Day of Reflection for Homeschooling Mothers

As mentioned in a previous post, some friends and I planned and conducted a Day of Reflection for the mothers in our Catholic homeschooling group one Sunday afternoon. They have graciously given me permission to post the questions from our Personal Reflection Survey and the schedule from the Day of Reflection itself.

This will have to be spread out over several posts, as some of the information is detailed. First, in this post, I will explain the reasoning behind and purpose of what we did. In another post, I will list the questions for the Personal Reflection Survey. Then, I will post the schedule for the Day of Reflection. Finally, I will explain how the day actually went!

Our discussion started in March sometime, because we felt like some of the mothers newer to homeschooling, like me, needed some guidance and encouragement in planning for next year. We tossed around a variety of ways to do that and finally settled on doing a Day of Reflection first, for mothers to evaluate the school year they are now completing, before coordinating some Planning Days for mothers to actually sit down and plan for next year.

We quickly realized that one Sunday afternoon would not give the mothers enough time to personally evaluate their year and allow time for discussion, which, as we all know, is essential to any group of women! That is when we came up with the idea of a survey that the mothers would complete before the Day of Reflection, in prayer, to force them to take some time personally reflecting on the state of their homeschools.

When you see the questions you will probably be a bit overwhelmed. Keep in mind that we gave the mothers over a month to complete the survey on their own time. The questions themselves were totally led by the Holy Spirit and only took me about an hour to develop; then, the other mothers on the committee inserted a few others and reworded a few others. Our goal was to be very specific, so mothers could answer the questions as vaguely or as detailed as they wish, mostly hoping to provoke thought.

Most of us took our surveys to our Holy Hours and went through them several times to keep adding information. We encouraged mothers who could not attend the Day of Reflection for whatever reason to still complete the survey on their own, as we feel it has been a gift to us in evaluating ourselves and our children.

Now, we pass it along to you. Print it. Complete it on a legal pad or in your prayer journal. Take it to Adoration and pull it out when you have some quiet time to reflect. Share it with your friends who homeschool. The only request I have is that you NOT copy and paste from these posts or print out copies for your friends but merely forward the links of these posts to others via email. Thank you!

Here is the direct permalink for this post. I will put the permalink at the end of each post relating to the Day of Reflection to make it simple to pass on!