Leslie's Thoughts on Homeschooling

 

I'm grateful for Leslie's thoughts on homeschooling tonight. Wow, she nailed it right on!  It's the most enlightening article I've read in a long time.  My kids are thriving, and I love what we are experiencing with homeschooling, but sometimes the critics are more than I can bare, so I feel defeated. Dumb that I care what other people think I know! I'm trying to ignore the judgement. Being authentic here, I'll just say years of being a people pleaser is wearing on me. How exhausting right? I am slowly coming out of that lame stage we all have been through where we seek validation from others.  I appreciate positive comments, yes, but I'm learning to be true to myself, despite positive or negative comments. I love my life and am glad we listened to our heart and chose a different path for now. And guess what? We're having a blast on that path. Learning through play is pretty cool.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite parts of Leslie's article:

"I remember one defining moment when my daughter was the age of a 6th grader, and we hadn’t formally talked about math all year long.  We had solved incidental problems together that had come up in natural life, but there had been no real ‘math lessons’ to speak of.

To get her ready for the standardized test that year, I bought her a math workbook for her grade level, and said, “Just see how much of this you can do. Let me know if you get stuck.”  A few times she brought it to me to get some clarification on what they wanted her to do, but she had the entire workbook completed in a couple days.  Because she wasn’t drilled on it every day of the year, she actually found it interesting, challenging, and fun to do.

I believe we’re all born with an innate desire to learn all the things we’ll need to know to complete our ‘life’s mission’.  We’ll naturally be drawn to the interests that will play a part in our life’s work, and we’ll naturally get frustrated when we don’t know what we need to know. Suddenly, in a situation like that, the knowledge MATTERS, and we are hungry to learn it because it already has application for what we want to be doing. That’s how I learned to build websites. That’s how I learned to publish books."

What are YOU grateful for?