Getting used to not having our kids go to school was quite difficult.
First we tried keeping things together with the same type of curriculum they did at school and that proved to be exhausting because we had the 3 girls; so we knew we had to do something different.

The first thing we decided to work on was discipline.  Discipline in the sense that there is really only one person that ever teaches you in life and that is yourself.  Sure other people can coach you and direct you to certain knowledge but the only person with the power to teach you is yourself.  We ran with this philosophy because it made complete sense to us and if we were going to teach 3 completely different girls we were going to have to be their coaches and not their so called “teachers”.

Coaching is much different than teaching – teaching requires constant and never ending attention and many tools at your disposal like “power over” and “power from”.  We wanted to use “power with”  to allow them to empower themselves to take a subject from start to finish with very little interaction form us.  That is not to say that we took some lazy approach at it because guiding them and providing subjects and materials is a big job.

It took some time for them to be able to be their own teachers without someone battering them with things and shoving meaning-less knowledge down their throats until they somewhat memorized it.  They took about 4 months to gain the discipline and by the 4th month they were waking up before us and having an hour worth of work done before we even woke up.   They came to the conclusion that the faster they started the sooner they finished.  Finally! they were using their intellect and making decisions on their own (something public school batters from our children starting from pre-school).  School tries to make the children into bees that don’t think for themselves and these effects were starting to ware off.