Let’s talk flexibility. Imagine if you will your perfect homeschool day. Everyone’s will look different, but maybe for you, it looks like having found a new curriculum you’re excited about or having all the materials laid out on the kitchen table or maybe you’ve planned a field trip to meet friends, hike and learn about wild edibles. You are up and dressed before your children. You even have time for a warm beverage and to sit in quiet. Today is going to be awesome! Then, because Friends, this is life, one of your children wakes up with a fever or the car won’t start or your friends have to cancel. Maybe a monsoon hits or your child takes one look at the materials you’ve gathered and gets upset or the curriculum you invested money and time into is not a good fit.

Your day is ruined, right?

It depends.

How flexible are we willing and able to be?

Today I had a unit meticulously planned for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I had six homeschoolers coming over to join us. Then the weather changed and my allergies clobbered me. I canceled the class. I slept until 11 am. My homeschooler did her math and then played Minecraft until I woke up. It was NOT how I wanted or planned our day. I suppose I could have pushed through feeling horrible. Sometimes we have to, but today I didn’t. That’s one of the things I appreciate about homeschooling. Today I chose to take care of myself.

My class can begin next week. My daughter and I still managed to do her top three. We just started at noon instead of nine. We also watched a National Geographic documentary and sipped tea. It wasn’t the day I planned but it wasn’t a failure day either.

Flexibility- “the quality of bending easily without breaking” is one of the most important adjectives to embrace as a homeschooler. Life is never going to go exactly as planned. Our awesome unit is going to have holes, our kids are going to get sick, we are going to get sick; we have to be willing and able to bend.

A Flexibility Mindset

Flexibility and a growth mindset go hand in hand. When we recognize that we can stand up and start again when things fall apart, we are more likely to be flexible when things go array.

In the article, 15 Ways to Build a Growth Mindset, Tchiki Davis says, “If we have a “growth mindset,” we enjoy challenges, despite the risk, usually because we value learning and growth more than others thinking we know what we’re doing. And because we’re always trying new things, we often don’t know what we’re doing. Still, those of us with a growth mindset often build new skills more easily because we believe we can and so we really work at it.”

A flexible mindset means:

• We are okay to start our plans a little earlier or later.
• We plan for lessons to take longer than they probably will.
• We have a backup plan when lessons fall on their face. Games are always a good backup plan.
• We plan for weather-related snafus.
• We admit when things aren’t working and try something new.
• We shake off feelings of failure when things don’t go as planned.
• When our child isn’t processing something, we try a new way.
• We are okay with things being hard sometimes.

Being flexible in our homeschool day means we don’t raise the white flag or throw in the towel or any other idiom when things don’t go our way.

Being flexible is a practice for sure. Like patience or any other trait that’s helpful, we are not always going to succeed. Just like our kids need time to learn new skills and behaviors, we do too.

The best part about learning to be flexible is our children will be learning right alongside us. It’s important our kids see us bend and flex and try again. The more flexible we are the more flexible our kids will be, and in a world that is going to constantly ask them to take on challenges, flexibility is one of the most important skills we can model and teach.