Category: Student Life

by Olive Pea

What is it like to run a homeschool support group with over 700 homeschooling families? 

I interviewed Rose Killion, a home educator, who joined the Tri Valley Explorers (TVE) homeschool Leadership Team in 2016.

Killion said her favorite part of being on the TVE Leadership Team is creating all the amazing events for the community. She also said her least favorite thing is missing part of the dances while she is sitting at the registration table. “But the benefit is that I get to say ‘Hi’ to every person that walks in the door,” she said.

Killion was recruited to the Leadership Team because they thought she would be a good addition. Killion said, “I decided to join TVE Leadership because I wanted to contribute to this amazing community.”

She also said that she has enjoyed being a part of TVE’s Leadership for the past 6 years, and will “miss being a part of this team as our homeschooling journey ends for my family in June.” 

Killion isn’t the only Leadership member retiring from the team, nearly HALF of the leadership team will be retiring this summer as their children age out of homeschooling and venture on to the next chapters in their lives. That will leave all the work to the few people who will remain. Nicole Pate, who has worked side by side with Killion for the past 3 school years said “I think TVE will have big shoes to fill when Rose and the other retiring Leadership Members depart.” Imagine! Only a few people running a community with over 700 homeschooling families! Leadership is looking for recruits, if you are a homeschooling parent in the TVE community now’s your chance to volunteer. Helping the TVE Leadership host even one event brings joy to the families and friends in the community. Here are the events hosted by TVE in order:

1. NBTSY (Not Back to School Year Picnic)
2. The Harvest Dance
3. The Winter Holiday Party
4. The Spring Fling
5. The Teen Formal
6. The Graduation and Promotion Ceremony
7. NETSY (Not End of the School Year Picnic)
8. Weekly park days in various locations

You can volunteer to help with an event today! If you are interested, please contact Nicole Pate on the Tri-Valley Explorers Homeschool Support (TVE) Facebook group admin page. The TVE Leadership Team hopes to hear from you soon! 

by Meru S.

Do you love growing vegetables? Would you like to try your hand at starting a vegetable garden? Spring is around the corner, so get your planting tools out!    

The Garden Odyssey club is having a plant sale coming up this month! They will be at all the TVE Park Days selling tomatoes, basil, squash, sunflowers, and more. Profits from the sale will be used as fees for the club’s field trip to the Filoli Historic House and Garden. Any extra profits will be donated to the East Bay Regional Parks. 

The dates for the plant sale are:

• TVE Livermore Park Day – Tuesday March 22 2022 1:30 PM                                                  
• TVE Walnut Creek/Lafayette Park Day – Thursday, March 24 2022 1:30 PM
• TVE San Ramon Park Day – Friday March 25 2022 12:00 PM

All plants were grown by the members of the Garden Odyssey using the best available quality soil and seeds, and with techniques learned from a UC Master Gardener. The Garden Odyssey would like to thank Alden Lane Nursery in Livermore and Sloat Garden Center in Concord for their generous donation of supplies.           

The Garden Odyssey is a group of eight children and their parents. They visit a public garden once a month together. Past visits have included: 

• Blake Gardens in Kensington where they met with the horticulturist to learn about the history of the garden
• Rodgers Ranch Heritage Center in Pleasant Hill where they met with the farmer to learn about the activities at the ranch 
• Regional Parks Botanic Garden at Tilden where they learned about the California native plants 
• St. Mary’s College in Moraga where they met with the groundskeeper who gave them a tour of the college grounds and talked to them about the plants and trees on the campus and their care. 

During their visit to Blake Garden, the members volunteered to make Caterpillar Crossing signs for the garden paths.

Please come and check out the sale! The Garden Odyssey hopes to see you there!

by Ava Salado

The last almost two years have been rough for the world, including the homeschooling world. The funny thing about “homeschooling” is that many “homeschoolers” are almost never at home. There are classes, co-ops, fairs, field trips, park days, and events, and this pandemic has put a damper on our “outschooling.” Most of you reading this are probably part of the homeschool support group, Tri Valley Explorers or TVE. The group has, at one point, over 880 adventure-seeking families. TVE strives to help and improve children and their families’ homeschooling journey through resources, events, and seminars that are designed for education, having fun, and making lifelong friends along the way.

Through the course of COVID, TVE has had to cancel or reschedule planned events. Most of the TVE events are in-person, so it was almost impossible to keep meeting under TVE. Because of this, TVE has had to step back from its regular self. Unfortunately, some have gotten the idea that TVE has been shut down and is no longer going to help homeschooling families like it has for years. This is thankfully not true at all, and the wonderful leaders have no intention of shutting down Tri Valley Explorers any time soon.

How TVE will bounce back is highly anticipated by its members, and we are glad to report that our “outschooling” will hopefully be back very soon! The history of TVE is broad, and we have many better answer-seeking families to thank for that. One person can change the way you think of your homeschooling journey, and this is just what TVE has done for so many. TVE is not just one person; it is a group of people working together to help each other.

The future at TVE is hopeful, with our first virtual Graduation scheduled for Saturday, June 5 of this year. We will be celebrating the incredible past of our senior graduates and their exciting future. You can tune in on Zoom 3:30 – 5:30 for a night full of celebration! Check the Tri Valley Facebook page for more info.

We thank you for sticking with us through these hard times and can’t wait to see all of you again.

by Ava Salado

I had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Sundin, a local, bestselling author of Christian Historical fiction (specifically WWII) and romance (http://www.sarahsundin.com/). She is the author of the Wings of Glory Series (2010, 2010, 2011), Wings of the Nightingale Series 

(2012, 2013, 2014), Waves of Freedom Series (2015, 2016, 2017), Sunrise at Normandy Series (2018, 2019, 2020) and When Twilight Breaks (2021). She graciously agreed to have a Zoom interview with me and homeschooler Sydney Shirley for a badge we were working on. We were working together on writing a story of our own and wanted to ask questions to a professional author. 

When Shirley asked Sundin, “How did you become an author?” Sundin responded that she was originally a pharmacist with three little kids, majored in chemistry. She then says “and then I got hit with a story idea, and I just wrote it.” Sundin said that it took her ten years, and she spent a lot of time at writer’s conferences, reading books about writing, doing workshops from published authors, and attending writers groups. Sundin explained, “so I started writing in 2000, I was 34 years old, my first book came out in 2010.” Sundin then explained that “it was going to writer’s conferences that was huge because I was able to meet with editors and agents in person and um… submit my work to them and get some feedback,” Sundin then continues, “and meet with published authors and learn from them.” Sundin also said, “it did take me ten years and finally got my contract and um… been publishing a book every year ever since.”

When I asked her, “Why did you become an author?” Sundin laughed and said, “Because the story wouldn’t leave me alone, I did not plan on this, I mean I, as I said I was a chemistry major, I became a pharmacist, I like pharmacy a lot. Um… pharmacy had some really nice things because I was a stay-at-home mom with three little kids.” Sundin explained that the pharmacy lets you work only one day a week, and that’s what she did for a while. She said it was wonderful. Sundin states “and I was planning that as the kids got older that I’d be… that I’d take on some more hours at the hospital, I was working a Sutter Delta.” Sundin remarks that once the kids were in high school or college, she would work full-time, Sundin continues “that was always my plan, that was my husband’s plan and then um… God obviously had different ideas because I had this story idea, and it just would not let me go, I was, It was almost obsession right, I just had to write it, I couldn’t not write the story; it was just coming out of me so fast and um… and I didn’t know what to do with it… I… I was a chemistry major, I tested out of taking English in college, and I was really happy about that.” 

She says the last time she had really taken English was in high school. “I couldn’t remember how to punctuate dialog,” Sundin said. Sundin remarked that she went in “kicking and screaming.” She continued, “I didn’t know what I was doing, I knew how hard it was to get published, and I didn’t want to waste my time just writing for me because I had three little kids at home, I had another career that I could be focusing on, and it seemed selfish for me to spend time on something… a lot of time on something like this that wasn’t going to go anywhere, and I decided from the beginning that I was either going to write seriously with the goal of being published or I wasn’t going to write at all.” She says that at her first writer’s conference it felt really “make or break,” she was really willing to say that if this wasn’t the right path “take me off of it now.” She said, “I submitted my work to some published authors, and their overwhelming feedback was, yes, you are writing at a publishable level, and you should be doing this.” Sundin said this helped her so much because she had five years of rejection letters. “All that time, just when I was ready to give up, God would give me a little something, you know something really positive, and even one of the agents who rejected my novel, she said I just love this story so much, she says I love the story, I love the characters, I love the writing, she says, um… at this time though World War Two fiction was not selling so she didn’t feel that she could find a home for it.” Sundin explained that the market eventually turned around, and historical fiction started selling again. 

After this, we talked more about the book world specifically; we all know how hard it is to take on writing as your profession or even your job. You must go through months, and even years of writing, researching, and rewriting all over again. It takes hard work; we wanted to hear advice straight for a hard-working person with a lot of great knowledge in the field. I asked her, “what is the difference between self-publishing and going through a publisher?” 

Sundin laughed and responded with, “there are entire books about this problem (laughs). Ok, so I am traditionally published um… this, this is the old fashion way, this has been done for hundreds of years, and that meant that I had finished my novel and then I had to send a query or a pitch which means to an editor or an agent usually, nowadays you go through an agent who then places your book with an editor, but the basic process is the same.” She then explains, “I would talk to them at writer’s conferences or send them an email, in the old days you wrote them a letter and say, I have written a book about such and such, it’s this, this genre and I think these people might be interested in it and this is why I’m a good person to write it, and then they say well that’s not for me, or that sounds interesting why don’t you send me more, that’s the query process.” 

She continues, “the more is what they call a proposal, and that’s a little longer you go into some of the details about who you are and why you can write and some marketing stuff, and you send that in and if they like that they say, ok I will see your full manuscript now.” Sundin then explains that she turns her full manuscript to her editor, who is also her publisher, and she might say, ok, I like this, but the editor can’t give me a contract. So then the editor talks to the other editors, each of them have already looked at lots of novels, and then they see which of the novels fits best with their publishing houses. They then present them to their publication board; this is salespeople, vice presidents, marketers, and finance people for the company, then they all discuss what would be the best route to take. If they like it, then you get a contract, and after that, it is officially a partnership where they provide the book covers, all of the editing, and lots of marketing. Sundin says, “because I’m with a traditional publisher, I can get my books in Barnes & Noble and other book stores.” Sundin then explains more about self-publishing.

“Self-publishing has really grown in the past decade um… when I first started… when I first started going to writer’s conferences it was kind of the ugly stepchild, like, oh if you can’t get published then you publish it yourself.” She went on to add, “it’s really changed, a lot of authors have um… chosen to self-publish rather than traditionally publish, there are a lot of benefits to it, you don’t have to be approved by editors and publishing houses, and that’s really important if your story’s a little different because most publishing houses like thing that are going to sell and so there’s certain genres that sell well and others that don’t. So if your writing um… ok, actually I have a friend that wrote this book, so it’s Amish Vampires in Space, that’s the name of her book, Amish Vampires in Space and she self-published because no one going to, no publishers going to buy it, but it actually has kind of a cult following because it’s just kind of a quirky thing, and she was traditionally published beforehand. So a lot of my friends who are traditionally have chosen to self-publish in addition to traditional publishing.” 

Sundin then describes that all of the traditional publishing process can take years and that rejection bothers everyone, including authors, and you have complete creative control if you self-publish; you won’t have an editor always telling you you must change this, take out this, and switch this. You can publish whatever you want to; the only disadvantage is that you must pay someone for editing, book covers, marketing, and that price can build up over time. Taking your time is very important so that you can learn what you really want to do; it took Sundin ten years to complete her first book, and she reports that that was good because it gave her time to grow and learn as an author. “ to authors who are interested in self-publishing I say, hey, make sure you, you take a deep breath, you take some time um… and learn, and learn, it’s ok to take time to learn. If you wanted to doctor, it would take you four years of college and four years of medical school, and a couple years of residency; you want to be a teacher, you gotta go to school, college for four years and a year for teaching school, so there’s, there, there’s things that you, that take time, and it takes some time to learn to be a writer to.” 

With that, Shirley and I thank you, Ms. Sundin, for the amazing interview that you gave us. So many people love your books, and you inspire our community in every way. We thank you, and I hope all of you at home are also as inspired to hear what Ms. Sundin had to say as we were.