Homeschooling With A Twist – God Schooling

Homeschooling With A Twist – God Schooling Episode 407

Never heard of God Schooling? Well, you are not alone. Many are new to this concept of education but homeschool mom and herbalist, Julie Polanco will share what it is and how you can achieve homeschool success.

Julie Polanco is a podcaster on this network! Check out the Crunchy Christian Podcast here.

Julie’s Book – God Schooling here.

Connect with her on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.

Julie has four children and has recently completed her eighteenth year of homeschooling. As children, she and her husband were both bullied and she didn’t want her children to have the same experiences, and the idea of homeschool resonated with them.

While on a family camping trip the family next door, on the next site was a homeschool family of eight. Julie felt like it was a God-incident. They were so impressed with the family and how close they were with each other and how mature the older children were. And they saw them and we said, we want that. It was a turning point.

*This is an excerpt of the interview with Julie Polanco on God Schooling. Listen to this broadcast for the entire content.

Julie says…

And from there we thought, okay, we’re going to work. This is what we’re going to do. And you know, anybody can teach preschool and kindergarten. But after not very long, it wasn’t too many years that it became a real chore trying to get the kids to do what I thought they should be doing.

God Schooling

And the light in their eyes, it started to go out, especially my oldest. And I just, I cried out to the Lord and he said, well, what are you doing? Like, you’re not, you’re not listening to what I want you to do with these kids. You’re trying to do this according to what everyone else says it should be like, and you’re not pressing in and seeking my peace and he just spoke to my heart and said I want you to do things differently. These kids are gonna need something different. And within a short time, he revealed to me just why they needed something different and what that something different was. And at the time you know, Christian unschooling is kind of a dirty word. I felt like the Lord was leading us towards a Christian unschooling approach, in a sense, it is child-directed learning.

Secular Unschooling allows the child to learn what they want when they want, how they want and if they want, and it often looks like a very sort of hands-off, like just let the kid do whatever they want all day. But I, in a Christian sense, knew that wouldn’t work. Children will not always choose very wisely and will not always choose very productive pursuits. So it’s more of a God-led or God School approach.

God Schooling is focused and informed by the child’s passions and their natural bents and interests, but it’s not just let the kid do whatever they want all day. It’s working with them, collaborating with them. And what is God doing in this child? Where what how is God shaping this child? It’s, it’s, it’s more of a relationship-driven approach and more of developing their passions and interests and looking at how you can direct them towards productive use of their time to develop those skills, to develop those passions and pursuits.

So it is directed by what God put into that child, but it is also taking into account that they need to be trained and good habits and morals and good character, and that it’s, they need to be, the parents seem to be very much involved and looking at how they’re using their time and making sure that the skills development happens. I mean, we don’t want the child growing up and not knowing how to do arithmetic or reading or things like that. But looking at it on God’s timetable, I’m not necessarily on a world’s timetable, which sometimes looks very different.

Wellness and Herbalist

I have always had an affinity for nature and plants. I’m going all the way back to my like preschool, like, you know, five, six, seven years old even. I grew up in a partially developed suburb of Chicago. And so there, there were vacant lots and big empty fields with a whole bunch of weeds and stuff. And I loved to spend time there. I didn’t know it then, but I know now that that, that I felt at home there because I felt like someone was with me and it was, it was Jesus who was there with me and I still feel closest to God when I am out in, among the weeds and the trees. And I always felt like there was something a little bit quote, unquote, magical about that. And I hate to say it like that because some, you know, I mean, that’s often affiliated with something weird, but I know now that the plants have a lot of medical proven medical qualities about them the essential oils, but also lots of other chemicals in ’em that scientists and doctors and other people have discovered and published in peer-reviewed journals.

So I, I learned that as I got older and I found, I found out more about that when I went to a chiropractor in my early twenties because I could not move my neck. I, I had pain in my shoulder. I could hardly move my arm, my left arm, and I couldn’t turn my head to the left at all. And I mean, you can imagine how scary that is somebody who’s twenty-three years old and they’re having this kind of pain already in their life. And that was a turning point for me because that chiropractor had magazines in her office that talked all about the qualities of vitamins and certain kinds of foods and talked about herbs. And just how you cook with whole foods. (More on the audio.)

It is wonderful to see the fruits of your homeschool journey. When I started homeschooling there was very little information. It was actually pre-internet. And we just really had to use our own resources. We couldn’t even get textbooks, which probably was a good thing. And you know, we had to scramble to find materials that we could use with our kids, but our kids did wonderfully. I’ve seen how well they’ve done with homeschooling and into college. And so it’s, it’s exciting now to have a whole nother generation coming behind us that can learn from all of these podcasts.

And I just appreciate you you know, giving of your time, because podcasting is a as well, almost like a full-time job, Julie, probably by now, you know, you probably have thought at one point, like, why am I doing this? Because it is a lot of, you know of heartfelt work, but people that are my pod-casters and I will tell you that a hundred percent of the podcasters on either one of my networks, either the homeschool network here or the Ultimate Christian podcast network are passionate about their topic. And that is what I look for. So I really want to thank you for coming on. And do you have any last words you want to share with the listeners?

I just want to say it’s character over content and, you know, God knows your child’s future. And so just relax and don’t worry about the small stuff that if you, it’s not, it’s not all up to you that God will fill in the needs that you missed at the right time. And, I have seen that with my kids and I’ve been a little better about that with my younger ones, but that it’s really the character that matters so much more because character is much harder to form later, but content can be picked up at any age.

Order Julie’s books via your local bookstore. If you went you can get it Amazon Barnes and Noble, etc. Or here

 

 

 

The post Homeschooling With A Twist – God Schooling appeared first on Ultimate Homeschool Podcast Network.

VHM-407-Schooling-With-God.mp3 (31:03, 39MB)