I guess what I'm asking is, do any of you guys exclude subjects solely because your child doesn't want to do them?
We don't homeschool for a variety of reasons, chief among them that DD7 is hugely social, and I'm hugely antisocial, and it's much easier for me to meet her social needs at school than it would be for me to coordinate unpleasant-to-me social activities.
That said, if we were to homeschool, we would unschool (although I personally prefer "child lead learning" as a label). For a variety of reasons, chief among them that, in my experience, I do a very poor job attempting to teach DD anything, and a very good job of facilitating her efforts to learn anything.
And yes, we would exclude subjects solely because she didn't want to do them. If it's important to her, she'll come around to it in her own time.
For example:
- Swim lessons from 12 months to 2 1/2 years, because I wanted her to be able to swim: total failure. The school actually asked us to take her out of lessons, because she was becoming more and more distressed around the water. Swim lessons at 7, because she was determined to swim: total success. She went from total nonswimmer to jumping off the diving board and swimming the width of the pool with rollover breathing in about 3 weeks.
- This past summer, if she was ready for bed on time, she got an extra 30 minutes to watch TV, read, or do EPGY math. Three nights out of 4, she picked math. Other than the library's summer reading program (for which she read the 20 shortest books she owned in about 30 minutes total, because she wanted the inflatable whale prize), I'm not sure she touched a book all summer. Yesterday was the first library day, and she went to bed last night 2 chapters in to Christmas in Camelot. I have no clue when she read the remaining ~80 pages, but it was in time to take an AR test over it in class this morning. So she seems to have gone back to reading, all on her own.
- DD has always been anti-vegetable. The school offers her vegetables every day at lunch, and she always tosses them untasted. I gave up on offering at home. I'm not sure she's eaten a cup of vegetables cumulatively in her entire life, if you don't count pizza / pasta sauce. In the car today, she asked me to please serve her 4 raw carrot sticks with Caesar dressing as dip with dinner on Monday, and to require her to eat them.
- She just started 3rd grade, still adding and subtracting on her fingers. One day, she'll either need to memorize her math facts for some reason important to her, and she'll memorize them. Or maybe she won't - I've been known to mentally count on my own fingers as an adult.
Kids will surprise you.
