This ONE Thing Completely Changed How I Homeschool Our Teens

When our homeschooled kids hit the teen years, my worries about doing it right nearly stole the joy from our homeschool. I thought the high school years meant mastering transcripts, credits, and advanced classes. I was wrong, and that misunderstanding almost cost us what mattered most. In the process, I realized that the heart of their education had far less to do with academics and everything to do with who our teens were becoming. Homeschooling high school does look different than the elementary years, but not in the ways that I thought. I want to tell you about the one thing that completely changed how I homeschool our teens. If you're new, hi, my name is Sherry. I'm a Christian homeschooling mom to 10 kids married to my high school sweetheart, Nelson. We've been married for 25 years. I love encouraging other moms here on my channel and also on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com. To give you a little backstory, my husband and I have homeschooled from the very beginning. I had been a public school teacher before I stayed home with our oldest, and although you would think I would feel completely confident about teaching our own kids, it was quite the opposite. The thought of teaching my own kids really intimidated me, and homeschooling seemed way out of my comfort zone. But the Lord provided some great friends at that time who also were thinking about homeschooling. We kind of jumped in together and started, and it was a lot at the beginning, but over time it became easier. I learned to establish some routines that really helped us. I learned how to be better at breaking things down and teaching my kids. We, of course, hit many roadblocks along the way, but with more time and experience, I just learned how to make it work. Once you have a few years under your belt, you gain more confidence. So when our oldest son was in about fifth or sixth grade, I was very confident about how homeschooling was going for us. It was such a great fit for our family. Our kids were getting an excellent education. It was individualized, yet we were able to have a lot of family time, and our kids were really close. There were so many things about it that I just loved. But as I began to look forward to the high school years, it was almost like returning back to that same stage that I was in when we started out at the very beginning in kindergarten, and I started becoming very intimidated by high school. I was looking at transcripts and the law, how many credits our kids needed to graduate, whether or not I wanted to have them college ready, and how to do that dual enrollment. There were so many new things to learn, and I did one thing I did right was to go to some moms that were ahead of me and ask for help, get all of their insight, and that really did help quite a bit. But I did what a lot of us do when we're intimidated by something. I overcompensated. I picked a very rigorous style curriculum. It was highly academic, and that's how we began. We've been having some beautiful snow days here in our area, and I always want to give the kids time to go out and play in the snow, even if it means an interruption to our school day. So this was one of those days where we woke up with lots of snow, and the kids went sledding, and everybody came in cold but so happy. Back to homeschooling in the teen years. Our oldest son began high school, and he did the work that I gave him, and he was very diligent about it. I don't think he really was enjoying it, and I didn't feel too sure of myself either, but I knew I had picked something that was excellent, and so we just kept going until one day a friend asked me a timely question. She was another homeschooling mom who was about two or three years behind me, and she just asked me how high school was going. The question was, how is he enjoying being homeschooled in high school? How's it going? And do you think, like, if you look ahead to when he's 30, and he's a dad, and he has kids, do you think this would be something that he would look back on fondly? Is this something that he would want for his own children? This question came at just the right time for me, because although looking at face value at the curriculum we had chosen, at what we were doing, it all looked excellent. The truth was, I wasn't enjoying it, and neither was he. The elementary years for us had truly been blissful, but the route we were taking for high school just wasn't a good fit for him. As he was growing, his interests were also changing. My teenage son, who loved to take apart cars and spend all his time fixing up his car, had to spend his school hours reading the of Plato and Socrates and diagramming independent clauses and dependent clauses. The work we were doing in school was not a great match for his bent. Now, I'm all for challenging my kids to excellence, and I know that children, teenagers, even adults, we can be lazy and just always want to take the easy road, so I don't think our kids should shy away from something because it's difficult. However, I also don't want to waste their time studying rigorous academic work that is not going to benefit them when they leave our home. As I began to realize that this was not a good fit for him and that it was putting tension in our relationship because he was doing the work, but his heart wasn't in it, and I was so focused on getting it right. I didn't want to mess up high school once again, just like it was when the kids were little, that fear of messing things up. At this point, we completely pivoted. My husband and I decided that our relationship with our kids in high school and the atmosphere in our home is going to be the top priority. We want to spend these years helping them develop the skills and talents to grow into the person that God designed them to be. We want them to look back on their early homeschooling years with fondness because they had time for free play. It was relaxed, and we want them to look at their high school years realizing that mom and dad gave them the freedom to pursue their interests and helped them to become skilled in the specific areas in which they were gifted. Our daughter is a perfect example of this. She has loved baking from the time she was old enough to follow a recipe, and we've given her a lot of freedom to explore this interest. She's started a micro bakery out of our home every weekend. She sells her baked goods. It's become an income for her, and she has just flourished being able to use her gifts in this way. I think homeschooling in the high school years is such a wonderful opportunity for teens. It's given our kids a lot of freedom, but I do think it's very important how you go about doing it. In the early years of teaching your kids, you're providing a nurturing environment. You want them to have a safe place to grow and develop. In the teen years, though, you're preparing them to launch out into the world on their own, so your approach changes. You start asking questions like, what is my child gifted at? What kind of skills do I want them to have to be prepared for real life? Allow me to share with you real quickly a free resource that's on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com this week. This is free copywork from the book James Harriet's Treasury for Children. These are some of my favorite stories to read with our kids, and this copywork goes along nicely with it. Again, you can find this at ourlifehomeschooling.com. Here, our daughter is taking a consumer math class, and right now she's working on budgeting. This is something that is so important to me and my husband that we teach our kids. In fact, my husband and I were just talking about this the other day. He uses Dave Ramsey's Every Dollar app to manage our budget, and he wants to sit down with each of the kids, the ones that are old enough and have jobs, have an income, and help them learn how to use this system to manage their money. Teaching these kinds of life skills that are helping them be prepared for living as an adult have just become much more important to us. One of the aspects I absolutely love about homeschooling in high school is that instead of being lumped in a classroom with a whole bunch of kids that are their same age, they are spending time with people that are younger than them that are looking up to them for influence and people that are older than them that they want to learn from. Now, just as a side note, our teenagers, I've mentioned this in other videos, they go to co-ops, they are with friends a lot, but they're not with friends every day, all day. Homeschooling allows us to be in a more natural environment for the majority of the time. For us, homeschooling in high school has meant we're not married to someone else's system that we have to commit to for such a long period of time. We can pick what we're involved in, and this has specifically made a difference for us homeschooling teenage boys. I talk about this a little bit more in a video I did on homeschooling boys. I'll link that for you. Teenage boys need to be raised by men, so I learned this from a mom who was ahead of me to turn over all of the homeschool work to my husband when our boys hit their teen years. I still help them plan, I still put their transcripts together, but they are ultimately responsible to him. You did these work problems. Okay, this one is actually not correct. Okay, divide eight children equally into two groups. You divided 16 children into two groups. 16 divided by 2 means you took 16 children and put them in two groups. Okay, do you see how that's a problem? When our boys become teens, we are looking for coaches and teachers who are men. So homeschooling our teen boys does not mean that they're home with me all day. Actually, quite the opposite. They are not home with me very much. It means that we get to pick and choose who is teaching them, who is influencing them. One of the best things that ever happened to both our sons was when they got a job with a contracting company. They get up really early every morning, they go out with a crew of men, and they're learning the skills of how to build a house. It's very fulfilling work for them, but most importantly they are learning from other men what it looks like to be a man. Like a woodpecker is a good example of this. Okay, so you can see the woodpecker. Woodpeckers will make their own hole in a living tree. William, do you know what kind of woodpecker that is? Uh, that's uh... Once they find a suitable hole, cavity nesters will often peck at it to make it larger and more to their liking. Once the hole is not fit for the bird, we'll begin filling the inside with nesting material. Now as we are giving our kids more time to pursue their interests, we're teaching them life skills, we're helping them learn entrepreneurial skills. This doesn't mean that they're not completing credits for a transcript. I have a sample of the transcript we use linked below if you'd like to look at it and use it for yourself. It just means that we're a little more creative with some of their credits. There's not only one way to get a credit. Now of course you need to look at the laws in your state and see what's required, but we have found creative ways to earn credits for our kids. It also means that we're looking at our kids individually. If a teen wants to go into a field that requires a college education, then they are going to take some more academic classes. But college is one of many options, and if a child is not bent toward that future, then it means that you can do what my daughter did. She took algebra one, she took geometry, and then she just did not want to take algebra two. So we found a consumer math class for her. She is loving it and I'm so happy that she's learning skills that she's going to actually use in life. So when our kids become teenagers, the one change we have made is to focus most of our attention on our relationships with them, the atmosphere in our home, and helping them develop their natural gifts and talents to become the person God created them to be. I'd love to hear from you. How is it going homeschooling your teen? Thanks for watching. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.