A Positive Plug for Planning

by Beverley Paine, Nov 2013

I know some people are not overt planners and just follow their nose, doing what comes next, meeting needs as they arise. I do that to some degree too, but I found that having an overall plan expressed somehow, often on paper, helps to guide me towards accomplishing my goals. It also helps to make sure they stay aligned to our values.

For a few years our family tried to establish a New Year's tradition of creating two posters, one for all the things we'd done that year and were grateful for and the other for all things we wish or want to happen in the coming year. Anything not achieved but still revelant was brought forward. It lasted about four years and in hindsight I realise that I probably should have started it when the kids were younger.

What the exercise taught me was that without overtly focusing on those goals or putting a lot of effort into achieving them, a lot of our listed goals, ambitions and wants were realised. Perhaps not that year, but in the following ones. Some were simply unrealistic (eg winning the lotto) but including them gave us the opportunity to mull over probable and possible, what was in control and what was not.

I could have read interpreted those missed short term goals each year as failure: instead I chose to be reminded of what was important to me and why. Sometimes I would ditch objectives as irrelevant or unnecessary, if that had proven to be the case, but mostly I'd add them to next year's list.

One year, when my children were in their late teens, I found a list of my personal life goals from 1986 in a box of papers and saw that 90% of what I'd written down had happened. Sometimes I think it helps us to presence our thoughts and dreams in a concrete way. Perhaps recording our goals is a small but significant commitment to ourselves to work towards them, and that sits quietly in our memory somewhere, guiding our actions?

I encourage all new home educating parents to sit for a while and consider and record their thoughts about why they want or need to help their children learn without school, what it is they and their children want to experience, how they see themselves and their lives a year from now, ten years from now.

I see this as an essential aspect of homeschool or unschool life, one that celebrates who we are now, who we were and where we've been, what we're doing, have done and want to do and learn.