Hey everyone. This is Dorenda Wilson. Welcome to this week's podcast. I am married to Daryl. We have eight kids ages 13 to 27. We've been homeschooling for over 23 years, and we have five grandkids.

Our fifth grandchild is on the way.

We just found this out a few weeks ago, so we're pretty excited about that.

But this podcast is brought to you by my simple mercifully short book on homeschooling called

The Unhurried Homestooler. You can go check it out on Amazon. It's also brought to you by my simple mercifully short book on homeschooling called The Unhurried Homestooler.

You can go check it out on Amazon.

It's also brought to you by Teaching Textbooks, which is a math program that we've been using for years,

and we still use with our kids after all these years.

So check it out at teaching textbooks.com.

I am super excited today because we're going to be talking about essentials

and early education. I get so many questions from moms who are just starting out or thinking

about homeschooling and their kids are maybe preschool, kindergarten age. And they're feeling

burdened by these expectations that I know as an older homeschooling mom are really unnecessary.

And it breaks my heart because I feel like those specific years are so much fun.

They have the potential to be such memory-making times, such fun times with our kids.

And so I asked my good friend Cheryl Bastion to join me today because

Cheryl is just has a massive amount of experience and education as an early educator. She has

started out many years ago. I'll let her kind of share her experience a little bit first,

so you kind of know where she's coming from. Some of you may already know her. She speaks at

homeschool conferences. And if you ever get a chance to listen to one of her workshops, go for it.

Because she has a lot of information. She is a mom to several kids. I'm going to let her introduce herself,

though, because Cheryl, I need you to tell these moms a little bit more about you.

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