly. Then you give yourself that [blessed] coffee, in triumph.”

Self validation is a different animal entirely.

But here’s where it gets complicated with kids and reading specifically. Because there’s a particular thing that happens when reading becomes something kids do for something else – an outside prize, external validation, someone else’s approval.

It stops being world exploring and becomes a task.

Reading, at its best, is what Madeleine L’Engle described as a way of being less alone. It’s the thing that happens when a kid disappears into a book and resurfaces forty-five minutes later, blinking, slightly confused about what year it is. That’s not something you can manufacture with a prize wheel.

When reading is primarily a means to an end – a pizza coupon, a contest entry, a gold star on a chart – the actual experience of reading gets devalued in the process. Kids start to learn, subtly, that reading isn’t worth doing for its own sake. That it needs a reason.

And, that’s a lesson worth interrupting.

But Here’s Where Tracking Gets Interesting

Now, I know what you might be thinking. Isn’t a reading tracker just another way to make reading into a task?

Fair. It’s a reasonable concern.

Here’s the distinction I’ve landed on, after years of watching my kids read and trying to figure out what actually works: there’s a difference between tracking as measurement and tracking as celebration.

A reading log that exists so someone else can evaluate your performance? That’s measurement. It’s external. It puts reading in service of a grade or a prize or someone else’s approval.

A reading tracker that lives on your shelf, that holds the record of every story you’ve traveled through, that you can flip back through and remember – oh yes, that was the one about the dragon, that was the summer I couldn’t stop? That’s something else entirely.

That’s a record of a reading life. And that’s worth keeping.

We have loved looking back over the years and remembering what year was the one we read what book. It really helps turn the whir of time into a distinct timeline that is memorable.

How We Use Our Reading Tracker at Home

Our tracker is pretty simple. Title, author, a star rating, and a checkbox for finished. There’s a small notes section at the bottom for anything worth remembering.

We don’t use it as a school assignment. Nobody checks it. There’s no grade attached to it. It just sits in our book nook, available, and my kids fill it in when they finish something – because they like having a record.

My daughter, the one who was jarred by the library drawing, has already finished countless books – and it is only June!

With this tracker, she can rate everything with strong opinions (two stars for books that disappointed her, five stars handed out like she’s trying to make the author feel seen). She refers back to old ones. She has, entirely unprompted, started recommending books to friends based on her own ratings.

She is, in other words, reading like a person who loves reading.

And, that is probably the one major goal for my entire over-a-decade of homeschooling. The End.

Not for a prize. Not for a contest. For the same reason I drag myself to bed at midnight because I just need one more chapter – because a good story is its own reward, and some lessons are worth learning even when they arrive via a slightly heartbreaking library trip.

The Free Printable Reading Tracker

I made this tracker with exactly that philosophy in mind. It’s colorful and pretty because beautiful things invite use. It has room for twenty books, a rating system, and a little notes section at the bottom for anything you want to remember.

It’s not a homework sheet. It’s not a contest entry form.

It’s a record of adventures.

Grab it free when you subscribe to the Homeschool with Joy email list – I send one helpful, non-spammy email a week, and you can unsubscribe anytime. The tracker will be waiting in your inbox.

A Note on Reading and Worth

My daughter still thinks she would have won that contest, by the way. She’s probably right. She reads more than any kid I know, and she reads well – the kind of reading where she has opinions afterward, where she comes back with questions, where she remembers things years later.

That’s not because of a prize. It never was.

And I think that’s the thing I most want my kids to carry into adulthood – not just that reading is valuable, but that the value is in the reading itself. In the sitting still, in the following a story, in the way good books have of quietly changing how you see things without announcing that they’re doing it.

The dinosaur excavation kit would have been cool. I won’t pretend otherwise.

But it wouldn’t have been any of the books. And some things aren’t replaceable with a drawing prize.