I don’t think anyone would disagree that this year has been a strange one. Life as we know it has been altered or altogether cancelled at times. We have had to adapt and find new ways for almost everything throughout the year, and we will have to continue to do so for the unforeseeable future. The biggest change for my family started with our schooling, and at times, lack thereof. And by lack thereof, I mean curriculum-based learning.
We are new to homeschooling this year, and although I have always contemplated homeschooling, this year I received the needed push to dive right in. I finally started doing my homework about homeschooling, and what I learned was life altering. With all the uncertainty of how school is taught or when it will be closed down again was quite a push for a lot of people. I, on the other hand, didn’t have much of a choice. I am a stay-at-home mom, and my youngest son is immunocompromised. Therefore, my responsible choices were remote learning provided by the public school or homeschooling. Remote learning didn’t appeal to me at all, so homeschooling it was.
I went out and bought the curriculum along with many other teaching supplies. I set up a classroom in our house, and I was very well prepared. It was tough in the beginning as I was figuring out the curriculum and how best to teach it. My children were not at all interested in sitting at a desk and working on worksheets. It became quite clear within the first month that it was not the best fit for my children. Things had to change or else we were all going to have burnout and soon. I decided to take the route of unschooling. So here we are, adapting to a completely foreign way of life and (for the most part) completely loving it.
Unschooling has altered almost every aspect of our lives, from when we wake to how we learn and many things beyond that. But the most positive thing has been the change in the relationship between my children and me. I didn’t see it when they were attending public school, but we were becoming strangers. I knew there was something wrong, I could feel it, but I didn’t know how to stop it, let alone fix it. We were starting to have a disconnection between us because we were away from each other so much. I didn’t really know what they liked to do, what they were interested in, or how they filled their days.
When I used to ask my boys what they did at school that day, I would get the dreaded answers that most parents of school children get— “I don’t remember” or “Nothing.”
Talk about frustrating! I was trying to communicate with my children, and they were so overdrawn from their day that they didn’t even want to talk about it. And then there were the anxiety-ridden meltdowns. I didn’t see at the time that they were mostly all related to going to school. Like I said, we were losing a connection. They were so tired and drained from their day that they didn’t want to do anything when they came home except watch TV or play video games. I am not saying they don’t want to watch TV or play video games nowadays (that would be a flat out lie!), but now I see them being children.
I see them play and make crafts and a billion other things. I see them learning because they are interested in what they are doing. I see them laughing and smiling and just being children, and they are not tired all the time. It has astonished me what they can come up with from their imagination and what they talk about, and they are starting to tell me what they are interested in.
The light is coming back into their eyes, and slowly but surely, I am getting my children back, and I couldn’t be more grateful. Keeping my children home has saved them from being lifeless drones. They are not stressed the way they used to be. Life is more simple. More pure. The learning is coming naturally, and nothing is forced. The pressure has been taken out of learning. They can be kids. They can be happy. They can have fun. They are learning all the time, and all we are doing is living life.
Nicole McReynolds is a homeschooling mom who resides in Wellington North, Ontario, and lives on a small homestead with her two little boys, ages 8 and 6. She is taking a more traditional approach to teaching by incorporating a hands-on and natural way of learning. Nicole is the curator of Backyard Bounties, an online source that connects customers to local farmers/small producers and vice versa. Backyard Bounties is accompanied by Backyard Bounties of Southern Ontario (a Facebook group) and Backyard Bounties Homestead on Instagram and YouTube.
Read more articles from homeschoolers sharing why they homeschool.
"Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6).