Spoiler alert: I think if you answer yes to any of these questions, you need to get a life.
Do you hide your life from people?
I do. I think what makes this blog good is everything personal. My wish is for you to love me and think I’m a parenting genius, but then I tell you stories about my life that pretty much preclude you thinking the latter, and probably the former as well.
When you go to a homeschool blog I bet you expect to find pictures framing moments of a charmed life: Dogs and children and nature and fun. Read more
I am in Minnesota this week. We are supposedly here for the national Suzuki conference. My son had to audition. He had to learn a ton of music that I screamed at him to practice. And now, after all that, he is sick in bed with a fever. Read more
CNN takes a breather from world events this week to cover the upper middle class education topic of school sabbaticals. The article contains interviews with multiple parents who took their kids out of school for a short time. To Tahiti. To Iceland. To downtown Chicago. It can be wherever. But whatever it is, this is not homeschooling. This is something else.
The most time-consuming part of homeschooling for me isn’t teaching the kids. If they have what they need, they teach themselves. It’s figuring out a strategy. For example, if my kid loves hip hop and he says he needs someone to teach him to do the flips, who do I find? What do I tell them? How do I help my son prioritize this given that best dance class for him is the same time as the best flip class for him? Read more
This is a guest post from Erin Wetzel. She is a painter and a poet who lives in Tacoma, WA with her husband and daughter. You can connect with her on instagram @ekwetzel.
I am a Gen Y-er. I have a 3-year-old and I plan to homeschool/unschool.
Whenever I discuss homeschooling with my peers, the #1 concern is socialization. Or, at least, that’s what my peers say.
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The most frequent question I get from people is, “How can I work and homeschool at the same time?” For example:
Just recently got turned onto your blog and am seriously considering the homeschool path for my three, yes three children-ages 9 and 6 yr old twins. Neither my husband nor myself want to give up our work–thankfully I work at home as a researcher and writer for a non-profit, he is less flexible. So please direct me on your blog or elsewhere to how, if it is possible, to work and homeschool. Do I have to give up working to manage the day? What resources can I access to start to figure this out?
I should have sent her the picture above of my older son reading while I meet with my banker. But I wrote this answer back: Read more
It’s very scary to take your kids out of school because if your kid grows up to be a lonely, unhappy adult, everyone will blame homeschooling. So I spend a lot of time worrying that I’m doing the wrong thing. At first I worried the kids wouldn’t be socialized even though I had no idea what the word meant. And I worried the kids wouldn’t be well-rounded, even though I didn’t know what well-rounded meant. Read more
I went to New York to pitch to investors, and I took my oldest son with me so that I didn’t feel like a bad mom.
I’d like to tell you that my boys love going to NY, but they don’t. They do like Broadway shows, so I took my son to see Annie. I saw it as a kid and remembered most of it, but one thing I didn’t remember is the moment when Daddy Warbucks puts the orphanage keeper in jail and then, of course, is responsible for all the orphans. Read more
It’s much easier to homeschool a kid who is like you than a kid who is different than you. But then, that’s true in all of parenting. We are best at guiding kids who want to go where we want to go. Read more