Children are amazing

I’ve long abandoned trying to form a short, articulate response to folks who ask me why we homeschool our daughter. Academics, safety, character and values – where do you even begin?

But I sort of want to hold up this map that our 7-year-old daughter drew freehand, in her spare time, with zero guidance from me, as evidence that she’s getting an unusually superb education. (Note how she labeled the tribes that settled in different regions and put our family name in Normandy because I had mentioned to her that her ancestors lived in Normandy before the Battle of Hastings, before becoming a British family. We had been discussing how Charles gave Normandy to the Vikings to stop their routine invasions, hence the reference to North in the name. So both branches of her ancestry were ultimately Vikings.) A 7-year-old doodled this map and labeled it from memory!

I tell people all the time that children are capable of accomplishing so much more than our education system expects of them. It’s truly astonishing sometimes.