A Day in the Life: Desire-led Worldschooling with Teenage Boys
I feel sluggish this morning. I’ve been doing too much for too long, and I know it. The traveling, working, and homeschooling has been intense during the last few months, and my body is crying out for rest. So, I give myself a little grace, hit the snooze button on my normal 5 am alarm, and ease out of bed around 6instead.
Today is Friday, the morning I send my weekly togetherness tip to mamas all over the world – it’s something I’ve been doing for nearly a year now, the way I connect with other moms to spark conversations about how we can build a connection with our kiddos that lasts long after they’re in our homes – and I treasure my Friday morning alone time writing and sending this little treat to the mamas in my world.
I finish writing around 8 am, just in time to check in with work (an online job I’ve had for years now) before my boys start to stir. So I grab a coffee and settle into my work until I see them emerge. Today is supposed to be #fieldtripfriday – a little tradition we started about a year ago to force us to get our heads out of the books, our bodies out of the house, and our feet moving to explore our surroundings – but I know today we won’t actually be able to go anywhere. We’re all just too tired, and I know it.
We are world-schoolers, road-schoolers, ocean schoolers, travel-schoolers, and we have been since 2013 when we sold our home and all of our belongings and moved into a 30-foot Airstream to see the United States together.
We love it – most of the time - and we’ve been able to see 48 states and over 50 national and state parks together in just a few years together. But this past fall, we decided to take our travel-schooling adventures a little further and get into some international adventures by boat. Just a few weeks into our new adventure, though, we hit health challenges and had to sell our boat, leaving us super tired and a little discouraged too. So, we’ve rented a house in the North Carolina mountains to do a big family reset while we wait for the summer camping season to start. It’s rainy and cold today, and I know no one is going to feel up to a big #fieldtripfriday adventure (or even a small one). I feel relieved.
We’re also a desire-led, adventure-schooling kind of family, not because I chose that method when I started homeschooling in 2009 and have stuck with it all this time, but rather because my kids have demanded it of me.
As little boys, they were wild. They wanted to put their hands on everything, and they couldn’t stay in their seats, which is exactly why we started homeschooling. So, we had to get outside and make an adventure out of everything just to wear them out enough so that we could try to learn to read on the couch for a few minutes in the afternoons. Eleven years later, I know the desire-led approach to learning is still right for them (even if we don’t have to run around outside as much as we did in those early days), and we try to approach all of our work –reading, writing, arithmetic, whatever – with a sense of adventure, discovery, and curiosity for maximum engagement. I find it’s the only way to keep all of us interested and on-task every day (myself included).
Around 9 am, I see the boys sleepily wander over to the table where I work, give each one a squeeze, and ask them what they want for breakfast. I start the kettle for hot cocoa and tea, and I get our little morning time tea pot ready. It’s the off-season for my hubby’s job, so he’s there too, wandering in for coffee, breakfast, and a few fun antics at the table as a family of four.
I try to breathe this moment in deep – this is truly the good stuff. This is what I live for.
A few minutes later, the food is gone, and they want to know how much school they have to do before they can get on with what they really want to do today – a big Lego project and a new video game. And so it begins.
#1– Curiosity Stream
Back in August, we decided we would be living on the ocean all winter this year and chose marine biology as one of our major learning areas. While we aren’t on the ocean right now, we’re still studying marine biology and are currently into the intricacies of shark behavior – a topic that Curiosity Stream has loads of resources for. I’m not quite ready to start the other things we need to do today(as usual, breakfast caught me right in the middle of a work project), so they spend a little while finishing up a documentary. I hear them chattering about the facts from the video, the crazy things they’re learning about sharks and I smile. Learning is happening – even when I can’t be totally present for it.
#2– Read-alouds
In this current homeschool seasons of ours, I call everything we’re doing aloud together a “read-aloud” because it gets my boys excited. My boys tend to lose interest in almost anything if I call it by a subject name like “science” or “history” or “geography”, but we can study almost anything, even extremely complex concepts, if I call it a read-aloud. So I announce that it’s time for read-alouds, and I hear my 14-year-old say, “Do you want me to read? I hope we’re doing that Big Fish book; it’s the only one I really enjoy reading aloud.” So that’s what we start with, and I’m impressed by the way he reads these scientific words aloud. I don’t understand them all (I have my strengths, but biology isn’t one of them), but it doesn’t matter. His little brother draws and listens. We look up concepts, chat about what we’ve read, and let our big questions hang in the air. Seeing him lead the discussion makes me think about what kind of college professor he might be when he grows up (if that’s what he chooses), but I don’t say as much. Instead, I smile and thank him for reading.
We cover our other topics in read-aloud fashion: language arts with Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and Donald Murray’s Write to Learn (both books I’m using personally right now and couldn’t help but share with my kiddos, even if they might be a little young for them), science and social studies with Big Fish, Rivers and Spineless, and character development with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens and a devotional from YouVersion. We talk about concepts and big questions. We read beautiful quotes over again and sit in quiet appreciation of them, and I think, “Man, I love having teens and tweens!” Our early homeschooling days sure were wild and fun, but this is fun too. Big concepts, big questions, and big connection.
#3– Writing
Both boys have creative writing projects they’re working on right now. One has been writing a fantasy novel for almost a year now, and he’s drawn big, intricate maps to illustrate the lands that appear in the storyline and everything. I have no idea how this began (and I certainly didn’t assign it), but I encourage it, and I make sure to give him space and time to work on it every single day if I can. His brother is into short creative writing prompts right now, struggling to find his way into bigger projects, and that’s okay. So, I take a note from our Write to Learn text and ask the boys to look at their creative projects and think about what they want to write before writing, rehearse it in their subconscious 10 minutes, and then write as fast as they can until the ideas stop. It’s one of Murray’s biggest pieces of advice for any kind of writer – even elementary students. One wants to read what he’s written so far first, so I let him, and the other draws while I answer emails. Then, the fun begins, and they both hop into the activity and write. I love to see them writing, so I let this go on as long as it will. Then, I let them show me their work, we tweak a few things together, and we end up talking about the editing process, why it’s so hard, and how it’s okay not to do it every single day but eventually the editing and rewriting comes. Now I’m dreaming about them becoming published authors one day, but I don’t say this aloud either. I just let this big conversation sit with us for a while.
Break-
Ah, the brain break – a magic trick I learned from Teach Like Finland long ago. It’s truly amazing – they run off to play for 15 minutes while I dig into work, and when the buzzer goes off, they come back for another assignment. We try to do the 45-15 method they use in Finland, but so many times we want the freedom to be in a flow for more than 45 minutes, so we just call a brain break when our brains feel full and it works.
Lunch–
I’m so thankful the hubs is around to make lunch because this is when I catch up on my work projects and emails. He chats with the boys while they fix food together, and then we all eat together. Afterward, they take a small break (one with Legos and the other with a book), and I finish off another work project or two.
#4– Math
While we’re big fans of the old tried and true Saxon math books and we spend our math time most days solving problems and reading lessons in their gradual-learning method, on Fridays, we normally leave the math books on the shelf while we explore outside for our #fieldtripfriday. When we can’t get out on a Friday (like today), we spice it up with some game-schooling instead. Deciding which game to play, though, is always our first challenge. One wants to play Scythe – his favorite game since receiving it as a Christmas gift this year and something we haven’t been able to play nearly enough because of all of our travels and big life changes since then. His brother wants to play Sabac – the quick, easy Star Wars game we picked up last week while at Disney World. I know he only wants to play this because he’s obsessed with all things Star Wars right now, but I don’t care. We decide to play both. I only have time for a quick game of Sabac before I need to get some work done, so they play Scythe together with their Dad – an endeavor that takes over an hour. It’s becoming their thing, and while I get really sad sometimes about having to miss out on a big game like this with them, I know I’m so blessed to be able to work from home and homeschool them at the same time, so I let it be. I’ve got a few things in the works to help me be able to have more time freedom and I hope to one day be able to put aside my computer completely during school hours, but until that happens, this is my reality, and I do the best I can.
SnowBreak –
Right inthe middle of the game, we see snow flurries outside, so we take a few minutes to run out and catch a few flakes on our tongues.
#5– Freedom!
Finally, we’ve checked enough boxes for the day and the boys can move into what they really want to do – a big Lego project and a few video games – and I get to dive into my work projects for the remainder of the day. I love the Lego, but I don’t like the video game stuff at all (more on that later). Even so, I know there are so many good things happening in their brains while they do both. (I even caught my 14-year-old reading about quantum physics on his phone the other night because of something he saw in a video game. I didn’t even know that could happen.) When the weather warms up, they’ll be outside more and not so subject to the siren call of the screen, so for now, this is us.
Today was a good school day. We talked. We read. We had fun. And, we created some beautiful things.
We didn’t get to our silent reading during our school hours today, but we’ll catch up this weekend.
Was all of this in my lesson plan book before we started? Nope – it was blank this morning at 9am, but it’s all in there now as a beautiful memory of what we learned together today.
Do all homeschool, roadschool, or travel schooling days look like this? Nope - In fact, yesterday, we had a baking-all-day kind of homeschooling day with lots of silent reading, a good book on Audible, and two big baking projects because we haven’t had an oven in our little home for over two years. (Maybe next time I write a Day in the Life post, I’ll choose that kind of day.)
But this was one day in the life of our little homeschool - just one little snapshot.
I hope it helps anyone out there wondering what it might be like, and I hope it gives you peace to know that my homeschool/worldschool isn't perfect, it's sometimes chaotic, and we're regular folks just like so many other families just trying to do our best to keep these kids of ours loving learning.
Want to read more Day in the Life posts from other homeschooling mamas?
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The 3-Step Strategy for Successfully Homeschooling Any Subject
our weekly email group full of goodies every Friday morning
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I hope to see you out there!
