Unschooling to Cornell U.

Our journey started 22 years ago, when my oldest daughter Marie was born. She was a high needs baby, and has always been attached to mom. When she was 6 months old, she saw her first dog up close and she laughed and laughed. I realized then she would love animals. When she was 5, we had her go to kindergarten in a small K-12 school in upstate NY, but in the spring of that year, my husband got a job in PA, and so we had to move. We had two other daughters by then, so it was quite an ordeal moving, but with friends' help, we did manage. When deciding about school, some of the things Marie "learned" from school I didn't appreciate. One of which was that you only get along with kids your own age, so she stopped getting along with her younger sister. And the neighbor boy who was 5 years older that she rode the bus with taught her other things like how to be mean, swear words and other such things. One of the last days of her public schooling, a beautiful 70s sunny day, she came home and told me they weren't allowed to go outside on the playground that day. When I went in the following day to volunteer, I found out that a teenager had been outside the school threatening a teacher, and since they didn't know what weapon he had, if any (knife or gun) the principal decided to keep the kids inside. After checking out the public school in PA, and discussing it, my husband and I decided we were going to homeschool. So started our journey through homeschooling. Marie was very high energy (more so when she ate cow's milk dairy!)  and so I knew doing "book learning" or "school at home" would not be a good fit for her. I had already worked with her kindergarten teacher to give her things to do extra because of her high energy, and she still came home pretty wound up, so I researched other methods. I learned about "unschooling" and decided it would work best for us. This is where you follow the child(ren)'s lead on learning what they are interested in. We did activities with other homeschoolers, and did projects and learned a lot of different things. Over the years I would do my best to reassure myself that they would learn what they needed when they needed to, talked with other parents with older kids that unschooled and read about others who did unnschooling and did just fine or even exceptionally well. It became obvious pretty early on that Marie's interest was in animals. She played animals with her sisters, making them "dogs" with leashes. She loved Beanie Babies, which are all animals. She played with Playmobile which has a lot of animals. She did not play with dolls hardly at all!  When we moved back to upstate NY (after a year in PA and a year in NJ), we knew when we could move out of our apartment, where ever we moved, we would need to be able to have animals. We were exploring moving to EcoVillage in Ithaca, but that fell through, so we started looking at buying a house, and we knew we needed to have land. So we bought the house we are still in now, with 10 acres. The first year we had Marie start with chickens, and shortly after one of our day care parents offered her some Jacob lambs in the spring. Marie had researched endangered animals, even writing to the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy to request information about rare breeds (I still remember her handwriting on the envelope, as she basically never wrote.) She knew that Jacob sheep were on that list and wanted to help preserve a breed, so she was really excited to be offered Jacob lambs. We had the lambs stay at a friend's house until we could get some fencing up for them, and when we brought those home, we also brought a goat, because Marie wanted to have goat's milk because of her (and her sisters) allergy. Over the years, she has been given and has bought more Jacob sheep and goats, and kept chickens as well as guineas and quail, and has learned most of her knowledge from her own flock. She has shown her animals at the 4-H Fair and NY State Fair, won the Sheep Knowledge contest for at least 3 years (till they told her she couldn't compete anymore) and since she was 13 years old been attending yearly the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival where she "wrote" an essay (she wrote a bunch of paragraphs and I moved them around and edited -basically the only thing she wrote till college) to win a Jacob ewe. She at times has the largest Jacob sheep flock in New York state. From when she was 15 till around 18 years old, she stayed up all night and played World of Warcraft (WoW) and I didn't push anything on her, but she learned a lot from it, including writing, interacting with others, attaining goals, among others. She missed out on events because of this, but it was her choice, and it helped her mature. When she was 18 she said she was "taking a year off" (and I wondered a year off of what, and still don't know LOL) and that December she applied for and started working for the Cornell Sheep Farm (which she worked at for almost 3 years.) The following fall, she started at TC3 full time, after taking the GED (and acing the social studies section -one question wrong, no idea how!! and doing really well on all but math which she got 100 points more than she needed, in any case.) She had taken the SATs when she was 17. The required GED classes she didn't actually take one of three that are required due to weather and sickness, but they let her take the exam anyway. This is how she got into TC3, and also taking entrance exams so several of her classes ended up being "pre-college" level, but she caught up fast. Her first English classes, she got A's in, first time she had ever actually written a paper. This past spring she started the application to transfer to Cornell, including reference letters from professors at TC3 and one from Dr Mary Smith ("thee" vet at Cornell) whom she had worked with at Cornell Sheep Farm, and had known since she was 12 years old and had to call her for her sick animals at the 4H Fair, as well as Marie's volunteer work with the Caprine Outing and Sheep and Goat Symposium, which her mentor, Tat Stanton (meat goat expert at Cornell who lives in Trumansburg) asked her to do. A month ago, she got her acceptance letter into Cornell, and she (and I!) couldn't be prouder! What a journey it has been! She will being getting "paid" to go to Cornell, her grant will cover more than she needs because she will be living at home. She will also continue to work on her farm business, Spot Hollow Farm.