Finishing What You Start Doesn't Mean Finishing the Book

Should we? SHOULD we? Yep, we did.

This week we switched curriculum for one of my boys. In the middle of November. Effective immediately.

And I’m not even a little bit sorry. 🤪

Midyear doubt doesn’t show up with a trumpet. It sneaks in. A sigh over the same lesson. A rule you have to reread three times before you can explain it. The quiet math in your head about how much you spent on those books and how far you are from the last page.

And under all of it, the question nobody wants to say out loud: if we change it now, are we quitting?

Maybe you’ve been there in past years. Maybe you’re there right now, looking at a stack of workbooks you were SO unreasonably excited to unbox in July. (Guilty. Every box, every time.) Have you ever kept going with something just because you’d already started?

If you’re nodding along, you’re in very good company because HI, IT'S ME! 🙋‍♀️ And I believe this all the way down to the bottom of my coffee mug: switching isn’t quitting. Sometimes it’s the most paying-attention thing you can do.

Here’s what it looked like at our house.

One of my boys had been using the same language arts curriculum since the start of the year. In past years, it worked okay. Not magic, but fine. Then this year’s level arrived and went straight into the weeds, with so many tiny details that the good stuff got buried underneath.

He was confused. And honestly? So was I. When the grown-up holding the answer key is squinting at the lesson, that’s a sign.

There was no big blowup moment. No tears over the workbook, no pencil flung across the room. It was a slow drip. Day after day of useless rules that just weren’t sticking, until it hit me that we were pouring all our energy into the rules and almost none into the reason we were there.

We wanted him to love writing.

To love reading.

To dig into a good book and get lost in it.

Not to get mired down in nitty-gritty rules he won't even think about when he's drafting that report at his engineering job later in life.

Before we decided, I fought it for a minute. We finish what we start in our house. We don’t quit just because something gets hard. But somewhere in there I realized I’d been mixing up two different things: finishing the learning and finishing the book.

So, are we quitting?

Nope.

We’re finishing. Just not with the same curriculum.

Instead of one program trying to do everything, we split language arts into two pieces. One is literature studies: real books, real conversations, real crafts, the cozy good stuff. The other is decoding and phonics, the nuts and bolts of how words work, in its own lane so it can’t swallow the whole subject. The new curriculum is ordered, and we’re already finding ways to have more fun, like weaving baskets and peeking at maps while reading Island of the Blue Dolphins aloud together.

I was listening to Janae Daniels on the ​School to Homeschool podcast ​last week, and it felt like she was narrating my week. She’s a former teacher who never planned to homeschool either, and her very first day back in 2020 ended with everyone in tears. Over six years, her family moved from a rigid curriculum to something completely different. Her homeschool didn’t get it right on the first try. It got better because she kept paying attention.

I’ve also seen the other end of this. A kid handed an algebra workbook and told, “Here, read it and learn.” No support. No one sitting beside him. Just a kid alone with a book that wasn’t working, and nobody noticing.

That’s the version that scares me. Not the switch.

The silence.

So if you’re in a midyear wobble, here’s what I’d tell you. Changing curriculum in November isn’t a planning failure. It’s the plan doing its job. A good plan was never a promise to use the same book until the last page. It’s a map of what your kids need this year, so when one tool stops working, you swap the tool and keep the destination.

Whether you haven’t bought a single book yet or you’re on your first (or your third), try this tonight. Grab a sticky note and write down what you want your kid to be able to do in that subject by spring. Then open the book. Is it walking toward that note, or wandering off into the weeds? If it’s wandering, it’s allowed to go.

We finish what we start around here...

... We just get to choose how.