Review – Coming Home: A Quick & Practical Guide for Preparing a Mother’s Heart, Mind, & Home for Homeschooling by Camille Kirksey (@theIntuitiveHomeschooler)
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Coming Home: A Quick & Practical Guide for Preparing a Mother’s Heart, Mind, & Home for Homeschooling is the first ebook by Camille Kirksey (@theIntuitiveHomeschooler). It is a book about the heart-work that we do as home educating parents.
Although written to help new home educators, I think it is useful for anyone who find they have feeling about their home education process they need to unpack. Especially if you have experienced resistance or hostility from family and friends for deciding to home educate, and your brain is a mixture of conviction and doubt. Or you are moving into a new phase of home education and need to adjust or change how you do things.
This is also definitely a book I will be recommending to people who are in that ‘Should I? Shouldn’t I?’ period – not because it will tip them towards home educating, but because it gives the reader a structure to work through their own feelings about education, their own experiences, and why they feel drawn to home educating as an idea. It gives us tools to recentre our thoughts, and replace negative inner voices with positive belief.
“The right way to homeschool is only found through an unwavering pursuit of authenticity, by defining your family’s version of success, and by doing things differently than the mainstream.”
Camille Kirksey
Camille Kirksey has written, with this book, the literary equivalent of a sit down and chat with a wise and calm friend, who makes you tea, and tells you that it’s going to be okay. That you have it within you to support and guide your children throughout their education. That it is okay to slow down, and that you don’t need to try and do everything at once. And that you need to make sure that you remember to take care of you, not just everyone else.
She provides a wealth of good practical information for preparing to home educate, including ways in which to consider your home environment, and how it can help, or hinder your home education plans. She also shows how that preparation is something the whole family can contribute to, as part of the home educating lifestyle, and stresses the importance of your own care, rest and time to follow your own joys and passions.
These are good, important reminders wherever your are on your home education journey and ones I really needed to hear as we start the autumn 2020 lockdown. This book is a tonic, and I really liked it.