My Advice on Buying and Keeping Homeschool Materials

Having "been there, done that", I am doling out advice on buying stuff for homeschooling today.

1. While it is great to listen to book recommendations from others do not look for or ask for advice on materials for future use. Just focus on what you need right now, for next month, or if applicable, for this whole year.

For example for book recommendations for fiction reading, do minimal research and get your hands on what your child wants to read next week or next month. For a full year math curriculum, buy only what you know you will need for that grade level such as one math text that covers the whole year.

Instead of focusing on what you want to buy just live in the moment and enjoy your life and learning with your kids. Focus on really using what you have and extracting the good stuff out of what you have.

2. If you like old, antique, and out of print books, be very careful about buying them for future use. If buying is the only way you can get your hands on them, do buy them, but only buy exactly what you know you will use in the next weeks or months.

For example if your child loves the Signature biography books and you know they are hard to find and your child has been devouring them, do look for them and buy them. While some may be scarce and while you may pay a higher price for them than you'd hoped just pay more for what you need now, i.e. pay $6 online right now versus $1 if you happen to be lucky to find one at a library fundraiser used book sale.

The reason is that despite the raves that others give for book series or individual books they may not indeed be a fit for your child(ren).

Also if they like Signature do not immediately buy Landmark books as they may not like those as much. Before going nuts buying a ton of Landmark books have your kids read a couple and see if they really do like them as much as they liked the Signature books.

3. If you have the space do save what you used on the oldest child for possible re-use on your younger child(ren) but if the books are not a match get rid of them as soon as possible. Do not keep them just because you paid a fair amount for them and want to get use out of them. That notion is nonsensical because the younger child(ren) don't always like them and will NOT use them.

If you found that you owned too many books on a topic to use with your first child, cull the books immediately and save just the best to re-use on your younger child(ren).

4.  Set limits on space for storage not just on spending. If you set a limit on how much space you will take up for book storage for future use or for saving books that your family loved in the past it will prevent you from both overspending and for over-accummulating.

If you concentrate just on spending limits, you can still over-buy and wind up owning too much. Many books can be found for $1 or for as little as 25 cents if not free. The next thing you know you may wind up owning too many books.

I once was given free access to take any books I wanted from a private school library (the school was closing). I took home a thousand books. My husband was out of work at the time and we were on a tight budget. I was worried I'd have to go back to work if I could not afford the materials to homeschool with so the decision to haul home a minvan load of books made perfect sense at the time. In reality I have not used all these books and many were not a good fit for us while others were not used just because we had way too many books on a topic than we realistically needed. I have given nearly all of those unused or not loved books away.

5. Use libraries if you can and only buy books only if you can't borrow them or if you will use them too much or for longer than the library check out time.

6. Buy books if you are making a collection and don't feel guilty about that but keep this quantity of the number of collections in check.

For example my child who has a collector mentality but was at one point a struggling reader wanted to keep all the books he'd read in his bedroom on shelves. Those books are special to him as he is proud to have read them and they feel like friends to him. I indulge him in that. This is partly due to the fact that my parents had kept a number of books of mine which I cherished as a child and I was grateful for it when I looked over the small collection as an adult. My parents did not save every book as so many were turned in to the used book store for credit and so many others were borrowed from the library.

7. Be careful about what you choose to keep. It is okay to be sentimental about a much loved picture book but who really needs last year's math curriculum text?

8. Tell yourself and make yourself believe that the reality is we are all living in abundance and we are not living in lack. When feeling we do not have adequate resources to buy and use what we need to give our kids a quality homeschool education we can tend to start to feel needy and then we desire to own more things. The drive to buy more and to keep more can be overwhelming.

If you feel you are living in lack and must buy, buy, buy as a remedy, remember there are libraries and there is the Internet for information. It is true that certain curriculum is necessary (for me, math curriculum is a must). However there are ways to get used items if you are really desperate. Seeing as how authors and curriculum writers do need a livelihood it does help them if you buy new since they earn a profit on sales. However having lived with no job and no income I can understand that at times the priority is to find affordable curriculum by purchasing the item used.

For example I just let go of a great hardcover thesaurus and two extra dictionaries because I realized we have been using the internet to get that information. I also just let go of quote books and a rhyming dictionary as we never use them. I let go of three books on finding constellations in the sky as we now use smart phone apps for that, which are better, because you hold the phone up to the sky and it shows you right then and there what constellations are above you.

Faced with buying something used at a slim discount and saving a few bucks I chose to buy new and to support the curriculum creator.

9. Recognize that what you needed at some time in the past is not always what you need now or that you will ever need in the future.

I had a bunch of education reform books that at one point informed me and interested me. Lately I have not chosen to spend my time reading the still unread (great) books because I am doing other things like actually homeschooling my kids and using my time knitting or reading for other purposes. While the books are great books, the fact is I no longer want or need to read them so I let go of most of them. I hope they go to someone who will read them and will be informed by them.

At one point I needed to read homeschool how-to books for information. The books were helpful to me as a newbie but they are no longer helpful to me, and in fact after the experiences I've had I'm ripe to write my own book. It was time to let go of many of those.

10. If you are a person who can be influenced by others be careful what you let others influence you about. One of the worst things I ever did was actively chat on a discussion board that focused on out of print antique books to use for the Charlotte Mason method. Talking so much with book addicts like myself was dangerous for me as they inspired me to overbuy and to overspend. We would discuss how scarce a book was and then we'd all want it. We would go bookhunting and then share what we found. I was anticipating sharing with the group what I got rather than really thinking about when I'd actually use that book.

There is a difference between being helped and being enabled to over-do. This is not unlike the advice that alcoholics get that if they are trying to quit drinking they should not hang out with the drinkers. It's the same advice we give teens about not hanging out with the wrong crowd lest they start to experiment with drugs. If you are of a certain personality or are a collector, hanging out with others who over-buy and over-collect is a bad idea. Be careful of what seems like helpful advice from other homeschool moms.

(And I apologize if anything I've ever shared on my blog has caused you to over-buy!)

11. Cut friends or acquaintes off if you have to. If a person is influencing you the wrong way, start to avoid them. If you have a friend who is math phobic and who is over-buying math curricula and you feel tempted to keep switching, stop talking about it or stop talking to her entirely.

Also ask yourself if her problem with the curricula could be a problem with her teaching ability or a discipline problem in her family, not an actual problem with the curricula itself.

I once joined a discussion list about home organization and decluttering. We were inspiring each other to declutter and it was motivating to me for some time. However there was a shift in the tide at one point that did not switch back. The members started giving excuses for why they were being packrats and hoarders and then others would chime in and encourage them to keep not-decluttering. It was kind of sick -- actually like an addict that had slipped and then the other addicts were saying "it's okay to have slipped and just stay doing the thing we all wish we could stop doing". I realized I was almost being influenced to slow my pace. At one point someone said something to put down those making progress on our supposed shared goal. That is when I quit the group and went at the task of decluttering all by myself.

12. We are living in a time of abundance for information and education. There are too many materials out there for us to ever use. There are so many books we could ever use them all, nor should we use them all. Try to remember that there are limits such as the limit on how much time we really want to spend learning about Ancient Egypt. Enough is enough at some point. We can never learn everything, even if we try. Sometimes it is time to move on to another topic even if we don't use all that we'd planned or hoped to use to learn about a topic.

Kids should be well-rounded. They should be spending time with friends and doing physical activity and doing extra-curriculars like Scouting or taking music lessons or such. With their busy-ness with those endeavors it prevents them from spending 100% of their time on academic pusuits, and that is not just normal it is HEALTHY and OKAY.

13. If we over-do in one area it means we are missing out on learning or doing something else. Thus there is a cost to over-doing.

While I am not a proponent of an education that is a mile wide an an inch deep it is impossible to learn every topic a hundred feet deep because there just is not enough time in our lives to do so. This is true for adult autodidacts as well as children (homeschooled or schooled).

Sometimes reading one good or great biography on a person is enough. We need not own two to five biographies on that same person. Find one great resource on a topic and stop there.

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As a person who has owned over 8,000 books at one point I hope something I said here has helped prevent you from being in this same situation.

I had the storage room to handle keeping that many books at one point so I justified my choice. However sometimes I wanted a book to use now but couldn't find it as I owned too much to sift through. Even though my boxes were labeled I didn't want to dive that deep into the closet to find it.

Now that we are moving half way across the country and I have to pay 60 cents per pound I am getting rid of thousands of books.

I also am moving to a smaller home with less storage so in order to keep the books I think I will use I am going to have to pay a monthly fee to a storage unit! Thus these inexpensive books are suddenly becoming more and more expensive to continue owning.

Although I had fun bookhunting I have a lot more fun actually teaching my kids and doing things with my kids. Actually using the books or having the kids read them and then learn from them is far better than the fun I had looking for them and collecting them. Trying to organize them has not been fun and trying to find what I needed has been a hassle.

The most use we've gotten from books were those we had out on shelves which were organized and quickly and easily accessed. Despite having great closet storage for the extra books I found I rarely used what was not on the shelf. When we needed a book we went to what was within reach. The only way we'd use the stored books was when I'd do a once yearly book cycle to haul out the stored stuff and to move it to the shelves. The reality though is what I cycled back into storage what we were done with or didn't yet use then later those items were still of no interest to the child or we'd done enough on that topic to use everything.

There is a great joy in learning about a topic and being excited right then and there to have found a book at the library that is immediately read, or buying a book from Amazon and having it delivered right at the peak of interest about the topic. This is much better than the mom having fun buying things years in advance and having hopes to use it someday, a day that often never comes.

I have felt guilt and regret while going through unused books and seeing all the great stuff we never did use. If I'd never over-bought I'd never have felt those negative feelings. If I bought just what I needed at the time I'd look back with satisfaction on a shelf of books we'd actually used rather than thinking of what was not used and never done.

I felt bad also about my kids (as people) when there was a great book that they just were not interested in ever reading because it is beyond their personal interest level. I had to tell myself to feel good about my kids for their good sides and for their strengths not to let myself feel bad about them for their weaknesses and what they were not. A person is not an expert or interested in Every. Single. Subject. so why did I ever expect that of my own kids?

I'd thought if I only exposed them to the best of the best books that they'd love learning about that topic, but the fact of the matter is that no matter how great the history book is that kid of mine will never love history because his passions are in a couple of different areas! Why not celebrate the passions and the natural talents? Why not feel happy that my son even knows he has a passion? Why not feel happy that my kids have had various deep curiosities in the past? It's okay to say a former passion has ended and that the child has moved on to something else. 

(I also found it odd that my over-buying of books had led to me feeling those things about my kids; I was not feeling bad about my kids for something they'd done that I observed. The negative feelings about my kids was brought on by my own actions and mistakes.)

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I now believe that nothing good can come from doing things in excess even if the reason for it seemed like a good thing at the time. Over-buying books in order to try to provide my kids with an excellent home education was not only not necessary but seems to not have been worth the time, effort and expense.

Another lesson I've learned is that sometimes the bigger issue is the teaching or the self-discipline to learn not just having access to information. Many people have access to educational materials but the fact is that some or many don't do what it takes to access and learn from them, while others need an element of teaching that they may not have access to. But those are topics that could be explored in another essay altogether, so I'll just stop here.

My advice: don't buy for the future and don't over-buy. Even if you perceive and feel that you are living in lack the fact is that most of us are living in abundance. Don't burden yourself by over-buying homeschool materials like I did. Trust me.