Creative Mountain Mama
Welcome to the Creative Mountain Mama podcast - for those that resonate with seeking a connection to the land, family, and a simpler way of life. We're talking about faith, motherhood, and slow country living. If you're up for real talk, genuine experiences, and finding inspiration in some of the most extraordinary places, this is for you!
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Creative Mountain Mama
Growing in Grace: Faith and Homeschool with Anna Panza
When little ones scramble their numbers, it is a reminder of the short season of childhood—a sentiment shared by Anna Panza from Our Faith Filled Home in our latest conversation. As we discuss her journey of homeschooling, you’ll get a glimpse into a-day-in-the-life filled with devotional time, tailored learning activities, the rhythm of outdoors, and practical education. With the Southern Californian sun guiding their routines, listen to how Anna Panza keeps the rhythm of education flowing all throughout their year.
Have you ever watched a child's eyes light up with excitement over seeing their favorite toy? That's the spark that fuels "interest-led homeschooling", the method that transformed Anna's family's learning experience. She explains how paying attention to her son's love for race cars has fueled their educational journey. Through laughter and passion, she debunks common homeschooling myths and hurdles to demonstrate the surprising depth of learning that is possible when education is not confined to the classroom walls.
To cap our conversation off, we talk about weaving faith into the everyday fabric of family life. Reciting Galatians 6:9 on car rides, for example, isn't just for passing time—it's about embedding perseverance into all their hearts. Anna prioritizes faith-based learning alongside academic learning, ensuring that literacy serves not just as a skill, but as a practical way to live out wisdom. Let's dive into homeschooling, homemaking, and the importance of raising up the next generation.
Anna's Website
Follow @ourfaithfilledhome
Faith-Filled Learner Free Resource
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
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Hi guys, welcome to another episode of the Creative Mountain Mama podcast. I am joined by Anna Panza of Our Faith Filled Home. She talks a little bit about homemaking, home management and homeschool. Thank you for joining me, anna. Of course I'm happy to be here. What's new?
Speaker 2:to be here. What's new? Um, there's not a whole lot, but I feel like every day is new, like there's always something that's going on in your world and it just changes every single day. So I am very fortunate to get to experience life with my little ones, and it's just every day is different life with my little ones, and it's just.
Speaker 1:Every day is different. Do you have any funny stories? It seemed to be a limitless supply.
Speaker 2:It just it keeps going. And, um, I thought of something. I thought when something happened. I'm like, oh, this is so perfect to share with everybody. Um, I have, I'm a mom of three boys. My oldest is six, my youngest is eight months old and I have a two and a half year old. That's in the middle there and sometimes he gets a little rogue. And we have this like little joke in our family that we started with my six-year-old when he started to learn life counting. So my two and a half year old is counting the other day and one, two, it gets to 10 and he's like 21, 23, 32, but you're not here to come. And, like I always say when things they don't come out of them as you would hope, like when other people around like oh, so far, homeschooling is going great, like you just have to like laugh off, like the imperfections, because we've learned that over time they do catch on to put 11 after 10. And it just it was one of those like all right, we're here again, it's going well, I guess.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Counting will come in the right sequence.
Speaker 2:Eventually, my six-year-old put eight between 12 and 13 for the longest time and it was actually something I was like I hope you never get rid of this like I know you have to eventually, and it was kind of sad the first time that he counted from 12 to 13 because it lost like that innocence about it. The eight wasn't there anymore.
Speaker 1:but I get to experience now again. Ours was gagokock for cookie.
Speaker 2:Gag-ock went away and cookie was replaced and I said that yeah, you want them to grow up and you want them to learn. You want them to be able to function, not be a 45-year-old that counts with an 8 between 12 and 13. But also it's kind of like a bittersweet moment where you're like all right, we're doing this, we're growing up, we're changing.
Speaker 1:I hear you On the homeschool side. Can you tell me a little bit about the rhythm of your day?
Speaker 2:Every day is different. That's actually the beauty of homeschooling, because we get the flexibility. So most likely I like to have a slower morning. There is one day a week where we do have to leave pretty like around eight o'clock in the morning and that day is not our example day. But for the most part we wake up, we will have breakfast together. We will make breakfast.
Speaker 2:I'm very lucky and fortunate that we have instilled my six-year-old. His habit is to empty the dishwasher, so I'll cook breakfast. He'll empty the dishwasher, so I'll cook breakfast. He'll empty the dishwasher. We'll work together, have little conversations about our day, we have breakfast and at that time our breakfast is blessed with either a devotional or a scripture verse that we're memorizing. So it's more of like a biblical time, foundational scriptural time, and then we go into getting ready for the day.
Speaker 2:Looking at our schedule, usually that looks like we will get dressed, we will take a walk together as a little family unit and then we'll come back and do some learning. Learning time looks a little different for my two and a half year old than it does for my six year old, but he participates, the baby. If he's awake, I'll put him in his high chair with something special for that day and then, after we do a little bit of learning, then we just play. We have lunch. Every once in a while We'll have a scheduled activity that starts in the early afternoon with some friends, or we'll have friends over, and then we just wait until family dinner feels like.
Speaker 1:Does that change seasonally?
Speaker 2:We're in Southern California, so I don't feel like it changes very much because we don't have a lot of the weather pattern changes that I think there are, and I think we're very fortunate that it doesn't snow where we are. So our biggest hurdle of getting outside for that walk is rain usually, or wind. We live in a very windy area and so even if it's cold outside, we'll still go for a walk. We will still try to keep this rhythm. I also don't change my homeschool pattern very much for summer. I know some families will take the season of summer completely off from academics. It's like that homeschool we're off for the summer. I don't find that that works well for us.
Speaker 2:For myself, but my six-year-old I just since he was two and a half um, when my son was two, we had COVID. It was 2020 and everything about our pattern shifted and changed and we ended up in our day going. I would get to the end of my day and I was like what did I do today with my two-year-old? And we watched a lot of TV. It disrupted our home. It disrupted dynamics. Everybody's life was kind of turned upside down in that time. But I realized that if I got really intentional about doing activities with him, pairing a book with a coloring sheet at that time, sitting down reading a Bible story, doing an art project he's actually just grown from two and doing this time together in the morning. He's now six and I just don't like to disrupt things if they're working well. So we might have a little bit of off time when we go like camping or to the beach, but it doesn't mean that I'll stop the time at the table with breakfast. We'll just kind of keep that pattern going.
Speaker 1:Can you tell me a little bit about how you got started and what that shift was like?
Speaker 2:I was never the mom that thought that I was going to homeschool. In fact, when we were starting the process as a married couple of looking for a home, you looked at the school district around you and I thought, if I was going to homeschool, I was going to need a homeschool room or a loft area where, like, the vision at that time was like, if I was going to do that, then I needed the bullet tomb boards with the funny little like scalloped edge around that, like we had when we went to school. And it was by an experience I, when my son was four months old, I joined a mom's group. I felt like at the time I didn't really have any friends. That related to the thought pattern and the thought process that we were having as a family in regards to a lot of things. Now that we have this child, we had some experiences before I had him that led us down this difficult path. The Lord used these struggles to refine us and draw us closer to him, because that's what he does. Struggles to refine us and draw us closer to him because that's what he does. He takes times of need and then he actually uses it as time to draw closer to him and I joined a group called holistic moms.
Speaker 2:They're all over the country, they have different chapters and I got around these women and I was mainly looking for like bubble bath, like what do you wash your baby in that's not toxic, and what do you eat and where do you get your eggs. And what I saw was these women homeschooling. But I saw their older children and what I loved about their older children was that they were engaged. They were not in a phone, they were either interacting with the younger kids. They were respectful. They were holding a conversation with me as an adult and they were in middle school and it was a respectful conversation. It wasn't like I was having to come down into like a methodical land to like communicate with them. We were actually communicating about real things and that sparked me into looking at homeschooling from a different lens.
Speaker 2:I was still on the fence, but what I learned from a couple that had homeschooled their children three adult? They had three adult children now and they came and I learned from them in this talk and they were talking about interest-led learning, which is still something that I believe in wholeheartedly. Interest-led learning, which is still something that I believe in wholeheartedly and basically what that is is. You take what a child is interested in. In their case, their daughter loved airplanes and the way that the airplane she wanted to be a pilot. In my case, right now, I'm going to use the example of my son. My six-year-old loves race cars and it he can memorize and race cars are his thing. Right, and they talked about how they would teach their daughter math through the airplanes. They would teach her science, they would teach her all of these things based on what she loved and what they experienced because she loved airplanes. What they ended up experiencing was they didn't have the struggles.
Speaker 2:So I don't know how you grew up, but when I grew up in school, it was a struggle for me to be there. I didn't feel like like I always wanted to do something very creative. I wanted to go to cosmetology school and I was met with resistance when I got to that point in high school. I didn't want to do all all the academic-y things. I wanted to use that time to do like cosmetology and that's what I was really I loved, and it kind of got stifled and pushed down because that wasn't whatever the term was realistic or it was hard for.
Speaker 2:I think it's hard for people to really see, like, when someone wants to be creative. We are taught culturally like that's kind of dreamy. But then you realize when you get older you look back and like, wow, I really would love to do something that I love. That's what interest-led learning is. But it starts it at such an early age and once I heard that there was there is no really you. You can't convince me otherwise just because I see the fruit of it already.
Speaker 2:And my son I don't have, um, I haven't experienced any resistance to learning because we just follow his lead. He wanted to learn how to read specifically so he could read, um, like the, the reader boards in different things or races. He just just he wanted to learn how to read. So that's what we started to do and it has not been met with any like like I I would have done if I was drug through something. Um, and there there are other things that led me there. I, um, I have any like any resistance to like the public school like a classroom day, and I kind of I read some books that guided me through like what a public school classroom looks like, how it got that way, how our, our academics were kind of came about and that shifted me too. So it's kind of like it's multifaceted what got me there, but those are the main things that that drove me to be here.
Speaker 1:And it sounds like you've done your research. You share your story. How have you seen that touch other people's lives?
Speaker 2:I, um, I call it like my hill, like this is the thing. I could talk about this for hours because I'm so passionate about it, so it's almost like my little hill that I'll stand on and, um, I am not naive. I know that homeschooling, for multiple reasons, is not for everyone that sometimes I met with, but I also think that we have a lot of hesitations as a culture that are really just misunderstood things and um it it has, the resistance sometimes can be. I don't want my kid to, and I can easily just like kind of justify all of these. I don't want my kid to be weird and not socialized. And or how, as a stay-at-home mom, how do I get my, how do I keep my home in a certain place when I have my kids there 24, 7 I? There's this idea culturally that they go somewhere and that's when you do all of your life and then you go pick them up, right, and there's a hesitation that you won't have like I. There's a hesitation that you're going to lose out or miss out on time with yourself or time to think for yourself, or if I'm at home for six hours, because we view it when I've, whenever I'm at resistance and I start to ask questions what is like?
Speaker 2:What do you think a homeschool day looks like? Because it does not look like a 7am or an 8am to a 2.30pm, a 7 am or an 8 am to a 2 30 pm, and actually looks more like an hour and a half a homeschooling day. Because when you think about it, I don't have the interruption. I have interruptions. I have a nine month old or eight month old and a two and a half year old, but I don't have the same interruptions. Right? And when you think about how a child in a classroom has to transition from subject to subject, right, we're taking 20 to 30 kids and we are. Transitions are hard, transitions are hard for adults, transitions are hard for children. And we take these 20 to 30 children and we transition them from math and then we tell them to click it off, and then we tell them to click it off, and now we're going into science and there is disruption, because a human brain cannot just toggle through in that manner smoothly 100% of the time. So you have 20 to 30, let's just say 25 kids that you're trying to get them to transition over. Of course there's disruption, of course there's struggle, there's children that learn differently. So now I have a teacher that is teaching in 10 different learning styles and patterns, so the day does not look like a six-hour school day.
Speaker 2:Life is also school. So we learn from a book for reading. Because I needed the help as a mom and I needed someone that went before me that knew how to teach a child's brain how to read. So I got the reading curriculum. But a normal day could look like math by baking, fractions, counting, make sure you put three eggs, because if you put four eggs, that's why I have to learn what comes after 10, because 21 doesn't come after 10. You can't put 21 eggs, you have to do 11 eggs. So that's why I have to learn what comes after 10, because 21 doesn't come after 10. You can't put 21 eggs, you have to do 11 eggs. So I do want my children to learn how to do all of these things, but I can also.
Speaker 2:I've learned that I can teach them in life, when we go somewhere, when we're communicating, and then the, the socialization thing I always think is so interesting. Socialization thing I always think is so interesting. And when I went to school I was in a classroom with I was six and I was in a classroom with six to seven year olds, and then I went into high school and I was in a classroom with 15 to 16 year olds. And then I got into college and I was with adults who were had grandchildren right. So I went through K to 12 with peers my own age and then I got kicked into life and I had to go into the workplace. I worked at Applebee's as a server and I had to communicate with adults. I had to communicate with adults that were my peers, that were at my tables, that my management system, because those people weren't 18 or 19 years old. So I had to learn really quickly how to function in the world and I feel like it's the only time in life for 13 years, where we expect a human to only communicate and socialize with their own age group.
Speaker 2:But also, I just find it really interesting that we have this belief system still and that's still a hesitation or like the resistance, or what I met with sometimes like well, how do they socialize? Their calendar keeps. I have to keep their calendar in a way that serves our family, because we could easily have socialization opportunities that would just blow us out of the water because there's so much abundance in the opportunity to socialize. But what we call it as a family is play with children of all ages at the park, at the museum, at the amusement park, because our schedule now has this flexibility where if my son was in class, he gets an allotted 30 minutes for recess, maybe if he didn't act out in class because sometimes we'll take that away from children, right or then he gets a lunch break and then he gets a. He would get a small period after school, maybe while he's waiting for someone to pick him up to socialize and play.
Speaker 2:I don't find that that socialization. I find and maybe I'm biased because I've experienced it for almost six years. My son entered into homeschooling groups when he was 18 months old and I started to build community with families at that time. I didn't, um, I haven't seen him just sit and wait for friends to come over or like we don't just sit in our house all day, you know we, we go out and we experience and we're social, so that I always find that if someone were to say that to me now, they need like 20 minutes for me to give them my answer back. But because I will just explain it just like that. It just doesn't. Socialization, I just feel like, isn't, doesn't even have any like. It's not even valid anymore, especially when we're looking at what school is now and the shift that happened from 2020 to where we're currently at.
Speaker 1:It's totally different, can you dive a little deeper into your reference to your background, studying public school how that came about.
Speaker 2:A little bit of the history. Is that something you can share? I can. So I found this book. It was recommended to me by this couple that I spoke about earlier that I went to the talk and they just they gave their hearts of how they raised their three children and it's called Dumbing Us Down by John Gatto. The book is about this big and it is such an easy read.
Speaker 2:I would say that sometimes you run across a homeschooling book and to kind of comprehend it you're just like this is so boring. But basically what he does is he walks through in this book and it's the thing that really shifted, because when I started to look at homeschooling I had fear, I had hesitation. What was my mom going to think? What was my dad going to think? What was my grandma going to think? What kind of conversations are going to happen at the dinner table? How is it going to protect my kids? And so I read this book and he basically walks through how the public system, public school system, was kind of established over time. Over time we created these little classrooms, we created a curriculum, we created an agenda. Gets thrown around in our world, so like we created a systematic way for children to learn and the reason for that was so that they would exit the school system and kind of fall in line, really Like, if you can.
Speaker 2:That's how I was raised. I was raised in a public school system and when I got out I thought I had to go to college. I took on student loans to go to college I referenced earlier. That drive and that passion inside of me to be creative and create was stifled. So I basically took out student loans to follow the course because I thought that's what I was supposed to do and it left me with student loan debt and unfortunately it left me with a degree that didn't match my passion, like it, it just. I look back at it now and like obviously you need experience in life to learn. That's why God gives them to us, but I needed I would. I still tell my husband to say I will go and do and pursue that.
Speaker 2:So when we go through school, by this, this, um, this way of life, this, this creation, we're just all kind of falling in place. The bell rings, we line up, we go in and we sit down, and when you don't sit down and you are a child that has, you're a child that wants to go play and burn some energy. I don't know how we sometimes we'll label it ADHD and I'm just like no, they're just children. And sitting at a desk, adults don't do that. When I worked in an office, I had to get up from my desk to walk around the office mindlessly to break. I just couldn't sit there all day.
Speaker 2:And we expect these little children to sit in a desk. But we're training them up and we're training them to sit in a desk. But we're training them up and we're training them to sit there. And if they don't sit there and they aren't quiet and they do use their limbs in wild ways in this 10 by 10 little prison cell that they get, then we call them bad, or we call them, we send them off, or we take away the reason. This is what drives me crazy.
Speaker 2:When I hear like they got their recess taken away, I'm like, oh my gosh, they really need that. Like that is not discipline, that is just taking away what they need. They need to go, obviously burn some energy, and I don't know. I don't think, observing my son like I am so grateful that someone is not forcing you to sit at a table, because that's what's not you you know. So the book is dumbing us down by John Gatto and I think if you're on the fence and you're not really sure, you need just some more, like not convincing, but you feel like you need to learn something so that when you're challenged you have this response.
Speaker 2:That is an excellent place to start.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Knowledge is power. Thinking back to where you started, is there anything you would do differently knowing what you know? Now I'm.
Speaker 2:I'm I don't say this from like a ego place, but I'm very happy with where we are ending up and I always joke like I might wake up one day and my six-year-old might just totally throw me off and blow like blow my theory all the way up Hasn't happened yet. I'm still banking that it won't, because I have the research and the knowledge and now I know how this is working. But something that I think I wish I would have started sooner was foundationally laying more biblical scripture and life in him. That took me a little bit of realizing a shift, and what I mean by that is I got caught up in thinking that academics were priority and I got scared. I got fearful of what would happen if he fell behind and I hear that often as well from other families and I'm grateful that the Lord took me and helped me work through that, because now, the way that I see it is, there's no falling behind, because the main thing for me now is making sure that my kids have a biblical foundation first. That is most important.
Speaker 2:And I discovered my sons, my six-year-old. I have three sons, my six-year-old, I have three sons. So my six-year-old had this incredible ability. After a race one time he memorized the driver, the driver number, the place of the driver in that particular race of like 27 cars, and he did it because he was passionate about it one. But what it made me realize was that I was underestimating how much he could memorize scripture. So what I did was like all right, let's see. Let's see if we can memorize John 3, 16 together. And he was three and a half, I think three years old, and we memorized it line by line together and he holds that in his heart and he holds that as a foundation that now he can walk into life and he can pray it, he can say it, he knows it and over time we've done many others. We're working on Galatians 6, 9 right now and my two and a half year old can not perfectly but given the correct, like helping him guide along, he knows Galatians 6, 9 and he's two and a half years old. 6, 9 and he's two and a half years old and I think sometimes we are leaning on as Christian, as Christian mothers, we kind of sometimes think okay, we only have so much time in the day, how do I fit all of this in?
Speaker 2:Right, like I just you kind of, and distractions of phones and the world and all of these things. And so we think, sunday, whether you have a children's ministry or we're sending them into a worship service with us and we're hoping that they're gathering all of these things, we hope that's enough and I just don't think it is. We come from a church that has an incredible children's ministry, children's team, and I feel like I would be leaving so much opportunity on the table for them, kingdom wise, because that's what I'm raising. I'm raising children to be disciples, to be kingdom movers, to go out into the world and move for God's kingdom. That's my job.
Speaker 2:I believe that, and so if I just left it up to my children's pastor on a Sunday and didn't incorporate it into our lifestyle during the week, I don't feel like it would be sticking. And I just see, because of the fruit of going through it consistently with them, I don't drive home scripture and then we don't sit there like a chalkboard and be all crazy Like we did in the car today driving them to grandma and grandpa's. We went through Galatians 6 and 6 and 9 together and I'll tell you, as a mom, I didn't grow up memorizing scripture, so I'm not the first one that can belt it out for you, but I'm learning it alongside my children and so now, when we need that little bit of a reminder, I can help them and help myself. Pull from scripture to center us, like Galatians 6, 9 is let us not grow weary of doing good, for in the right time we will reap Right. So I can use that to remind my son or to remind myself on the hard days.
Speaker 2:Hey, like God shows us in his word that if we keep going we will reap a benefit. It may not feel like it right now, but then to be able to link them back to scripture is my job. And then ABC's one, two, three's reading comes after. I also think it's interesting. Reading is not the primary thing, but if he wants to read, to read the scripture himself, then I'm like all for it. And so we do a lot of reading out of children's. There's like easy reader Bibles that go through different accounts in a way that he can now read it for himself, because I can tell him, I can show him. But if I teach him how to do it, he's going to retain it a lot better and longer.
Speaker 1:Raise up your children in the way they should go, and they will never depart from it. Thank you so much, anna.
