Meant To Teach

I've not posted very much this year, probably because this year we've been so relaxed with our schooling and the girls have been very independent that there has really not been much that I could think to write on. Plus, with my girls being so much more independent I've been working more with my photography business. My oldest also has her first job and we just stay super busy. However, in looking back where I was a year and a half ago to today I started to think about our journey and where it's gotten us. In previous posts, you will have seen where we stopped doing school completely. My kids didn't stop learning, but the textbooks stopped. We gained SO much from that 7 months that are beyond all textbooks. You can read on our previous journey on the links below. We Quit School Child Led Learning in JUST the First Week What If We Trust? There's Value in Being Relaxed Today I decided that I wanted to talk about more than what this journey did with our s...

So if you have followed my blog, you know that last November, we took some time to do NOTHING. We were technically "unschooling" or "deschooling". My kids didn't stop learning, but it wasn't with anything structured and it was based on what they wanted to learn about it. My oldest ended up covering so many topics that would have been in a Biology textbook just in her research and an anatomy book for that matter (which she actually bought two of those at the bookstore for fun). My youngest ended up doing a lot of science experiments and realizing vocabulary was important to her and started expanding her own vocabulary. I have to say that quitting school was the BEST decision I have ever made. There is value in letting your kids have the reigns. There is a value in being relaxed and letting go to let them explore their own interests. Before we did that, my oldest wanted no part of going to college and really didn't know where she was headed. Now she...

With growing up in the system, I will say that letting my children lead their own learning is one of the hardest things I have ever done. I know that I probably still have some deschooling to do on my own. I often find myself not needed and start to question our decision. I miss planning our lessons at times. I have often been upset not knowing what to do with my time. However, do you notice the word "I" that I keep using? My husband pointed out to me, we can't change what we are doing just for me. This way of learning is totally about them. It's totally about them finding themselves and healing the curiosity and creativity so they love learning again. Usually, about the time I start to question everything about this new way of learning for us, my kids end up amazing me. The truth is there is a lot of time spent on YouTube. However, while my daughter is watching a simple, definitely non-educational, YouTube video about a boy dying from a certain disease leads to res...

I've been super excited to write this blog post. I have been amazed by what the kids have done. My oldest was wanting to learn about the brain and brain surgeries, but in her research she went down a rabbit hole and really took on the topic of Alzheimer's. She dove in. I walked into her room and saw many cards with research and her own thoughts.  When going to lunch with her dad, we became engulfed in discussion about Alzheimer's. You can tell this was a big interest to her partly because her great grandmother died from it and she is worried about other family members having it. She became interested in all the clinical trials and frustrated that there wasn't a cure for this disease.  One of the next few days, she asked to see her bank account balance. I wondered why. She then started to tell me about how she was trying to talk to a neurologist. So she put a $5 deposit down from her card hoping to get some questions answered. However, then she got an email say...

So if you read my previous post titled We Quit School , I thought I'd post a follow up to how life has gone since then. It's actually pretty amazing the stages that have happened during our "de-schooling" process. If you'll remember, my high schooler wasn't motivated to learn anything. She was just doing the worksheets and memorizing for a test and driving on to forget it the next day. She had told us she wasn't at all interested in college. She wasn't learning anything with the way we were having to do school just to earn her high school credits. She just had no drive for the future. Now, I will admit the first couple of weeks, it drove me insane to not be "doing school" and it was very hard to hold those thoughts of mine in. Often my high schooler was on her phone and on YouTube a lot. However, if you give things in abundance and freely, they eventually get bored of those objects. She did eventually have enough of looking at her phone. ...

That's right...you heard me straight. We "quit" school. This first half of the year has been with our noses in our curriculum, making sure that my high schooler has everything she needs to attend a four year university. Also, my youngest has been diving into language arts, reading, math...you know all the subjects we are supposed to do. I've gotten very strict with her on learning more vocabulary and grammar. Both of my girls were writing papers every week. We were in a great routine with our heads in the books. It has become a struggle and NO FUN! In the past we have always been so hands on. I have seen my girls LOVE to learn and learn pretty deep on certain subjects because they wanted to. I used to love how they would have more and more questions and look it up. I have seen them change their minds on what they want to be when they grow up. My youngest used to dream of being a marine biologists with her love of dolphins and sea creatures. When my oldest was youn...

When I sat down with my high schooler with a list of electives she could choose from to do this year, she chose current events as one of those. I thought I'd write a post on what we do for our current event subject. Each morning we start off with Channel One News . I was so glad when I came upon this website because I remember being in school and Channel One News came on every morning and we had to watch it in class. I'm not trying to make our homeschool like "public school", but my oldest and I grab a cup of coffee and just cozy up to watch the news like many Americans do in the morning. So I was thrilled to find it. It is definitely a news source that relates to middle school and high school students, even teaching them a "n ews related  word of the day" that they may hear in stories in the video. Sometimes there are even polls that you can vote on after the video and they could be featured in the next day video. We participated in one of the polls on ou...