For twenty years, I homeschooled with my three kids. Before that, I was an elementary school teacher. My teaching experience did not exactly prepare me to be a homeschooling parent; it was more often a hindrance than a help.
Over time I learned to loosen my teaching expectations and came to trust the kids, letting them guide their learning more and more, while still embracing the structure of a regular time working together. I tell more about our homeschooling style in this post.
The “kids” are all now young adults–28, 25 and 19. H homeschooled until he was 16, when he decided to go to high school as a junior. He started making films as a teenager, studied film in college and is now pursuing life as a freelance cinematographer in Brooklyn. L homeschooled until high school. The girl was born knowing her own mind; she wrote her own major in college, combining art, education and empowerment of the individual, and is now in grad school studying Urban Policy and Leadership. Mr. T also homeschooled until high school. He’s now an undergrad, studying from home during the pandemic, double-majoring in History and Comedy Filmmaking—no surprise if you’ve read about him here over the years.
There are a lot of posts here, going all the way back to 2008, with a particular focus on helping kids love writing. I’ve tried to organize the highlights for you. Thank you for being here!
lots and lots of posts
on helping kids
guide their own learning
read the post that’s been viewed
more than 27,000 times,
with lots of thought-provoking comments!
my favorite topic!
there are oodles of posts here on
making writing fun for kids
a series on
taking dictation,
one of the best ways to encourage
a resistant writer of any age
a series on mentoring
rather than teaching
(and why it’s more effective
in the long run)
instagram series on what childhood homeschooling fun
can lead to in adult life
my parents’ guide to facilitating
writer’s workshops:
one of the best ways to motivate
kids to write!
download a free PDF
of my essay for Mothering
dig through archives of posts
from 2020,
2019,
2018,
2017,
and so on…
all the way back to
2008,
a time long ago and far away