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...

I'll be honest here, the main reason I keep a blog is so I can go back sometimes and remember what we did. This is especially the case now as we are now in the high school years. One of the universities in our area actually requires homeschoolers to list a lab and explain it, even down to the materials that we use. This is part of their application process. So this will be helpful in remembering what we did.  Anyways, I don't have very many pictures for this lab, because well - I dropped the ball as we had family in town and forgot to take pictures.  The first step to this lab is to get a naked egg (or two depending on how you choose to perform the experiment). If you aren't sure how to get a naked egg, you place it in vinegar for 24 hours. It's a pretty easy process.  The things you will need for this lab are: Corn Syrup Water Food Coloring Glasses 2 Naked Eggs (or 1 if you do it the way we did) The experiment for osmosis can be seen in this...

My oldest had fun with this. We just used what we had in the kitchen to make her edible cell project. I offered to take her to the store and by candy to do it. However, being the smart girl she is, she said, "I don't want to waste money on candy I may not even like or eat." So we just used things we had on hand. Everytime she was writing down the organelles in her "cell key," we were also going over the functions of them. Fridays are our project days or lab days with biology. I'm loving the time with her doing these to make sure she is understanding what she is reading throughout the week. She seems to be loving it, too. Now that she is a teenager, I am savoring these moments.

For this experiment, we used a red cabbage powder to determine if regular household chemicals or liquids were an acid or a base. You can make your own red cabbage powder. Click  here  to get instructions. You can also just do what I did and buy it offline. Red cabbage powder is the purple color indicator that scientist use to determine and measure whether something is an acid or base and it contains a natural pH indicator. My oldest had fun doing this experiment with things around the house that she started grabbing more and more things from our cabinets to test it on. It's not every day that you hear your high schooler say, "This is cool," when it comes to science. So we tested it on things like creamer, dish soap, vinegar, baking soda (dissolved in water), sugar (dissolved in water), lemon juice, etc. If it made the color pink or red, it was a base. If it made the color purple, it was neutral. If it made the color blue or green, then it was an acid. It was a ...

The school year is off to a great start and I thought I would blog about it. This year for my 7th grader, we are doing Character Quality Language Arts by Donna Reish . This isn't the first time we have used pieces of her curriculum. We did  samples  of the program last year. This year we are using it as our full language arts curriculum for my middle schooler. My 10th grader is also using Meaningful Composition , also by Donna Reish, this year as well. I definitely recommend it and I will say, I found this curriculum while looking into Institute for Excellence in Writing. To be truthful, I didn't want to pay that much for a writing curriculum I didn't know would work. So I came across Meaningful Composition as a MUCH less expensive option and with the Checklist Challenge, it seems to be very similar to IEW. Meaningful Composition vs. CQLA: Character Quality Language Arts incorporates everything into one. It covers spelling, grammar, vocabulary, writing, dictation, and i...

As we were getting settled in the car from a normal Friday afternoon park day (months ago by the way), my oldest daughter (13 at the time) asked, "Mom, can I tell you something?" She then preceded to tell me, "I was playing and then coming up to find you and I overheard someone's mom talking about me with other moms." I then preceded to ask her what she heard, who she heard it from, and so forth. At that point, I just told her that I'm sorry she heard that, we don't want to be like that, and to let it roll off her back and move on.  When kids are doing it to kids, or even when moms are doing it with moms...it can be easy to dismiss it and move on. However, when moms are talking about children...sometimes it is easier said than done for sure, especially on my end as a mother. I bring this topic up, because today I had a an old friend message me and tell me about a very similar situation. However, I think it is a bit worse. I don't need to go into...

My oldest daughter has been taking Biology, but really with an Anatomy emphasis, because she is thinking of going into the medical field. As we have finished learning about the skeletal system, integumentary system,  and muscular system, we ended a unit today dissecting a chicken leg. My youngest was intrigued too, so of course, she did it with us.  Many animal systems have skeletal systems similar to ours.  Our leg is very much like that of a chicken including the femur (thigh bone), knee (hinge joint), fibula and tibia  (smaller bones of the shin), cartilage, and ligaments that are all part of  our skeletal system. We pointed out all of these things in our chicken leg.  We even went a step further and broke the largest bone to observe the bone marrow. We talked about people actually can give bone marrow for people with life threatening diseases like leukemia.   I've never been a fan of dissecting anything, it always grossed me out in ...