Home School High School

I did not expect to be homeschooling this long, and things do change a bit in the teenage years. But here we are and it's honestly working out fairly well. 

The first and biggest benefit is our ability to prioritize physical, mental and spiritual health. Tired people cannot regulate emotions very well and teens are even more susceptible as they go through puberty. When things are going off the rails, we revisit this and focus on it until it's regulated and then honestly, many problems clear themselves up quite easily. And if I'm ever in a panic about how all this is going, I can usually reorient myself with some sleep and healthy practices. Either it turns out I was worried about nothing, or the solution will come to me very easily, if a legitimate problem did in fact exist. 

The second benefit is flexibility. Due to this flexible nature of homeschooling in general, we were able to pivot and spend several months in Mexico City, while M worked in person with his team there. But it's not just geographic flexibility, it's also the idea that we can elevate some subjects when it makes sense (focusing on art made a ton of sense there since the scene is so vibrant and ever changing), and deprioritize things that are easy to come back to (like math). 

Our state requires that certain subjects be studied and provides guidelines for how many hours. We are filling out a transcript where Laurel puts together components of her self-directed learning that fit into these categories. One credit of Environmental Studies included an author study of Rachel Carson, notebooking prompts with a Harbor & Sprout guide on mycology and leading a class on foraging for peers at our co-op. Amazing, if you ask me! 

At some point, her evaluator and I can sign off on this and give her a home school diploma. However, as I am not an accredited institution, a high school diploma actually means very little on its own. So the more important thing is to discern short and long term goals, and design a course of study that walks you towards those things. And of course, to collect artifacts of growth and accomplishment, which will open doors along the way.