A Quiet Simple Life | Sallie Borrink

For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 6:23

A Quiet Simple Life

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Relaxed Homeschooling

Relaxed Homeschooling is a thoughtful Christian approach to homeschooling that is flexible, customized, academically responsible, and rooted in strong family relationships.

It is the sweet spot between unschooling, rigid classical education, and overly idealized Charlotte Mason — a family-centered, parent-guided approach to education.

Home Schooling or Home Education?


I don’t know why it took me so long to have this aha moment, but it did. It wasn’t until last week that I fully grasped that I am not a homeschooler. I am a home educator.

Then I found a little video of John Taylor Gatto that confirmed what I was thinking. He put it forth in such clear terms that I appreciated.

Homeschooler Versus Home Educator

From the video:

The truth is schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.

Schools were designed…to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulae, human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

John Taylor Gatto, Schooling is Not Education

(See complete video at end of post)

This should have been obvious to me. After all, I left the teaching profession, in part, because although I loved children and teaching, I did not enjoy school. Just last week at a gathering for educators at Barnes and Noble, I was talking with another woman who is both a home educating mom and works in a school. When she asked if I missed the classroom, I gave the answer I always give. I miss teaching children. I do not miss school.

So why have I called us homeschoolers? Because it is the most widely used term. But as I’ve watched our adventure in home schooling educating unfold, I’ve realized that I really have no desire to “do” school at home. I care deeply about educating Caroline. But I have no desire to subject her to “school” at home.

Spontaneous, Authentic Learning

We’re fortunate that the laws in Michigan are very lax. It is great because I don’t have to document every minute of everything we do. At the same time, I find it challenging to keep track of everything we do because so much of our learning is spontaneous and unplanned.

Two weeks ago, about five minutes before bedtime, Caroline announced that she wanted to make a solar system on large paper. She’s been fascinated with everything space for months now. We said okay. So she went to bed about an hour and a half later than usual. But she created by herself (with a little help from Daddy) a solar system on two large pieces of black paper. The next day she drew in comets, the International Space Station, and many other details she’s learned from spending literally hours pouring over books about space, listening to Daddy read to her about space, etc.

The other night, she found a page from my Autumn Themed Learning Pack that was in the office recycled paper pile. It was a measuring with pumpkins page. I didn’t even know she had it (and I hadn’t done it with her yet). She discovered it, figured out what she was supposed to do by reading the directions, and had already started on it by the time David found her. This, too, was at bedtime. I certainly wasn’t going to derail her learning, so we let her finish the page.

So much of her inspired learning seems to take place at the “wrong” time. Just before dinner, at bedtime, as we’re heading out the door, etc. But I try to accommodate her as much as possible. If she is interested in something, I do whatever I can to make that possible for her. This has always been our philosophy, starting when she was little and would ask us to read books. Our rule was to read to her any time she asked, even if it wasn’t the most convenient thing for us.

When the teachable moments arrive, I make the most of them.

And so we do very little “formal” schooling where we sit down and I instruct Caroline directly. We do some handwriting, calendar time, and math pages. I do plan reading activities and books for her to read to me. Beyond that we are pretty wide open. But we are educating every day. Caroline is getting a wonderful education. Will it get a little more formally organized as she gets older? Probably. But I’m happy to let her continue to delight in open-ended creativity, discovering things for herself, and exploring whatever interests her. Her time as a small child is so brief. I want her to enjoy the wonder of the world for as long as possible without endless details and educational pressures and expectations.

Why are children in first grade given high pressured, standardized tests? The answer is right up there in the Gatto quote. It isn’t because it is good for the children at that age. Teachers in the early grades hate standardized testing and know it isn’t a good practice. But everyone in a school must be measured scientifically and so the tests happen. Children who are barely six years old are told that they can’t pass to the next grade if they don’t pass certain tests. What are we doing to these precious children? The stress we are inflicting on them because of these tests is truly criminal.

I think, too, this is why even though there is much I like about Charlotte Mason, I don’t feel especially drawn to using the Ambleside curriculum. I’ve looked at it many times, but it just feels so formal and rigid to me. I look at the heavy books suggested even for Year 1 and think that it isn’t at all where Caroline is right now. Even from a parent’s perspective it looks stress-inducing. There is so much there! Might we someday use Ambleside? Maybe. But there is a heaviness to that curriculum that I just can’t embrace, at least at this time.

Embracing God in Her Education

God has given us a delightful world, full of His wonders. I want to enjoy those wonders with my child. When we get home from a wedding reception after dark, I want her to enjoy getting out a chair and finding Orion and the Big Dipper with her daddy.

  • God is an immensely creative God. I want my child to embrace her creativity. I want her to have craft materials and boxes and ideas that cause her to be absorbed for an hour with anticipation of what she is creating.
  • God is Truth. I want to discuss Truth with my child. I want us to talk about Jesus and sin. About the election and God’s hand. About music and beauty.
  • God delights in the individuality of each person He creates. I want my child to discover who God created her to be as a individual with unique giftings and a purpose in His Kingdom.

All of these have happened in our home over the past week. None of these endeavors were stress-inducing and nor should they be.

Education is an amazing adventure when parents and child are interested in the world God has created for them to enjoy.

  • Education should not suck the life out of a child.
  • Education should not be drudgery.
  • Education should not be fear-inducing.
  • Education should cause a child to pause in wonder at God and how He is at work in the world.

The following video is about ten minutes long. The presentation of the material is kind of slow, but there is good food for thought there.

If you are planning your homeschool year, you may also want to visit my Homeschool Planning Help page.

You may also enjoy my Back-to-Homeschool Help hub with planning encouragement, relaxed homeschooling posts, and free printables.

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Teaching Our Spirited, Active Child To Read


I wanted to bring together two topics near and dear to my heart in this one post: spirited children and homeschooling. More specifically, teaching a spirited child to read. (If you aren’t familiar with the concept of a spirited child or wonder if you have one, you might want to check out my spirited child page that has lots of resources and links.)

I think that effectively teaching a spirited child to read boils down to one thing: Don’t teach her to read.

Yes, you read that correctly. Don’t try to teach her to read. Allow the child to teach herself to read.

Now let me explain.

Note in 2019: Since originally writing this, I have also realized Caroline is a right-brained learner and a visual-spatial child. These also factor heavily into why this method worked so well. Generally speaking, right-brained children love to learn, but hate to be taught. It took me a long time to figure out off of her quirks!

Early Reading and Talking Strategies

Caroline constantly amazes me with her reading. She amazes me because I have done relatively little direct instruction with her and so I’m somewhat taken aback at how much she knows. To be sure, David and I have done a great deal to invest in her developing ability to read. Probably most importantly, we have read multiple books to her every day since she was around six months old as part of our desire to raise a reader. The power of reading a variety of books every day to your child cannot be overstated. We surrounded her with print material including books and subscriptions to magazines such as Baby Animals and now Highlights Hello and High Five. (Thanks, Mom!).

The other biggie is we talk. A lot. And we never did the baby talk thing. We always spoke in adult voices with her and didn’t dumb down our language. We expanded on the things she said so as to greatly increase her vocabulary. (If someone wants an explanation of this, just ask.)

But we have not “taught” her how to read. She has taught herself so much that I can’t point to a curriculum and say, “Caroline knows these words because we’ve learned them and I’ve tested her on them.” This summer we were out driving and another car had one of those baby screens in the back window. She said, “The First Years.” I had no idea she knew the words “first” and “years” but she obviously did because she read them with absolutely no supporting context at all. She basically does this every day. Every day I discover another group of words she knows that she learned somewhere.

The Philosophy of How to Educate a Spirited Child

When I realized Caroline was a spirited child, I knew I had to rethink every aspect of my educational philosophy in light of the child I had been blessed with by God. I’m a former teacher and I had thought a great deal about homeschooling while waiting to be blessed with a child. But none of that really mattered. I wasn’t trying to figure out how to teach a class of twenty-five first graders to read. I had one child to consider. Mine. And it really didn’t matter which curriculum choices sent my heart racing with possibilities. It only mattered what would get Caroline excited about learning. So I had to rethink all of my approaches in light of my child. Some of my views would remain the same, some would adjust slightly, and others would take me in completely different directions.

One of the realizations I had early on was that any thought of the two of us sitting down and me “instructing” her how to read was simply not going to fly. She wouldn’t sit still that long and it isn’t how she functions best. I knew we would both be miserable. She learns best by watching and acting. So I made the choice to embrace two mediums I would not have expected: DVDs and websites.

Utilizing DVDs

Caroline didn’t watch TV or DVDs until she was almost two years old at which time I started to let her watch Baby Einstein videos. She loved them and we used them as an educational tool to foster discussion about all kinds of topics.

(Yes, they also worked as an excellent babysitter to give us a break.)

But we just didn’t let her watch them without also discussing them, connecting them to her real world, etc. So, for example, Baby MacDonald – A Day on the Farm (the “Cow” video as it was called in our house) was connected through other books we read, toys we played with, and regular rides we took in the countryside to help her see in person what she was seeing on the television.

Over the past four years we’ve allowed Caroline to watch a lot of carefully selected DVDs. I know they have helped her advance as far as she has. The LeapFrog series has been very helpful.

Using Learning Websites

The other biggie has been Starfall. (We also subscribed to the More Starfall when it became available.) Some of the stuff on Starfall is hokey and cheesy. There is stuff on there that makes me wince at the dubious artistic quality. But Caroline learned so much from Starfall and More Starfall.

We’ve also subscribed to ABCMouse.com for a season and are utilizing ABCya.com.

But Starfall has been the most instrumental in helping her to this point.

Teaching I Do

Now there are ways that I will have to teach Caroline. She definitely needs work on the long vowel sound patterns and so we will practice those. We’ll play games with word families. I utilize the pocket chart and learning games as much as possible. I do everything I can to get her to read without it being obvious that we’re working on reading. But it is soooo much easier because all of the foundation is there. I just work at filling in the holes and not trying to build it from the ground up. Drilling her and working on sight words from scratch would have been an exercise in frustration for both of us. This is much better.

I’ve been quizzing her on the Fry’s First Hundred Words to see what she knows because I honestly wasn’t sure. She basically already knows all but about ten of the first hundred words that are supposed to be learned in first grade. We started going through the second hundred words for second grade and I’m guessing she probably already knows at least a third of them, probably more. I’m going to check her on the third grade words as well. I’m guessing just by looking at them she already knows quite a few of them as well.

More Learning DVDs

Back to the DVDs. The other DVDs that we’ve utilized have been the Little Einsteins such as:

and Curious George such as:

We’ve purchased all of the DVDs we could find in both of these series and she has enjoyed them over and over and over and over.

The thing that I like about both of these series is that they have a learning component, but they also meet her need for creativity and fun. She has such an imagination and these two series really seem to feed it for some reason. The Curious George videos have a real life segment at the end of each episode that shows real kids doing real things related to the topic. These have been a great springboard for further discussion or projects.

Doing What Works for My Child

So there’s a little bit about how we’ve “taught” Caroline to read. Will our method work for every spirited child? I have no idea. But I do know that spirited kids who are more of everything need a different approach to much of life. This is what I discerned about how to handle the reading aspect.

It was a big shift for me because I tend to be rather low enthusiasm on the technology front. I think it has its place, but I’m not interested in getting sucked up into it. But I know this was the best way to approach reading with Caroline and I’m just thrilled so see what a great job she is doing.

It also fits well with our philosophy of making all of life a learning experience.

  • Caroline taught herself to read through the tools we gave her in our home (books, games, DVDs, computer, reading aloud, library visits, etc.).
  • We’ve shown her that learning happens all the time and she can embrace learning on her own as well as with us.
  • We’ve empowered her to read and we reinforce that every time she reads something and astounds us yet again. Her reading is her own, not something we gave her. And that is a powerful lesson for her to begin learning even as a first grader.

I’ll try to follow up with another post with some of the other reading resources we’ve used (games, books, etc.) and maybe even a post about how we are rapidly becoming semi-structured, semi-unschoolers.

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Our Homeschool Learning Room For First Grade


Like many of you, I’ve been consumed with Back to School for the past month or so including getting our homeschool learning room ready. For about two weeks at the end of August all I did in my spare time (and late into the night) was planning and organizing for the school year.

Beginning First Grade

We started school last Tuesday and made it through the first week. In my interactions with other moms of first graders I was reminded that the transition to first grade can be really challenging for some little ones. I heard a couple of stories of unhappy campers who did not want to go back to school after the first day. Homework meltdowns the first week. All that kind of stuff.

It took a few days for Caroline to really grasp that summer vacation is OVER and you HAVE to do school EVERY DAY. I think it makes it harder when you are home all the time because the switch from total freedom in the summer to actually being accountable that real learning is taking place is not so evident when nothing around the child has changed!

But we’re settled in and I’m cautiously optimistic that we are over the worst of the back to school blues.

Homeschool learning room bookcase corner

Our Inexpensive Homeschool Room

I’ve got oodles of stuff to share about all the great things I found while planning, but those will have to come in future posts. Today I’m just going to share what our learning room looks like as promised in the post where I discussed repurposing our living room during our first year of homeschooling. (You can click on the photos to make them a little bigger.)

I did some changing of things for the fall and I’m really happy with the results. It is simple and cozy. We have lots of natural light and sunny yellow walls. It is a cheerful room and that makes us all happy.

I also wanted to share because our room is an example that you can have a simple room and still have what I think is a pleasant learning environment. You don’t have to spend a lot of money.

I was reading through Confessions of a Homeschooler’s post on her learning room recently and had mixed feelings. It is a spectacular room.  I don’t mean to take anything away from her room. It is gorgeous and she’s done so many neat things with it. But so many homeschoolers don’t have the room or the money to have a room like that. One woman left such a comment and I responded to her because I didn’t want her to feel like she couldn’t be a good homeschool mom if she couldn’t trick out a room in the way COAH did. Many homeschoolers don’t even have the luxury of having a separate room. I’ve sacrificed my living room to do this and it is a trade off I’m more than willing to make. Each family has to make the best of what they have!

Homeschool learning room organizational boxes

Keeping The Learning Room Uncluttered

Our room only has a small fraction of our books and other materials. The rest of it is in the basement. I actually had another large bookcase in the room and took it out so I could keep the pocket chart holder up in the room all the time.

I also purposefully kept it simple so it would not be over-stimulating. The last thing Caroline and I need is a room packed to overflowing with books and educational materials. Some people might like their room to be really full, but I find it overwhelming and distracting. So our room is purposefully not overly full. I could have easily filled a room twice this size, but am glad that we are limited by what we can put in here.

Repurposing Things For Our Homeschool Room

I’ve purchased almost nothing for this room. The table and chairs were in the kitchen of our previous house.  The light green rocker was in Caroline’s nursery. There is a dark green rocker not in the picture that we’ve had for years. The bookcases have been here and there throughout the house over the years. The arts and crafts supply cabinet was in the kitchen in the previous house.

I’ll share in another post the things I have bought (such as the plastic containers in the photo that I use to organize each day’s work). I’ll also share about our calendar time and some of the other routines we have as well as the items on the walls.

Now I’m off to figure out Fancy Nancy birthday party invitations for my soon-to-be six year old!

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Parenting and Homeschooling As An Introvert


The past few weeks have been hard.  I hit the proverbial wall this week and it all had to do with being so strongly introverted. Parenting and homeschooling as an introvert is hard. On the bright side, I think God allowed me to realize something in the midst of it.

Singleness and childlessness were two of the hardest things I’ve ever experienced.

Parenting is the hardest thing I have ever done.

I struggled with singleness and childlessness. Those seemingly never-ending years were an important part of my faith journey, and God used both of them in significant ways to shape me as a person. But in the midst of them I never really felt like I had any control over the situations. I could pray and wait and trust. It seemed that the overall theme that kept rising in my life was that God was calling me to patience and waiting in the midst of each situation.

But the parenting thing. This feels different. I’m not waiting on God to move and change something. It’s something I have to get up and do every day. And it is challenging in a completely different way. Yes, I need to rely on His power in my life to parent well. But it is still different than the paths I walked before. And so far I don’t see an overall theme coming forward to give me encouragement and confidence that I’m on the right path in my thinking about the situation.

The past couple of weeks have been full of people and devoid of any meaningful introvert time for me which is a sure recipe for disaster on pretty much every level. I started searching for articles online about parenting and introverts and found some gems. I felt encouraged after reading them if for no other reason than I knew afresh I wasn’t alone.

I thought Why Introverts Fail at Attachment Parenting had some fantastic gems of truth. Oh my. A few statements resonated loudly in my weary heart and mind, especially in contrast to so much of what is written about Christian parenting and homeschooling.

To put it simply, being an introvert means that being around other people slowly depletes my energy. I love talking with people, but it is as though I have a word limit both for hearing and for speaking. Once I have exceeded my limit for the day, I begin to lose my ability to be a kind or even polite person. I cannot be around people—any people—24/7. I absolutely have to have alone time to recharge my emotional batteries.

and

I am fully convinced that many—if not all—of the parenting experts favored by liberals are extroverts. Extroverts find themselves energized by connection to other people. So it isn’t surprising that extroverted parenting experts have told us that we should be overjoyed at spending every waking minute with our children. Extroverts have a nearly unlimited number of words that they can hear and say in a day, so they have told us to be constantly attentive to what our children say, to engage in every conversation. Extroverts can talk for hours on end, so it seems perfectly reasonable to them that everyone should be able to be tuned into toddler babbling and grade-school chatter for days on end without becoming suicidal or homicidal. Extroverts enjoy being in close physical proximity to other people and can go for days on end without any alone time. So they believe that everyone should be able to be able to wear a baby in a sling, be snuggled up to another person 24/7 without going completely out of their minds. 

and

I would argue, however, that the first step to being a good parent is being a self-aware person. It is knowing and honoring your own limits. I believe that we are better parents when we work with our nature rather than against it. For those of us who are introverts, this means that we honor our own need for space, for quiet, for time alone. We do these things not because we are selfish, but because they make us better parents.

and

Look at it this way, when we discover that our children have special needs, we move heaven and earth to make the kind of accommodations that will allow them to thrive. Even if we decide that being an introvert handicaps us as a parent, we owe it to ourselves and to our children to make reasonable accommodations for ourselves so that we can thrive as parents.

I also appreciated a discussion I found on Mothering.com that tackled Introversion and Parenting. I related to many of the comments.

I laughed out loud a couple of times while reading Pity the Introvert. I loved this (and so will my mother-in-law):

A few years ago – well, probably around ten years ago, now that I think about it – one of my older sons asked me what my favorite day of the week was.

“Monday morning,” I said, “When everyone goes away.”

and this comment from a reader named Sue:

The first day of school after a long summer is the highlight of my year. I would walk back to my car saying ‘Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty I’m free at last!” Have you ever read ‘Party of One: The Loners Manifesto’ by Anneli Rufus?? Some of it is a stretch but I liked her description about spending hours with friends would leave her feeling drained, like she had donated blood..all day long.

I thought Amy made some really great observations such as:

On days when everyone is around all day, I must stay up later than everyone in order to feel like I exist. I don’t mean that overdramatically, I just mean that my self doesn’t feel really connected until it’s…quiet and I can process stuff in my head.

coupled with this…

My oldest son is an extrovert. I mean…he’s an extreme extrovert. It took me a long time to figure this out. It all finally came together for me in the aftermath of doing one of the Myers-Briggs inventories (for school, of course. So we could all get along, etc.) and observing him during one more aggravating trip to the grocery store in which he could not, would not leave either his brother or sister alone. It finally hit me, “If he’s not interacting with someone, he doesn’t feel alive. ” And I grasped the corollary of that which was that I feel most alive when I’m alone. And we were going to have to figure out a way to co-exist.

This is EXACTLY where I am with mothering Caroline. Bless her little extroverted, only child heart… She wants interaction ALL. DAY. LONG. The other day we took her to the Children’s Museum in the morning and then we ran some errands. When we got home mid-afternoon, her tank must have been full because she actually went into the learning room and was fully engaged A.LONE. for the better part of an hour. I vacillated between total shock and thanksgiving. But it took all of the attention from me AND David until three in the afternoon before she got to that point. We simply cannot do that every day. (Update: I’ve since concluded that she’s an introvert but needs lots of interaction.)

And bedtime… If she doesn’t have her word and interaction quota met… She CANNOT go to sleep or stay in bed. Drives me nuts to no end.

And, yet, I’m the same way on the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s past midnight and I should be in bed. I want to be in bed.But I’m sitting here typing because it is finally quiet and I can finally find a way to bring some life back into my introverted self. I can’t go to bed until I’ve had my introvert time.She can’t go to bed until she gets her extrovert time.

I have no idea how this is going to work. I’ve asked myself more than a few times lately if I am simply incapable of homeschooling and being a healthy person. And yet I believe with every fiber of my being that homeschooling is the best thing for Caroline even though she is an extrovert.

No answers tonight. Just some thoughts put to electronic paper so I can quiet my own mind and go to sleep.

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