11-Year Old Shares Her Thoughts About Homeschooling

My friend’s daughter wrote a blog post about homeschooling and they generously offered to let me post it here.  I loved her piece and I hope you do too!

 My mom thought it would be helpful for me to give my perspective on homeschooling. Being an eleven-year-old homeschool student has some good things and some bad things.

Good things:

-I can sleep until nine every day! No getting up early for me, unless I want to or we have some kind of appointment.

-Shorter school days. Instead of a defined amount of time that I have to work, I have a set assignment to complete in each subject, so the day goes by faster.

-If I get too frustrated, I can always go take a short break (5-10 minutes).

-I can see my cats all day. That way, they don’t get lonely, and I get to have company while I work. (Side note: when I get irritated, petting Pip and Trouble always helps me calm down and get a fresh outlook.)

-Movies! Watching educational movies (mainly for history, and when I was younger, science) helps me retain information better. I have a hard time remembering important history facts, and movies make it a lot more interesting.

– If I get hungry, I don’t have to wait until lunch. I can grab some crackers, a sandwich, or a yogurt cup anytime.

– If Mom’s tired or if we’re all just in a bad mood, every once in a while we get a surprise day off.

– You wouldn’t expect that I would be able to see my friends very often, but I do. Mom schedules lots of sleepovers and play dates, and we go to a lot of group homeschool classes.

-If I get up early and Mom’s not up yet, I can still work. I have a set of labeled drawers, one for each subject, and Mom lays out my work for the following day every night.

-When my friends and family come to stay with us, I usually get time off while they’re here.

-No summer vacation. I know it sounds like a bad thing, but it isn’t really. Mom says that lots of kids forget stuff over the vacation, and in the fall they have to go back and re-learn it. That doesn’t happen to me. It’s not like I have more school time per year than most kids, either. All the mini- vacations I get, spread out over a whole year, adds up to one summer vacation.

-I get to stay in my pajamas all day.

-I get to have each subject level at whatever level I’m at. I’m not required to go faster than I can. Once I learn something, we move on. If I have to take it slow, we take it slow. Mom’s always available for questioning.

– I get to travel while everyone else is in school.

Bad things:

-There’s eight inches of snow on the ground. Everyone, even my parents, gets the day off today…except me. WHAT’S WITH THAT!?!

Thank you for sharing that with us!!

You may be interested in reading her Mom’s thoughts about balancing homeschooling with working outside the home.

You might be interested in our other Homeschool Interviews and Guest Posts:  

• An Interview with A Homeschooling Dad
• An Interview with a Christian Classical Educator (Part 1) and (Part 2)
• An Interview with a Montessori Homeschooler
• Homeschooling Through a Virtual School
• Homeschooling in Australia
• An Interview with Erica of Confessions of a Homeschooler
• Interview with a Radical Unschooling Family
• Guest Post: Working Outside the Home, Homeschooling Mom – A guest post by one of my very best friends! 🙂
• 11 Year Old Shares Her Thoughts on Homeschooling – The daughter of my friend (above) wrote this!
• Guest Post by My Homeschooling Sister: Intensity in Learning
• Homeschooling Through Spousal Deployment, a Destructive Flood and More (Another post featuring my sister’s homeschool journy. They lost their house during flooding in Nashville 5 years ago.) and Part 2 of that post–Homeschooling Through High School (My sister’s kids are Older than Mine!)
• Homeschooling Through the Teenage Years: Video by Susan Wise Bauer

See you again soon here or over at our Homeschool Den Facebook Page!