One of the best resources for a homeschool parent is kids who were homeschooled and are now grown up and hated it. It’s kind of like knowing your personal weaknesses so you can avoid them. It’s always important to hear the negative opinions.

The most common complaint I hear is that kids were sheltered from scientific basics, like evolution, and they blame their parents for keeping them in the dark in the name of religion. That’s a good complaint for me to hear, because I’ll never do that to my kids so it makes me feel safe.

The second most common complaint is that the parents were incompetent at teaching math and science so they let the kids fend for themselves. There’s a good chance that I am guilty of this neglect as well.

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If you’re looking for curriculum, try resilience

When I started homeschooling I was inundated with useless advice. Use cupcakes to teach math! Use car trips to teach geography! The ideas are not helpful because parents who are able to conceive of the idea of homeschooling do not need help thinking of fun projects. The problem with fun projects is that most parents don’t think they are fun. Read more

When I was in college I had a hard time focusing on prescribed topics. I couldn’t handle the feminist reading of The Republic. Seriously, I could barely even understand the Cliffs Notes reading of The Republic. Read more

One of the scariest things about homeschooling is that you are deciding to put your kid on the road less traveled. Who knows if it’s a good road? We can see the standard path is bad, but it’s hard to know for sure that the alternative path will turn out better. Read more

Let me just say that everything I have memorized I like having in my head. I have some poems in my head. I have totally boring dialogue from my French textbook that I was so scared I’d have to read aloud that I said it out loud 5000 times. I know way too much about Renaissance England. And I know so much about children’s books that my family’s book store did not have to go to a computer—I had it all in my head. Read more

I am certain that you cannot teach via test and that all people are teachers, not just Teachers. But I am constantly refining this thinking by asking myself, “Why don’t tests work? Why is the practice of teachers and schools inherently limiting?”

I think I’ve found the answer in the idea of stories. Read more

NPR did a segment on the book Secrets of Happy Families, by Bruce Feilier. His premise is that we should look at what happy families do and then copy that for our own families. Feilier says that happy families have shared values and spend time together expressing those values in their actions.

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I took a bunch of photos waiting for the doctor to tell my son that he’s fine. (The kids are always fine until I don’t take them to the doctor and then they are deathly ill and I’m a bad mom. But that’s another post.) Melissa cropped the picture so that I look at it and forget that my son is leaning on me. He looks just fun and happy and I’m there to hear his laughs, but it’s not how I expected to be in the picture. This is exactly how I feel about homeschool: I’m there, and it’s fun, but it’s not at all how I expected to be in the picture. Read more

My son asked me if I could make cookies with him.

I told him I was on a coaching call and to wait fifteen minutes.

He threw a fit and said I always tell him to wait fifteen minutes.

After the call I went downstairs and he was making his own cupcakes.

I thought, Oh my god he used the mixer without me. I told him that I’m blown away that he did it all by himself.

This is unschooling. If I laid out curricula for him then neither of us would be surprised by the choices he made. He would be doing my choices instead.