We were recently driving in the car talking about what was on the dinner menu for that evening. Our oldest daughter gets so upset with her brother when he calls his carrots, cucumbers, and croutons (all separate and ready to dip), a salad.

This spurred a conversation about what “salad” actually is. My first words were in reference to salad being a bunch of vegetables mixed together. Huh? Then I moved to needing lettuce in the mix, with Chloe adding things like cucumbers, carrots, radishes, and broccoli. Jayden proceeded to say you could put bananas on a salad, which we all pointed out would make “Fruit Salad” (Yummy, Yummy). Jayden’s final and ultimate thought on the discussion was that, “You can put anything on salad that you want.” What do you prefer in your salad?

This lead me to thinking about how we define things, and what happens when we try to define things that don’t seem to have a clear definition. That is how I got from salad, to homeschooling.

I find homeschooling to be one of those terms which lacks a clear definition. It is a broad large term, encompassing many different looks and variations. Dictionary.com defines it as, “to teach (one’s children) at home instead of sending them to school”. Even to say that homeschooling is school at home (which uses the literal combination of the words), does not accurately define nor encompass all that homeschooling has come to be an umbrella for. When talking to my husband about this he said, “No, homeschooling is more like school that is conducted outside of a traditional public or private school!”

To read more about why I think homeschooling is like salad, check out my full post at Hip Homeschool Moms.