CHM 149: Homeschooling Middle School - Tips for Success

Hi, everyone, Welcome to the Christian homeschool Mom's podcast. On this show, the goal is to encourage you, the homeschool mom, to homeschool with joy during this very limited season of your life and to help you stay hopeful on your homeschool journey. So I hope to help you in that area. My name is Demetria. I'm your host. I'm a veteran homeschool mom of two beautiful daughters, one who is in college and one who is currently in high school. So I'm a wife, I'm a songwriter, I'm a podcaster, and I'm a child of the King and I'm so happy to be your host. Now, this podcast is sponsored by Faith Media and Impact podcast Coach, and that's a service that supports women podcasters to boldly share their voices and their powerful messages through the medium of podcasting. You can find out more about that if you're interested in Impact podcastcoach dot com. But I'd love to also route you to my main homeschooling website, and that is Christian homeschool Moms dot com, where you can find loads of information about homeschooling and info that will help to inspire and encourage you with your endeavors, whether you're a homeschooling full time or a part time or after schooling, I really want to honor your endeavors to raise your kids while teaching them at home. I hope you enjoyed my last episode and interview with Christy Thomas. She helped to motivate us and helped us to see that we as parents can indeed instill those deep faith roots in our children. And so moving on to a new topic today, we're going to be discussing middle school. And I know some of you are thinking, how that a lot of content we hear today is mainly focused on the younger grades, the younger kids K through five, and then once we start getting into the middle in high school years, a lot of that information sort of begins to dissipate. We are unable to find as much information for the older grades just because not as many people are home schooling older children. And so for that reason, I wanted to put out content for a middle school, or specifically in high school on these last couple of episodes, and I did say that I would be podcasting more frequently to just help those of you who were thinking about beginning homeschooling. This season, especially now that at the time of this recording, it is currently in August of twenty twenty three, and some of you have already started back to school for your new school year, and some of you are about to start in a couple of weeks or maybe maybe next month. So I just wanted to be on the front end of that for you and help give you more resources and more encouragement. So if you're thinking about homeschooling your middle schooler, if you have a child that will soon begin middle school, or maybe young children who will be in that stage in a few years, then this episode is for you. So I created a video and uploaded to YouTube a few years ago. Maybe it was just one year ago, but back in twenty twenty two, I uploaded a video about my process or homeschooling my middle school daughter and the things that I had to think about when she entered into her preteen years. And so I want to reshare that video with you, just as I did two episodes back when I shared at high school. I also shared a video with you on this podcast, and so I'm going to do the same thing now. I'm just going to replay the video. If you've already seen the video at some point in your life and it's redundant for you, then just know that that's what I'm going to be replaying on this particular episode, and you're welcome to listen in for a refresher. But if it's brand new for you, this is going to be super helpful, I hope, and this is something that can help you to feel encouraged that you really can do this if you're thinking about homeschooling your middle school child, and so I have some advice for you and tips that helped me through those times. And it's about a sixteen minute video. I'm just going to replay it as is, and then I may or may not come back in the end to wrap things up and to say my goodbyes. But in case I don't, when I edit this, I'm just going to go and say now that I appreciate your listening. Thank you so much for being a supporter of this podcast and for listening and today again. Reach me at Christian homeschool Moms dot com for anything that you might need regarding homeschooling, and you can always reach out to me personally. I do spend some of my time sometime on weekends just talking to parents who are thinking about entering home education. So I totally don't mind doing that. If you would like to reach out and have a few minutes to chat with me, I would love to do that for you and to see how I can help you in the area of your homeschooling. All right, So that's all for now and until next time. God bless you and I hope you enjoy the episode. Hi everyone, I'm Dmitria with Christian homeschool Moms and also with a couple of other blogs and websites where I help women entrepreneurs. Today, however, I am going to be talking about another homeschool topic, and this topic is tips for homeschooling middle school. These are a few things that I think will help you in going through those years with your student. The first thing I would like to suggest is that you think about these three years basically six, seventh and eighth grade as years to allow your student a lot of room to explore. This is a wonderful time for them to figure out what they want to be, and they still will have plenty of time in the rest of their life to figure that out. A lot of us adults are still trying to figure it out. So we shouldn't put a lot of pressure on them to have it all nailed before high school. But it is a wonderful time, nonetheless to have them really discover their interests, explore who they are and how they were wired, how they were created, at what they might actually be interested in exploring a more depth in high school. This can be really important for students who are very focused on already know what they want to do, so that by the time they're in high school, they're actually taking classes that work towards their end result or in goal of what they want to do after high school. So if it's college, maybe they already know they want to be a neuroscientists. Maybe they already know they want to be a brain surgeon or a veterinarian, whatever it is. Maybe they want to go into design or art. So having a specific idea in mind about kind of where they are, you know how they feel about different topics, it's going to be really helpful to them before they get to high school and start taking those electives. So use middle school years to really help your child explore. That means they should try out a number of different types of classes and activities and really try to find their group. One thing we like to do when our kids are in middle school is to put them in different various activities. So whether that's sports, so, whether that's some think creative that we think they might have a bit toward, We like to use this time to get them plugged in. So currently my daughter is in ballet. When my oldest daughter was going through this stage about seven years ago, she tried a stint at basketball, figured out she didn't really like that, and then we tried different things with her. She also tried ballet. We ended up figuring out that her thing was singing. She was very involved in a lot of our worship groups at church and singing groups, chorus things like that. So we found out she really liked singing and she liked art. So those are the two things that were big on her list. So she was a creative and we figured out right that out right away. She didn't want to do anything really related to the sciences or mathematics or engineering or anything in STEM, but she had a real knack for creativity. So we knew after putting in her her in a lot of different art classes online and trying out with different platforms, which I'll talk about in a moment, but finding online websites and resources to help your child explore what they like and what they could possibly be interested in was very helpful for us in determining what she wanted to do. But by the time my daughter entered her junior year in high school, she was touring colleges and looking at schools that she knew would provide her the type of measure that she was interested in. So we were looking at fashion design schools, we were looking at graphic design schools, we were looking at art schools in general, and then we went to tour places in San Francisco. We looked at music conservatories, we looked at fashion design schools, We looked at art schools and that offered graphic design and animation because we knew that that was the thing that was calling to her the most, and between art and music, she ended up choosing music. So really use these years to do that. Another thing that we do was we like to expose our kids to different career options through watching documentaries and docuseries with them watching things together that will help them to see what is the day in the life of a judge, Like what is the day in the life of a medical doctor. What do these things look like? So we we find films and we find docuseries and television shows basically that help us to see what's what's their life like, what's the interior designers life like. So these would be something you can find on your local networks and just watching together, and then your student will be able to see whether or not they really want to do that thing by just by watching someone else do it, watch someone in that field who's actively, you know, doing the work, and they see what all it pertains and what's involved in doing those works, and so it will help them to make a decision about whether or not that's calling to them or speaking to them or not. And so I like to do that with my daughters. This is also a great time to have your student pick their own classes, because again they're not going to be able to choose their classes with as much specificity in the later high school years as they really have to hone in on the core academics and things they need for their credits, so to be, especially if you're not unschooling, if you're choosing to go a certain maybe traditional path of depending on what your route is for homeschooling. Your student may not have a lot of flexibility in high school for all kinds of electives, So now is the time to get that in in middle school where they can just take whatever suits their fancy and makes them happy, and you will get to really see them well, see them in different situations, and if they're blooming with a certain topic or if they really hate another topic, it will become obvious to you as the parent what your student really likes. Another thing I like to do is to just keep reading aloud to them, because they never get too old to have you read to them. And I just feel like reading together with your student is a great connection point that you can have and continue to have with your child. So I never stopped reading to my daughters. My daughter that is in college right now, I would be glad to sit down and read aloud a book with her if she had the time, right because I'm not ashamed of that. And I do that with my younger daughter right now. She's going into high school, and we still have books that we sit on the couch together and we read. I read aloud to her and we are so entertained. Because I change my boys and I do all the sound effects and everything, so it's just fun. But the books that we're reading are fun, they're light, they're easy reads, and they're usually books that are culturally relevant to us, and so it just helps us to make a mother daughter connection in a different way. I don't usually read classics with her or anything that I think would just kind of take too much time to really think through. I just re really like things with her because I want it to be a lighthearted time that we have together. And that's just how we do it in our family. Read whatever is good for you, but that's how we do it, and it makes me happy, it makes her happy. Some of the books that we've been reading in her younger middle school years, and I'll see if I can put a picture up here somewhere, but we were reading a book series. So it's a series of books, or three of them by Rita Williams. Garcia is the author, and one of them is called One Crazy Summer. One of them is called PSB eleven, and the other is Gone Crazy in Alabama. And those three books are so hilarious. I loved reading that with my daughter. We read them. I think it was last year, so she probably was like twelve or thirteen when I read them to her, but that's kind of the age range for this little series very light reading. Those were some fun light reads that we did together, and we looked forward to our reading times. So that's something that you can always do with your kids, is set aside a time to read together and you can connect that way. Another thing to do during middle school. It's fine things that your kids like to watch and see if you can kind of get into it with them. So you know, at first, I'm not like an anime kind of person, but she likes it, so I wanted to see, like, what is this about? And so just watching things with her, also watching I've been watching K dramas with her and just really getting into her world and actually getting kind of attached to some of these K dramas now and I can't stop watching them. So that's another fun connection point that we have, and it kind of like opens up your role to discuss different cultures and to discuss, you know, what, you know, what things are like in other countries and languages and that kind of thing. So we're listening to Korean and we're she's actually learning a little bit on Duolingo app So by spending time together being more kind of casual at times and not really all is focusing on those standard court topics and subjects, you're able to make connections with your child and get into their minds, get into the world, see what they're thinking, and it helps you get to know them better and it helps them feel more connected to you because they feel like you understand them better. And so it just makes for a really cool experience with your child. And that goes into my third point for what to do with your middle school students and prepping them for high school. It's just to keep those lines of communication open with your student. So, like I said, reading together, but now we're talking about all kinds of things that you can do together. So it's about work and play together. Right. It's not always school, So school is part of work, right, So working together, but then playing together that means relaxing together and doing fun things and not always being together, right, because they need to see mom her own space, enjoying her mama time and enjoying her alone time, not feeling the need to always have to be in servant mode, like always always giving, giving, giving, and never taking time to rest and take a reprieve and take care of herself. They need to see mamma taking care of herself. So that's important to show your student that you value yourself. Show your child that you care for yourself and respect yourself, and then they will respect you for that right. They will respect you for respecting yourself. So keep those lines of communication open with your kids. Do things together, but then do a lot of things apart. You know, do things together, but don't do everything together, and have some time to yourself. And my last point is to help your kids stay accountable. I think it's important that you make your kids take responsibility for completing their projects, for communicating with their teachers, whether they have virtual online teachers or whether it's just you and your husband, your partner. Like you want to make sure your students are keeping tabs. You're keeping tabs on them, but that they are proactively taking an initiative. And that's part of preparing them for high school. So they need to take initiative, own up to mistakes that they're making. So if we show something that they've done wrong, they need to say, yeah, I didn't do a good job. I was sloppy with that. Let me okay, I'm gonna do it over, just encouraging them like do this, do this assignment over to receive full credit, Like don't think that you're just going to give me something anything and be okay with that, because you know, there needs to be some structure and at least the way we do our homeschool, there's there's got to be some structure there where we make sure that our our child is doing what she needs to be doing. Because with high school, we know that, you know, the standards are higher and the work becomes more it becomes the workload becomes more intense, the subjects become trickier, a little bit harder. So we want to make sure that she's taking full responsibility now for completing projects that she's been given, keeping her deadlines with her teachers. She is an online school, so we kind of help her to learn that through this online school platform she's using. We want to make sure that anytime a teacher gives her corrections to redo, that she redoes those assignments. And if there's an opportunity for extra credit, we want her to do that extra credit assignment. You know, we just encourage her. We don't make or do extra credit, but we encourage her like, this is a wonderful time to get that extra in because when you're in high school or when you're in college, there this training that you're getting now with knowing to take initiative to put yourself at the best position possible in order to be successful in the end is going to help you. So if you're learning that now, if your kids are learning that framework and that mindset now, to always try to be one step ahead of the game, because a lot of times that's what this is, right with private schools and public schools and college down the road, is it's a matter of learning how to play that game of time management. It's learning how to correspond and interact with professors. It's learning how to collaborate with your classmates and peers and keeping your deadlines, all of this kind of thing. So now it's the time to learn to start learning a lot of these skills in middle school. And we don't play around with that in our home. We take that very seriously. So even now as we speak, she's taking her class, and she's she's having to show you know her work, and she's coming back to check in with me, and we're like making sure that she's getting things complete and done for her classes. So that's what we do in our homeschool. At every homeschool, it's different. Some homeschoolers are a little bit more relaxed, and what we've been these past two years, we haven't been that relaxed with our youngest daughter because we feel like what she needs in her life is that structure, and so we were allowing her to We're giving her that structure. We're giving her that opportunity for structure, but within the comfort and relaxation of our home. But it's working out really well for us. But those are some of our tips for middle school or some of my tips for homeschooling middle schoolers. And if you have any questions and would like to learn more, let me know. If you want to talk to someone about homeschooling and you just need like a voice or a listening ear to bounce ideas off of, and you just need someone to talk to about your plans for next year, you want a coaching session, I'm available for that. You can check out my website Christian homeschool mom dot com slash homeschool coach, and I would be glad to get in touch with you about that, and I do offer other services such as site design and coaching women creatives with online marketing strategies, and so I will probably be talking a little bit more about that in the near future. As I continue to create homeschool content, I will also be throwing in some things here and there with what I'm doing in my business, so you can see a little bit of that aspect of my life also. And that's all I happened now. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll talk to you guys later. By