I need your advice. I've been homeschooling my eldest daughter for 5 years now - since kindergarten, and before that she didn't attend preschool nor daycare. She gets discouraged very quickly. The moment she hits something non trival, she has a tendency to turn back and run away. I think this lack of maturity is the main reason, why she doesn't like to study - she doesn't like working hard on solving problems, she would like everything to be easy and I should provide her with all the answers at once. One example - she wanted to learn german, so we started working on it, but since it requires boring repetitions, she is becoming more and more impatient and discouraged. In our homeschool, I like working with students' books and workbooks, because they correspond well with the end-of-year exams, children are obliged to take to be allowed to be homeschooled for the next year. I feel like I cannot let go of the school/work books, because they allow us to go smoothly through all the material the daughter needs to learn. People around me say, that school books are convenient, but very boring for children, and therefore should not be used. They say I should let children learn more naturally. Perhaps that is possible in grades K-3, as this is when the children are expected to learn to read, write, know basic grammar, do some basic maths (the hardest thing being multiplication and division) and acquire random facts about the world. This can be achieved without school books or worksheets. But what about older children? I tried many times to make our lessons more interesting. I tried playing movies, reading living books, looking things up on the Internet, designing games, making PP presentations and so on - but all this was just time consuming, and meaningless, as the daugher didn't learn anything and/or became bored at some point. When I asked her to narrate to me, what we read/watched/..., she was unable to tell me any significant details. Making her write a notebook page about that is always a struggle too - she doesn't like to write and when forced to do it, uses short and simple sentences like a two year old. We are working on 5th grade biology now. I try to follow the list of topics we received from school. She was very happy about starting biology, but now she's discouraged, as it starts slowly with cells, living organisms and their body functions, some primitive beings - she hoped to study animals. We take notes on every topic (which actually is me dictating the text), because we will have to send them to school before the exam. I would like her to do this notetaking on her own, but since it is a school document, I feel like I cannot let her ruin the work by writing just two short sentences. At the end of the day, it is only this note that is left as a proof of us studying this particular topic - nothing is left in my daughters memory, as acquiring knowledge would require even more effort, than writing half a page of text. If I want her to memorise some facts, I need to sit with her and force her, listen to her whine and watch her pretend to be unable to construct a full sentence. I feel very discouraged. She doesn't want to take responsibility for her studies. I don't see any passion or hunger for knowledge in her. Those other parents, I mentioned before, say, that public schools kill all the joy in kids and take away their initiative, but I feel like I am doing the same. They say I should "unschool" myself first. But how? I am not concerned about grades, but I insist on us following the lists of topics given by school. Should I put them aside, let the girl do whatever she wants and then make her start studying a month before the exam? I always feel like she's behind and we don't have time to waste - she still struggles with the multiplication table, has trouble with orthography, her handwriting is a mess, she forgot all the history and science facts we worked on last year and so on and so forth. Just by writing all that I can see that our work isn't effective. Maybe something does need to change. But what? How? She passed all her exams. Should I let her run loose till September? Do your children retain what they study? Do they remember only the things that are particularly interesting to them? My daughters learning process seems to be an endless cycle of forgetting things and learning them again and then forgetting them again and learning one more time... Should I make her learn facts by heart and recite them? I alaways wanted her to be able to think independently and draw conclusions, but maybe I expect too much of a ten years old? What should I do? Can you relate to my situation? Do you have any tips? I feel like I really need help from other homeschooling parents.