Homeschooling for a Year

In the name of deschooling, we had our first of hopefully many poetry tea times recently. This is a really fun concept that I learned about while reading Julie Bogart’s book, The Brave Learner . I’m drawn to the idea because, who doesn’t love a tea party!? And if I can incorporate some poetry or other form of reading/learning to the experience, all the better! The kids were super excited for tea time when I let them know it was on the agenda yesterday. Just like the tea time of my own childhood, I substituted tea for things like juice, chocolate milk, etc. Whatever your kids enjoy drinking really. And we had a mixture of sweet and savory finger snacks to accompany the “tea”. I laid out some poetry books that I purchased with their curricula this year, as well as some poetry books from John’s collection. I just opened one of the kids’ poetry books and read to myself until I found a short, funny poem that I shared with them. This spurred a conversation about a form of short poetry:

About Us I’m a Mom of 3. I have 2 boys: C10 and L7; and a girl: L2. Why are we homeschooling for a year? My eldest has ADHD and I believe he may also have dysgraphia. Suffice it to say I had heard from his school a lot about how he wasn’t completing things on time, and I saw first hand his struggles with memorizing math, and with any kind of writing when helping him with his homework. Add to this my 7 year old son who was just miserable all school year. Always complaining about how much he hates school. I don’t know if part of it was seasonal affective disorder, but I got the impression that school was as soul sucking for my middle child as it was for me as a child. I was inspired by family and friends who have and are homeschooling their kids to give it a shot for ourselves. I wanted to find a way for my kids to enjoy learning. I wanted to give them opportunities to learn more than what traditional schooling sets kids up to learn. I wanted my kids to have chances to find real pa