A Year of Personal Growth for Teens | Teaching Mindset, Confidence & Life Skills in Our Homeschool

Hey everybody. Welcome to the wall walkway. I'm Jessica. Today's video is going to be our one thing for the upcoming homeschool year. Each and every year I pick one thing that I really want to make sure I am focusing on. I want it to be kind of the base of our homeschool year. Sometimes it can be a habit. Sometimes it's something that I feel like has just been laid really heavy on my heart. Sometimes it's just something that I need to make sure that we're focusing on and sometimes it's something I think Emily needs to focus on. Over the years we have laid down habits like read alouds and nature study and doing more art, um, playing more games. We have focused on things like logic. Last year I made sure that we were connecting before we hit the curriculum. That was something that I needed to focus on this year. I am calling it our year of personal growth. I feel like as we enter into the teen years more than academics, what I want to make sure I'm instilling in Emily is that I am raising a capable, confident teenager. So because of that, that's what I'm focusing on this year. It's the year she turned 13. It's our last year before we hit high school. I just feel like it's the perfect time to really focus on making sure I'm raising that capable, confident teenager who's going to be ready hopefully to enter the real world. With that being said, I have picked for the most part, a handful of books. These books are going to be ones that we read aloud together because another thing that I love about the teen years are those deep conversations and I want to make sure that we are having those deep conversations with them. The first thing that I have is a year of positive thinking for teens. We will be adding this to our basket time because it just has a short little kind of daily motivation to beat stress, inspire happiness and achieve your goals. So this is something that we'll just be doing on a daily basis just to kind of lay that foundation. The first book that I have is one that I actually read when I kind of started my healthy journey, which included mental health as well, and it is make your bed. So this is little things that can change your life and maybe the world. We will be reading this one aloud together. It's probably the one we're going to start the year with just because I want to make sure we're talking about those little things and getting back into those habits, right, of making our bed and doing the things that we need to be doing that we've kind of been slacking on over the summer. And then the rest of the books that I have, I kind of picked for multiple reasons. Number one, they span a wide range of things. We've got mindset, we've got emotional, we've got habits, we've got a little bit of everything here, but also every one of these books is a teen version or a kids version of the adult book. The majority of them I have read the adult book and I got a lot of value out of it. So I knew she would get a lot of value out of it as well. Some of them I have not read the adult book yet and I'm going to read it alongside her. So we will read these books aloud together, but I will also at the same time be reading or listening to the audible version of the adult book. That way I will have even more kind of information, statistics, things that we can talk about because I noticed in a lot of the ones when I read the adult and then turn around and read the teen version to myself when I was proofing these books, there was a little more antidotes or a little more statistics or a little more background on the adult. I don't necessarily think she needs all of that, but I like having it and kind of knowing it so that if we get deep in conversation, I have more to add to the conversation because of that. So every one of these that I'm going to show you has an adult book. So if you're looking at these and you're like, man, these are great for my teen, I wish there was one that I could read as well. There is the first one we have is your new playlist. This is by John Acuff. I have personally read everything by him and love it. This is all about mindset. So it is the superpower of mindset. It is basically a way to reprogram those negative soundtracks that we have in our mind that say things like I'm not good enough and turning them on their head and making it basically a new playlist that is positive versus negative. Another one by John Acuff we have is how teens win. This is all about accomplishing big goals and it's kind of specifically almost ran even to a perfectionist. Um, we're like done is better than perfect. So another really great one cause I do have a perfectionist, a teen's guide to the five love languages. So this is just the teen's version of the very popular five love languages. Um, how to understand yourself and improve all of your relationships. We have how to win friends and influence people for teen girls. So this is an essential guide for new generations of empowered, savvy and confident young women. We have brave. This is a teen girls guide to beating worry and anxiety. Eat that frog for students. Um, I have read eat that frog actually multiple times. It's really, really great for having those habits, doing the hard things first, um, finding ways to be more productive, um, and being productive in the right ways. Like not just, I'm going to be productive for the sake of being productive, but like really putting your time into the things that count the most. The confidence code for girls. Girls can rule the world. All you need is confidence. This is, um, taking risks messing up and becoming your amazingly imperfect, totally powerful self winning the war in your mind for teens. This is kind of like a prepare to do doubt, prepare to do battle. We're going to be, um, stopping self doubt, stopping negative thinking, um, kind of changing your thinking to change your life type of book. We have rich dad, poor dad for teens. Now we're going to read this one first. I actually do think that the rich dad, poor dad, like the original book has enough value and is probably, um, at a level she could understand. I'm probably going to save that for high school though for her, but this is just the secrets about money that you don't learn in school. What color is your parachute for teens? So this one is all about discovering yourself, designing your future and kind of planning for your dream job. So it's all about like, like kind of like what character traits you have and, um, what jobs might fit you best. And then having to kind of design your future towards the jobs and the things that you want in your future. I'm not sure how in depth we'll get with this, but I think it's a really good start to kind of being able to gear high school towards her interest or her future job. And then the seven highly effective habits for teens. So this is just, um, basically the teen version of seven highly effective habits. It is really, really great. I've read the adult version. I loved it. It is essentially like a roadmap, a step-by-step guide to helping you get from where you are to where you want to be and those habits that are going to help you get there. So there you have it. These are the books that we're going to be reading aloud together for our year of personal growth. Like I said, this is a lot less resources than I would typically have, but at the age and stage that Emily is, I feel like conversations have really become a huge part of kind of our learning. And so I love that all of these books are going to work on that your personal growth, raising a confident and capable teenager, and also really give us the ability to deep dive into those conversations on all of these topics. So as you can see, we're going to be talking about habits. We're going to be talking about money, life skills, mental health, physical health, all of the wonderful things that are hopefully going to help her be a capable, confident adult. Eventually, if you have any books along these lines that you think I should add to our list, please let me know down in the comments.