Happy Wednesday, friends! We’re three weeks into our Foundation Month, and this week’s story involves me, a GPS, and a level of directional chaos that I wish I could say was unusual for me. 😅

Life

Last week I was taking my daughter to her very first dance class. I knew myself well enough to leave 20 minutes early, because I am… let’s just say directionally challenged. Always have been.

The studio had given us two different addresses. One was a back entrance, and the other was up a super steep hill to the front. Simple enough, right? For everyone else except me maybe! 🤪

I typed the address into my GPS. Get almost all the way there and realize it’s the wrong one.

Turned around, typed in the other option. Wrong. Again. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Did one of those embarrassing U-turns where you pull into someone’s driveway and hope they’re not watching from the window. Finally found the steep hill (almost drove right past it!) and FINALLY found the studio.

We walked in exactly as class was starting with not a second to spare.

All 20 of those extra minutes? Gone. Every single one of them eaten up by mistakes I made because I was rushing out the door and didn’t take two minutes to actually look at the map before I left.

Two minutes of preparation would have saved me twenty minutes of panic. But I skipped the prep because I thought I didn’t have time for it.

(The irony is not lost on me. lol)

Homeschool + Math

I see this same pattern in math all the time.

A student is working through a concept, and the parent can tell it’s not fully clicking. But the scope and sequence says they should be further along by now, so they keep moving to cover more ground, thinking, “We’ll circle back later.”

But skipping past a concept your student doesn’t understand yet isn’t saving time. It’s borrowing it. And you do eventually have to pay it back later with interest, almost always in the form of harder concepts that don’t make sense because the earlier ones never solidified.

Pre-algebra is especially unforgiving here. Every concept leans on the one before it. If your student doesn’t have a firm grip on what fractions actually mean, or how multiplication connects to division, or what it looks like to think about relationships between numbers, the later material isn’t going to feel hard, It’s going to feel almost impossible, leading your student to think they’re the problem when really, the preparation just wasn’t there yet.

Two minutes looking at the map would have saved me twenty minutes of wrong turns. In the same way, a few days camping out on a foundational concept now can save you weeks of frustration later.

You’re not losing time by slowing down. You’re investing it in a foundation that will actually hold.

Grace

You know what I keep learning over and over? God does everything in His own time. And His timing usually doesn’t match mine.

If you know, you know I’m a planner. I like to know where I’m going, when I’ll get there, and what the backup route is just in case. But God doesn’t hand me a highlighted map with turn-by-turn directions. He gives me the next step, sometimes just that next step. And He asks me to trust Him for the rest.

That’s hard for me, and I’m guessing it might be hard for you too.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9 (ESV)

When you feel behind in your homeschooling, and when the calendar says one thing and your student’s understanding says another, it’s okay to slow down. and trust that the right pace is the one God has you on, even when it doesn’t match the plan you had in your head.

His timing is perfect. Especially when it doesn’t feel like it. ❤️

See you soon!

- Mrs. Holman

P.S. We made it to dance class on time, by the way. Barely. And my daughter loved it. Sometimes the stressful road still gets you exactly where you need to be, right when you need to be there! That might be true for your homeschool this week too. 🩷