The first time it happened, it was about field trips. As the leader of our local homeschool support group, I was definitely involved in field trips. Sometimes, I even arranged them. Apparently, my three children had gone on enough field trips because they came to me one day, with our older son as their spokesperson, and informed me in no uncertain terms that they were not going on anymore field trips. I felt sad because I liked field trips. But I understood; they were getting too old for them anyway.
The next time it seemed more like a coup d’état. The explanation was definitely more prepared. Again, led by the eldest child, I was informed that we would not be doing any more unit studies. They involved too many rabbit trails. This insurrection made me even sadder than the field trips rebellion. I loved using unit studies, but they were determined. So, I capitulated for a while. I was able to sneak in a disguised unit study a couple years later, being very careful not to use the offending term unit study.
These two experiences provided good practice in listening to my children. I did not want to “provoke [my] children to wrath, lest they become discouraged” (Colossions 3:21). I wanted them to enjoy their education, so I respected their requests. The summer the boys were almost twelve and thirteen years old, they told me that they wanted to learn serious geography. Terrific! How could I ignore such enthusiasm? I borrowed a curriculum from a friend, and when I read the description that included the words history and culture, they firmly objected. “No history or culture, Mom, just straight geography.” So, the search began, and I found Welcome to the Wonderful World of Geography by Brenda Runkle. The boys worked on this together and independently of me except for tests. They just ate it up. I knew that they had been digging deeply when our giant National Geographic atlas was left out on the coffee table.
Another example of listening to our children occurred when our older son was studying chemistry and doing the labs himself at home. This was before the chemistry lab was added to our informal co-op. Our son requested to talk with his dad and I together. As he explained, it was evident that he had thought out his proposal well. He was about one-third of the way through the chemistry curriculum and was frustrated with the labs because they were not precise enough in his opinion. This was our math whiz kid; he still is. We listened, and not wanting him to be provoked by a subject that he enjoyed, we arrived at a compromise. We proposed that if he could explain the experiments of each lab to our satisfaction, he could skip actually doing them. Little did he know that this was Charlotte Mason’s narration method in action, very similar to how we used it in the elementary grades.
I leave your with a photo of Marble Canyon, which is located near the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument in northern Arizona.