5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Homeschooling Middle School | The Next Chapter Series

Hey everybody, welcome to the Law Dock Way. I'm Jessica. And today's video is going to be the second video in our next step mini series. If you missed the first one, I will link it up here for you. This mini series is basically a middle school homeschooling bootcamp, if you will. So Abby from Rooted in Rust and I decided that we really had it on our heart to talk about the next steps in our homeschools, which for us was middle school, obviously for her was high school. So every day this week we are sharing a video that has our heart behind it because I am just finishing middle school with Emily and she's getting ready to finish high school with her daughter. So we wanted to kind of like tell you guys the things we wish we had known, the things that we know now that we didn't know and just kind of our experience. So that's what we're doing this week. So if you have one going into high school, make sure you check out Abby's channel and I hope you will stick around for my middle school series as well. In today's video, I'm going to be talking about the five things that I wish I had known before starting homeschooling middle school. Before starting middle school with Emily, when we were like staring down at sixth grade, I had all these ideas in my head. I had like, all of this is gonna be more stressful, it needs to be more serious, I need to step up my game as a homeschool teacher. I was freaking out, like absolutely freaking out. If I could go back and talk to my past self, knowing what I know now, these are the five things that I would tell myself and I'm hoping that it will help you if you're starting to stress about middle school. Number one, middle school isn't elementary school, but it's also not high school. Hence why it's called middle school. It is literally meant to be a bridge from elementary school to high school. A lot of people treat middle school almost like it's a high school waiting room. And so they kind of start instilling doing high school level things in middle school. And I honestly thought I had to do the same thing. I thought we needed to be like earning credits and stressing about all this. Like I remember looking up and stressing about transcripts in seventh grade. Middle school is a bridge for a reason. It's not meant to be high school at that point. Honestly, because most kids are not mentally and emotionally ready to do high school at that point. If yours is, great, mine was not. Absolutely was not. Academically, she totally could have handled it. Mentally and emotionally, no. It would have been a recipe for disaster for her and I both. Middle school is a transitional period. It's a transitional time for them as human beings. Mentally, emotionally, hormonally, physically, developmentally, like all of the things. They need that time to transition. They need that time to figure out who they are as people. To figure out who they wanna be, right? Like they're transitioning from a kid to an adult. Adding in more rigor and trying to be like, we're gonna go ahead and start high school early and collect credits and forcing that on them, it's not gonna work. And that's not what middle school is meant to be. If middle school was meant to be high school, then that's what it would be, right? Like we would just start high school in seventh grade and maybe move sixth grade to elementary school and then that's just the way it would go. But it's not, they pulled it out and made it middle school because that time, it's different. Like they need that transitional period for them mentally and developmentally. Number two, you don't need more curriculum. This one was a shocker for me because I obviously assumed that we needed more curriculum, stricter curriculum, curriculum that made her do more, like, I don't know, busy work. Like we needed more rigor, we needed more paper, we needed more tangible things. We actually have less tangible work than ever. Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade produced way less tangible physical work than her elementary school years did. And that is because learning in middle school isn't about doing more, it's about going deeper. And the main way that we did that in our homeschool was with conversations, which is not quantifiable. There's not tangible proof of that. So while a ton of learning happened, deeper and richer learning than I ever could have expected, it wasn't quantifiable. It didn't come from a textbook. So more curriculum, more rigor, more of that would not have been useful at all for us because that is not how Emily learns best. Also the biggest shifts and change that I saw in her as a person never could have come from curriculum anyway. Like it came from us just having the conversations about confidence, friendships, peer pressures, just everyday things, right? Knowing that those lines of communication were open enough because I had spent years listening to her and letting her have a voice and continuing to do that through middle school. That is where like so, so much of the learning happened. So curriculum, I didn't need more of it for sure. In fact, I actually needed less in the middle school years than I used in the elementary school years. Number three, your child needs so much more grace than they do pressure. It is so easy for us to put extra pressure on them because they're getting older, right? They're tweens, they're teens. We need them to be more independent. We need them to pick up more slack around the house. They should be able to do all of these things by themselves. And I'm not saying that that's not the case. Obviously they could probably handle more. However, they need so much more grace than they need pressure and pushing from us, especially at this age because of the transitions they're going through. They're going through so much hormonally, mentally and emotionally in their body that there are some days that it doesn't even feel like their body anymore. And I can say that from experience because as somebody almost 40 and going through perimenopause, I feel like there are some days that I don't even feel like I know what's going on in my body and that makes me emotional and not fit to do anything productive because I'm like just crying or a mess or I feel broken and not like me and I'm not my best self. And because of that, thankfully, even though there were some days that it was super hard, I was able to empathize with Emily and give her the grace most days that I knew that she needed, right? Like, listen, you woke up crying for absolutely no reason. There's nothing we can do. We don't know why you're crying. That's fine. It's okay to just cry sometimes. We can skip math today. Let's just do something that feels cozier like read a book together or play a game or watch a movie and talk about it. Like they need so much more grace in that situation but then they also need grace when it comes to like, because I feel like they revert and that seems so sad because like as parents, we've spent so many years teaching them like to brush their teeth, to brush their hair, to take a shower, just the little things, right? Don't forget to put on your deodorant. And then I feel like there's a regression in the tween and teen years and we get aggravated as parents and this works in homeschool too because I felt like there was a regression in academics at a certain point but we get aggravated because there's this regression. It's like, you're a tween, you're a teen, you're older. I shouldn't have to be reminding you to brush your teeth every day but it's like developmentally what's happening in their brain they literally can't help it. So give them grace and find ways to still remind them without it being something that's gonna drive you crazy. Maybe that's writing in a dry erase marker on their mirror. Maybe it's making them a visual step-by-step, you know, like you would have when they were in elementary school. Maybe it's, you know, I don't know. Whatever, I mean, you know your kid best so whatever works best for them. Help them by giving them the grace to find a way to give them that independence but still meeting them where they're at. So a lot of times for us that would be, these are the things we need to get done today in our homeschool. Where do you wanna start? What do you wanna do first? What do you want me for? What do you wanna do alone, right? I'm giving her a lot of different ability and grace to pick what she wants to do in what order, what she wants me sitting here for, what she wants me to teach versus what she wants me to leave the room for because there were days that it was like, I want you to just sit beside me while I do my math and then there were other days it was like, I don't even want you in my line of sight while I do it and I could have like been really, really hurt on the day she didn't want me around or I could have been really aggravated on the day she just wanted me to sit there and twiddle my thumb. Like I have things to do, I can't just sit here but giving her that grace of just being like, this is what she needs in this moment and the fact that she could verbalize what she needed without just having a meltdown was the thing that I kept seeing as a win in my book. Like she verbalized her needs and that's something that I can barely do at almost 40. So again, that was a win and I just gave her the grace and did that versus pressuring her to do things a different way or my way. Number four, you don't have to prepare for high school by doing high school early. This kind of goes back to what we already talked about but I feel like in seventh and eighth grade a lot of times it's like, oh, we're just getting ready for high school. You don't need to do that. Like you don't need to prepare for high school by starting it early. If your kid's ready for that and if that's what you wanna do, great but don't feel like you have to. There's a reason that high school is high school. All of high school can be done in the four years of high school. You don't need to prepare for it. You didn't prepare for middle school by doing middle school early in elementary school. You didn't prepare for elementary school by starting it in preschool, right? Like you did preschool in preschool. You did elementary school for elementary school. Middle school is meant to be middle school. You don't need to prepare for high school. You can just start high school their ninth grade year. And for that matter, the same thing goes for college. If your child wants to dual enroll and that's the best fit for them, I am all for that. But I also don't think that you should just because it's what everybody else is doing. If that's not the right fit for your child and maybe they're not college bound to begin with then don't do it. Like you don't have to do college in high school. You can just do high school in high school. Like there's a reason that it's labeled middle school, high school, college. It's okay to just do that then, to just focus on where they're at and not try to be preparing for the next thing. I don't think you should be so worried about high school that you start missing out on the middle school years. And that's kind of what I started realizing when I was like, okay, watching her become a young adult means that there's only so many years left, right? Like we only have three years of high school. We only have four years of, I'm at three years of middle school and four years of high school. And at this point I'm over halfway done with my homeschool career and with her schooling career. Why rush it if I don't have to? Like I want her to still enjoy the things that she's eventually going to grow out of. So instead of forcing her to do high school now and basically taking the time away from her that she can enjoy the middle school things, like I don't wanna do that. I want to enjoy where we're at right now. I don't wanna be so focused on the future in high school that we miss out on the tween and teen years and the middle school things and those transitional phases things, right? The things that she's gonna grow out of in a year or two. Let's just do those now and enjoy them and deal with the other things when that time comes. And number five, you are absolutely doing better than you think you're doing. I stressed every step along the way. Are we doing enough? Should we be farther? Are we behind? What about what they're doing? That's not what we're doing. It is like, it's innate. We're all gonna do it as homeschool parents. It's never going to change, but you're doing better than you think. The fact that you care if you're doing enough already proves to me you're doing better than you think you're doing. And I will stand on a soapbox until the cows come home and say, even if you were to do zero academics for the entire middle school, sixth, seventh, eighth grade, if you did nothing except focus on their mindset, their mental wellbeing, their emotional wellbeing, and help them through this transition of childhood to adulthood as beautifully as you possibly can, then your kid is already ahead and on track. Because if they can go into high school mentally and emotionally ready for it, the academics are just gonna come. It will come naturally. Even if you don't finish any curriculum, which we didn't, we literally did not finish one thing in our eighth grade year, not one, none. We didn't finish any because that was the year that the hormones and the emotions and the mental and all of that stuff hit us super duper hard. And that was my priority. And I will tell you, there have been so many times, even just in like the last month or two, and it's not just me seeing it. I've seen it. Kevin's seen it. My mom's commented on it. My dad's commented on it. Like her as a person who at least now can verbalize her needs and say like, like I need to step away for a minute or I'll, you know, whatever it is, like verbalize what she needs for her mental and emotional stability or be okay crying and then just saying I'm crying for no reason. Like we literally got our hair done last week and she just started crying. We had gotten up super early. We'd only had like three hours of sleep. She was super overwhelmed with the sensory because she gets the highlights in her hair and the foil was in her hair and it was really heavy. And so she was like oversimulated. She was super tired. It was that time of the month and she just started crying. Like she just cried. And we just kind of looked at her and we were like, is this a situation or a problem that needs to be solved? And she was like, nope, there's no rhyme or reason. I can't help it. And we were like, okay. And we just like let her have a minute and she was fine. Like she turned on some music and she read a little bit of her book and she was good. Like she has tools in her toolbox now that even at almost 40, I still am not at that place. Like she is better at 13 and almost 14 than I am almost 40 because she is more mentally and emotionally prepared than I was. And so that is just me saying you're doing better than you think. And also if you do absolutely no curriculum at all and you focus on mental and emotional health, I think your kid will be way better off in the long run and more prepared for life, which let's be honest, is really our goal as homeschool parents, right? Is to prepare our kids to live in the world and for life. I think at the end of the day, whatever job they find that they want, whatever career path they end up going down, they're going to learn the things that they need to learn for that job, for that career path, for that. Like they're gonna be taught on the job. They're gonna learn it in college, whatever it is, they're going to learn what they need to know. But helping them be a more mentally and emotionally stable and healthy person versus a smart person is going to benefit them so much better in the long run. And so like that is the one thing that I'm so, so glad that we focused on in middle school. And it's the one thing I want you to remember is that you're doing better than you think, even if you don't do any academics, even if you don't finish any curriculum, even if all you do is hold your child's hand and help them through the emotions and the transitions and all of the feelings that they're going to be having over that course of time. The middle school years are beautiful. They're messy, they're emotional. They can be a roller coaster. But before you know it, they're going to be over. They're gonna be like a flash and then it's gonna be gone. Don't spend so much time worrying and stressing or looking towards the future, which would be high school, that you miss out on what's happening because it is literally gonna be over in a blink of an eye. So enjoy it while you can.