Building Community Connections and Creating “Cat Warriors“
Local BCS@Home family fosters creativity in the homeschool community
Home education is known to bring families closer to one another as they learn and pursue creativity together, and the same is true for local homeschooling parents Julia and Chris Graham. Julia always liked the idea of homeschooling, but they decided to make a full transition to home education when Grade One in public school proved too difficult of a learning environment for their oldest daughter Jade.
“I didn’t like homeschooling at first, but now I like it because – well – for one, you don’t have to ask to go to the bathroom,” 12-year-old Jade jokes. “But also, I think I would have more trouble with some things like math if I was in school, because sometimes I have trouble understanding new things.”
Julia and Chris have three kids: Jade, age 12, Nathan, age eight, and Sera, age six. For Julia, the transition to homeschooling meant more time with the family, more hands-on teaching for each of her kids’ learning styles, and more opportunities for her and her husband to teach their kids about the importance of family.
“We get more time to spend as a family together, and to focus on our values as a family,” Julia says, “and it gives us the time to follow those rabbit trails of knowledge and dig deeper into the things that the kids are really interested in learning.”
For Jade, homeschooling led her to enter the world of storytelling. At 12 years old, she is now in her third year of writing her own book series, Cat Warriors, inspired in part by her own make-believe games that she played with her two younger siblings.
“It’s really rewarding to watch as her mom,” Julia says. “We purposefully chose a very literature based and creativity centred curriculum for our family, so it’s so good to see that Jade is picking up on that and developing her own creative skills.”
Jade explained that her book series, Cat Warriors, is a futuristic science fiction series that takes place in a universe with all kinds of strange new planets with various life forms. Her stories focus on the cat planets, where cats with superpowers go on adventures across the galaxy together to fight battles and champion good! Her first two books in the series are available for purchase on Amazon, where she is hoping to raise money for a local cafe that has fallen on hard times.
“There’s a local cat cafe called Cafe and Mi that I like going to,” Jade explains, “and they’ve had trouble because of COVID-19, so I’m giving them some of the money that I get from the books.”
Jade’s parents are proud to see their daughter dedicating her time and creativity to helping the local cafe that she loves. They have worked hard to encourage all of their children’s creativity, and have made sure to instill a strong sense of work ethic in their kids at a young age, as well.
“I want to be a writer and a cat sitter when I grow up,” Jade says, “but that might not make enough money, so I’m okay if I also have to stock some shelves at a store as well.”
The whole Graham family remains very involved in the homeschool community, both in person and online. Julia Graham started the BCS@Home Google Group so that parents could connect and share social events, playdates, buy-and-sells and even prayer requests with one another.
“It’s basically a group where people who don’t want to be on Facebook can have a way to connect with each other through the homeschool community,” she explains, “I just thought it was a good way to support each other and be connected with one another without all the distractions of Facebook.”
The Google Group can be joined by contacting Julia at juliadgraham@yahoo.ca. To view Jade’s Cat Warriors book series available for purchase on Amazon, follow through this link.
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Written by Micah Jansen.
