Tag: homeschooling

homeschooling

Free Odyssey Unit Study for Homeschool High Schoolers

Jessica Lovett

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has been in theaters since mid-July, and it is – by every account, including the Motion Picture Association’s – not a kids’ movie. Rated R for strong violence and some sexuality, Matt Damon’s three-hour Cyclops-and-sirens epic was built for teenagers and grown-ups, not a family movie night with the little ones piled on the couch.

Here’s the good news, though (stick with me): that R rating actually hands homeschool families the perfect excuse to do this the right way. Read the real Odyssey first – the one written by a blind poet a few thousand years before Nolan got his hands on it – and worry about the screen version later, once it hits rental and can be handled with the right tools… See the end of this post.

I happen to have a full, free unit study on The Odyssey sitting inside Journeying Through the Classics, my 700+ page Charlotte Mason high school literature curriculum.

I started writing it way before the movie was even announced…

So let’s talk about how to actually use it – book first, art project second, movie decision whenever you’re ready.

Why Everyone’s Suddenly Searching “Odyssey Homeschool”

Nolan’s version stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, with Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, and Charlize Theron rounding out an absurdly stacked cast. It’s a $250 million, three-hour epic shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film – the first time Homer’s poem has gotten that kind of big-screen treatment – and it opened July 17 to a genuinely enormous amount of buzz.

It also opened with an R rating, which the MPA attributed to strong violence and some sexuality. Fair enough – the actual poem has a Cyclops getting a stake driven through his eye, a decade of increasingly bad decisions, and a fairly memorable slaughter of suitors at the end. Homer wasn’t exactly writing a picture book.

For homeschoolers, this is the rare moment when Hollywood and the reading list actually line up. Your teenager doesn’t need convincing that The Odyssey matters this year – the trailers already did that part. If you’ve been wondering whether the Odyssey movie is appropriate for teens, the short answer is “with a parent, and probably not solo” – which is exactly why the book comes first. Your job is just to get the real story into their hands before the movie becomes the only version they know.

Step into a Barnes & Noble right now and you’ll see it for yourself – a giant display of Odyssey tote bags, candles, and shiny new editions of the book, all clustered by the front doors like Homer just topped the bestseller list again. (See the post here.)

And it’s not just the bookstores. Saks Fifth Avenue has a display.

So does Nature’s Basket – a grocery store. (Saks, Nature’s Basket).

When a 2,800-year-old poem is trending hard enough to show up next to the produce, that’s not a marketing fluke. That’s genuine cultural momentum, and it’s worth riding straight into your homeschool year.

And if you want proof this has gone fully unhinged in the best way: theaters are selling a Trojan horse popcorn bucket for $70. (See the absurdity here.) I have no notes. I just needed you to know it exists.

(Frodo had Sam and a fairly reasonable itinerary. Odysseus had ten years, a curse from Poseidon, and a apparently genetic inability to just sail home when things got weird. Comparatively, the Fellowship had it slightly easier. Well, I take that back, they were fighting against the very essense of evil.. but, I digress…)

What’s Actually Inside the Free Odyssey Unit Study

Journeying Through the Classics uses a living books approach – which, if you’re new around here, means real literature and real narration instead of worksheets asking your kid to circle the correct theme from a multiple-choice list. The Odyssey unit is fully self-contained, so you can drop it into your year whenever it makes sense (right now, for instance, being an excellent time).

Inside the unit, you’ll find:

  • Discussion questions and narration prompts that actually develop critical thinking, not just plot recall
  • Writing instruction woven directly into the unit – MLA citation practice, analytical essay work, vocabulary and spelling pulled straight from the text
  • Direct links to read the entire epic online for free, so nobody has to buy a book to get started tonight
  • My personal recommendation for which print edition to buy if your family prefers a physical copy (a genuinely important call to make, given how wildly translations of Homer can vary – some are gorgeous, some are a slog, and I’ve done the sorting for you)

Both the free reading links and the edition recommendation are included the moment you download the curriculum – no separate hunting required.

This is one of thirty-four units across the full four-year program, and it stands entirely on its own, so you don’t need to have started the curriculum from year one to use it.

The Art Projects That Bring Homer to Life

Every unit in Journeying Through the Classics has an integrated art project, and The Odyssey unit is one of my favorites. It’s built right into the notebook pages your student is already keeping, so art isn’t a separate subject bolted on top of literature – it’s part of how they process what they’ve read.

Art is optional by design, though. Some students narrate best through discussion, some through writing, and some genuinely light up with a paintbrush or chalk pastels in hand. The Odyssey unit gives all three a real chance to shine, which matters more than it might sound like when you’re the one trying to keep a reluctant writer engaged through a ten-year sea voyage.

If you want to see what the actual notebook pages look like before you commit to anything, I filmed a quick video tour of the art pages on Instagram – worth a look if you’re a visual person who needs to see it before you believe it.

Read First, Watch Later: A Family Plan for the R-Rated Film

Let’s talk about the movie question directly, because I know it’s the reason half of you are here.

Nolan’s Odyssey earned its R rating honestly – strong violence and some sexuality, per the MPA, which tracks with a poem that includes monster combat, an extremely epic final showdown, and a decade of Odysseus making choices that would not survive a modern parenting book. He wouldn’t survive chapter ONE of a modern parenting book, lol. That’s not a knock on the film. It’s just not built for the whole family in one sitting, and it’s not out for rental yet.

Which is genuinely useful timing. Here’s the plan I’d suggest:

  1. Start the unit study now, while the book is culturally relevant and your teenager has actual motivation to read it (motivation being the homeschool resource none of us can print more of).
  2. Finish the reading and the unit work at whatever pace fits your family – it’s self-contained, so there’s no rush against anyone else’s schedule.
  3. Wait for the rental window, and when it opens, watch the film as a family using tools that let you filter out what you don’t want in your living room.

That third step is where ClearPlay and VidAngel come in.

Both let you filter language, violence, and sexual content out of a movie while you stream or rent it – you choose what gets filtered, the cuts are often nearly invisible, and neither one requires you to be a tech genius to set up. I’ve written a full walkthrough of how we use both tools (and a few others) to protect our family online, including exactly how we run them through our own setup at home.

My husband and I are intending to rent it and ClearPlay or VidAngel it for ourselves so I don’t have direct info on whether or not it is effective enough in taking out violence and whatnot or if it is still too strongly inferred, even when censored, if that makes sense.

This isn’t about being afraid of a good story. It’s about reading the real thing first, on your own terms, and then deciding – deliberately, not by default – what the screen version looks like in your house.

Get the Full Curriculum Free

Homeschool reviewer Cathy Duffy – who runs the most trusted independent curriculum review site in the homeschool world – had this to say about Journeying Through the Classics:

“Journeying Through the Classics would be phenomenal if it were a program for purchase, but it’s free! This program really scores high in every area: great content, ease of use, academic excellence, flexibility, and affordability.” — Cathy Duffy, CathyDuffyReviews.com

The full curriculum includes:

  • 700+ pages covering four full years of Charlotte Mason-style literature study, organized into flexible, self-contained units. Print only what you want and need at the time.
  • Integrated art project instruction in every unit (including The Odyssey unit discussed above)
  • Direct links to free online versions of every single book and essay covered
  • Complete writing instruction – MLA citation, analytical essays, vocabulary, and grammar in context
  • Discussion questions and narration prompts built for real critical thinking
  • Flexible pacing – use units in any order, skip what doesn’t resonate with your student
  • No expensive textbooks required, ever

Download the free curriculum here and the Odyssey unit – reading links, edition recommendation, art project, and all – is waiting in your inbox.

Is your teenager the kind of reader who needs a movie to get excited about a book, or the kind who resents the movie for existing at all? Either way, I’d start with the book.

Disclaimer: I share what works for our family – book picks, movie ratings, filtering tools like ClearPlay and VidAngel – but every kid, every household, and every threshold for “too much” is different. You know your own children better than I ever could from behind a keyboard. Please use your own judgment (and maybe a quick preview) before deciding what’s right for your family to read or watch. Homeschool with Joy is not responsible for any parental decisions made regarding content, viewing, or reading material for your children. I’m just here with my personal opinions and a really good unit study.

homeschooling

How to Declutter Homeschool Materials Without the Guilt

Jessica Lovett

I found a box of about twenty gluesticks in our schoolroom last week.

One big box. A whole tube-farm of them.

We’re moving, which means I’ve spent the better part of a month sorting through every corner of our homeschool life, and that gluestick box turned out to be the least surprising discovery. I bought it in bulk from Amazon years ago during a fit of “I will never run out again” and “look how much money I’m saving!” optimism, and somehow we still had a ton left after a solid decade of dioramas, lapbooks, and one memorable poster board Star Wars space study unit with loooots of galaxy and science themed vocabulary words. Not to mention a bagillion spontaneous art projects!

If you’ve ever opened a homeschool closet and felt the walls press in a little – like it’s somehow smaller on the inside than the TARDIS is supposedly bigger – you already know exactly what I’m talking about.

Ah, hello there… (This is also what my stuff says when I open the too-full closet.)

Homeschool clutter isn’t like normal clutter.

It doesn’t creep in slowly. It arrives in waves – library giveaway shelves, co-op free tables, a friend’s “I don’t need this anymore, take it” – and every single item feels responsible when you grab it.

That’s the trap. Each individual “yes” makes sense. It’s the accumulated “yes” that buries you.

This week I want to talk through how homeschool clutter actually builds up, how to figure out what’s worth keeping, and – maybe most usefully – what to do with the rest. Because holding onto things out of guilt doesn’t serve your kids, your shelves, or the workbook itself, which honestly deserves a home where it’ll get finished.

The Great Homeschool Hoard Nobody Warns You About

Nobody tells you this before you start homeschooling, but the clutter isn’t a “you” problem. It’s baked into the homeschool culture.

Library giveaway shelves are a genuine menace (a delightful one, but still). You go in for a picture book and come out with three vintage readers and a stack of unit study guides someone’s family outgrew a decade ago. With classics that you want your child to read someday but they aren’t old enough to yet. With an additional copy of a book that you love so that each kid can have their own when they take their books to their own house someday. An extra copy of a book you love so you can leave the Extra Non-special one in the car to read in waiting rooms, etc. without worrying about it getting hurt…

Or maybe this is just me! 😂

Co-op free tables operate on the same principle – good intentions, low resistance, and a table that somehow never actually empties. And, then there are friends. A homeschool friend cleaning out her cabinets is basically handing you a guilt-free excuse to acquire more curriculum, because refusing feels rude, and accepting feels responsible.

It’s a vicious cycle because I shared a lot of the things I decluttered, but it is kind of different if the person you are sharing it with can actually USE the item whereas you have not used it. In five years.

Add to that the bulk-buying instinct (see: my gluestick situation) and feeling like you are saving 50% on a per item basis and you’ve got a closet that grows even when you’re not trying to grow it. None of this makes you a bad planner. It makes you a homeschool mom, which is a species that has never once regretted having “just in case” supplies – until the day you’re taping shut your eleventh moving box of specialty scrapbooking paper nobody’s touched since 2019.

Here’s the part that’s sneakier than the clutter itself: taking something free feels smart. Frugal, even – like you outsmarted the system by not paying for something you “need.” But you cannot actually teach every curriculum you think is cute.

If you did, your kids would never end up graduating!

There isn’t room in a homeschool day, or a homeschool life, to use every unit study that catches your eye on a co-op table. And every box you keep “just in case” doesn’t only take up shelf space. It takes up mental space. Spirit space, even. You carry around the quiet weight of “I should really do something with this” long after the item itself stopped being useful to anyone.

When Your Kids Age Out (and Your Shelves Don’t Know It)

Here’s the shift nobody prepares you for: once your kids reach a certain age, entire categories of material just stop being useful, and your shelves are always the last to find out.

The phonics readers. The math manipulatives. The nature journal prompts written for a seven-year-old when your seven-year-old is now fourteen and reading things you’d need a dictionary for.

These aren’t things you got wrong. They did their job. But a homeschool room isn’t a museum, and keeping every artifact of every stage isn’t preserving your kids’ childhood – it’s just storage with extra steps.

This is where I’ve had to get honest with myself. Charlotte Mason talked about giving children a wide, living feast, not hoarding every crumb of it forever “just in case.” If a resource has served its purpose, it’s allowed to move on and serve someone else’s purpose next.

I should say here – I am not a minimalist. I will never be a minimalist. We have three copies of A Wrinkle in Time on our shelves (one that is my copy, one that’s my husband’s childhood copy, and my great-great aunt’s that I received from her when we were penpals for years) and I have exactly zero interest in narrowing that down to one.

Keeping all three isn’t clutter. It’s evidence. Evidence that my husband and I were exactly the kind of kids who’d find each other later – margin notes and all. Evidence that a Kindred Spirit I mostly knew through letters loved the same tesseract-jumping, universe-questioning story I did.

Decluttering was never about stripping a home down to the bare minimum. It’s about being honest with yourself over which things are still doing something – holding a memory, connecting two people, meaning something specific – and which things are just occupying a shelf out of habit.

Sell It or Share It? How I Actually Decide

This is the question I get asked most, and my answer has gotten simpler with time. I ask myself three things.

Is it still in demand and in good shape? Full curriculum sets, name-brand math programs, and anything still in active print tend to hold value. Those are worth listing for sale, especially if you paid real money for them originally.

Is my time worth more than the payout? Selling takes photos, listings, messages, and porch meetups. Then the person not showing up… If an item would sell for eight dollars, I’ve probably spent that much in time before the transaction’s even done. Some things just aren’t worth the hustle.

Would this genuinely help someone right now? A workbook that’s 90 percent blank – even if a few pages are filled in – is still a gift to another homeschool mom staring down curriculum costs. She doesn’t need it pristine. She needs it useful. I used to feel weird passing along something “used.” I don’t anymore. Free is not the same as worthless.

If it clears the first bar, I sell it. If it doesn’t but it’s still good, I give it away – because “freely you have received, freely give” isn’t just a nice line, it’s basically a homeschool decluttering policy.

(I made this whole decision tree into a free printable checklist, by the way – grab it at the end of this post.)

Where the Extras Actually Go

Once you’ve decided something’s leaving, the “where” matters more than people think. A few places that have worked well for us:

  • Local co-op free tables – the same place a lot of clutter comes in is also the fastest way to send it back out, minus the guilt.
  • Buy Nothing groups – hyper-local, zero cost, and things move fast when they’re free.
  • Homeschool Facebook groups – especially for curriculum-specific items; there’s almost always someone hunting for the exact edition you’re holding.
  • A friend with younger kids – this one requires zero listing, zero photos, and usually a cup of coffee.
  • The library donation shelf – closing the loop on where a lot of it came from in the first place.

The goal isn’t finding the perfect home for every item. It’s getting it out of your closet and into someone else’s hands before it becomes just another box you’re taping shut on moving day.

Keeping the Clutter From Creeping Back

A decluttered closet doesn’t stay that way by accident. A few things that have actually stuck for us:

  • One in, one out for anything beyond consumables – new curriculum in means old curriculum finds a new home.
  • A quarterly ten-minute purge instead of one massive annual reckoning (much less overwhelming, much more sustainable).
  • A hard “no” on bulk buying anything except actual consumables – gluesticks are the exception that taught me the rule.
  • A designated “give away” box that lives in the closet year-round, so items don’t have to wait for a big purge to leave the house.

None of this requires a label maker or a Pinterest-worthy shelving system. It just requires deciding, on a regular basis, that “might need it someday” isn’t reason enough to keep something taking up space today.

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Decluttering Checklist!

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    What’s the one homeschool item you’ve been holding onto “just in case” – and what would it take for you to finally let it go?

    What’s the item you’d never let go of – not because you’re keeping “just in case,” but because it’s your version of three copies of A Wrinkle in Time?

    If you gave something away today, who would it bless?

    Moving has a way of forcing decisions you’d otherwise put off indefinitely, and I’m grateful for it, even with the gluestick reckoning. Your homeschool doesn’t need to hold every version of itself at once. It just needs what’s useful right now, what still means something specific, and the confidence that when this season ends, someone else will be glad to catch what you’re ready to let go of.

    Grab the free Homeschool Declutter Checklist here – the same 3-question test, the “where it can go” list, and the reflection prompt, all in one printable page.

    homeschooling

    Homeschool Morning Music: A Free Charlotte Mason Playlist

    Jessica Lovett

    Homeschool mornings have a personality of their own, and it’s not always a good one. Someone’s missing the particular colored pencil they want. Someone’s narrating a dream in unnecessary detail. You’re explaining math problems when you bought the streaming videos to do that so you wouldn’t have to – how many minutes until you’re actually starting, multiplied by how many times you’ll say “please finish your waffle.” Then, kids decide to argue about something silly, derailing your plan to read Keats quietly while sipping tea and then doing a picture study…

    I didn’t fix this with a system or a schedule. I fixed it with music, and I’ve been fixing it that way since before Spotify existed.

    That’s not a metaphor. It’s practically a timeline of my life.

    What “Atmosphere” Actually Means in a Charlotte Mason Homeschool

    Charlotte Mason named atmosphere as one of the three instruments of education – right alongside habit and “a living education” through good books. But atmosphere gets misunderstood a lot.

    People hear it and think Pinterest-board homeschool room, matching baskets, a very specific font on the chore chart.

    That’s not it. Here’s what she actually wrote:

    “When we say that education is an atmosphere we do not mean that a child should be isolated in what may be called a ‘child environment’ specially adapted and prepared, but that we should take into account the educational value of his natural home atmosphere both as regards persons and things and should let him live freely among his proper conditions.”
    -Charlotte Mason (A Philosophy of Education, p. 94)

    Read that again. She’s not talking about decor. She’s talking about the actual air a child breathes in your home – the tone, the pace, the way things feel when they walk into the room. Atmosphere isn’t staged. It’s ambient. It’s what’s already happening around your kids, whether you planned it or not.

    Which means atmosphere is already being built in your house every single morning, whether you’re the one building it or not. I found my way into shaping mine a long time ago, and it started with a website most people have forgotten existed.

    I’m decidedly not a morning person in any way, shape, or form. I’m a night owl all the way! But to make the mornings happy for me and my kids, I needed to set the vibe and also get my brain gradually revving up.

    Why We’ve Never Not Had Music Playing

    Back before Spotify, I had Pandora. When my kids were little, I’d click on a piano station and let it run, and it wove this quiet, peaceful air around our home that I didn’t fully understand the power and how sentimental we would get about what the kids came to call Morning Music yet – I just knew it worked.

    No one can be grumpy with quiet piano lilting in the background. Try having a tantrum to Jim Brickman. I mean, you can. But it’s hard. It just makes your heart happy. At least it does mine.

    Once Spotify came around, I was a die-hard member almost immediately. We outgrew our individual plan fast – thank you, family plan, for saving us from everyone arguing over who gets to listen when and for keeping each of our algorithms from getting hopelessly tangled with each other’s.

    I would give up the lights and go full candlelight instead of electricity before I’d give up Spotify.

    Honestly, I’ve been hooked up to music like an IV since I was a kid myself – toting around a giant hard CD carrier and a Walkman on band trips, cheap Sony earphones with stickers on them and those big foam pads that never stayed put. I’m a percussion person at heart, always have been.

    Which is probably why piano continuously wins me over so completely. Piano is technically a percussion instrument. The strings get struck by hammers in there, not plucked or bowed. Somewhere in my brain, pianos have always quietly belonged to me every day, either playing mine or playing piano music. It is the default instrument in my mind. The one that fits all moods.

    The rhythms that are ordered and steady magically make the day ordered and steady, too.

    What’s Actually On the Playlist

    Doug Hammer anchors the whole thing. Fifteen of the fifty-eight tracks on this playlist are his, either solo or featured on someone else’s – “Travels,” “Sunrise,” “In the Fields,” “Wind and Waves,” “The Dance,” “Flying High,” and about ten more, scattered through like a thread holding the rest together. His playing has real movement in it, which is the difference between calming and boring.

    Nothing about Doug Hammer says Elevator Music. It is expressive, earnest, and peaceful.

    Around him: Jim Brickman, Yiruma, Joe Yamada, Wayne Gratz, Robin Spielberg, Steven Cravis, Michael Allen Harrison, Joseph Akins, and a long list of other solo piano artists doing that same quiet, contemplative thing. There’s one instrumental worship track tucked in (“Senhor e Rei”) for the mornings that need a little more reverence than resolve. And there’s one genuine surprise: “Sheeta’s Decision” from Castle in the Sky, the kind of cinematic, hopeful piece that makes even a Tuesday morning feel like it might matter.

    Fifty-eight tracks. Three and a half hours. Long enough that you can let it run well past breakfast if your household needs peace to stretch further than just the first twenty minutes (mine usually does) or use part of it one morning, start somewhere else the next, and never get bored.

    How to Use This Playlist in Your Own Morning Routine

    You don’t need a plan for this one. That’s the whole point – atmosphere isn’t a lesson you teach, it’s a condition you set. But if you want a starting place:

    Start it before anyone’s fully awake. Let it be playing when the first kid wanders downstairs, not something you scramble to turn on once things have already gone sideways. The atmosphere works better when it’s already there to greet them. It also helps the kids wake up! (In theory… mine are teenagers now so are slightly more immune than they used to be!)

    Don’t announce it. You don’t need to say “we’re doing atmosphere now, everyone.” Just let it play. Kids absorb tone faster than they absorb instructions, and a quiet room teaches a kind of settledness that no worksheet can.

    Let it run through your morning basket time, your read-aloud, even your independent work block if your house tends to get loud once everyone scatters to their own tasks. This playlist is built long on purpose so you’re not restarting it four times before lunch.

    I’ll plan on sharing others in the future. Not to brag, but Spotify once calculated that we were in the top 1% of users or something crazy… I have a problem, but it’s a good problem, and I love it!!

    I’m not the only one who’s thought about this. Einstein once said:

    “If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”

    And Jane Austen put it even more simply:

    “Without music, life would be a blank to me.”

    I think that’s true of a home, too. A home without music is missing something you can’t quite name until you add it back in.

    What kind of home do you want?

    What kind of home do you envision when you hear certain songs?

    What does peace actually sound like in your house?

    What do you want your kids humming, twenty years from now, without even remembering where they learned it?

    Start creating that home with music. It doesn’t take a system. It just takes hitting play before the day gets a chance to set its own tone.

    If you want to try it in your own house, the playlist is free and waiting for you – just pop your email in below and I’ll send it straight over.

    I also made a printable of some of the songs that inspired the playlist to the fullest, if you’d like some fridge art!