My Son is FINALLY Writing

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Homeschooling Parents, I'm here to offer more anecdotal evidence to the well-known unschooling mantra Trust Children. We hear it all of the time from our unschooling friends and from John Holt and I myself have even written posts offering reminders to trust our children.

While various websites and adherents define unschooling in different ways, it is generally considered an approach to homeschooling that advocates child-led learning, learning initiated by the interests of the child. Our family has not been an unschooling family, but I do embrace this basic approach of using personalized and meaningful content in our eclectic lessons.

Again and again in the lives of my children I have reminded myself to trust them, to trust the process of homeschooling. Especially as regards those areas of specific challenge for the kids. Elizabeth has struggled with math and John has struggled with language. With time, when learning these skills became necessary, they have both learned what they needed to know. Elizabeth has learned and is learning math because she now wants to and needs it for her own reasons and purposes. And John?

JD and John
Wrestling Fans
xxx

John now has an interesting and totally unforeseeable reason to write. A reason for writing that I couldn't have predicted in a zillion years. John and JD have started getting into wrestling, as in wrestling, the kind of wrestling that is entertainment-based, story-lined, choreographed and scripted, but not fake at all. 

That kind of wrestling.

JD has been writing for an online wrestling forum for about  year and he's gotten John involved. Each week John writes a couple of promotions, promos, for the wrestling character that he has created for the forum. His character is called Maero, sounds like marrow, and is a total freak of a character.

The absolutely amazing thing about John's writing is this. Although he has found writing to be a total chore for over fifteen years, although picking up a pencil used to give him nerves and anxiety...now he is motivated, driven, and shockingly excellent at it! 

No kidding! His writing is at a level that I though we would never reach a few months ago.

I Can't Believe It!

I read his promos each week, often several of them a week, and I have watched his writing skills improve so much over the past three months or so. Now that he's motivated, his learning curve has been straight up! His spelling, syntax, grammar, punctuation, style...all have developed into some truly excellent writing. And because he is proud of his burgeoning skills, his he delighted to send each of his promos to me for reading.

Color me surprised.

If I had begged him to write it wouldn't have happened. 

It had to happen when it meant something to him.

Trust your children.

 Do you have a similar story? 

You might also love this article from Schooling the World blog
called A Thousand Rivers.
I sure did.

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Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

Trust

Prospective Homeschool Parents: Part 1 of 5
Licorice

Dear Me: Being the Mom

Strategies and Stuff for Successful Homeschooling Parents

Parents Need to "Deschool" Too: Part One

new to homeschooling, deschooling, frustrated homeschooling parent failure

Recently I was talking to a young mother of young daughter. They had been homeschooling for less than a year and this mother, I'll call her Jenny, was feeling like a loser and like the worst homeschooling mother ever. She was discouraged, to say the least. 

My daughter is like my husband. She is ahead of the game in most every subject...reading at 3rd grade level or higher, and is doing at least 1st grade math. We have skipped over most of the stuff that she would be doing in a typical kindergarten class and are working out of workbooks, worksheets I have found and printed out, along with making up some of our own lessons. I just do not know what to do... Now it is a struggle to get her to finish getting ready in the mornings so we can start our school work. She does great when she finally decides to sit down and do the work. Usually almost all her work is perfect.

Every single homeschooling parent can appreciate Jenny's concerns because we have all been there, the struggle, the self doubt, the fear of failure, the fear that we're not good enough. When the kids are dragging their feet into lessons and when we sense the resistance just under the surface we, the homeschooling parent, begin to experience the fears that this may have been a terrible idea. After awhile we all feel that frustration of feeling that we have to fight our children to get them to the table.

We didn't want this kind of environment of dynamic in our home, yet here it is.

The surprise answer to this is that WE, 
the parents, might be the problem. 
And it's solvable.

Deschooling is a term often used in the homeschooling world that means to taking time off from formal lessons or academia at the beginning of the homeschooling change in order to restore a child to a healthier, happier, receptive person after having had negative experiences in traditional school. I'm sure that there are other/better/different definitions of the term somewhere. For the purpose of this post, though, I am referring to the need of we parents to deschool, to let go of what we see as learning, as acceptable lessons, as what we view as normal or necessary or schooling as we homeschool our children. 

For this post I'm going to use the term deschooling to mean the process of letting go of the rules of schooling and of accepting a wider, more generous, more accepting modes of what is learning. It is the process of liberating one's self to an environment in the home and family that is unique and inspiring and enlarging, regardless of the method, mode, or style.

The kids with my sister, Brenda

With some exceptions, most of us were traditionally-schooled kids. We know that when your work is done in the classroom you find quiet activities to keep you busy until the class time is over. We know that learning activities occur at the desk in silence. We know that only one person can talk at a time. We know that the teacher knows it all. We know that learning begins at 9am and ends at 3pm. We know that this structure is worshiped. We know that routine and organization are necessary in a classroom. We know that our papers need to be neat and tidy and on time. 

We know that there is a right way and a wrong way. We know that a body of people who know better than us ...somewhere... has decided what we should learn and how we should learn it. We know that others tell us when and how and what to learn. We know that our questions and daydreams and comments aren't welcome in the learning milieu. We know that someone else gives us the materials to learn. We know that all knowledge comes from someone else and is given to us in spoons full. We know that our lessons come out of our textbook and curriculum. We know that we need to read appropriate and pre-approved materials. We know that some reading is crap and other reading is edifying and wholesome. We know that tradition is key. We know that the point of view of our culture is the best...  

You get it, we, the parents, are living in our heads with the knowledge of what learning is supposed to look like...and homeschooling seldom looks like that. We worry about how others see us, if they judge us, what they think we should be doing... The worry catches up and pretty soon we are feeling like huge failures.

The good news is that there is a place to start to get yourself back on the road to wherever it is you were hoping to be when you decided to take that step into homeschooling your children.

It is a basic two step intervention:

1. Say to yourself, I didn't meant to be schooling at home! That's not what we were planning on! And...
2. Ask your child what they would rather be doing and do that!

So, relax, Jenny, and deschool awhile, and stay tuned because I have more to come!
Welcome to the wonderful world of homeschool.



Have you deschooled?
What was your experience like?

...............
Other posts you might enjoy:
Are You One of the Good Homeschoolers?
Strategies and Stuff for Successful Homeschooling
Another Reason That I'm Glad I'm Not a Camel

Unschooling, Our Fall-Back Mode

I often call our family Eclectic Homeschoolers, but we are so UNSCHOOLY that I can't keep using the first term. We have used books and materials whenever the urge hits us, don't get me wrong, but we aren't married to anything. We put the books down as soon as we lose interest, returning to them if and when the feeling strikes.

I was talking with another unschooling mom earlier tonight on an unschooling board on Facebook and she was very angry with me and felt like I was being unhelpful. Her original question was something along the lines of:

Help! My three year old son is obsessed with reading!

What should I do?

I replied something cray cray like this: 

 SERIOUSLY?!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just give him books!
My daughter honestly and truly started learning how to read, TEACHING HERSELF HOW TO READ, at the age of 2 and a half. People kept accusing me of PUSHING her! LOL
If your son wants to read, (why use the term "obsessed?") Encourage him, find out what books interest him, and sit back and let it happen!

And she writes back:    

Yikes Karen, I was using the word obsessed in a funny sense, not negative. And as much as I give him books if what he is asking for is a bit more involvement from me why not give him that? He's expressing an interest, which is child led. Not everyone just naturally teaches themselves to read, but it's nice that your daughter did. I remember as a child being frustrated that I couldn't read and was extremely happy when my.mom started helping me learn phonics. 

I find your reply to be a bit abrasive and not the least bit helpful.

Well, OK.
I'm abrasive and unhelpful.
I wrote back that I had not intended offense in the least and I apologized.

Man, Facebook and other social media sites 

can be freaking EXHAUSTING.

But it is true, my daughter did teach herself to read when she was 2 1/2 years old! She asked for more and more phonics help with books that she carried around and I gave her any help that she asked for.

She had one book in particular that she carried with her, it belonged to my husband. It was a huge, heavy book on how to manage a team of computer professionals and she loved it! Ten thousand books in the house and she chooses one entitled something like The Death March of the Project Manager. LOL. I remember my aunt asking me in an appalled way Why did you give Elizabeth that book to read?!

Elizabeth started out by looking through the words of the books she perused until she found one or two words that she could read. She would look and look and then say, Look, Momma, here is the word moon! I would be in a state of complete FLABERGASTEDNESS and amazement at my 2 1/2 year old toddler daughter doing such a thing. Reading!

But my family, did they find it amazing?
NOPE. They accused me of pushing her and controlling her and micromanaging every aspect of her life. 
As if this amazing child of mine would allow me to control her...HA!

Anyway, my point is not that my family didn't get it, that's another post entirely, my point is that Elizabeth taught herself in her own time. 

On the other hand John didn't want to read until he was past twelve years old. I fretted a bit.      (understatement)

But now he has a book going all of the time and he can be found kicked back on the couch, feet on the back cushion, arm thrown up over his head laughing, tittering, celebrating, generally enjoying the read! In his own time.

I had to remind myself again and again to trust the process, to recognize his strengths, and that this child was going to be OK regardless of his interest in reading or not.

Reading Percy Jackson isn't the be all - end all. But he is enjoying it and he is learning that he enjoys the story far more from the book than from the screen.

Too bad I was pushing him so hard...Pshaw.