Joyful disagreements are those wonderful times in homeschooling when you can stand back and watch your children flex their wings.
I love those moments when I am happily reading away to my children and WHAM! In comes the disagreement, “What is he thinking? That makes no sense!”
Today we were talking about the early days of World War I. There was so much jostling and complex negotiating. Every country had detailed plans for what to do when one or the other potential enemy made the first move. Everyone was busy making agreements with each other, except the Kaiser who grabbed up his family and went on a month-long boat trip. Why? He knew that the Austro-Hungarians took forever to decide things. And he was right.
But a little later in the story, it turns out that the leader of Belgium actually, factually felt bullied by the Kaiser! Belgian authorities put up posters in their town squares when they realized that the Germans were going to invade. These posters asked the Germans to please not hurt them! And then the Belgian officials asked their population to surrender their arms as a sign of good faith. Well, those people did surrender every weapon they had to local police stations. And then guess what? The Germans invaded and the Belgian people couldn’t fight back. Big surprise, right?
This episode created a full scale verbal re-enactment in my living room today between my two high schoolers. Even though they are teenagers, they still ‘try out’ new ideas by discussing them and advocating or disagreeing with different positions. Just the same way they “tried out” grass by rolling down hills on the playground. Same concept, only slightly older kids.
In reality, the details of what bit of information sparks a discussion are not really important.
Even if I only get the chance to feed my kids a little bit of new information every day, I am still happy just so long as it creates discussions.
My kids are spirited and these discussions are more like disagreements than anything else. They are loud and they interrupt my reading. Does that every happen to you?
Sometimes I feel like I am preaching to a wonderful congregation and not homeschooling. My kids interrupt with, “Yes!” and “Amen!” And when I stop, they usually say, “Hey mom, don’t stop! We are liking this!”
A good reading session is marked by boisterous, joyful disagreements and I wouldn’t have it any other way!
That was my week!
How was your week homeschooling? Did your kids learn something really fun, or have one of those precious homeschool moments? Share! I would love to read about it!
Our Blog was busy this week – Thank you to everyone who is commenting and joining me as we talk about homeschooling life! I really enjoy the conversation and fellowship.
I wrote about how I try to approach my kids using the art of gently, how the best thing I can do sometime to help one of my kids past a rough spot is to be simply by their side, and a wonderful place online to find free, unlimited books!
A bit of music for the Hub (our anniversary is this weekend).
A fantastic product we reviewed this week:
We are evaluating lots products & books this week that will result in interesting and exciting reviews in a few weeks:
- Fourth Form Latin (what may be my son’s favorite review this year, from Memoria Press)
- Super Beads from Zirrly
- Always Fall Forward by Todd Gerelds (the son of the coach from the Woodlawn movie)
- Honey by Ezra Jack Stein
- A Pocketful of Hope for Mothers by Robin Jones Gunn
Places I am linking up this post
Drop by and read the posts of some great homeschooling families at this week’s Homeschool Highlights Link Up. And read through the great posts at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers’ Link Up as well!
