Art of Homeschooling Podcast
Join Jean Miller, a homeschooling mom of three grown children, for enlightening stories, strategies, interviews, and encouragement to help you thrive as a homeschooling parent. In each episode, Jean helps you let go of the overwhelm and get in touch with inspiration. You CAN create a homeschool life you love. And here on this podcast, we keep it sweet and simple to help you develop the confidence you need to make homeschooling work for your family. Look for new episodes every Monday.
Art of Homeschooling Podcast
A Conversation with Barbara Dewey, My Mentor
EP188: How can simplifying your homeschooling journey bring more joy and effective learning into your household? Join us this week on the Art of Homeschooling podcast, where we have an enlightening conversation with my mentor and dear friend, Barbara Dewey of Waldorf Without Walls. Barbara opens up about her transformative journey from discovering homeschooling and Waldorf education to creating a nurturing and personalized learning environment for her children. Together, we explore how letting go of traditional schooling's perfection can lead to celebrating learning in its purest form. This is an AoH Classic from the archives of the podcast. Enjoy this delightful conversation!
Find the Show Notes Here (www.artofhomeschooling.com/episode188)
Inspired at Home Membership (www.artofhomeschooling.com/inspiredathome)
Thanks for listening! Follow us on Instagram or find us on Facebook.
You're listening to the Art of Homeschooling podcast, where we help parents cultivate creativity and connection at home. I'm your host, jean Miller, and here on this podcast you'll find stories and inspiration to bring you the confidence you need to make homeschooling work for your family. Let's begin. Hello homeschooling friend. This week we're bringing you an art of homeschooling classic from the podcast archives and I'm so excited to bring back episode number two from here on the podcast, a conversation with my mentor. Barbara Dewey is not only my homeschooling mentor but also now a dear friend, and she is the one who helped me discover not only how to keep homeschooling simple and doable, but also to make it work for my family. She's the one I would call every February when my two boys were driving me crazy and I wondered what I was doing wrong. In this episode, barbara reflects on the advice she would give her younger self and the advice she would give you over a cup of tea as you travel along this homeschooling path, to encourage you to keep homeschooling simple and doable, to let go of the perfection of trying to do school at home and to celebrate learning for its own sake. This episode will inspire you, no matter where you are on your homeschooling journey and help you feel empowered to make it your own. For any links we mention in this episode, please check out the show notes at artofhomeschoolingcom slash episode 188.
Speaker 1:Today I am having a conversation with my mentor, barbara Dewey of Waldorf Without Walls, and I'm just so excited to share this conversation with all of you. So hey there, barbara, hi Jean, so nice to have you on the show today For you listeners. I met Barbara early on in our family's homeschooling journey and I'm so glad I did, because Barbara really helped me, particularly to keep homeschooling simple and doable. Like that is something, barbara, that you are so good at, I think, and those are themes of this podcast. Right, I have this goal of encouraging all of you to keep homeschooling simple and doable and let go really of this idea of perfection and trying to do school at home. We wanna just let that go right. Okay, so I'm going to give you a short introduction to Barbara and then we're just going to dive into a conversation here.
Speaker 1:Barbara Dewey has been consulting with homeschooling families throughout the world. She writes publications, provides trainings at Waldorf Without Walls and in her spare time she enjoys her unique solar home and developing her farmland. So Barbara is a master gardener. Her husband Quimby is a forest entomologist and together they lead workshops and field days on the environment and backyard food production. Barbara is the mother of four and grandmother of six. She holds an MS in Waldorf education from the Waldorf Institute of Sunbridge College in Spring Valley, new York, and Barbara has been teaching in various settings since 1960. So you are a veteran teacher, barbara. Welcome. It's so great to talk to you. What's life like down there on Taproot Farm?
Speaker 2:Well, it's a gorgeous fall day and we've managed to keep a lot of our vegetables from freezing, so we're still picking peppers and tomatoes and things like that.
Speaker 1:Our tomato crop this year, holy moly, we've had so many tomatoes. It's been wonderful. But yeah, but the frost came early.
Speaker 2:It did, but it hasn't been too heavy yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great thing, All right.
Speaker 1:Well, let's start this conversation and I just want to say right off the bat that you have just made a huge difference in my family's life, because I met you early on in my journey and I was able to really begin to simplify and it's amazing, once we start down that road of sort of shedding our own expectations of what homeschooling is supposed to look like, how much shedding there actually is to do so. For the listeners who don't know you, I would just love to hear a little bit. Let's start with your journey as a mother and a grandmother, because I know that you didn't really discover this idea of homeschooling until your kids were already growing up, and you didn't really discover Waldorf until your kids were grown. So tell us about your journey as a mom.
Speaker 2:Well, I was interested in homeschooling but people went to jail over homeschooling in the 60s and I knew some people who did go to jail so it wasn't an option for me. And I discovered Waldorf when my kids were probably oh, somewhere between three and 11. And I tried very hard to find out more about it and get educated about it. I went to Detroit to talk to the Waldorf Institute. Could they do something by phone or letter or something with me to get me more involved in this? And there was no way they could. It was such a small movement then I just did what I could.
Speaker 2:Luckily I was brought up by a German mother who, just by the nature of who she was and where she was from, got a somewhat Waldorf childhood, so that part wasn't too difficult for me. I wasn't big on letting my kids watch a lot of TV, and I mean we had a TV but they didn't watch very much and a lot of handwork went on in the house and that sort of thing. So we did what we could and the children went to school. But we had all summer and after school to do lots of other neat things which we did, and that's how it all happened.
Speaker 1:You were really involved in 4-H too.
Speaker 2:I remember Well, all but the oldest one were very involved in 4-H and did a lot and we lived on eight acres and we had chickens and ducks and geese and a great big garden and a dog and all of the things that you have there. So that was nice.
Speaker 1:And so as your kids got older. Well, first of all, it's so interesting, isn't it? Because now there are all kinds of distance learning, Waldorf teacher trainings and that sort of thing, and I have found, you know now that the Waldorf movement has really been celebrating for this past year, a hundred years of this approach. Right, it was a hundred years ago that Rudolf Steiner founded the first Waldorf school. There's now much more conversation between Waldorf schools and Waldorf homeschoolers, and even that wasn't happening a lot. So I like to think of you as the matriarch of homeschool consulting and of this Waldorf homeschooling movement, Like that's a pretty big deal.
Speaker 2:Well, the Waldorf homeschooling movement was not at all welcome in 1991 when I went to the Waldorf Institute. When I went there I told them I wanted to do homeschooling because this just wasn't available to people who lived far away from a school which is most of the United States and people who don't have tuition money. And they almost didn't accept me into the program because that's what I wanted to do. That was not okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I had friends even later well, probably in the 90s also, because that's when I started homeschooling but friends who also, as homeschooling parents, went to the training, who also, as homeschooling parents, went to the training and they had these week-long grades trainings in the summertime. You know, friends who had to pretend that they were classroom teachers so that they could be welcome to stay, which is amazing really. But nowadays, you know, I think the homeschooling movement is seen as a huge part, like a movement in its own right and also a movement that can influence what happens in a classroom and vice versa. Right, they're just different settings and I always say the pros and cons of any setting.
Speaker 2:There were quite a few of the people that I worked with early on whose children grew up, went on to become Waldorf teachers in a school, so the schools have definitely benefited from homeschoolers.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. And in some places now schools welcome homeschoolers for part-time programs or for festivals or something like that, which is wonderful to see that evolution. So let's back up a second. I find it fascinating that you decided that you wanted to go do this Waldorf education training, so you have a master's in Waldorf education with a focus on homeschooling. So say a little bit more about that. I know that in between raising your four children and going to get that master's degree, you had run a preschool. So you had an interest in education, right For sure. But say a little bit more about that, the evolution of your interest in the homeschooling movement in particular.
Speaker 2:Well, I started out as a public school teacher In 1960, I had a class of second graders and they homogeneously grouped then and I had there were five sections and I had group C and guess what, there were 22 boys and 11 girls in my class and I really got to like little boys about then and then I had three of my own before I got a girl.
Speaker 2:So it was a great experience.
Speaker 2:But after that, when I had finished raising my children, by then I had been exposed to Waldorf and I had met some people who were homeschooled in different states than New York, who didn't have to go to jail for it, and I was really impressed with what these homeschooled children were like, how they really saw learning for its own sake rather than to pass a test or get a grade, and so I was really impressed with that and I couldn't afford to go do the teacher training right then.
Speaker 2:And when I moved to Colorado I just worked in the ski area the first year in the nursery and then there was a preschool in town, a small one that the woman wanted to retire and leave town, and so I bought the preschool and I ran it as a sort of a Montessori Waldorf-y type kindergarten for five years. Oh, I guess I kept it for seven or eight. Then I went and got the Waldorf teacher training, which worked out very well, because my mother had just died and my father was 97 years old and living alone and needed somebody to come and live with him. He was perfectly capable, but he shouldn't be left alone. So I moved to Hocus, new Jersey, which was seven miles from where Sunbridge was, and that was my opportunity.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's serendipity, right, or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, pretty amazing. So tell me, because I don't even remember this. I know we've had this conversation before, but what was your first exposure to Waldorf? Like, when did you learn about it? I know, for me, I went through graduate school in Montessori. Just like you said, montessori was there, like, talked about and these other alternatives, but Waldorf was never mentioned in my graduate school program, and that was in the 80s and then so I also I worked in a Montessori preschool for a while before having kids and then discovered Waldorf. So how did you come to know about this method?
Speaker 2:Well, our family goes to the Edgar Cayce Foundation camp in the western part of Virginia and one year when we were there I guess it was probably about 1973 or 4, most of the counselors were Waldorf teachers that's how I got to know it. And one of those counselors actually, when he moved to Hawaii, started a couple of Waldorf schools in Hawaii. So they were really a resource for me in that we were there for a week a family week with our children, and I can see how wonderfully they worked with the children and I was hooked, yeah Well, so that I'm just finding is fascinating, and I was.
Speaker 1:I was hooked, yeah Well, so that I'm just finding this fascinating. So first, the two hooks for homeschooling and for Waldorf. First, for homeschooling, it's the children themselves, right? You're seeing these children grow up as homeschoolers and grow into themselves in such a full way. I love that, right. And then you're meeting these Waldorf teachers they're like Waldorf teachers during the school year and camp counselors in the summertime and seeing how they interact with the children in that setting, and that was really compelling for you.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I love that, yeah. And then there's that idea that Rudolf Steiner talked about. That I've always been so drawn to and I remember early on in my homeschooling it was sort of baffling to me, but this idea that we're looking at the children themselves right and bringing them what they need, and that seems so magical to me. You know, I was a classroom teacher too and I had like 32 children in a sixth period English class. They were juniors in high school and the spark was just kind of gone out of their eyes, finding ways to bring them activities, hands-on learning experiences that will help them discover their own gifts, grow into the adults that they were put here to be.
Speaker 2:And the other thing about that is that in a homeschool setting, where you have probably no more than five or six children, you can much better ascertain what each child needs than in a class of 32 or more.
Speaker 1:Yes, that is so true. I've had both experiences and I also taught at a small parochial school where I had like eight children in a seventh grade, and that was very different than having 32. It's quite a different scale. I remember early on one of the reasons I was so attracted to homeschooling when people would ask me right, I'd want to answer in language that seemed educational or whatever, like I knew what I was talking about as an educator. And so I would say well, it's all about class size, you know, because at the time there were all these conversations about teacher-student ratio and class size and there was a lot of effort nationally in public schools to reduce the class size so that teachers could have to help children a little bit more individually. Well, I would always tout that statistic that we had a very reasonable student-teacher ratio in our home school. Reasonable student-teacher ratio in our home school.
Speaker 2:So when did you decide? What made you decide to start Waldorf Without Walls? Well, what I intended to do when I finished at Sunbridge was to equip a vehicle like a camper or something as a small classroom that I was going to drive around the country. But I very soon realized, after I graduated, that those vehicles take a lot of gasoline and are very expensive to travel with, and so I decided to use my little car and at the beginning I just would get calls from people. And at the beginning I just would get calls from people.
Speaker 2:Like there was a group in Pittsburgh that had been trying to start a school for four or five years and they heard about me and called me and said we have these kids that are getting to be seven and eight years old and we still don't have a school. Will you come and teach them? So I went to Pittsburgh for several years, one or two days a week, and had classes for children there. And then, jean, you called me and I went to Cleveland and essentially did the same thing, and that was the beginning.
Speaker 2:The funny thing that happened the first time I was supposed to go to your little kindergarten class, I rolled my car. I remember that my house was half finished and I was still living in my daughter's house and I had pulled up in the driveway and it was a real cold. I think it was like an October November morning and I put the handbrake on and left the engine running so the car would stay warm, and went in the house to get some tool or something and when I came out the car was rolling down the hill and rolled over the cliff on one side.
Speaker 1:Oh, dear, and here's a little insight into you, barbara. You then got the car out of the ditch and still came to Cleveland, then got the car out of the ditch and still came to Cleveland.
Speaker 2:Well, I had to call a tow truck and he looked underneath and he said oh, I think it's okay to drive. And so all the baskets were homogenized. I had everything in baskets and all the pine cones and acorns and everything were all messed up. But I was only about an hour, an hour and a half late and we had our thing just the same. We did.
Speaker 1:That was a wonderful thing. Now I want to talk about when you and I met and how our lives have really intersected. So I remember I went to a week-long training at a Waldorf school about using the Waldorf methods in public school classrooms, and that's where I met a colleague of ours, royce Kroll, and Royce told me about you and said, oh, you have to meet this woman, barbara. So I have always had this librarian fantasy about being the librarian who drives the bookmobile from little town to little town. So when I heard that you wanted to equip an RV and make it this traveling classroom, I remember thinking not only for my kids, but like I wanted to go with you. And so here we are, years later. We are kind of, you know, in some more modern fashion, doing just that in a way. The internet, yeah, the internet. And so Barbara has Waldorf Without Walls.
Speaker 1:I started my business, so originally it was Waldorf Inspired Learning. I've now changed the name to Art of Homeschooling. But I really was inspired by Barbara. My kids were, you know, my youngest was in high school and I started this little business. But I wanted to be complimentary, right to what you were doing and offer a service to homeschooling families in a similar fashion. So I finally got to meet the woman who was going to travel around the country in this little classroom, which turned out to be her little red car.
Speaker 1:And so Barbara started coming to Cleveland. And so my kids I have boy, boy, girl, and the boys are close in age. So Barbara would come two days a week for a number of years and stay over at our house. So Barbara and I got to be close friends. She worked with my, especially my older two, because by the time Lila came along I was running the classes. But that was so delightful to really get to know each other. And I made many visits down to Taproot Farm and so Barbara then started this summer teacher training on her farm, called the Taproot Teacher Training. So talk a little bit about the inspiration for that.
Speaker 2:Well, for a couple of years I went to Sunbridge and I led homeschooling trainings at Sunbridge. They were willing to do that, especially since they were having a problem servicing homeschool people in their regular classes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then so you had become, like I said, you were the matriarch of this Waldorf Homeschool Consulting, so you had, by that point, really become somebody that people were beginning to pay attention to.
Speaker 2:Well, there were a couple of others, mainly Jean Campbell from Canada. She's passed away now, but one of the years, the last year we did it at Sunbridge. She was the person that worked with me and she also did a program in Ontario, at the Waldorf School in Toronto. So we agreed the next year that I would go and present at hers and she would come and present at mine and we wouldn't pay each other, we'd just trade work.
Speaker 2:So that's what happened, and at both the one in Toronto and at my farm the accommodations were very meager. You brought a camp mat mat and in Toronto you slept on the floor of the kindergarten with 40 other people in the room snoring. I did that a couple of years and at my house it was on the floor in one of the buildings there and of course it was much cheaper. Everybody had to cook and we had a kitchen manager who told everybody what to do to cook. But people cooked and did all the dishes and everything. So that's how we started out and there were some years when we barely broke even.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Barbara invited me to come be a presenter. I was still in the thick of homeschooling right At that stage and the first Taproot teacher training it now has happened every year. It's an annual event. It happens the first weekend in August, usually every summer, so it's a long weekend. It's four days in the summer and Barbara started this on her farm, which is named Taproot. So that's how we got the name for the Taproot teacher training. We've kept the name and that was 2007. That's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1:So early on I was one of a handful of presenters at the training and now that Barbara has children and grandchildren who've moved back to the farm and all kinds of other things going on in her life, we've moved the training closer to Cleveland. But it is a wonderful, wonderful summer experience. We did one year I looked back at our records, barbara and one year we had seven people, we had seven parents come. Yeah, we do this in person every year, except when there's a pandemic, and so this Passover we did it online for the first time. That was also a big learning curve. So anyway, as a listener, if you want to know more about the Taproot teacher training, you can go to artofhomeschoolingcom slash Taproot, and you'll find details there. But we hope to continue this for years to come. So that's an amazing experience that you started, barbara, for all the Waldorf homeschoolers or we get beyond Waldorf even just hands-on homeschoolers. It's an amazing experience. Thank you for that.
Speaker 1:I just want to ask you. Well, first I just want to share a little bit about your support for my family. So, barbara, I had discovered Barbara and she taught my older boys, as I said, in this one day a week experience, and I learned so much from you, barbara, during those years. I have to say and I think this is true probably for anybody who hires an outside teacher that some of those years I felt really inadequate with what I was doing at home, right, so their school really became what they did once a week with Barbara, and at home I was just trying the best I could to sort of scramble along and bring some stories and handwork projects and things as I could. I got better at it, of course, but then I got pregnant with my third child and I was really sick during that pregnancy, during that whole year, and of course, so in the fall I'm really sick, in the spring she comes early and it was a preemie. So I remember, barbara calling you up.
Speaker 1:I was probably in tears calling you up that spring after I made the same mistake that I had made so many times and knew not to do this. But what did I do? I initially panicked after this. The baby, after my daughter, came early First before I called Barbara. I was in a panic.
Speaker 1:And what do we do as homeschoolers when we're in a panic? We buy more curriculum. So I bought a homeschooling curriculum that I had had in a different grade but I thought, oh, this will be the answer. Nope, that wasn't the answer. And here I was. I mean, I had, you know, two boys in the grades and a preemie baby and a year of crazy upside down family life. And I bought another curriculum and pretty quickly realized, nope, that's not the answer. And then I tried to use a curriculum that I already had on my shelf. Nope, that's not the answer either. So I called Barbara I think in tears and said Barbara, please help me. And so we crafted a really good experience combining grades for my boys right, because I couldn't handle two main lessons. And we combined grades and Barbara helped me pick stories and I just did one main lesson block. That year. I got one in right before the end of the year.
Speaker 2:Well, I probably also told you that having a new baby in the house was a learning experience for your sons, and helping with the diapers and all that stuff wouldn't hurt them, and that their wives would thank you.
Speaker 1:I do remember you say that their wives would thank me, and it's so true, because when I look back, like now, I can tell people at the time I felt like, well, that's not enough, you know. But when I look back I think okay. Well, they learned to cook eggs because they got tired of peanut butter, and jelly sandwiches Cook, right, seriously. They learned to change an IV dressing because when I was really sick in the fall I was on IV sustenance. They learned where babies come from. They were nine and 10, you know, not in great detail, but they were asking questions, right. And, like you said, after Lila was born, isaac and Ben they learned to take care of a brand new baby. You know, they learned to help take care of a brand new baby. And so, you know, we did a really short block at the end of that year, I remember, on clothing and fiber and we got two books from the library.
Speaker 1:I called the librarian and requested the books and a friend went and picked them up for me. We read Pell's New Suit. And then there's this book called I think it's just Hats, hats, hats. It's by a woman maybe her name is Ann Morris, don't quote me on that and it's about people's hats around the world, and they knitted a hat each for their new baby sister, and that was our block. You know, I think we looked at books about fiber. You know where different fibers come from. We had been volunteering at a farm for years and they'd seen the sheep sheared and you know all of that. So, but, barbara, I think that's your gift is to help us remember, as homeschoolers, that family life has important lessons in it too, and to keep things really simple, right, because you know, what I've learned is that if we don't, then we give up altogether.
Speaker 2:That's true, yeah, or we become a crabby mother.
Speaker 1:Or we become a crabby mother and insist that our children do worksheets or something like that, and that doesn't really last very long either, it's so true. So what advice? I just have a couple of questions for you. I know my listeners would love to hear this. What advice would you give to your younger self just about parenting, mothering, education? Or if you had been homeschooling your own kids? I know you homeschooled a couple of your grandkids for a while.
Speaker 2:I think the one thing that I would say to myself as a younger person would be to believe what Steiner said, that each of us comes into this world to do something particular, and the teachers and people around us don't know that, but the child herself or himself does know At some level they know and to trust them with that Trust, where they want to go with their learning. If they're not ready for math at age six, so what? If they're not ready to read at age six, so what? Go with what they are interested in and read it to them, and that way they know how important books are and eventually they'll figure it out. And that's one of the things that I think I would tell myself. And the other one would be not to listen to all the advice and criticism and the lady behind us at the checkout counter or our mother-in-law or whatever, telling us how we ought to deal with our children, because that well, I didn't pay that much attention to it. It hurt me and bothered me and I wish it hadn't.
Speaker 1:Yes, oh, that is just such a gem, you know, and one of the things that I did for myself to help with that. Because you get these questions from even from strangers, and for some reason we feel compelled to answer, we feel obligated to answer a question. You know, that is really challenging our choices here, and so what I recommend to people is just like come up with a one-liner, you know. Come up with. You could say I have a homeschooling mentor who's helping, who's guiding me right. Or we did our lessons this morning and now we're out grocery shopping to study math. I mean, just make something up, it doesn't like.
Speaker 1:But to be able to have a quick answer in mind ahead of time for me, it helped me from getting thrown off course or really, like you said, letting it hurt deep down inside, even though I would pretend it didn't bother me. Sometimes those things have a way of sort of sneaking in and creating doubt. We need to do everything we can to keep that doubt at bay. Those two pieces are really really good advice, like that's what you might've told your younger self. Are those similar? Like what would you say? What's your best advice for a homeschooler today?
Speaker 1:Because, it's really different now, and especially during a pandemic.
Speaker 2:Well, I've been asked that a lot lately, particularly by one young friend of mine who the school district she's in here in Ohio offered three choices a hybrid school, an online school or homeschooling.
Speaker 2:And she debated and debated. She realized that her younger son, who's really active, she said I would have to beat him to sit six hours and look at a screen. So I said well, why don't you homeschool? Oh, I don't know how to do it. And I said, well, you have all kinds of things that you're already doing in your yard. You're hatching chickens and ducks and building ponds for them, and they live on a small acreage. And I said just pick a few things that you think it's important they learn, or ask them what they want to learn this year and go with it, get books on it and just do it. And that's what she's doing and she's having a ball. They were out the other day with the two boys on their Friday field trip and those boys are so engaged and asking lots of questions and they're just so much happier than they were when they went to regular school before the pandemic. So I'm pretty sure she's probably going to continue doing it.
Speaker 1:So, again, I think that message is to trust yourself right, even if you feel like you don't know how to do it. You don't need someone else telling you how. You just need to start. You just need to take a step and discover things, along with your children.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and let your children tell you what they want to learn. Children are dying to learn until they're spoiled away from it by too many tests and too many frights about not knowing something.
Speaker 1:These are great messages, barbara, I think, to trust our children as well as ourselves and to just begin right. Just begin exploring the world. That's what I often will say, like my one sentence about when people ask me are you glad you homeschooled all those years? And I will say, absolutely. You know, I wouldn't trade those years for anything, the time that I had with my children, and as young adults they are interested, like they're curious about the world and they're interesting humans, and that's what we want, right? That's really, really the goal in the end. Well, thank you so much, barbara. This has been such a fun conversation. And tell us I know you have some great eBooks. I've used so many of your books in my own homeschooling in the elementary years, so tell us where people can find you in the elementary years.
Speaker 2:So tell us where people can find you. I have a website, waldorfwithoutwallscom, and you can purchase my books on there. They're all eBooks now, so you can order them and print them out.
Speaker 1:That's great. Barbara has a great form drawing book, a geometric drawing book, some handwork, and she's so good. Barbara, you have been really instrumental in teaching me to keep things simple and doable, so I really really appreciate that, and thanks so much for this conversation. It's been really fun to talk to you today.
Speaker 2:Well, it's always fun to talk to you and I'm glad you're taking over where I left off.
Speaker 1:Thanks, barbara. It's a joy and we will continue and hope to have many more conversations together. Thanks so much, and I will talk to you soon. Bye, everyone. That's all for today, my friend, but here's what I want you to remember Rather than perfection, let's focus on connection. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you on the next episode of the Art of Homeschooling podcast.