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homeschooler the Utah Utah March 2025THE UUtahtah HOMESCHOOLER Volume 1, Issue 4 ·· March 2025 Executive Director Editor in Chief Supporting Editor Harold Godfrey Della Hilton Anna Owen PUBLISHED BY The Homeschooler Magazine TheUtahHomeschooler@gmail.com MISSION STATEMENT To provide community, resources, and support for homeschooling parents, and to recognize and inspire excellence, creativity, and exploration in homeschooling students. CELEBRATING AND INSPIRING EXCELLENCE Important Dates April 11, 2025 Last day to submit Student Spotlights, Big Wins, or Book Nook reviews! Visit to learn how to submit. April 18, 2025 Last day to enter the writing contest! ead the winning entries from the last issue and find details on the next contest. Mid May The next issue comes out! Each student who sent in a submission for this issue was entered into a drawing for a $25 Amazon gift card. Congratulations to our lucky winners! Thank you to everyone who contributed to this issue! This magazine wouldn't be possible without you! Hello Homeschoolers! And welcome to the March 2025 issue of The Utah Homeschooler magazine! It’s that time of year when the snow is melting and all the lit- tle green things are starting to poke through the ground. My kids and I have a bad case of spring fever, which makes staying inside to homeschool a challenge. I was encouraged by Jennie’s unschooling perspective that everything is a learning opportunity (story on page 4). It’s great to be reminded that doing math through square foot gar- dening is just as educational as doing math in a workbook (and per- haps even more so!). I created this magazine because it’s what I wanted—no, needed!— as a homeschooling parent. I wanted my kids to have a chance to be recognized for their hard work and progress and to be inpsired by their peers. I knew I wanted to support and encourage parents too, but I could not have anticipated how helpful the Feature Family articles would be. I think I have taken something from every single article and implemented it in my family. So to Jennie, NaTaya, and everyone else who has shared their story—thank you from the bottom of my heart! On a lighter note, I think this issue’s writing contest is my favorite of all the writing contests we’ve done so far. The entries were charming and creative and made me laugh to read them. The best are published here (see page 22). I hope they bring a smile to your face and inspire your kids in their own creative endeavors. Happy Homeschooling! Della Hilton Editor in Chief From the Editor Charlie K Stewart G Lance R Marcus JStock images from DreamsTime, Freepik,Vecteezy, and Pixabay. 4 Unschooling: Living & Learning through Passion, Play, & Joy meet the Jones family 8 Hybrid Homeschool with the Nelsons meet the Nelson Family 14 Teens in Trade: Technical Colleges & Homeschoolers 22 Wordsmiths writing contest winners 28 Big Wins 30 Student Spotlights 36 Book Nook book reviews for kids by kids 4 | The Utah Homeschooler HHii! My name is Jennie Jones. I’m a homeschooling mom of four, ages 12, 10, 6 and 3. We have been homeschooling for seven years, unschooling for three, and in the fall of 2024, we opened our own microschool, The Treehouse, in St. George, Utah! I first started homeschooling in 2018 when I couldn’t find half-day kindergarten for my oldest son. My homeschooling friend told me, “You can’t mess up kindergarten.” So I gave it a go. My second child had little to no interest in learning to read at age 6, then age 7. It wasn’t clicking for him, and he seemed to have zero interest in learning it. I was still postpartum from my fourth child, and I wasn’t sure if I was just burned out of homeschooling or if I was being led to a new way of doing learning, but I remembered a piece of encouragement that a friend had given me: “There are no learning emergencies.” Although it felt crazy, I decided to test that theory and not push reading for a while. During that time, I did a lot of research about unschooling. The concept seemed beautiful—give your kids space to follow all their interests and watch their natural curiosity lead them to all the learning. I envisioned my three boys (then ages 9, 7 and 4) watching bugs with a magnifying glass, climbing trees, mixing baking soda and vinegar, building forts, and having poetry tea time—all the things you see in the homeschool blogs and reels. Several principles kept coming to bear in the lives of the unschoolers I was reading about and listening to, and they really resonated with me: Focus first on your relationship with your child. Work collaboratively with your child to design learning opportunities based on their interests and goals. Give space for deep learning to happen through play and natural curiosity. Choose a life of joy (rather than obligation) by learning together as a family, based on your interests, goals, needs and values. Eventually, we had a family meeting in which I explained that we would now start learning by following our interests and setting our own goals. I told my kids that in our family, you could learn whatever you want to learn. As you can imagine, the news was very well received, but I had a small panic attack bubbling up inside. I couldn't help wondering, “Did I just hand over all authority in my house?” But I had been listening to a ton of unschooling families at this point, through podcasts, blogs, YouTube channels, and books. In my moment of panic, their wisdom came back to me. Unschooling isn’t a black-and- white choice between who is in charge: mom or the kids. It is a collaborative relationship, and in a collaborative relationship, both mom and kids get to say if something isn't working for them. I knew that if needed, I could use the same “family meeting” system we had just started to adjust and tweak our new homeschool approach, and that this would be an ever-evolving process of trial and reflection. This mindset shift ended up becoming very powerful for me. However, after that initial family meeting, it did feel a bit like the floodgates were opened. UNSCHOOLING AND READING As you might remember, my foray into unschooling began because of my 2nd child's lack of interest in learning to read. In my unschooling research, I read about a study that had found that kids, when left to their own devices to learn to read, generally learned between the ages of 4 and 10, with the biggest burst happening between 8 and 9. I decided to trust that study and started leaning more into my son's interests rather than pushing my own agenda. His experience ended up being pretty textbook for that study, and he became a fluent reader just before his 9th birthday. I don’t totally know how he learned, but here is what I know I did: UNSCHOOLING Living & Le arning Living & Le arning Through Passion, Play, & Joy Through Passion, Play, & Joy by Jennie Jones Opposite, clockwise: Making pinatas for Christmas Around the World (Mexico); A sewing project turned into life skills—introduction to ironing; Our beautiful family (photo credit to Matti Parker); In the community—meeting a neighbor's highland cows.The Wells Family: Homeschooling Cross-Country | 5 Read books often with him; Made games like Reading Eggs available; Played lots of board games and card games; Let him follow his interest in drawing, tracing, looking up coloring pages to trace, and doing videos on Art Hub for Kids; Spelled things for him when he asked; Read things for him when he asked; and kept lots of books around and made regular trips to the library. Seeing my son learn to read made me trust unschooling as a viable way to educate my kids. Seeing how it healed my relationship with my kids and led me to a more connected parenting style made me keep unschooling. OUR UNSCHOOLING RHYTHM I’m now in my third year of unschooling (and seventh year of homeschooling). Much has changed since our early days of “experimenting” with the unschooling philosophy. Our life today has been built totally around our family’s needs, values, and goals. Our general rhythm includes a weekly planning meeting to schedule “appointments” with ourselves and one another. Appointments with ourselves are for habits we are trying to build or projects we want to work on. Appointments with one another are for projects we need help on—kids from parents, parents from kids, kids from one another. In these check-ins, we ask questions like: What do I want to get better at? What do I want to learn more about? What books am I reading right now? How will I use technology this week? How will I rest this week? Most importantly, my mindset has shifted. Now, instead of asking myself if I am messing up my kids, I try to ask myself questions like, What habits do I want my children to develop? or What skills do I want to ensure my kids are learning? and then actively move toward what I want, rather than fearing what I don’t want. Right now, my priorities are reading, hygiene, personal responsibility, goal-setting, etc. (there are lots of great lists online if you need ideas), so I make systems for practicing these habits as a family. We find ways to learn these and schedule them in the calendar, but we do it in ways and at times that make sense based on our family’s needs and values. We take it slow, not trying to focus on all the things at once. OUR UNSCHOOLING MICROSCHOOL This is our first year running The Treehouse, a self-directed learning center in my home—it's sort of a microschool for unschooling. We meet with our school friends three days a week from 9am-2pm, so we get a lot of socializing, collaboration, and inspiration from our interactions with them. Unschooling: Learning & Living Through Passion, Play, and Joy | 5Our school has a merit badge- style program that we use for practicing goal setting and task management. We spend most of our school hours working on passion projects, passing off merit badges in our interests, and trying new things with friends. We also attend a homeschool park day on Fridays. We are fortunate to have made such good friends there over the last four years of attending, so even though our school has increased our socializing a lot for my somewhat introverted kids, we still go to our park day. FITTING IT ALL IN Mondays have become our main cleaning day, where we get all the laundry and grocery shopping done and reset the house for a new school week. To ease my mental load, we have organized cleaning jobs by zone and assigned them to certain days, so that they get hit at least once a week. Automating the bare minimum of cleaning tasks has been so helpful to free me up to engage with my kids more throughout the week. I also feel like we naturally share the work of the house more because of our lifestyle. Unschooling gave me permission to see everything as learning opportunities rather than as interruptions to learning, so now we take the time to learn things when they need to be learned. For example, sibling rivalry is a sign that we need to learn communication skills. Hangry kids are a sign we need to learn more skills in the kitchen to manage our dietary needs. We take the time necessary to cook for ourselves and clean up after ourselves because these are valuable skills. We don’t need to rush them to get back to the “real” learning. Now, lest anyone believe we are the poster family for Maria Montessori, I should be clear that I am sharing with you my guiding principles and some of the ways I try to put them into practice. I am not perfect at living these, and still have my moments of over- stimulation that I handle by hiding in my closet with chocolate. I sometimes catch myself putting too much of my own effort into things I want for my child and then feeling a little resentment when I realize they’re not into it. And let’s be real—as I write this, I have at least six baskets of clean laundry in my room that could be sorted. Our systems don’t run a perfect house, and I don’t try to do it all. But as a general path of growth, I love how unschooling has brought my family closer together, helped us communicate our needs with less judgment and defensiveness, and helped clarify our values to build a life we really love living. MY OWN GROWTH When I started unschooling, I had so many questions, but this one was a biggie: If everyone gets to do what they want all day, why don’t I? A result of unschooling that I hadn’t anticipated was my own growth, my own rediscovery of joy and of doing things for the sake of joy, love, and desire. This rekindling of my own curiosity and following my own interest-led learning journey alongside my kids ultimately led me to starting our unschooling microschool. How it came about is a story for another day, but I am so grateful for the way that this kind of freedom has shaped our whole family, not just our kids. If you’re curious about unschool- ing, know that the ways to do it are as varied as the number of families doing it. Here are some resources I found helpful for taking a deeper dive. Podcasts: The Life Without School Sage Family Journey Through Unschooling Exploring Unschooling LiberatED 6 | The Utah Homeschooler Left: Passing off our "Cooking Basics" badge (ages 5 & 6); Edible Science: spherification is a chemical reaction that makes popping Boba; Our school friends planting in the greenhouse. Opposite: Dungeons and Dragons creative writing class; Making slime, a project led by 10 & 12 year old students; Minecraft board game—bringing digital interests into the real world.UNSCHOOLING TIPS If you’re considering unschool-ing, or just want to infuse your homeschool with more self-directed learning, here are my tips: Add more play—board games, card games, silly word games. Play your kids’ video games with them, if you never have. Figure out what things capture their interest and why, so you can offer them ways to deepen that interest. Be a self-directed learner yourself and create a ritual to share what you’re learning as family, maybe around the dinner table or at bedtime. Don’t force the sharing, just model and invite. Move through life seeking joy. We do a lot out of obligation, and then we feel obligated to oblige our children and that just gets heavy. Carve out a space of time for you to do something just because you enjoy it. Tap back into your own joy so you don’t resent giving your kids space to find their joy. Make things. It doesn’t matter what you make, but build a ritual that gets you making things with your hands on a fairly regular basis, and invite your kids in. Baking, cardboard crafts, rock art, drawing—it doesn’t need to have a curriculum or intended outcome. Just see what happens. You first. If you want your kids to enjoy reading, you find joy in it first. If you want your kids to play a musical instrument, you enjoy music first. If you want your kids to study science and be curious about the natural world, you go out and be fascinated first. Keep supplies available. Keep paper and drawing/writing tools at the table. Make a craft corner with supplies and materials they can have free access to. Buy some kid-safe kitchen knives and teach them age-appropriate cooking skills. Keep a rotation of books, toys, and games available without any coercion to use them (or to use them in certain ways). Just like there is no one way to homeschool, there is no one way to unschool. I believe that infusing interest-led learning into whatever method, curriculum or ideology you’re using will bring new life into learning for both you and your kids. I may have started this journey as a “closet unschooler,” but I have grown into an “unschooler apologist.” It has done so much to shape my parenting, my relationship with my kids, and my own fulfillment in motherhood and personal growth. For the ways I see my kids learning and growing, I now shout it from the rooftops: “I am an unschooler!” Here’s to joy and love of learning! You can connect with Jennie via her Homeschool Coaching account on Instagram To learn more about The Treehouse check out their instagram page at If you are like I was, you might feel comfortable with play-based learn- ing up to certain ages. It was hard for me to wrap my head around what it looks like for kids over the age of 8, and most things I saw online were preschool and early education. So by way of a snapshot, here are what my own big kids and big school kids (ages 9-12) have done lately: Edible science: popping boba Planning a haunted yard for neighbors to attend Lemonade stands Planting seeds and buying starts to tend in the greenhouse Playing Dungeons & Dragons Collaborative Minecraft builds Minecraft modding 3D design and printing Creating and practicing a condensed version of a musical Building video games Learning wilderness survival skills Family read alouds Books in all formats Writing a novel with a friend AI art, music, video, and story generation Running YouTube channels and monitoring charts & stats Stock Market Game Digital music on Garage Band Drawing on Infinity Canvas Making play weapons in the woodshop Animations in Flip A Clip and Stop Motion Studio Unschooling: Learning & Living Through Passion, Play, and Joy | 7 Nelsons Nelsons Hi! I’m NaTaya Nelson. My husband, Chaz, and I homeschool our seven-year-old daughter, Acelee (who goes by Ace), and our two-and-a-half-year-old son, Koa. My husband grew up in a traditional school system, but I had a different experience that sparked my desire for alternative schooling for my children. Those experiences gave me the tools and confidence to eventually make the decision to homeschool. I was born and raised in Guam. My childhood was a mix of unschooling and traditional schooling that changed yearly—and sometimes monthly—depending on what natural disaster hit my tiny home-island. We moved to the mainland of the United States when I was in 5th grade, and I remember sitting in my new class at school and not understanding the math they were learning. I was very behind compared to the math standards for 5th graders in Texas and was almost held back a grade because of it. Luckily, my grandmother tutored me every day after school so I could catch up. I learned then that I thrived in a one-on-one teaching style. In 9th grade, I transferred from a very large high school to a more intimate college-prep high school. Our graduating class had only twenty-five students. That high school experience was refreshingly untraditional and opened my brain up to new learning and teaching styles and sparked the desire to give my children a different type of education— to cater their education to their needs, instead of anyone else’s needs. THE DECISION Before we had children, my husband and I both worked full-time jobs that we enjoyed. We imagined we would both be okay to continue working after children joined our family, but as we integrated them into the life we had, it started to make less and less sense. My husband and I hated being away from our kids all day, every day while we both worked. Taking the time and effort to bring them into this world only to pay a daycare or entrust a school system to practically raise and hang out with them full-time was not what we wanted. As we considered sending them to school, we realized it meant being away from our kids all day, five days a week, for the next twelve years. By the time Ace turned five, the impending kindergarten enrollment deadline was starting to give me anxiety like I had never known. We had a big decision to make and needed to nail down our “why.” Before I had children, I used to imagine what it would be like to meet my child’s first teacher, pack lunches, get report cards, volunteer on field trips, or run the carpools. However, much has changed since I was in school, and the school system is very different from when I was a kid. HYBHYB RIDRID HOMEHOMESCHOOL SCHOOL by Nataya Nelson with the 8 | The Utah HomeschoolerAfter my oldest was born, I would think about sending her to school, but the thoughts that kept running through my mind were very different from what I had previously imagined. I would think about the increase in violence and bullying and worry for her physical and emotional safety. I would think about how miserable she would be stuck in a building for six to eight hours a day and how little time would be left for our family. How would we be able to go on family adventures and extended travel when the school had specific expectations for her attendance? I also felt uneasy with how the curriculum was being picked and taught. But even with an ever-growing list of cons about the public school system, I wasn't sold on the notion of homeschooling, or the idea that I, myself, could be a good teacher. What if I wasn’t smart enough to teach my kids? What if they didn’t like to learn from me? What if my children missed out on friendships or experiences I couldn’t offer? Did I have the patience for homeschooling, or would I scar them with my inadequacies? And if I stayed home to teach, how would our family survive on one income instead of two? There has always been a part of me that wanted to homeschool my children, but I didn't want to let fear or “what ifs” be the reason we chose to homeschool—or the reason we chose not to. And then Covid happened. THE UNEXPECTED BLESSING OF COVID Part of me feels very fortunate to have children reaching school-age after Covid. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but prior to Covid, homeschooling was less accessible. When the world was sent home for a year, it radically changed the game of at-home learning. Ace was three years old when the coronavirus hit, and while many people had a very hard time juggling the needs of different school aged children with limited resources, our experience was the opposite. It was the first time we were all at home together—my husband and I working remotely while teaching Ace and playing together all day. It was one of our best years, and more importantly, it showed us that we could do this and how being at home together worked. Learning and growing and travelling together was how we wanted to raise our family. Once we had our second child, our work and family schedules no longer flowed as well, so before my son turned one and before Ace was to start Kindergarten, I quit my job and have poured myself into being a stay-at- home, homeschooling mom ever since. We have learned a lot, and there have been many mistakes, but we have had more successes than failures and continue happily on this homeschooling journey. OUR HOMESCHOOLING STYLE In our house, we have discovered that we all work better in a rhythm instead of a routine. We flow rather than force and use a weekly outline instead of a strict regimen. We have utilized a few different teaching methods and curriculum over the years for our daughter Acelee to fit each stage of life she was in. When she was a toddler, we used Montessori, which was very focused on motor skills and child-led, hands-on play. As she grew, we unschooled and focused on playing outside in nature, learning life skills like swimming/water safety, and motor skills like bike riding, which is what she was interested in. Our first year of registered homeschool was kindergarten, and it was a mix of nature school and basic academics. Ace participated weekly in a farm school, gymnastics, and hula dance. We also joined a weekly co-op so Ace could have more socialization. However, this was hit or miss due to infrequent attendance by members. As a result, Ace was left craving consistent friendships. Now that Ace is in first grade and we are in our second year of homeschooling, we decided to change it up. Right now, she attends a charter school for 1 ½ days each week, and we homeschool the other 3 ½ days. This allows us to do a mixture of online curriculum, workbooks and hands-on learning and provides more electives like theater, sports and more. Hybrid Homeschool with the Nelsons | 9 Ace and KoaNext >