This week on Homeschool Highschool Podcast: Model Diplomacy with Natalie Mack.

One of the blessings of homeschooling high school is the ability to give our teens some outstanding extracurricular experiences. Model Diplomacy is one of those marvelous opportunities. Our friend and Cousin, Natalie Mack, teaches Model Diplomacy. She agreed to tell us about it!

Model Diplomacy is a gift we can give our homeschool high schoolers to help them be better prepared for life and good citizenship.

Natalie’s family has been homeschooling a for over twenty-three years. She and her husband (a retired Navy chaplain) have five children. Four of them have now finished college and one just graduated from homeschooling high school. (You will love her son Nathaniel’s interview on the podcast. He shared about his experiences with a Virginia Conservation District’s student project program.)

In her other hats (and Natalie has LOTS of other hats), she serves as:

You can find Natalie all over the place, even on Tedx (where she talked about homeschooling). You could say that Natalie Mack is a diplomat for homeschooling families!

When Natalie was working on her degrees at Spelman College, she was a double major in Political Science and Spanish. Her plan had been to go on to graduate school and study International Affairs. In graduate school Natalie ended up switching her major to Counseling. (So she and Vicki are both counselors.) She worked as a counselor in private practice and as a drug and alcohol therapist. Then came homeschooling for more than two decades!

Whether it was counseling or International Affairs, Natalie has always been drawn to is the study of people and culture. As a homeschool mom, Natalie has been teaching Civics to local homeschool high schoolers so that they could earn their required credit while learning about government and how to be a good citizen in a nonpartisan manner.

After a while, Natalie was contacted by the Council for Foreign Relations, known as CFR. They mentioned a Model Diplomacy educational resources. She was excited. She began teaching Model Diplomacy in-person the military homeschoolers in her area. Then, as the word got out, more teens wanted her classes, so she added some of her own resources and moved to Google Classroom.

There are resources and discussion material for teachers and students for these topics and more.

So, teens are learning current events and past events that were current events at that time. They learn perspective-taking, how governments work, and how to be a good citizen.

Teens learn better with examples. That’s why the lessons are example based. Through the examples, they see and discuss the ways things actually interacted in the past and in the present, rather than just reading a textbook.

Natalie calls her class the Model Diplomacy Popup because the individually segmented events popup in time.

If Model Diplomacy looks interesting for your homeschool high schoolers, [email protected] and mention Model Diplomacy classes.

Join Vicki and Natalie for a delightful discussion on Model Diplomacy.

Thank you, Seth Tillman for editing.