Janae Daniels Host

00:00

Hello, my friends, and welcome back. I am very excited today to have the author of Living Homeschool Create a Learning Environment tailored to you and your children, which is so good today. This is Treece Davis. She is the mother of eight children. She's been homeschooling y'all for 32 years and the last one is about to graduate after 32 years, and she hails from my beloved, blessed home state of Texas. So, therese, thank you so much for coming on today, thanks for having me, and it's so fun to talk to an original homeschooler, like where you fought for the laws and, you know, did it without a million curriculums and just trying to figure things out. So, so thank you for for being the giants that we can stand on your shoulders. So thank you Okay. So first, what made you decide to start homeschooling, especially back in the day when it was not a thing yet?

Trece Davis Guest

01:00

Right, Uh, I grew up in Wisconsin and never had heard of it ever actually and we moved to Virginia shortly. Right around the time we got married and we started going to a church that the kids were so interactive with their parents and extremely well-behaved and we babysat for some of them and we started realizing these kids are like top notch. What is the difference? And there we found out oh, we homeschool lots and lots of homeschoolers in that church. So, yeah, we observed and we said we want this, Whatever they're doing, that's how we want to raise our kids.

Janae Daniels Host

01:51

Wow. So then, how old was your oldest at the time?

Trece Davis Guest

01:58

Oh, that was right, as we got married so we didn't even have kids yet. And then one of those couples gave us a book that was very instrumental what the Bible says about child training, and I was like I didn't even know. The Bible said anything about child training, you know. So we read that kind of as like our first parenting anything, but mostly it was just watching these families how they interacted with their kids, how the kids really respected their parents, but also how the parents genuinely viewed their kids as whole people and not just an annoyance or whatever. We just we really appreciated the value that they put on their kids and they really listened to them. So, yeah, so we had no kids at that time.

02:47

And then by the time we started homeschooling we had moved to Texas so I didn't have any of them around anymore, but we did connect with a brand new homeschool group in the town we moved to, and so then I started learning from all of these, you know, seasoned homeschoolers Whoa, she's got a middle school child. How did she do it? You know, and just started observing, listening to their conversations. I can remember, honestly, one of the early meetings the ladies were all sitting around talking about what do you use for phonics? What do you use for phonics? And they thankfully didn't ask me, because I didn't even know what phonics was. I thought to myself I don't know what they're talking about, I just know I need to teach my kid how to read somehow. So that's where I was, at Ground zero, knew absolutely nothing.

Janae DanielsHost

03:46

Okay, so you meet with these moms. They talk about phonics Like how did you start? Like what resources did you use? What, what did you do?

Trece DavisGuest

03:58

Well, again, I'm not sure I recommend this, but I just started with all right. I know we can start with just simple words like three letter words, and I just started going through the alphabet. What word starts with the letter B and maybe has an A in the middle and then has a different consonant at the end? So I just said, bad bat, you know all these different. It was a very organic way of learning myself and I think in that whole process I was learning to understand our language. I was the one receiving the education. So incrementally I taught my son how to sound those words out and that by the time our second one came around, I discovered a wonderful set of readers that did the exact same thing and I thought, okay, I can trust this. You know, I understand it now. So that's really what we did then. From that point on, they would have little sample words and then little stories that use those words, and it really was just a matter of giving their brains a little time to be exposed to those things and very naturally they learned it all at different rates.

05:19

Like you said, we have eight kids. Some were ready for those readers at age four and some were struggling at age seven. You know they're all different, boys versus girls as well, but also just different giftings. And so there was a point early on where my husband heard another little boy reading fluently and he was five and he's like Therese, why isn't our son reading like that? And I said he's not ready yet. He's not ready, you don't have to worry, you don't need to compare, and that's something I would still say to parents whose kids are maybe five or six, especially parents of boys. Their brains need to be ready and that's not something you can rush. It's just going to cause a lot of frustration and anxiety and there's no need. You know they will eventually get it. So, learning to, you know, just continually expose them to a variety of things, but not having these expectations. Oh, they're in kindergarten, they should be reading blah, blah, blah, you know.

Janae DanielsHost

06:29

Yeah Well, and I think I think that's valuable, especially now we have the research out of that that pushing academics too early is detrimental in the long run. And yet I still see on Facebook pages like yesterday a young mom had a two-year-old and she's like, oh, what curriculum should I get for my two-year-old?

Trece DavisGuest

06:49

I'm like read to them, read and let them play Exactly, and I think there's a lot of, I think, sometimes pressure that people put on themselves, probably because, oh, what are my in-laws going to say?

07:06

Or are they going to think I'm failing their grandchild or neighbors or whoever. Oh, my kid is doing X, y, z. But we really do need to appreciate where they're at and just take them step by step and, as you said, when they're very young, I mean putting that kind of pressure on them really young is just not healthy. If a child is showing readiness, you will know and you'll see that right. Because I was really concerned when my four-year-old was like wanting to read and I thought, oh, we can't be doing this, this is not good for her. But she was, she was doing it on her own. I said, yeah, and she's always been that way, just like a, a brilliant kid. So I'm like, well, it'd be wrong to hold her back too. So you just kind of have to gauge it with each one.

Janae DanielsHost

07:56

But yeah, it's true. It's true Because I look at with my six kids. They are all so different and whereas I have one child that, like, understands math and has had a mathematical brain forever, reading came a little bit later, whereas other children reading came a lot earlier, and but when they were developmentally ready for each thing, they they showed it. You know, like you could see that Right.

Trece DavisGuest

08:21

Most of them went through public school at the beginning, but so relaxing and not putting that kind of pressure on about how your homeschooling morphed over the years, because I just find this super fascinating and really really cool and your approach really cool, oh sure. So again back in 1993 when we started, there were only like three curriculums out in the market and I looked at those. I know it's hard to believe. Today there's hundreds now 7,600.

Janae DanielsHost

09:15

Somebody counted?

Trece DavisGuest

09:17

Wow, that's amazing. That is amazing. So, yes, at that time it was very limited and they were very traditional, and I looked at each one and I said I can't do this. I feel like it's strangling me. It just felt so artificial and I felt like it was sort of um, um I I'm trying to find the right word sort of like an insult to my intelligence. They'd say, okay, now take a breath, now say this sentence. And I'm like I can't do that, I can't live like that.

09:55

And so I started sharing my frustration with a friend who, you know, was the leader of this little group, and she said well, why don't you create your own? I said can you do that? He said, absolutely, yeah, right, well, are we allowed? And so she told me about this book, how to Create your Own Unit Study, by Valerie Bent, and I read that and I said this is me, this fits me exactly, this is exactly what I wanted to do. And so I started looking at other. I mean, I had never even heard of unit studies actually.

10:32

So, basically, I started looking at some samples of little let's say, a unit study on ancient Rome, let's say, for example. And I looked through it and I said, well, well, there's a lot of busy work in there. They were trying to cover all the different subjects, um, government and literature and all of that. And I said, I think I get the idea, but I think I'd rather do it with the books I choose. And so we started going to the library and finding, let's say, looking up for a specific book that was maybe recommended in a homeschool catalog, and I would maybe find one or two of those titles, but they're on the shelf for 20 more that I just. I said, well, these all look really good, so I would check them all out, bring them home, look through them and then just glean from them what I wanted to use. So we would make it as multisensory as possible.

11:34

I had learned from, I think from that Valerie Bent book, that the more senses you involve, the more retainable the information will be, so therefore, the longer that they'll remember it. And I thought, okay, that's a good thing, right. So I'm like, well, we could, let's say we're doing ancient Rome. We could make some of the food that they would prepare. We could don some togas, you know, take a flat bed sheet and the kids would put a little olive wreath on their head, and I'm Socrates, I'm Aristotle. You know, they were really fun. Actually, I think that's ancient Greek.

12:20

Sorry but they had a lot of fun dressing up like them, and then we would try to do different field trips. Let's say we were learning about the ancient aqueducts. Well then we would go to, let's say, a modern day water treatment plant and try to see how things have changed over the years. We would study their artwork. We would try to replicate whether it's mosaics or frescoes or weaving or anything. We tried to really do a lot of multisensory activities we would. Certainly the most important thing we did was read living history books, books, which is basically books that are fictional but are set in a time period where you feel like you're living there and you immerse yourself in all of the different things that are going on. Another thing we would do is listen to the music or read the plays or poetry that was popular from that culture. Um, we would always spend some time trying to understand their either mathematical contributions or scientific discoveries, and so it was. It really encompassed all the different subjects and I felt like at the end of a unit each unit was a semester long At the end of that semester, we had deep dived and immersed ourselves so much that our kids really got it. It wasn't what I really was trying to avoid was oh, you know the textbook. You dip in, you learn three things and you move on. I didn't want it to be that way. I really wanted them to experience it, and so I I.

14:12

I feel that we really did that. We all really lived it, whether it was the ancient Mayan culture or Canada, or African countries, antarctica We've just been all over the world with our studies. Some years we do more of like a world tour where we'll do one month we'll be in Australia, one month we'll be in Japan, one month the Middle East, that kind of thing, russia, india we've done all of those. And what I love about that is our kids grow to have an appreciation for different cultures because they're going to come across all of these cultures and different people that they meet. Now you know they live on our street, we're at the grocery store with them, and I just really wanted my kids to have a heart for people who may not be exactly like them but are still enough. They're humans and they're enough to appreciate and become friends with, and I just really wanted my kids to appreciate the beauty in every culture.

Janae DanielsHost

15:27

I love that. So, whereas I've heard some people use like they'll choose a topic such as like butterflies or springtime and then use that as the springboard into their unit studies, what was your main area of topic that you'd use as your springboards?

Trece DavisGuest

15:49

Uh, history for sure. Um, we started out doing those kinds of say okay, unit study on horses or unit study on dinosaurs or big machinery. Um, one day our oldest son said, mom, I really want to learn about presidents. I'm like, really Okay. Okay, not sure I'm ever going to hear somebody else ever say that, but great. So to this day he's 37. He loves biographies of different presidents. I don't know. He was like seven when he told me that.

16:22

So we built our whole 1800s curriculum around the presidents and that was kind of like the structure from where we, where we began and launched each each decade. I had another son who was crazy about penguins, and still is to this day. So we spent a unit learning about Antarctica and incorporated the love of penguins into that. So everyone in the family, from pre-K up to 10th grade, we're all learning that one unit of whatever history or culture that we're studying, of course at different levels of difficulty. I had another son who said, mom, I'm just crazy about planets and outer space. And I said, okay, that fits in perfect with an ancient Mesopotamian, because the Babylonians and Assyrians were really incredibly wise about astronomy and of course, the ancient Greeks were too. So we fit that into those studies. So I tried to key in on their interests, definitely. And then I just got more and more comfortable, I think, with saying, okay, how about we study ancient China? We did that one for an entire year because it's so huge.

Janae DanielsHost

17:41

As you say, it's a long history and a lot of land, and it's so colorful, it's so huge. As you say, it's a long history and a lot of land.

Trece DavisGuest

17:46

And it's so colorful, it's so fascinating. So, within that year, okay, well, this daughter over here is really into making paper. Well, the ancient Chinese invented paper, perfect. Yeah, so that was a phenomenal way to tie in and kind of connect her interest. Some of the kids are really into animals and you know different ages. Okay, well, that fit in perfect.

18:17

With Every single study we've done, you're studying Australia. Think of the unique animals that are only found in Australia the kiwi bird or the kangaroo or the. There's a lot of, actually koala, a lot of K animals in Australia we came to find out. So, trying to kind of find their interests. Like one daughter, huge into fashion, loves fashion interests. Like one daughter, huge into fashion, loves fashion.

18:47

When we studied the 1900s, she wanted to do a book where she would dress up in a particular decades clothing and she found all of the accessories hats, umbrellas, shoes. Did her hair that way? Because if you think about, let's say, 1905, america was still in the victorian age where it was full length dresses, black, big hats. You showed no skin, basically. Then you look at the 1920s and we've got the flappers, the jazz age, where hair is cut short. You show a lot of skin for those days, you know, sleeveless shirts, short dresses, and so she had a lot of fun with that. So trying to key in on their interests within a unit helped a lot, but I also wanted them to learn all the other things that they might not have necessarily been gravitating to to begin with, just for a general knowledge type of thing.

Janae DanielsHost

19:44

I love it. Do you know, you bring up something interesting with your daughter and, going through the decades, my degree was in costume design and I had to study clothing history and that's how they did it. They started with one time period and we'd have to research it and research it, and then we'd have to design, you know, clothing based on it, and then, when we went into the makeup, um, we'd have to, we'd be given you know, a time period and we'd have to study the pictures and the paintings and the history behind it and then recreate the makeup.

20:13

So what you did which which is what you did with your daughter as college level work you know like, because that's what what I did in college to learn you know how to do costume design, and that I mean that, granted, that was like three classes of costume design, but still I appreciate you sharing that.

Trece DavisGuest

20:31

I've never had anybody tell me that before but it was a fabulous project that she totally took ownership of Um and we I still show that book when I I mean speaking in um, like homeschool groups and everybody's like that's a fun idea. So you know, just try to stay open mainly to what your kids are interested in and expand that and help them to develop it.

Janae DanielsHost

20:56

Um, yeah, what were some of the challenges over the years? Um, as they were getting older and going into high school, what did you find as as some of the challenges over the years, as they were getting older and going into high school? What did you find as some of the bigger challenges?

Trece DavisGuest

21:08

Well, there's always I think it's less so much the academic as it is. I'm one mom and I've got eight kids. For me it was time eight kids For me it was time and I really made a big effort to be a mom first and a teacher second, or a guide or a mentor, whatever you want to call yourself, because I don't think I was teaching them so much as I was exposing them to where what they could learn. But yeah, here I've got one going to driving us to his college orientation and I've got a newborn in an infant seat in right behind him. This feels a little surreal. All three of us went to his college orientation that day, so trying to meet the needs of them at all of the different levels.

22:08

I will say, before we started homeschooling, I broke down one day crying, saying I'm going to have to teach high school chemistry. One day I was really afraid and having a meltdown and my husband said you know what? When we get to that you'll know what to do, but you're only in kindergarten right now. Let's not worry about that now. And he was right. By the time we got to the high school years, I had a wonderful set of um science to be taught from. Uh, the book itself like teaching textbooks or apologia that contained all the information. I didn't need to know as much as oversee it and watch them kind of take ownership of it, and a lot of it was explained in the text itself. So I would say that was a. It's a common fear. I think. A lot of people are like how am I going to do high school? I remember barely making it through high school or I didn't complete high school. Some people will say how can I teach high school? There's loads and loads of co-ops, loads and loads of online programs people can take Absolutely, and what we have found to be a wonderful help is starting in 11th grade. Our kids take dual enrollment classes at our local community college and that just completely takes it off my shoulders. That has been wonderful because then they're earning college credits at the same time as taking their 11th and 12th grade years. So they ended that, they've already got their transcript, the school has made the transcript for them and then they transfer to four-year college. So all eight of our kids have either already finished college the first six have finished college and had, and the last two are in it currently, but had little little, to no help from me at all. So I felt like that was a really amazing thing.

24:12

I remember thinking my husband was like, well, let's, it's time for our oldest to apply for college. I said, well, he'll never get in. And he was like, well, I think we should at least try. And so we applied and sure enough, he got in. And they were like we'll help pay for lots of this. And we were just like amazed. I was amazed. My husband was like well, of course he can go through college. He's a bright kid. He's done well so far.

24:43

And what I learned when they started college? I was so encouraged that all of these years of, I guess, just building discipline in their lives I never really thought of it at all. But they became responsible. They were in charge of when they had to turn in their homework, when they had to write their paper. It was incremental and maybe that's why I never really put it together. But by the time they started college and went in college, all of their fellow students were like not even attending class, let alone turning in assignments or papers, and they were failing. And I'm like, wow, my sons, my daughters, they're all getting A's. And I'm like. I mean they're not like Albert Einstein, but they were being diligent to do their work because they'd never known anything different. You know, of course I'm going to do it. So I was really encouraged that homeschooling, I think, really taught them that self-discipline and responsibility.

Janae DanielsHost

25:52

I found that my daughter, who's 17 and she's a junior, is doing concurrent enrollment. She took last year off and then, as a freshman, she did concurrent enrollment. She took last year off and then, as a freshman, she did concurrent enrollment, and I was.

26:04

I was really really worried about that because we pulled her in the, you know, in sixth, just finishing sixth grade, and that was during the pandemic and you know all the things that I thought, oh, how she, how's she going to do this? I mean, all we've had was the last couple of years with me, and yet she, she just took. She's like, oh yeah, I've got this assignment, I've got to get it done. She was pretty funny because she was like, wait a minute, if I do exactly what the teacher says and jump through all of their hoops, I get an, a yes. And she's like, okay, I don't love that, but you know, and here she is finishing up the semester and that's like we have a, so, but. But I was surprised at how she just took, you know, had the, took the responsibility and she's like, oh yeah, I've got this assignment to do. I didn't have to ask her Exactly.

Trece DavisGuest

26:55

They take ownership?

Janae DanielsHost

26:56

Yeah, yes, they sure do. And she rose to the occasion with her peers, realizing that there was a couple of people in her classes that were older than me, and she's like, oh okay, I and they're treating me as their equal, so I need to rise to the occasion. That's beautiful. That blew me away.

Trece DavisGuest

27:13

So she was ready. She was mature and ready to handle that. And I think they do. They do generally speaking, and I think, as they go along, I mean I've had different ones saying why do I need to take an English class? I can already know English. Like it's just sort of basic. Like you know, got to write papers, you'll be doing it all your life. And now they're like oh yeah, obviously that was very, very basic class, but they kind of some of them kind of put up a little bit of a fight about it initially, but yeah, they grow into it, I think so.

Janae DanielsHost

27:51

I remember telling my mom when I was 14, she would do cooking schools during the summertime and I'd have to help. I was like when am I ever going to use this stuff?

Trece DavisGuest

28:02

Like every day.

Janae DanielsHost

28:05

Three times a day? That's adulting. What are you going to eat for the rest of your life? Three times a day? That's adulting. What are you going to eat for the rest of your life? So let's talk about living homeschool. Well, actually, before we go into living homeschool, what are your kids doing now?

Trece DavisGuest

28:19

Okay, yeah, our oldest is a senior statistician with Amazon Wow. Our second is a designer with Apple out in San Francisco. He's like Mom, I can't believe I get paid to do what I do. He was my kid that I was really worried about. Okay, I was like he doesn't love math, he doesn't really enjoy reading, all he wants to do is computer stuff. I think this is bad for him, you know, and I was like really worried. No, that's the way he's wired. I mean, that kid was always like that and he's got a great personality and I think he just kind of wove his way into people's hearts and they trained him and taught him. Of course, he got a college degree as well, but he also said, yeah, a lot of what I've learned.

29:12

I've learned on the job. It's not so much my degree, but it gave me credibility. But he is the most creative person and I think they see that and obviously they see that. So, yeah, so he's at Apple. Our third son is a fire protection engineer down in Houston and our fourth is a daughter. Our first daughter is a communications specialist out in Maryland. Our fifth is computer science here in the Dallas area. Our sixth is an ER nurse in Phoenix. Our sixth is an ER nurse in Phoenix and the last two, probably number seven is probably going to be mechanical engineering. He's kind of deciding his major right now brilliant mathematician, but he's like, yeah, there's not a lot of money in that, so he's probably going to go into engineering. And our eighth, our last, is computer science, for sure.

Janae DanielsHost

30:11

Very cool, very cool. Let's talk about living homeschool, which y'all. This is such a good book. I think the story behind how it was developed is super cool and fascinating and actually inspired me, because I'm like, okay, I'm going to start journaling better, so can you share how you developed the living homeschool?

Trece DavisGuest

30:34

book. Sure, my daughter, I've never wanted to write a book, never even considered it, never thought of it. My daughter-in-law had, let's see, they had a, I think, a three-year-old and a one-year-old at the time and she said Therese, how did you homeschool? Because she actually was raised being homeschooled as well. She says my mom did it differently than you. We used textbooks pretty much. And she says but Josiah keeps telling me how you homeschooled and that sounds so cool, how did you do it? So I sort of explained it to her and she says I like that, could you write that out for me? And I said, sure. So I just kind of gave her a little example of, let's say, an ancient Egypt study, and so I gave it to her. She read it. It was maybe five pages worth or something, and she said now, I get it, I love this. I said, okay, great, so you good to go right. And she's like, no, I need more examples, I need more details. Could you do that same kind of thing with every one of the civilizations and cultures you've studied? I said, whoa, okay, that's going to take some time.

31:46

So I went back through my journals and it took me. I would only work on it in the month of June, because that was the only month I had where I could completely lose myself in it and I would just go through all my journals at that time was 25 years worth and look at all the books we read and all the activities we did. And it took me six years, but by the end of it I had written this book and I could see by that point, you know, maybe more than just my daughter-in-law could benefit from this. And so, yeah, then we had a friend who did self-publishing and my other son helped me design the cover, and so it just kind of came together. Another friend who's a phenomenal editor. So God provided lots of help for me and here I am. I love it Okay.

Janae DanielsHost

32:44

So one question that I've heard a lot and this has been a hard question that I've not been able to answer because when we started homeschooling my kids, my youngest was four, turning five, and then I had two adult kids who had gone through public school and so I had, you know, teenagers and then an elementary and one about to go into elementary. But I hear often from young moms with littles, like how do you do it? How do you balance moms with littles? Like, how do you do it? How do you balance With eight kids? What would you do, especially when you had a baby in tow or several babies at once? What would you?

Trece DavisGuest

33:20

do Right. Well, one thing that really helped us was that we were all studying the same things, so we were all thinking about the same thing and our lunch conversations we'd be discussing hey, what did you learn today? Hey, this is what I found out, and it was very, very exciting and very invigorating. So they were all kind of on the same page, understanding the older ones would often work independently, always work independently. Um, I'd say, hey, these are the books, go tell me what you can find from those the very youngest, of course I wasn't doing as much like the baby and the three-year-old, Um, and then I would be working one-on-one with, let's say, the five-year-old, the nine-year-old, the 10-year-old, 12, you know that range and so then I would have one of them take turns playing with the three-year-old. Could you go in the next room and read them some books while I help this child kind of thing with math. So we would do a lot of that where they I always had helpers who I could call in, so they would do it kind of like in shifts.

34:35

I would say for moms, let's say they've only got two, one's a five-year-old and one's a two-year-old let's say, and you're really wanting to work on reading with that five-year-old or something a little more brain intensive. Keeping that two-year-old occupied is always a challenge. The one and two-year-olds they're busy, they don't understand what's going on and you know you're their mommy. So I always try to fill their tanks first, attention wise, read them some stories and then set them at a little chair next to us with some snacks and some stickers and some watercolors or Play-Doh or whatever, and then we'd maybe have a 20 minute window where we could work with the five-year-old kind of thing. So I mean, it got increasingly easier for me as my kids got older because they could help me with that two and you and three year old. I always say that the two year old is the variable in every equation. If they're having an awful day, you're going to have an awful day If they're teething or they're tired or they're sick.

35:41

Be a mom and meet their needs and try to you know, make up for it when they're napping. And one day is not going to be the end of the world if you have to have a wash day, kind of thing. But yeah, it's a balancing, juggling act a lot of days. And I think the biggest thing that I would say is homeschooling is not so much about the academics, it's a lifestyle, it's compassion. Schooling is not so much about the academics, it's a lifestyle and it's compassion. And your kids are watching and they're, they're imitating everything I do.

36:16

So I was really wanting to be, wanting to be, but often failing wanting to be a patient, listening person in their lives, because I I wanted that to be part of who they are. So just kind of stepping back from like a lot of the pressures of oh, we've got to get through this today and just saying you know, we're going to live today and that's why my book Living Homeschool I didn't want it to be something artificial, I didn't want it to be something dead, I wanted it to be life-giving. I love that and truly, where we're breathing in and breathing out, breathing in the story, breathing back. What did we learn? It's really that simple. Let's read a book together and you tell me what you got out of it and then write about it. I mean it really it, it, it's. It can be very simple and but I wanted it to be genuine learning. So, yeah, that's kind of how we did it with the, the littles. I love it.

Janae DanielsHost

37:20

Now, as far as like with math, would you ever go through curriculums with them or would you stick to? Okay, we're doing this unit study on Greece, and so we're gonna, you know, study Pythagoras.

Trece DavisGuest

37:33

Yeah Right, Um oh, we always had a separate math curriculum in addition to the unit study. Yeah, cause I, there's just so many skills that I wanted them to learn incrementally. So, yeah, we, we definitely used umPress were the workbooks we we love. It's published by Key Curriculum. They also have a very dynamic called Interactive Math Program IMP or IMP for short for the high school years.

38:05

I absolutely love because it was story form, is built off of real life examples. I loved it but, um, I kind of ran out of time to do it because by the time I was there in high school, you know, um, I had so many other kids that were under. So then we began more independent math work when they got to that age level. Yeah, so we definitely, we definitely still had a math curriculum and starting in fifth grade we'd also have a science curriculum and my, our favorite, was lyrical life science, and that again fifth through seventh grade. There are these topics that they put to music really well done, very comical, but helps to remember it when you sing the little song over and over and over again. And lots of you know stuff that they can investigate and deep dive into.

39:03

Very cool, yeah. So math and science we had additional, but it also I didn't feel so worried about it because I was also touching on it within the unit studies as well.

Janae DanielsHost

39:15

Yeah, and I love what I've, as you shared about the unit studies that I've been reading in your book with the. So, for those of you listening, in the back of the book she gives examples with all the different individual subjects and historical unit study examples, which are so great. But I love how integrated it is, where we get to see in real time like, oh, this is how it all fit together, this is how the science and the math and the art all created this culture, you know, and added to it.

Trece DavisGuest

39:50

I think laying that context it helps them to understand it exactly as you said, to understand where they were in the human history and to appreciate the incredible things that they were able to figure out without calculators, you know.

Janae DanielsHost

40:12

I also think we'd die If everything went down.

Trece DavisGuest

40:15

We're in trouble, yeah without the internet, without AI. They figured it out with their own brains. So that's really. It develops a beautiful appreciation for what was discovered and how now we build off of that today and advance it far, much farther. I love it.

Janae DanielsHost

40:38

What would you give? Last bit of advice that you'd give to homeschooling moms, especially newer homeschooling moms who've just pulled their kids, whether teenagers, elementary, middle school. What would you tell them?

Trece DavisGuest

40:53

The most valuable thing is your time with them. It's not the academics, it's helping them to become healthy human beings and giving them that security, that unconditional love. That security, that unconditional love that you know as a parent, you love them more than anyone else, you have more invested than anyone else and you care more than anyone else that they are going to succeed. So you've got a lot of natural motivation already. So I'd say, trust the fact that you're going to be learning right alongside of them. In fact, I am certain I was the primary student. It was not my kids, I was the one learning. I was finally getting an education. So yeah, just develop your relationship and all the other stuff will fall into place.

Janae DanielsHost

41:46

I love it. Therese, thank you so much for coming on today. The book is Living Homeschool Create a Learning Environment tailored to you and your children. I'll have a link to it in the show notes if you're interested in picking that up, therese. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your time with us today.

Trece DavisGuest

42:06

Mamas and Papas.

Janae DanielsHost

42:07

Oh, it is my. It is an honor and pleasure to have you. So, Mamas and Papas, Grandmas and Grandpas, you are doing so much better than you think you are and you got this. We'll talk next week.