Saturday, August 24, 2013

What I love about unschooling

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!

There are so many things that I love about unschooling and I'm going to touch on a few of these today. 

1. I love the freedom of it.  We are able to live as we see fit and we do not have to follow strict guidelines with the way we plan our life.  Nor do we have to follow anyone else's schedule.  We choose the outside activities that our children want to participate and extra classes.  We are also able to travel whenever we want.  I am so thankful for these freedoms.

2. I love how our children's individuality can be cherished.  My oldest son is my scientist.  He loves doing his own science experiments daily and this usually occurs in the kitchen.  So far nothing has blown up.  He is also a great nature guide.  Yesterday we hiked trails and he was our guide.  He knows every super hero that ever existed and is already a wonderful protector with his younger brother and sister.  My daughter is a girly girl.  She loves dancing around like a ballerina and creating her own songs and stories.  She loves princesses and pretending she is in love.  She loves playing with her dolls and dressing them.  I kept her old baby clothes so that her dolls have a very extravagant wardrobe.  She also loves pretending that she can read and she make up her own version of many of her stories and will memorize  most of her books.  Baby boy is into cars.  He started pretending his baby toys were cars when he was 6 months old and started to sit.  We realized this and just started giving him matchbox cars as a baby and he would sit and play with them for hours and make an interesting motor sound while doing it.  As he became older, not only does he play with his little cars, but he likes going outside and riding around on the little cars we have that he can push with his feet.  We have also discovered him taking items apart and trying to put them back together.  So he is my mechanic.  We try to incorporate these personality traits and interests with our day to day life to help motivate and inspire our children to learn.

3. I love how our children have the opportunity to get to know each other well and how they can rely on each other.  I see so many siblings who just fight all of the time because their lives are so separate.  They spend most of their day away from each other, so it's difficult for them to get along well when they're together.  While with homeschooling or unschooling, the siblings are almost always with each other.  They are one another's first best friend.  Even though my children are all very unique, their differences are respected and they spend so much of their day playing with each other and bonding.  There have been days where my oldest son and daughter will spend the entire day playing princesses, Star Wars, Super Heroes, playing house, or whatever seems interesting at the time.  They can often entertain each other for hours and learn from each other.  I have even found my son reading to my daughter and teaching her letters and numbers.  They do often include baby boy in their play too, but when they play together, it gives me one on one time with their baby brother.  Baby boy is very influenced by having an older sister and spends much of his time reading and watching videos about Dora, Strawberry Shortcake and Hello Kitty.  He loves these girly shows.  It's a nice balance for his strong car interest.

.4. I love having everyday as a school day.  Children learn daily if they are given the freedom of doing so.  Learning does not fit into a box.  Every second of every day can be a learning experience for them.  Even if they are sitting around and not doing anything, they are still thinking about things while doing this.  Learning is fun when it is not forced.  When my son tells me about something he knows or learns something new, he talks about it with so much enthusiasm.  I love seeing this.  It reminds me that I made the right decision to homeschool them.

These are just a few example of things I love about unschooling.  There are days I question myself and wonder if I'm doing the right thing, but then something wonderful will happen to clarify that my decision was the best one for my family.

No comments:

Post a Comment