Refreshing Your Heart

Let’s face it, homeschooling is a tough, and sometimes draining, task. While we love our children, and relish the time we spend with them, there are some days, some months, some seasons, where it is just hard. It is in those moments that we need to seek encouragement to help build us up and move us forward in our journey. While I love to get together with other homeschooling moms for encouragement, I also find a lot of it in reading books. These are a few of my most recent favorites:

1. How to Have a HEART for Your Kids

Written by Rachel Carman, this book chronicles her own (at first reluctant) homeschool journey and offers practical advice for how to balance homeschool, life, and family without losing your mind. Chapters on building your own relationship with the Lord and your husband lay the foundation for chapters about instructing, loving, and building up your kids. This is one of my most highlighted books, and I keep it on my nightstand. I have also recommended it to many of my friends.

2. Educating the Wholehearted Child

This book is written by Clay and Sally Clarkson, and included chapters on building your home, homeschooling methods, building relationships with your children, and remaining committed to your vision. I found the honest and heartfelt advice to be very helpful. It also includes an appendix with lists of helpful resources, other books, and forms.

3. Flourish

I recently reviewed this book for the TOS crew and found it so inspiring. Written by Mary Jo Tate, it provides a wealth of ideas, encouragement, and practical advice. As a mom trying to balance homeschool, family, home responsibilities, and work, I find myself stretched very thin. And most of the time, honestly , I don’t feel like I do a good enough job at ANYTHING. After reading this book, one of the things that stuck most with me was the phrase “make peace with the space between the ideal and the reality”. While my ideal may be supermom, my reality is that I am a regular person living with a 24 hour day, and I need to cut myself a break every now and then!

So, those are three of my recommendations if you are looking for some inspiration! I am always on the lookout for new homeschooling books to read, so if you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments! To see other ideas for great books to encourage you on your homeschool journey, check out the Crew Round Up here: (goes live 9/17/14)