Unschooling Our Way

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!

We are unschoolers and some people expressed an interest in me starting an unschooling blog.  I have 3 children who are 7, 4 and 2 and I thought it may be helpful for other unschoolers or people who may be interested in unschooling their children.  What I have discovered is that unschooling does look different for each family.  I thought it may be helpful to describe what it looks like in my family.

My oldest son is 7 years old and would have been starting 2nd grade this year if I would have sent him to a traditional school.  We decided to homeschool when he was 4 years old and I just could not find a preschool I was comfortable sending him to, then kindergarten time rolled around and my husband and I just decided not to send him to kindergarten either.  It was a difficult decision because no one on either side of our families had homeschooled their children and we knew very little about it, but one thing we did know is that we did not want to send our children to school.  We made this decision because 1) We felt it would be better for our children to spend a majority of their childhood with their parents rather than teachers that may or may not like their jobs; 2) Most teachers I know have quit their jobs because of the politics; and 3)  I've been hearing about way too many school shootings and 2 have happened at schools where I knew children who attended the schools.  Based on these 3 issues, we decided to homeschool.

I started using a schooling at home approach with My son and it was not working well.  He would be resistant and I would feel frustrated and I was almost ready to give up about halfway through kindergarten and since we had very little support at that time, I felt very defeated.  Then I was introduced to the concept of unschooling.  I read some simple books about it and thought it may be something we would try.  Then I came across the book, "Free Range Learning:  How Homeschooling Changes Everything" and I knew exactly what we were going to do.  We were going to unschool our children.

Unschooling is interest led learning.  So children choose what they want to learn.  My son's interest are often triggered by field trips, movies, books, puzzles, whatever is part of his life.  He became interested in mummies from watching Scooby Doo, we went to the Indianapolis Children's Museum and they have a huge exhibit on Egypt that includes mummies and they did an actual demonstration on how to prepare a mummy.  My son was only 5, but he sat and watched the entire demonstration for 45 minutes and fully participated.  After that, he wanted to learn everything about mummies for the rest of kindergarten and this is exactly what he did.  Everyday we went to the library, we could come home with about 4 books about mummies.  He wanted to look up mummies on the Internet.  He would listen to  information about mummies from my husband's anthropology books from grad school and look at the pictures.  During the process, he also learned a lot about Egypt, Africa, South America and Chile.  He also learned about pyramids and the grieving process of different cultures.  It was an amazing process.  Then 1st grade, he became interested in Great Apes.  He was intrigued by the Orangutans at the zoo and learned that they were from Borneo and Sumatra and we got books about them and learned that they were endangered because of loggers destroying their habitat.  He wanted to help save the Orangutans, do he decided to learn Indonesian so he could speak the native language of the area, so my husband found a site where he went to grad school and started learning Indonesian with him once a week.  He has also learned about all the great apes.  He is very interested in Asia and Africa now because this is where the great apes live in the wild. 

This is just an example of how unschooling works.  It is truly amazing.  I'm going to share weekly or daily adventures in unschooling on this blog.  Feel free to follow it if you are interested.  Thank you for taking time to read about our adventures in unschooling.  :)