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. She didn't get rid of it completely of course, but she's now not glued to it.
Around the 3rd or 4th week, all of a sudden, I found her mindset more open to watching documentaries, playing board games and trivia games, and even learning games in the car when we went on vacation. This was something that a couple of months ago, she would have resisted because it was "educational".
It's actually even more amazing that she took up a Netflix documentary called "Untold Stories of the ER" and wanted to watch every single episode before they took it off air, which is the end of this week. She dove in to these episodes learning a lot of diseases and even hypothesizing how doctors would treat a problem before it was solved. You could see her wheels turning and how interested she had become in the medical world again. One day I had to be out of home and she called me telling me about these videos she started watching of cancer survivor stories. She was actually crying over them. My mother-in-law came to visit our family, who has recently had open heart surgery. My high schooler watched a thoracotomy video that another friend had shared with us, showing how they open the chest to work on organs like a heart, lung, etc. So discussion began on that. One morning, we were at the breakfast table and we started talking about strokes which led to pulling up google at the breakfast table and even more discussion. It is absolutely amazing to see her loving to learn again and to see the knowledge during our discussions because she has looked up much on her own. So while this isn't school and I don't even want to use that word...it IS learning. Learning in life never stops. The love of learning is what I want to instill in my girls. This curiosity will motivate them to go further and be successful.
She hasn't just had her head in the medical field. We've spent time making spa treatments like scented stones, bath balms, etc. We learned that citric acid is a preservative. Of course, this led to discussing that certain citric fruits can have citric acid. If you were to slice an apple and put lemon juice on one slice, that slice would stay looking nice and "preserved".
My youngest daughter has really taken up scrapbooking and bullet journaling during this time. She has always been a writer and planner. She's written many of her YouTube channel scripts, which she films and edits. She's also watched a couple of documentaries herself. Both of my girls have also been designing a cruise ship with their dad on Minecraft. We've enjoyed a recent trip to the book store to get a book they were interested in.
Aside from this, we've been living life and taking trips. California (Hollywood and San Diego) included seeing sand dunes on our way back, observing sea lions, looking for whales, and learning about the history while we stayed in Hotel Del Coronado including many presidents that also stayed there. There was quite a bit of history about that hotel that we discussed at the breakfast table one morning. I could go on and on. We took a small road trip to Jerome, AZ where we visited the Douglas Mansion and learned about the copper mines and the ghost town. Living life and learning is a real thing for sure.
I can tell you this though. This process has worked. When we went to go pick up my in-laws from the airport, my high schooler was talking about wanting to go into the medical field and going to college and even hoping she can start dual enrollment next year through a community college. WIN!
This process reminds me of when my oldest daughter was in swim over two and a half years ago. She was good at swim. She wanted to get even better. So we, her parents, decided to invest in that. She went to two practices on some days and we had her doing private weight training. We had her going strong and hard and we couldn't miss a day or a meet. What do you think happened? She got burnt out. All of a sudden, it wasn't her idea anymore. She quit swim.
Just this year, she has come back to swim after those two and a half years. She is doing great. In just four short months of being back in, she has already made state cuts on a couple of events. It's up to her if she wants to go to practice or a meet. It's up to her on what she swims. She is so motivated. She rarely misses practice, we had to beg her to miss last night as a matter of fact. She's doing better than she did three to four years ago and it's all her. We're just there to support her.
Anyways, I wanted to wrap up with one last thing. We have chosen child led learning for the rest of this year. Just in the past two months, my husband and I have seen such a difference already. So we sat down and had a family discussion of what the girls were interested in learning. I did wonder what topics they would say. I was sort of afraid. However, my oldest daughter's response was the brain and why people have brain surgery and the diseases you can get in the brain. So she's all of a sudden interested in neuroscience. She also mentioned she wanted to learn more about speed and velocity, too. My youngest wants to learn about slime, but wait, it wasn't just slime. She wanted to learn why the ingredients caused the reactions. So there's actually a lot of chemistry she'll be learning. I'm actually really excited because I found this blog post: Slime Kit for Kids Science.
I'm confident with our decision. I've had time to "de-school" myself and I'm relaxed and I think we all needed that, too.
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. She didn't get rid of it completely of course, but she's now not glued to it.
Around the 3rd or 4th week, all of a sudden, I found her mindset more open to watching documentaries, playing board games and trivia games, and even learning games in the car when we went on vacation. This was something that a couple of months ago, she would have resisted because it was "educational".
It's actually even more amazing that she took up a Netflix documentary called "Untold Stories of the ER" and wanted to watch every single episode before they took it off air, which is the end of this week. She dove in to these episodes learning a lot of diseases and even hypothesizing how doctors would treat a problem before it was solved. You could see her wheels turning and how interested she had become in the medical world again. One day I had to be out of home and she called me telling me about these videos she started watching of cancer survivor stories. She was actually crying over them. My mother-in-law came to visit our family, who has recently had open heart surgery. My high schooler watched a thoracotomy video that another friend had shared with us, showing how they open the chest to work on organs like a heart, lung, etc. So discussion began on that. One morning, we were at the breakfast table and we started talking about strokes which led to pulling up google at the breakfast table and even more discussion. It is absolutely amazing to see her loving to learn again and to see the knowledge during our discussions because she has looked up much on her own. So while this isn't school and I don't even want to use that word...it IS learning. Learning in life never stops. The love of learning is what I want to instill in my girls. This curiosity will motivate them to go further and be successful.
She hasn't just had her head in the medical field. We've spent time making spa treatments like scented stones, bath balms, etc. We learned that citric acid is a preservative. Of course, this led to discussing that certain citric fruits can have citric acid. If you were to slice an apple and put lemon juice on one slice, that slice would stay looking nice and "preserved".
My youngest daughter has really taken up scrapbooking and bullet journaling during this time. She has always been a writer and planner. She's written many of her YouTube channel scripts, which she films and edits. She's also watched a couple of documentaries herself. Both of my girls have also been designing a cruise ship with their dad on Minecraft. We've enjoyed a recent trip to the book store to get a book they were interested in.
Aside from this, we've been living life and taking trips. California (Hollywood and San Diego) included seeing sand dunes on our way back, observing sea lions, looking for whales, and learning about the history while we stayed in Hotel Del Coronado including many presidents that also stayed there. There was quite a bit of history about that hotel that we discussed at the breakfast table one morning. I could go on and on. We took a small road trip to Jerome, AZ where we visited the Douglas Mansion and learned about the copper mines and the ghost town. Living life and learning is a real thing for sure.
I can't list all the things the girls have learned just in the past two months. I do actually try to keep a log for myself believe it or not, so that I can later list it in subjects. I even have things written down like a discussion on supply and demand when we were discussing gas prices.
I can tell you this though. This process has worked. When we went to go pick up my in-laws from the airport, my high schooler was talking about wanting to go into the medical field and going to college and even hoping she can start dual enrollment next year through a community college. WIN!
This process reminds me of when my oldest daughter was in swim over two and a half years ago. She was good at swim. She wanted to get even better. So we, her parents, decided to invest in that. She went to two practices on some days and we had her doing private weight training. We had her going strong and hard and we couldn't miss a day or a meet. What do you think happened? She got burnt out. All of a sudden, it wasn't her idea anymore. She quit swim.
Just this year, she has come back to swim after those two and a half years. She is doing great. In just four short months of being back in, she has already made state cuts on a couple of events. It's up to her if she wants to go to practice or a meet. It's up to her on what she swims. She is so motivated. She rarely misses practice, we had to beg her to miss last night as a matter of fact. She's doing better than she did three to four years ago and it's all her. We're just there to support her.
Anyways, I wanted to wrap up with one last thing. We have chosen child led learning for the rest of this year. Just in the past two months, my husband and I have seen such a difference already. So we sat down and had a family discussion of what the girls were interested in learning. I did wonder what topics they would say. I was sort of afraid. However, my oldest daughter's response was the brain and why people have brain surgery and the diseases you can get in the brain. So she's all of a sudden interested in neuroscience. She also mentioned she wanted to learn more about speed and velocity, too. My youngest wants to learn about slime, but wait, it wasn't just slime. She wanted to learn why the ingredients caused the reactions. So there's actually a lot of chemistry she'll be learning. I'm actually really excited because I found this blog post: Slime Kit for Kids Science.
I'm confident with our decision. I've had time to "de-school" myself and I'm relaxed and I think we all needed that, too.
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