Fostering Curiosity Through Nature-Based Learning

  School districts are starting to make plans to reopen - some with sneeze guards between desks; some on reduced schedules to accommodate the amount of space needed for social distancing, while some are going online-only for the Fall semester. How will your child cope with this? Did your child adapt well to online learning when schools closed?  Will they find it relatively easy to see their friends but not be close to them?  There are some children for whom these arrangements work well, but for others parents see big trouble ahead. What are the options?  Even if you've never considered homeschooling as a realistic option in the past, it might now be the tool that gets you through the next few months.  But are you terrified that you don't know everything your child needs to know?  And how could it possibly work for your family? Join me for a conversation with Dr. Laura Froyen, who is considering homeschooling her two children next semester - even though she has a Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies and wrote a dissertation on supporting young children in learning to read, she's nervous that she doesn't know everything she needs to know - so if you're worried about this you're certainly not alone! We look at what we know about how long children actually spend learning in school (the answer is going to shock you!), how you can work AND homeschool, and how you can get confident that you really can support your child's love of learning - even if you know your child will eventually go back to school.   Click the banner to learn more about The Confident Homeschooler:       [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast where I critically examine strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. In this series of episodes called Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, we turn the tables and hear from listeners. What have they learned from the show that's helped their parenting? Where are they still struggling? And what tools can we find in the research that will help? If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE guide to 7 Parenting Myths We Can Safely Leave Behind, 7 Fewer Things to Worry About subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us   Jen Hello, and welcome to Sharing Your Parenting Mojo. We are here with Dr. Laura Froyen today to discuss the topic of homeschooling. She's thinking about whether and how to do it over the next few months. And as we were chatting about it, we figured that some of the things that she's thinking about right now are probably similar to some of the things that other parents are thinking about too. And so we thought, why not just get on a call and discuss them live and share what we're thinking and what we're learning with other people as well. So that's kind of what we're going to do today. So welcome, Laura, do you want to tell us a bit about yourself and your background first?   Laura Absolutely. Thanks for having me and agreeing to answer my questions Jen. So so I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and I have my PhD in Human Development and Family Studies with a specialization in couples and family therapy. I am currently a peaceful parenting and respectful relationship coach and course creator, but I started right out of grad school in an academic job. And so I did my dissertation on how family processes influenced the home learning environment and children's early literacy skills. I'm a big believer in delaying, reading, teaching, active reading, teaching until in a developmentally appropriate age. I've always been deeply curious and, you know, interested in the prospect of homeschooling, but then also not sure if I could ever handle doing it. I have a very strong willed personality, I tend towards control. It's something that being in the respectful parenting world as a constant exercise and letting go for me. My oldest daughter is my best teacher in that way. So I guess I just I'm so glad that I get the chance to learn from such an expert on this, as I'm trying to make a really conscious and informed decision for my family.   Jen And I think the thing that stuck out to me when you were saying that you wanted to talk about this was that you have a PhD in a related topic and you've studied reading, and you still feel unsure about how to best support your child in learning to read. And so when parents are thinking, oh my goodness, I don't know how I'm going to even do this. How do we even support my child? They're not alone, right? Even you're struggling with this.   Laura No, I literally am an expert in how parents support their kids and learning to be at home. And it's still like I my youngest is five, she just turned five. She had a quarantine birthday. And she would be learning to read if she went into 5K in the fall. And I am so intimidated at the idea that no so if we homeschool for this next year for just the fall or kind of whatever, it ends up looking like that she'll go into a school system and I am worried about her being behind because, like it's, we're not in as a Scandinavian country where she wouldn't be allowed to learn at her, you know, reading at a developmentally appropriate age. We're in the US, and it's the reality of it. So yeah, no, of course, parents are not alone in this. I think like I think I have a couple of things that are coming completely normal parent, like even like all of us are, you know, we all are. The experts make mistakes. We have questions, we need support, and it's okay.   Jen Yeah. Yep. Awesome. Well, thank you for, for owning that for all of us. And yeah, I definitely mess up too. And we figure things out as we go. And we move on, we adjust and we move on.   Laura There's something so intense about the idea of like, teaching your kids. So you know, like, I mean, I feel so much more relaxed about parenting, just because I know like, we're resilient. Like our relationship is resilient, like attachment relationships are built to be resilient and, and open a bit. There's just something so intense about being charged with our child's learning, you know, and, yeah, so I'm looking forward to hearing about that from you about, like, what are my options and approaches to homeschooling? What do I need to be thinking about?   Jen Okay. Well, let's start there, because I think that's a really nice place to start. And it's so interesting what you say about needing to teach my child. And that's such a kind of a Western idea, basically, from someone who has been through school and I went through school you went through school, we have this idea that our the teachers role is to know everything that there is to know. And they hold the knowledge. And the child's job is to kind of wait there with this ready and open mind. And the teacher pours the knowledge out of their jug into the student’s vessel. And that's how knowledge is transferred. And so when we're thinking about different approaches to homeschooling, I kind of think on a continuum where traditional schooling is kind of at that end of it is at one end of it. And then there's a whole continuum of potential approaches to the other end where we just see learning as part of life. And so if we kind of talk through what are some of those, well, anything that's curriculum driven, is based on this idea that the teacher knows what there is to know. And their job is to teach the child and so when you're doing this at home, I mean, there are books that you can buy of 100 curriculum options. And you can go through and you can pick one that covers all the subjects that you want to study. And you can pick, you can just decide to focus on reading and math. And just buy those ones, there's any combination of these things that you can do, and build your own approach to it. But it is based on the idea that somebody somewhere knows the essential things that children need to know. And you're kind of saying that…   Laura Like, I don't even believe that. I know!   Jen Yeah, and by saying, I'm going to go with that approach, you're essentially saying, I do believe that I do believe that there is a set of skills that somebody has decreed is the right skills for children to have, and where I don't know what that set of skills is. So I'm going to trust somebody else, I'm going to outsource that aspect of the decision making. And so when we do that, what we're doing is we're kind of absolving ourselves of responsibility for needing to know everything our child needs to know and that can feel good that can feel like a weight off our shoulders. That somebody else has decided this stuff is important. It's not just me. And if I follow this, my child would know what they need to know.   Laura Yeah, you're speaking to me. Because I am such a perfectionist, a recovering perfectionist, I work on my perfectionism every day. But like, I sometimes get paralyzed in doing something new because I want to do it the right way. Yes, I have this concept that there is a right way. And if I could just know the right way, what the right way it would be right. It's just, and I have dedicated my children's life to trusting them. Why wouldn't I trust them in their education? And their learning process? It's just this there's this big disconnect. Yeah, I feel like what it isn't, is there a process of like, like unschooling yourself?   Jen There is there is obviously there is. Yeah, and that's the reason you're feeling this cognitive dissonance.   Laura That’s the word.   Jen Yeah. I mean, you know, one thing you believe it to be true, and yet you grew up In a system that taught you that another way was the right way to do things you feel in your bones that trusting your children is the right thing to do. But you were told in school for a couple of decades, that you don't trust children that you tell children what they need to learn, and you were told what you needed to learn. And that's why you're feeling this. That's why you're having such a hard time with this. And we're not alone. I was lucky enough to see this when my daughter Carys was you know, she was two or three at the time, and I saw, okay, well, if I believe this about learning, how can I put her in that environment? And so I had years to figure this out. And now parents are they're feeling this discrepancy, and they have weeks to figure it out. And so…   Laura Clearly there’s a sense of urgency.   Jen Yeah, that's why you're feeling stressed. And so okay, so let's keep going through our potential curriculum options, or potential approaches to schooling. So you're kind of moving towards more self-directed Charlotte Mason is a name that gets thrown around a lot. You've probably heard of it. She was an Englishwoman Who Lived In the early 1900s, and she had these kind of three philosophies or three ideas that underpin her philosophy. Your values shape your child's education, cultivating good habits is important, and based on her background that include very heavy religious values. And thirdly, we should give children living thoughts and ideas, not just dry facts. So ideas to understand not facts to remember. And so that sounds pretty good, although there tend to be ideas about what are the right ideas. And it's not the child's place to determine what those right ideas are. The parent’s place to determine what those ideas are. So there's that and then classical homeschooling is another method where you have these kind of three stages of learning. The grammar stage where you're you really are kind of doing rote memorization, you're learning facts. And then as the child gets a little bit older, they begin to be able to apply reasoning to knowledge. And then the third phase is rhetoric where we're applying wisdom and judgment. And so you can already probably see already the discrepancy between these approaches between Charlotte Mason between classical homeschooling, either we're living thoughts and ideas with Charlotte Mason, or we're saying that we need to memorize dry facts. That's what that's the work of early childhood because the child is incapable of reasoning early on and therefore they have to wait to do that. So which is it? How can we figure that out? And so what you'll often find with these approaches homeschooling is that whoever's approach you end up falling will say all the other approaches are wrong. If you do it my way, you'll be golden. And so just keep going through these and we'll kind of tie it together. So you probably have heard of Montessori and Waldorf and Montessori - with its focus on personal responsibility and Waldorf kind of bringing in mystical elements. And so there are homeschooling approaches that you can use that are pretty similar to the kinds of things that you have seen in preschools with the same name. Unit studies where you're kind of allowing the child to live with a topic for a certain time, so maybe they might explore the History and Geography and literacy and math angles to whatever is the topic they're interested in. pretty often as the adult that picks the unit and says, Hey, we're gonna learn about ancient Rome. And then you explore it from all angles. So that can be more interesting as a child, although it's definitely more interesting to them if they are allowed to pick the unit. And the parent may also supplement with a curriculum. So if we feel like we're not getting enough math with ancient Rome, then we'll maybe we'll do math curriculum on the side. And then kind of where we're ending up here is with more child led approaches to learning. And so with the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education, you're really focusing on following the child's interests. And there's a heavy emphasis on what's called the co-creation of knowledge. So the idea that knowledge isn't some thing that you can put into somebody's mind. But through having this conversation, we are co creating knowledge. We are developing both of our ideas about what it means to homeschool. So that's an approach that I really like. And then sort of the opposite end from the school approach is unschooling. Conveniently named school or unschool, which sees learning in life is inextricably linked. And by living life, the child learns. So when a child is in school, what we're saying to them is, you're not ready to live life, you're going to be here you're going to do this stuff that we're telling you is meaningful. And when we deem you ready, we'll let you out into the world and you can live life. What unschooling says is that learning comes through living life, and by living life, we are doing our work. This is the work of a life of childhood, of adulthood, of our entire lives. And so when we're interested in something, we will learn about it when we need to learn something, we'll learn about it. I know you just started a podcast, you have probably had a fairly steep learning curve for the number of things. You're not an expert in podcasting yet. You've learned enough to be able to record and release an episode. And when there's something you find you can't do, you're going to Google “The thing I can't do” and you're going to learn how to do that task. That's how we learn in real life. We don't have this, you know, I'm going to be a podcaster. And so I'm going to learn everything about the recording software I'm going to use. Why would you do that?   Laura Right. Why would you? Learn as you need it. Yeah   Jen Yes, exactly. And so that's more about kind of what unschooling does. It says, we're going to take this as far as we want to take if I want to learn everything about dinosaurs or ancient Rome, I'm going to absorb because I'm just fascinated with this stuff. And there are other things that I just need to know the bare minimum right now. When I need more, I'll tack on more. So let me pause there and just I want to hear your reactions and what's calling to you and what feels comfortable and what feels super scary, but really interesting, anyway.   Laura Yeah. So in the past couple months of being at home with my daughter, we, you know, so part of like, with my older one, like we're both stubborn, and so, like, even as much as I kind of wanted to homeschool, like when she turned three I was like, “This is not going to work for us” We just butted heads. Like even if I ever tried to teach her something. She knows I'm a feelings doctor. Like that's what we say like a therapist. This was the feelings doctor. She would much rather learn about emotions and feelings from her guidance counselor than from her mother, you know, like it just like there was just multiple relationships. I like it got too complicated. Anyway, so when we got into kind of our saver at home orders, we were learning at home, her teachers with assignments that she was not interested in doing. And it was this big battle and my relationship with her was way more important. So we just didn't do them. And she's a very self-motivated learner. And I sat down with her teacher about two weeks in and I was like, This is not working for us. I'm happy to turn in what she's writing and reading kind of on her own, but I'm not gonna make her do these assignments. And her teacher was like, that's totally fine. Like, All I care about is that she's writing and reading really. And so like so today. She had some assignments from her teacher where they were given a virtual field trip to an aquarium, like an aquarium in Georgia. And all of her assignments, her math and reading and her writing were all based on that. And she like, loved it. And she loves marine biology. She loves ocean life. She did way more than what was required of her. She filled her notebook with like, for small space writing, like full of pages and math problems. And, like, I mean, just facts and stuff to do above and beyond what was asked because it was interesting to her and I just like I can see us doing that. What do you want? You know, what do you want to do today? Like what would be good for you today? Oh, yeah, I can see us doing that. Um, it's just hard. It's scary to think about like, especially like with math. I think math is the thing with her. She loves it and she likes learning about it. She likes to do worksheets. I just don't know how that all fits in. I don't know.   Jen Yeah. Yeah, no worries. And I think that is in a way that teach you got lucky that she picked a topic that your daughter is interested in. If she had picked the desert, then your daughter probably would have said, I don't care about the desert. I don't want to do this. I'm not doing it and you would have been in your usual battle. And the reason that it didn't go that way is because the teacher landed on something that happened to be of interest to her, probably half the class doesn't care about.   Laura I don't battle with those things. Like I drop the rope and like, I'm not doing this great, we'll do...