Classical Education for Homeschoolers: Our Experience + Using Step Up for Students
I think one of the biggest gifts classical education gave me as a homeschool mom was permission to respect developmental stages more.
I couldn’t have articulated that when we first found it. I just knew some of what we had been doing felt like too much.
We were already homeschoolers when we found Classical Conversations, but that was really where I fell in love with the classical model. Before that, my son had struggled with writing, and when I say struggled, I don’t mean he didn’t have ideas or that he wasn’t capable of learning to write. It was taking the ideas from his brain and getting them onto the paper that was really hard.
I remember him being expected to write whole papers in second grade, and it felt like he was just expected to… write. There wasn’t enough structure around how to get there, at least from what I could see at the time, and I remember thinking, this is TOO much.
Much later, our Classical Conversations director suggested something incredibly simple. Have him tell me what he wanted to say and let me write it down for him to get the rough draft out.
Oh my gosh. Our whole world changed.
The ideas were there. Getting them onto the paper was a separate skill, and that sounds so obvious to me now, but it was huge for us at the time.
What Is Classical Education?
If you have never looked into classical education before, the word classical probably makes it sound much more complicated or old-fashioned than it really is.
In a nutshell, classical education is built around something called the Trivium, which is basically three stages of learning: grammar, logic and rhetoric.
The grammar stage is really about giving them things to know. This is where you see a lot of memory work, vocabulary, stories, facts, language and those foundational pieces that they can pull from later.
Then you move into the logic stage, where the questions start. Why? How do we know that? Does that make sense? How does this connect to that? Anyone who has lived with a middle schooler can probably understand why this stage makes sense. 😂
Eventually you get into rhetoric, where they are taking what they know, thinking through it and learning how to communicate their own ideas clearly through writing, discussion, presentations, debate and other forms of expression.
Obviously there is a lot more to classical education than I can fit into a few paragraphs, and different programs do it differently. But for me, the simplest way to explain what I loved about it is that there was a sense of building the foundation first, teaching them how to think about what they know, and then teaching them how to express it.
That felt very different from some of what we had experienced before, especially with my son and writing.
And again, I did not have those words for it when we first found classical education. I just knew it felt like someone had finally given me permission to stop expecting every skill to show up fully formed at exactly the age somebody else had decided it should.
Why Classical Education Worked for Our Homeschool
My son is not suddenly some amazing natural writer now, and I don’t think writing is necessarily where his greatest strengths lie. But he is so much more capable, and through IEW we have a system now. If he really needs to sit down and write something, we know how to do it.
We can make a keyword outline, review what makes a good paper, work through a checklist and follow a process. My little Virgo Rising child, unsurprisingly, appreciates having a system. He is also a Taurus, so maybe slow and steady was always going to be the way with him. 😂
I try very hard not to study my kids’ charts too much because I really just want to let them be who they are without me projecting things onto them, but every once in a while astrology gives me one of those little moments where I have to laugh.
More than anything, classical education changed the way I thought about what children should be expected to do and when. It gave us permission to respect the way their minds were developing, the way their hands were developing, their attention spans, their ability to organize their thoughts and the fact that all of those things do not necessarily develop at exactly the same pace.
Because my daughter is younger, I feel really grateful that we found this model before she had to experience some of the same expectations that had felt so unrealistic with my son. I could meet her where she was much earlier, and that has probably become one of the things I value most about homeschooling in general.
How We Found Get Classically Educated
For a few different reasons, including my health at the time, Classical Conversations eventually stopped being the right fit for our family. I still loved classical education. I just needed another way to do it.
Before last school year, I went to a homeschool expo in West Palm Beach, Florida, and stumbled across Get Classically Educated. As soon as I saw that it was the classical model, it was online, and their slogan was Four Hours to Freedom, I was like, you have to be kidding me. This is for me.
I knew it almost immediately.
I joke all the time that freedom is basically my number one goal in life, so obviously this spoke directly to me. I want to do right by my children educationally, and I want them to have all the opportunity in the world to learn whatever it is that their hearts desire, but I also really value flexibility and having a life outside of school.
That is probably what I love most about GCE. Somehow there is both structure and freedom built into the program.
I know exactly what we are doing week to week. They have a little checklist, I have a little checklist, and so much of the planning is already taken off my plate. We also have mentors available if we have questions, concerns or just aren’t sure about something, and they have always been very responsive.
They’re still a small group of people making this happen for families, and I really like that there is a human feeling to the whole thing.
An Online Classical Homeschool Program That Gives Us Freedom
The younger students meet in shorter blocks across the week, which I really like because I think it respects their attention spans. As they get older, the format changes, but there is still so much flexibility around the live class time and the work they complete independently.
And for me, that freedom matters.
There is time for activities, rabbit holes, research because somebody suddenly became fascinated by something, and just regular family life. There is room for childhood, and I am also not spending every Sunday night trying to invent an entire curriculum for the coming week. That part is pretty important too.
I really do believe you can give children an excellent education without needing school to consume their entire day. The structure is there, the expectations are there and the work is there, but there is still room for them to be people with interests and lives outside of it.
That Four Hours to Freedom idea sold me so fast because it really does speak to what I want homeschooling to feel like. I want us to have a structure. I want to know what we are doing. I also want room to breathe.
This little digital microscope from Amazon (affi link) has been such a hit. Here she was examining all the different parts of one of our lily flowers over breakfast, because apparently breakfast is also science class now. 😂 And yes, we checked out the egg too.
Teaching My Kids to Research, Question and Think for Themselves
One of the things I really love watching, especially with my youngest, is how much more interested she has become in doing thorough research. She asks questions. She doesn’t just take what I say for what it is anymore, which is great. Great and rough at the same time. The moms will know. But of course I genuinely love that for her.
I don’t want my children to just take things at face value because I said them. I want them to learn how to research something, ask questions, consider what they find and think for themselves. That is a huge part of why we homeschool in the first place.
And I can see that beginning to show up in them more and more.
Sometimes I’m the person getting questioned, and apparently that is the price I pay for encouraging independent thought. 😂
Letting Kids Learn at Their Own Pace
Math is one of the areas GCE leaves for families to choose separately, and honestly, the longer we homeschool, the more I understand why. Math can be so developmental, and it would be really hard to build it into a program like this while still respecting where individual kids are.
We are doing Algebra 1 twice with my son because we just weren’t really ready the first time, and that’s okay.
I can’t imagine having to look around at a classroom full of other kids and think, well, everyone else is moving on, so I guess we have to move on too. He needed more time with it, so we’re taking more time with it.
Sometimes a child needs longer. Sometimes they’re ready to fly through something, and sometimes they want to go way deeper than the assignment requires. I love having enough structure that we know where we are going without feeling like everyone has to move through it at exactly the same speed.
That is what I keep coming back to when I talk about respecting development. I want my kids to be able to learn at the pace that is right for them, at the level that is right for them, and at the depth that is right for them.
Using Step Up for Students for Get Classically Educated
For Florida homeschool families, there is another really important piece of this, which is that you can use Step Up for Students scholarship funds toward Get Classically Educated.
Last year, GCE was not yet an approved provider when I enrolled, so I paid for the program myself and then submitted everything to Step Up for reimbursement. And I have to say, their reimbursement was one of the easiest ones I dealt with all year.
I submitted a lot of things through Step Up, and some of them were a whole process. My daughter’s horseback riding lessons, for example, were a struggle to get reimbursed.
GCE was completely different.
The documentation they gave me was clear, organized and nicely highlighted. Whatever they were doing, they knew what Step Up needed because it worked. I was reimbursed very, very quickly, honestly faster than almost anything else I submitted.
This year, they are an approved provider and you can purchase directly using Step Up funds. Right now, if you search specifically for Get Classically Educated in the provider search, they pop right up.
Soon they’ll also be on the actual Step Up marketplace and should be even easier to find, but you do not have to wait for that if you’re interested now.
And if you’re trying to navigate using your Step Up funds and aren’t sure what to do, I would reach out to GCE. I’m sure they would be happy to walk you through getting connected and signed up because, based on my experience, they clearly know how to work within the Step Up system.
Anyone who has used Step Up knows that alone is worth something. 😂
And one more thing: if you decide to sign up with Get Classically Educated, use code BONNIE to get the free headphones offer. If you’re purchasing directly through the GCE website, enter it at checkout like a coupon code. If you’re purchasing through Step Up for Students, just add it to the notes at checkout so they know you came through me.
You might also appreciate this Step Up Funds Tracker freebie I created here.
Why Get Classically Educated Works for This South Florida Family
I think what I wanted from homeschooling all along was some combination of freedom, structure and the ability to respect the kids in front of me.
I want the freedom to let my children be individuals, to spend longer on Algebra 1 if we need to, to let somebody research something for three hours because suddenly she needs to know everything about it, and to have a life outside of school.
At the same time, I want to know that they are getting a good education. I want a plan. I want some structure. I want someone I can ask when I am unsure, and I want them learning to write, research, discuss, question and think for themselves.
Classical education gave me permission to respect how my children develop, and Get Classically Educated has given us a way to live that out that works really well for our family right now.
So when I walked past that booth in West Palm Beach and saw Four Hours to Freedom, apparently I knew exactly what I was looking at.
Sometimes you just know.