The Sequoia Breeze

Rebecca: Welcome to the Sequoia Breeze Podcast, a breath of fresh air for your home school. I am your host, Rebecca LaSavio. Listeners, I'm delighted to to have you here today. We're going to listen in on a conversation that I was privileged to have with Carrie Carlson. Carrie is the Tk Eight program administrator for Sequoia Grove and also an HST. Carrie has a wealth of experience homeschooling her own kids and being a classroom teacher, and she's going to tell us all about that. When we got in the booth together, we talked and talked and talked and rambled a little here and a little there. So I've chosen some nuggets from that conversation to share with you. I want to invite you to listen in to the thoughts and reflections that Carrie has to share with us on her very nontraditional, but very enlightening homeschool journey. And I hope that you will find it as encouraging and helpful as I have. Welcome, Carrie. Thank you so much for being here today.

Carrie: Thank you for having me.

Rebecca: So tell us a little about yourself, your background, how you got into home schooling.

Carrie: So, first and foremost, I am a wife. I have a wonderful husband who has been very supportive on this journey, which is definitely critical when you move into the home school world. I'm a homeschooling mom of two. I have 15 year old sophomore and I have an 18 year old high school graduate. He graduated actually last year, so one year post high school for him. I've been homeschooling for 14 years, actually. I am the TK8 program administrator and I've worked for the schools for six years. My previous life, before I was a home schooling mom and worked for the schools, I was a classroom teacher and I taught in the classroom for twelve years. And I taught everything from preschool all the way up through high school.

Rebecca: That's a lot of experience in a lot of different areas.

Carrie: Yes. I knew from the minute I was born, practically, that I was meant to be a teacher. I loved teaching Laura Ingles Wilder Little House on the Prairie, like she was my hero. And I would watch those shows and I was like, I want to do that. That's what I'm going to do. So I would like line my stuffed animals up and I would teach to them any chance I got. I did try with my three brothers. They did not sit still long enough. Definitely not. And so I did switch to the stuffed animals and they were much more well behaved. So I did teach from the time I was little. And when I went into education, I never had this plan that I would even homeschool my children. I was always going to be in the classroom. My kids were going to come to the school that I worked at and we were going to do this together. We'd have the summers off. It would be amazing. And then my son had different plans, actually. He started kindergarten. And midway through his first year of kindergarten. He was really struggling in the classroom setting. And some of the struggles he had were time limits placed on assignments or activities. Really. Because it's kindergarten. And he really has a wild and active. Even to this day. Imagination. And it was very stifled in the classroom environment. Very much of a hands on learner. And so it really wasn't working for him. I decided to pull him out the last half of kindergarten with this desire or this plan that he would just re enroll in the fall. He's just not mature enough. He's just not ready for kindergarten. But my ego was strong. I was a classroom teacher. I taught other people's kids. I was really good at that. How was my own son not succeeding in this environment? And so basically when I pulled him out, it was with the intention that I was going to teach him in those few months everything that he needed to know. So that when I re enrolled him in the fall, the teachers would be like, oh, my gosh, she's amazing. Like, look at everything she did, how.

Rebecca: She helped this kid.

Carrie: And I was really going to show them. So day one of him pulling him out of school, I set up a classroom in my living room and proceeded to start this lesson to which he started rolling around on the floor and doing some results. And I'm like, oh, okay. So I just said, oh, this isn't going to work today. It's just too fresh, it's too new. Let's take a break and we'll come back tomorrow. Day two, I was all geared up in GungHo, ready to go again. Same thing rolled around on the floor. Didn't want to do this. I naively tried again for a day three, thinking, this time it's really going to click. And sure enough, it didn't. And at that point I realized, this is just ridiculous, this is silly. This is obviously not going to work. So I stopped, and I really worked hard and took the idea of school out of my head. I realized he was five years old, let's just stop. And so instead of doing school or anything that really resembled school, I just included him and my daughter, who was two at the time, in what I was doing on a daily basis, which was cooking, cleaning, going for walks, exercising, reading, and I just started including, like I said, including them in everything I was doing. And that seemed to really play into well with our family. It was like a family rhythm. This is what we do. We wake up, we get ready for the day, we have coffee, we read a little. So that was how the days were going, and I really, really liked it. And I started noticing that he just started to relax, and his imagination started to come back his little personality that had been somehow lost in kindergarten with just a few short months in the classroom setting that he was in, it was changing him. And so my sweet little imaginative boy was coming out of his shell again. And then when fall rolled around, I said, well, we're not going to go back. We're done. So I started researching, too. I'm a reader. I'm an avid reader researcher, especially when it comes to educational literature. I started researching Montessori Waldorf, Thomas Jefferson education, unschooling, and I incorporated little pieces of each into what we were doing. I do find value in all of those methods. So when my kids were really young, there was probably a lot more Montessory and Thomas Jefferson integrated. As they've gotten older, we've progressed to more and more full blown, self directed learning.

Rebecca: As our conversation continued, I asked Carrie how she came up with the plan or the curriculum that her kids were going to use as she continued to follow this nontraditional model. Here's how she explained it.

Carrie: My kids and I work really hard at learning. You're not really creating it. You're helping point your child in the direction of where what they want to learn exists maybe is that in the direction of where they can pursue that more fully?

Rebecca: Okay?

Carrie: So I don't create content or create days for my kids. My kids will come to me. Like my daughter, for example, really loves anime, and she's been an artist since she was little. She's always taken drawing classes at something that she's loved, but through studying the art of anime, she then said, well, I want to learn Japanese. Well, I cannot.

Rebecca: You don't speak Japanese.

Carrie: I do not. And if I can be quite frank, I have no desire to learn to speak Japanese. And so it's not something that I am comfortable even purchasing something and learning it and teaching her right. And so I have just helped her find the Japanese class that would work for her or the Japanese instructor. And so I facilitate learning. I don't take the responsibility of learning on myself that I'm teaching them.

Rebecca: Okay. Carrie and I spent some time talking about misconceptions that people can have about homeschooling, and especially when you take a unique approach. At one point, you might notice that she'll use the word unschooling. We're not going to unpack that term in this podcast, and it's not precisely what she meant. So let that fly on by and just know that she's talking about her unique approach. So what are some other misconceptions?

Carrie: So another one that I hear a lot is unschooling gives kids too much freedom and choice. And by giving them that much freedom and choice, all they're going to want to do is play video games all day.

Rebecca: That's not what happens at your house.

Carrie: Depends on the day.

Rebecca: Okay, but that sounds like choice in behavior and how they're going to spend their time completely not just educational choice.

Carrie: Yeah, so that's actually a really good point, especially when my kids were younger, and I think that's a really important distinction is things that we had in place when our kids were younger in terms of rules in our house versus where they are now because they're high schoolers, are there 15 and 18, it's very different. So when they were little, part of why they didn't play video games all day is because it just wasn't something that was allowed in our house. We did have guidelines around media, right? So it was like, well, you have 30 or 40 minutes a day, or an hour a day, and it adjusted.

Rebecca: I don't think it matters what method you follow in your home school and what it looks like when they're six and what it looks like when they're twelve is so different. And what it looks like when you have one kid who is on their educational journey versus when you have four. It all changes as your family flexes and grows and matures.

Carrie: One of the things that I felt very responsible about when my kids were growing up. And even to now. Is including them in how to selfregulate and how to make those choices. Because we can say no media. And we can have that as a rule in our house. And we can have that rule as long as we need to until they're 18. And then they move out. And then they have no ability to really self regulate that. And then they might go out, and all they're doing is that because they never had the opportunity at home. I think we've seen that in a lot of circumstances, not just with video games. And so in our house, rather than you can play video games or you can't it was having a discussion about it. What are you using the video games for? Is this a learning tool right now? What are you using media for right now? Are you watching a movie because you're trying to waste time, or you need to relax, or are you watching a movie because you're trying to learn something? So when they were really little, it was, is this a tool or a toy? And helping them understand the distinction. And I even find that I still do that today. Am I going to Facebook because I need to look up something for work, or I'm doing research, or am I going to Facebook because I just had a really rough day and I need ten minutes to completely unwind, and this is a way to veg out, which is okay too, right? So I think that became part of the conversation with everything, with that whole idea of teaching them the why behind things, not just, we do this because I said so.

Rebecca: I'm hearing a lot of intentionality in all of your descriptions, so what are some other misconceptions that you had to deal with?

Carrie: I think another one would be kids won't be prepared for some I love this. Are you afraid that your kids won't be prepared? And then in this case, I just want to say insert some unknown future that the world has somehow decided they need to be prepared for putting anything in there. Are you afraid that they're not going to be prepared for X, Y or Z?

Rebecca: But I hear a lot of intentionally preparing them for life in all that you do, is that a fair?

Carrie: I think it's very fair, and I think in many ways that's the main.

Rebecca: Purpose is not preparing them to get through the 13 years of school, but instead preparing them to live as people beyond those years.

Carrie: Absolutely. Because my goal as a parent is to have lifelong learners. And if I that 13 years of school in a lifespan is a tiny little blip and these are adults that I'm raising good, hopefully good humans I'm raising to put out into the world. There's a ton of intention, like you said, in doing this, as I'm very careful and there's a misconception that you might be unparenting or there's no rules or boundaries. Kind of like this, anything goes in our family. We definitely had a distinction between boundaries, rules, family, and what was allowed in our house and schooling. So at one point I had heard, and I really subscribed to this, was my kids have a lot of educational freedom, but they don't have a lot of family freedom, especially when they were little. We can discuss how to learn history, or we can discuss how you want to approach what book you want to read for your bedtime story, but you do have a bedtime brushing your teeth as a nonnegotiable. And you do have chores in our house.

Rebecca: So it's not a freedom from all responsibility, from all behavioral expectations. You're still continuing to teach them to learn in the way that's most interesting to them, then not disregarding all education about behavior and expectations on that.

Carrie: Absolutely. Chores were a big deal in our house because, I don't know about you, but when I started homeschooling, just in general, I was like, oh, my gosh, if I don't teach these humans to help me clean or cook or do laundry, I'm not going to have any time to do anything. I'm going to basically be a short order cook or a maid. And that was not my intention. So my kids knew how to make breakfast for themselves by the time they were six and seven.

Rebecca: What did you do on a daily basis? What did a day in the life at the Carlson house look like when your kids were in, say, first and third grade?

Carrie: Yeah. So that's a great question. So I typically start every morning with coffee. So that was the day in the life of I would wake up usually ahead of my kids, and I would sit down with a cup of coffee and I would do my own reading or writing. So whatever book I was reading and I would do journaling or something like that. And then my kids would slowly emerge from their rooms, usually around 07:00 a.m.. They were really good sleepers actually. And so they would come out around 07:00 a.m. And that was actually the sweet spot of the day. So first and third grader we would cuddle up on the couch and I would typically read to them early in the morning while they were all still in their pajamas. We hadn't really got going yet. We would read for anywhere between 30 to 40 minutes depending on the book or what else we had on our agenda for that day. Shortly after reading together, we would start, we had a morning meeting. So a morning meeting for us was literally everybody sharing their highs and lows of the day, what they were looking forward to. And then I would outline what we had on our agenda for the day. And basically on our agenda basically meant do we have anywhere to go? Do we have any field trips, do we have any park days, did we have any doctors appointments, are we going grocery shopping? And then also when we needed to be out the door ready for those things. But also on top of that, I had always blocked off a certain amount of time. And I guess some people would call it school time, but it really was known as moms available to you time. So this is time where we will all learn together or do something together during this time. And what would that time be? And honestly, when they were little like that, it was anywhere between one to maybe 2 hours because their attention spans or whatever. Okay, so let me go back. We would have our morning meeting, we would talk about our day, what we had on our agenda for that day. And then after that it always followed with breakfast. So either we would make breakfast together or they would make breakfast on their own and clean up, right? So we would have breakfast. Breakfast is very simple too. It wasn't like grandiose breakfast, but they would have breakfast and then we would do what we would refer to as our personal chores, or personal chores. So that's when you would go make your bed, you would get dressed for the day, you would brush your teeth, you would comb your hair. And then following that we did family work. And family work was we would pick a room in the house and that would be what we would clean that day. So some days it would be the bathroom and then one day it would be the living room. One day would be the car. The car is a room in your house. If you have not figured that out, it's brilliant. Yeah, it would be okay for family work today we're all going to clean the car and everybody was given a job or chose a job, and everybody worked together to complete that family work. And then after that, it would be again, I hesitate to use the term school time, but it would be we are all available to learn together. So what are we going to do next? And we surrounded our house, or our house was filled with educational materials and it was what's available to them, but I didn't put really any restrictions on it. The only restriction that I put on things that I didn't want my kids doing. So if we go back to that question, how do you prevent them from doing A, B, and C all day? Don't bring it into your house. So if you don't want your child playing Legos, don't buy Legos. I don't really know how that's a really bad example because Legos are like the best thing in the world. But if I don't want to eat chocolate, I'm not going to buy chocolate and bring it into my house because I can't control myself around chocolate. So it's like that kind of idea. So I only invited into our house what I was comfortable with my kids using 100% of the time.

Rebecca: So again, more intentional choices.

Carrie: Absolutely. Or let's say 90% of the time I invited into my house, but I was comfortable with them using maybe well on their own. There's limits around that too. Right. So you can use this by yourself or you have to use this with supervision, like paint or plato. Let's talk plato. Oh, my gosh. Plato is the best and worst thing in the world. Right. Love the plato. But it's not like plato is a free for all in our house. We had it available. So that would be something that they could use under certain circumstances or under certain conditions. Like at the kitchen table and ever over the white carpet, right?

Rebecca: Yeah. Same with paint or glitter, if you even like glitter in your home.

Carrie: But PTSD from being a classroom teacher, the glitter.

Rebecca: So how do you make sure that your kids have learned American history?

Carrie: How does anyone make sure their kids have learned American history? I don't mean that tongue in cheek.

Rebecca: No hit me way. Yeah. Tell me your thought process.

Carrie: I mean, just because a kid took American history at high school and they went through the class, how do we know they learned it?

Rebecca: So would you consciously choose some books to read with your kids that made sure that covered some of that well.

Carrie: Again, you're bringing items into your home. Right? If I was looking at the school, say, I can, statements for fourth grade and social studies, is the discovery or the learning about California history then as I am choosing things to put in our house or books that I'm having around my house or in the book basket that's by the fireplace. Yeah. There's going to be California history books in there or story books about California history. Because then when it's like, oh, let's read a book together, choose one from the book basket, they're choosing a book.

Rebecca: OK, so you have a plan in your head at times, or at least certain things that you'd like to present the opportunity to your kids to learn about and they become available.

Carrie: Yes, but I also listen to my kids a lot and so if my son is saying I'm really interested in airplanes, or my daughter is I'm really interested in octopus, then I'm going to help them get those items too. And then I'm going to perform the reverse on that. And rather than saying you need to study this because somebody is telling us to study this, I'm going to look at what did you just do and how does that fit with what we're being asked to do, if that makes sense.

Rebecca: Okay, so that leads me into then in our Sequoia Grove context samples.

Carrie: Yes.

Rebecca: Where do your samples and proof of learning come from in this lifestyle?

Carrie: When my kids were little, we worked under a private school, Affidavit.

Rebecca: Okay.

Carrie: So we did not join the charter until my son was in 7th grade and my daughter a couple of years younger, she started a little bit younger.

Rebecca: Okay.

Carrie: Samples are a great question. My kids were always busy doing something and again, because they had things available to them or at their fingertips, it wasn't hard to snap a picture of them playing a board game together.

Rebecca: Okay.

Carrie: It wasn't hard to find some type of coloring page that they might have been doing as they were listening to Story of the World that shortly after that I could say tell me what you heard today, or tell me something you learned about that. We didn't. We wrote down exactly what they had said or and then I would say, oh, do you want to type this out? And type out your answer? So samples were never hard to come by because we were always doing photo. Samples were probably my number one go to. We were doing field trips all the time. We were out doing experiential learning and you snap a photo and then you ask your child a few questions. And when they're little little, you can scribe for them. When they're bigger, they write their answers for themselves. And my son would have a picture and then a paragraph.

Rebecca: For something that's a little more mechanical or specific like grammar. Are you initiating that with them? Are you simply looking through their writing and talking about it? Do you do a little more formal instruction with those kinds of subjects?

Carrie: Everything that I ever taught my kids was very organic. OK. Not a huge fan of personally like grammar worksheets or spelling lessons. To me, the most authentic way to teach grammar is to read and read and read some more and read some more. So I might point out, like, I guess maybe as we were reading, if it came up where they asked a question, I would say, oh, do you see how this sentence has a question mark at the end? That's because the sentence asks a question organically within stories that we were reading or in things that we were doing. I think those lessons were integrated, but my kids didn't. If they had wanted a grammar worksheet, I would have supplied them with a grammar worksheet, but they didn't really want that, so I didn't approach it in that way.

Rebecca: Okay, so you had been trained as a teacher and you were perhaps particularly aware of some of the things that they needed to learn or that you wanted them to learn because of that. So is this a method that would be difficult for somebody who doesn't have that same training to follow?

Carrie: For me, the hardest thing was untraining myself from everything I'd learned about education. When I went through my Credentialing program and when I started studying and researching, when I read John Taylor Gotto, when I read Dumbing US Down, which is an incredibly good book about education, when I started reading stuff by Blake Bowls, that was when I went through this huge transformation of what is education, really? I think that I actually think that in some cases, people that haven't gone through the Credentialing program are almost at an advantage.

Rebecca: Listeners, we're going to have to pause it right there and we will continue this wonderful conversation next week on the final episode of The Sequoia Breeze. For this season two, I have found this conversation with Carrie to be immensely helpful and has caused me to think more deeply about the how's and the whys of how I home school my own kids. I hope that you are finding it just as helpful. Before we go today, I do want to remind you that I always love to hear from listeners. I would love to get an email from you or if you would like to send me a voice clip telling me why homeschool is important to you, or if your kids would like to tell me what they love about homeschooling, I'd love to get those from you. So send those on to me at podcasts@sequoiagrove.org. This has been another episode of the Sequoia Breeze podcast. I've breath of fresh air for your home school, and I've been your host, Rebecca LaSavio. I'm so glad you joined me today.