You may find yourself asking, “what do I have to teach my kid in homeschooling? What curriculum do I have to use?” Those are valid questions you ask as a homeschooler. BUT…what about sprinkling some creativity and interest into that question!
Here’s a question I have for you, “if no one were going to review your curriculum at the end of the year, if you were free to teach your child the practical and valuable life skills you wish you had graduated from school with…what would that look like?”
Now we’re getting to the good stuff! Now you’re dipping your toes in the beautiful freedom you get to experience through homeschooling!
Yes, of course, we want to teach our kids the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. We want them to grasp history, science and the arts AND we absolutely want them to be able to clearly and effectively express themselves to the world around them…buuutttt…. part of the beauty of homeschooling is that you get to tailor a whole lot of your child’s education to what sparks their creativity and ignites your family’s love of learning.
Listen through to the end of my video where I give you some practical examples of how this could look. Get excited, homeschooling is a lot more fun than you thought it could be??!!
Video Transcript
Hey, everybody, Gina here.
Alright, I wanna bring you something encouraging and maybe a little bit of something that’ll get you excited about homeschooling, now I know you’re excited, but you’re kind of overwhelmed and there’s a lot of… I have to do this and I have to do that. But let me tell you about the exciting part, one of my favorite parts about homeschooling.
Okay, I have a question for you, If nobody… We’re going to see the things that you taught your kids, if you didn’t have to have a review at the end of the year or somebody check your work, or if there was no testing, or if you weren’t worried, ” I better be teaching this for High School because I want them to get into college.” If that thought didn’t exist… What do you want your kids to know?
What do you wish you knew?
I wanna say it again, if there was no restrictions, if there was nothing that you had to teach or couldn’t teach, what would you want your kids to walk away from their home school experience having learned… And also, I’m gonna tell you you can… Well, do this for high school, this is how I tailored my high school to my boys, was figure out what they love, what sparks their interest, because that’s part of keeping homeschooling fun, where the kids are not just so not wanting to do their school work. So this is a blessing that I wanna teach you about, and it’s directing what you choose for curriculum towards what your kids love, and also what do you want them walking away with…
Okay, so for instance, me, this last year homeschooling, my last son through 12th grade, we learned about budgeting, personal finance, investing, all things that I wish I have learned. Don’t you wish you had learned about staying debt-free and putting a lot of money down on the house and all those things that… We wish we knew back then. Well, we learned it… Actually, my other older kids were actually sitting in on it because we didn’t learn about investing until the last couple of years. So I asked my son and my husband a couple other people, What do you wish you had graduated school with, or what do you wish you had learned while you were still in school, so I’m maybe give you a couple examples. Okay, and this is exciting. Also on my website, I’m gonna have a resources tab and it’s gonna be my favorite picks, and I’m gonna break it down for elementary, middle and high. So look for that.
Alright, other things that they wish they had learned was about persuasive writing, like my one son for his business, he writes blogs and it’s just something he’s not gifted at, but wishes he knew the basics about it, and then right now he’s… As we’re building my website, he’s learning about graphic design, he wishes he had learned Adobe, he wishes he had learned about public speaking more… Just graphic design in general. These are all things he’s learning now as a 23-year-old, but he wishes that we had made that maybe a high school course or something, that’s the beauty of homeschool, and you get to design, you have to cover certain subject areas, but how you cover that subject area is open for so much creativity, and I want you to remember, if nobody were watching, what are some of the things that you would want them to learn?
So maybe you wanna learn about meal planning, about cooking, maybe you wanna learn general like home maintenance, maybe you wish you knew how to fix the toilet instead of having to call the repairman every time something. My sons loved to learn about survival. Survival skills, survival medicine, like I’d say, Alright guys, let’s go out in the woods, we’re gonna pretend that we’re on a mountain side, what are we gonna do for shelter, what are we gonna do for food? How are we gonna filter our water… Okay, that’s a science… And that is something they loved… What are some other things? My husband, he wishes he learned about marine biology and nothing boring, not a textbook, but real living books.
They wish they had learned about archaeology and more about food preservation and solar energy, like my son is looking at building a couple of solar panels. And there’s a lot of engineering that goes into that. A lot of math and science, some other things. Let’s see, he wishes he had learned more about animal care sometimes we say when we were early on in farming, we wish we knew what the Amish do, how do they know how to do this and that and that, and we’ve been building our skills over the last decade, but still, if we learned this in high school, it would be like second nature to us. Another thing that I taught my so, and this is something I think is really missing today, is people skills.
When my sons were in high school, we did this great book from 1930s, it’s called How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Now, it sounds bad because in the current age, people take advantage, but this book was truly written like how do you put others first, how do you first develop a rapport with people, how do you talk to people, how do you look them in the eyes, shake hands, with them, all of the people skills that sometimes in our culture, they’re sometimes a little bit lacking, and don’t you wish that was a class that you had had in high school or that other people around you knew, just basic manners. That’s another class that we did as part of our health was manners for children about how to answer the phone, how to answer the door, how to take a message, all of those things. So I wanna encourage you, it’s something exciting, what peaks your interest? What peaks their interest? And that’s the kind of thing that I’m gonna keep teaching you about, is designing the curriculum, not to be stale and boring, but to be exciting, and that’s one of the keys to keep your kids interested.
Alright, guys, I hope this was helpful. If it was, if you know somebody that this will bless. Share it with them. Alright, I’ll see you soon.
