Tweens and Teens – Getting out of the Way! -Melinda Harrington

Tweens and Teens – Getting out of the Way!

-Melinda Harrington

(There's a video made by Marnie about this topic down below after you've read this post. Or you could skip straight to it now!)

It’s been fascinating to watch how many home educating families change the way they homeschool as their children grow into the early teens and beyond. Everyone’s experience is different of course, but there have certainly been some major homeschool changes at our house in the past twelve months – so much so that it makes my head spin sometimes.

I found the primary school years to be relatively simple. Busy, but simple. I'd look around for some books, websites or resources on a particular topic, keep an eye on the national school curriculum, watched what my daughter seemed to like doing and went along to heaps of gatherings and playdates. With multiple regular activities during the week our schedule was packed but happy enough.

I detected that my daughter was not engaging with the material I was presenting when she was about 11 and a half years old. By 12 and a half years old we had more or less stopped learning along the lines of individual subjects like ‘maths’ or ‘science’ or ‘English’. In just twelve months I found that she was developing her own interests and wanted more and more freedom to pursue them.

Our learning looked very different when she was 13. Basically I had to get out of the way of her learning. My ‘teaching’ was actually getting in the way! Now we follow a ‘project based learning’ style. She is learning as we work on projects together – take this blog example. She is learning about IT, business start up, filming and documentary making, communication across a range of different people, digital based design, getting quotes, putting together proposals, setting up data storage systems etc etc etc.

And probably the most important shift has been in the dynamics of our teaching and learning – I'm no longer the teacher. We are both learning together. And to be perfectly frank, with regard to IT, she has certainly stepped up into the ‘teacher’ role for me!

Did you change your teaching and learning style as your children grew?

How did you change it?

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