When SelfDesign learner Graydan completed his homeschooling last June, his family finished a journey with SelfDesign that had begun almost 20 years – and four siblings – earlier.
Graydan’s mother, Natalie, wrote to Coordinator of SelfDesign Home Learning Suzanne Gregory to thank her:
“I want to express my undying gratitude to you and everyone at SelfDesign for everything that you have done for us over the years!! My children wouldn’t even be the people who they are today without SelfDesign. I will be forever grateful for attending the homeschooling conference talk given by Brent Cameron and Michael Maser. That day changed my life and the lives of my family forever.”
How it started
Back in the early 2000s, Natalie was homeschooling her eldest child on their farm 100 km west of Kamloops, British Columbia, and was considering homeschooling for her younger children too. Hearing Brent, SelfDesign’s founder, and Michael, a SelfDesign learning consultant at the time, speak about SelfDesign’s philosophy and approach to learning at a conference one weekend confirmed her choice of home learning for her children.
In fact, it changed everything.
She, her spouse Scott and their five children enrolled with SelfDesign Learning Community, our kindergarten to grade 12 program, and worked with BC certified educators who supported the family as the children learned.
“We had fabulous learning consultants,” Natalie says. Two of them became and remain family friends. “Funnily enough, they have both told me that they learned a lot from me…. Both were amazing mentors for our daughter, and I feel extremely lucky that they have been a part of our lives.”
Then the family moved to SelfDesign’s homeschooling program, now called SelfDesign Home Learning, seeking less structure, less reporting, and even more freedom to shape their day-to-day learning.
Unlike SelfDesign Learning Community families, Home Learning families don’t work with an educator. Parents take full responsibility for their children’s learning program and do not report to the school. Learners’ work is neither tracked nor assessed by the school, they do not earn credit for courses in grades 10 to 12, nor do they graduate and earn a high-school diploma. (Learners can, however, seek out additional opportunities to meet high school graduation requirements or access post-secondary education without a high school diploma.)
Read more about SelfDesign Home Learning.
Learning and growing together
Some of Natalie’s children would alternate between the two programs over the years. Remaining constant through that was SelfDesign’s learner-centered and relationship-based approach to learning.
The children followed their passions and learned at their own rates. They lived in nature for most of their childhoods, free to explore the world around them, free to watch and help care for the pigs, goats, sheep, cows, chickens, ducks, dogs, horse and cat on the family’s five-hectare hobby farm, and free to find joy in discovery.
And as the children learned and grew, Natalie and Scott also learned and grew.
“We learned to look at our lives as a learning journey, to enjoy the journey and each other,” she says. “We all had the freedom to grow and learn together instead of growing apart.”
Close family bonds
Today, their SelfDesign journey over, the family remains close. They regularly spend time together, dropping in on each other and helping out when needed.
The oldest, Jorgianna (registered with SelfDesign Home Learning until 2011), is raising four kids of her own on a nearby farm. Gavin (2014) works for the local township. Brenna (2015) loves farming, works on a ranch, and is starting a vehicle-cleaning and -detailing business. Lucas (2017) runs his own day stock-trading business, capitalizing on an interest in the stock markets and trading stocks that he discovered as a teenager. Graydan (2020) works with Natalie and Scott full-time in the family’s construction company.
In fact, it’s thanks to Graydan’s own early passion for machines and equipment that the family started the company.
“He has loved equipment since he was born,” Natalie says. “He ate, slept, and breathed equipment from the time he was in diapers. For his ninth birthday, he asked for diesel for his birthday so that he could drive the excavator that a friend was storing at our house at the time.”
Scott started the company because he wanted to work with his children, and he wanted to help Graydan realize his dreams.
“The four youngest kids all work for the company when we need them,” Natalie says, “so I guess my husband has realized his dream of working with his kids.”
~
Because of one talk at one conference almost two decades ago, this entire family undertook to learn together, to explore their interests, and to follow and support their dreams together.
“That talk changed my life forever,” Natalie says. “It transformed our family. It completely changed the way that we raised our children and made our family 100 times better than it had been before…. My children are the amazing people that they are today because of that one weekend.”
Read more about SelfDesign Home Learning:
Meet Suzanne Gregory, the coordinator of SelfDesign Home Learning
