Happy New Year!

I hope it is going to be an inspiring and creative homeschooling year for all.

Last year I blogged about my plans for the website, and thought you might be interested to hear how things went. The answer is: pretty good! I managed to start quite a lot of new things 🙂 Here is a round-up of the year.

• Started the store. It has grown much slower than I would have liked because it takes such a long time to find products that I think you will love. But I am happy with growing it slowly and love the ebooks in there so far.
• Started the Teenager Tuesday Newsletter. As my children get older it seems appropriate to channel some ideas into teenager realms! I found this newsletter really hard work last year – it is much harder to come up with ideas for older children than younger ones. I seem to have settled into a ‘5 weeks on’ – ‘2 weeks off’ routine with this and that gives me a chance to regroup and get my mojo back!
• My homeschooling-ideas facebook page grew by over 10,000 fans! Amazing! But a lot of responsibility too. I really want those of you that liked the page to find it a place of wonderful ideas and inspiration.
• With more traffic to the site, blog, facebook page and pinterest boards – I got a LOT of questions from new homeschoolers. In an effort to try to stop reinventing the wheel with regard to answers, I created a free ‘Book of Answers‘ (the link to download is under the ‘download’ tab).
• Wrote my Best Homeschool Year Yet workbook and planner (and sold some copies too!).

So, of course, I have been thinking and dreaming and planning where things should go in 2014. I am not finding things so clear cut this year so I wanted to sound out some ideas with you.

Dreaming and Planning!

• A Mega Book of Answers. I do really want to help people with questions, but I am spending more and more of my time answering emails and messages from people. And this is taking away time from what I love to do (which is inspire you all). Plus, really, I am not the best person to ask which homeschool curriculum you should be using for your 3 year old – my answer to not use one at all never seems to go down well! So, with the help of you all, I would like to make my Book of Answers even bigger and better. Then I can just point people there and free up my time for other things.
• The Store. I would love to make it bigger and better but am resigned to growing it nice and slowly. There is only me to provide customer service and I want to be able to handle that super-professionally!
• Ideas, Ideas and More Ideas. When I set the site up in 2008 I felt I could contribute a lot by sharing my homeschooling ideas with the world. Most of the sites about homeschooling were curriculum based – and I wanted to inspire people to break away from that. Now, I think things have changed a lot. There is a wealth of sites sharing ideas, not to mention facebook and pinterest. I want to continue with the newsletters but I am not sure if this is the best direction any more. 

I am wondering if instead I would be better to help you actually DO some of the ideas you are reading, pinning and bookmarking. I don’t mean ‘be more organized’ – I know some very organized people that don’t actually get anything done 🙂 I mean truly figure out how to have a fabulous and inspirational homeschool and life. How to really live that life you dream of. How to find passion and excitement within your homeschool – and live it to the full.

For example, tomorrow I am starting a Facebook challenge to help you plan your Best Homeschool Year Yet (based on my workbook) – but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

I want to inspire you even more than ever before. But in a way that works for you.

What do you think? Would you be excited by my moving the website in this direction? Or not? I only have so much time and I want to spend it well 🙂 Help me out – leave a comment or come over to Facebook and tell me there.