Why did I choose 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!

Why did I choose unschooling to educate my children? 

Before I get started with this long explanation, I just want to say that I have complete respect for public and private schools, licensed teachers and parents who choose to send their children to school.  I do not think homeschooling is superior to public school or private school.  I feel like they all have positive and negative aspects to them like anything else in life.  Homeschooling just works best for my personality, my husband's personality and for our family as a whole, but I completely respect others with different views and do expect the same respect in return.  I am always open to questions if you have them about anything we do because it is a little different from the norm even though homeschooling is growing and may be more mainstream within a few years.

So this is my journey and what led me to this crazy path called unschooling.  First of all, when I think back to my childhood, I really do not remember much about school.  I remember riding on the bus for 2 hours and being in a classroom for 6-8 hours, but what happened during that time, just seems like a fog to me.  What I do remember about my own childhood is playing outside, riding horses, playing with the new spring kittens every year on our farm, starting my kitten business to make extra money, playing in the woods and pretending I was going on great adventures, playing with friends, pretending crayons were people, playing house with my dolls, playing Barbie dolls, making my own clothes, going shopping with my Mom, riding my bike, roller skating, ice skating, singing, performing, being in plays, reading, writing, listening to stories, watching family movies and shows with my family, playing games with my family, traveling around the US with my parents, participating in 4-H, having imaginary friends, searching for 4 leaf clovers, playing by the creek, listening to music, playing the piano, drawing pictures of people, photography, creating mazes, making up plays and songs.  My memories of the classroom mainly involve just sitting in a chair, or on the floor and daydreaming and thinking about what I would do when I got home.  As I got in the upper grades, I was lucky to have a very passionate music teacher who chose me to participate in many choirs and encouraged me to sing solos.  I also seemed to like doing algebra for some reason even though it has no application in life that I have discovered.  Aside from this, my memories of school are not very prevalent.  I have even felt angry at times as if a big part of my childhood was taken from me by being forced to participate in something I really had no desire to do.  Perhaps if the school days would have been shorter, it would have been better, but it just seemed like my experiences in school took up most of my time, but very little of my attention or memories.  Very few people homeschooled when I was growing up and at the time, I probably would have been pretty isolated because of this, but today it is very different and my guess is if my parents would have raised me in today's society, knowing their personalities and views on parenting, I'm pretty sure I also would have been homeschooled.

The first homeschooler I met was in college.  She had been homeschooled up to high school and she just seemed so smart, mature and had such good social skills.  It just seemed like she was so much more prepared for the real world than I felt like I was after 13 years in the required public school.  I also did not feel like my public school education prepared me for college.  The guidance counselor did not even encourage me to attend college because I never did well on standardized test because I would just make designs with the dots.  So when I started college, I had no idea what direction I wanted to go in with my education.  Luckily, along with school, I was also involved in 4-H and I would take a personality project every year, which I loved and that triggered my interest in psychology and it has been a lifelong career for me.  Psychology was offered in high school, but it was taught by a coach and I'm unsure if he even knew what psychology was.  He thought it meant the same thing as being psychic and would have us to psychic experiments with each other.  So that was not very helpful with my career choice, although I like to think I have psychic powers sometimes.  ;)

As time progressed, I had finished college and got my master's degree, started my career and started to think about having children of my own.  However, I was very hesitant about doing this because I did not want to have to deal with sending them to school.  After working in the social service field for a few years, I started to be a little less trusting of others, the system, would hear about school shootings every couple months, and really did not want to put my children in a possibly hostile environment at such a young age.  One of my co-workers homeschooled her children and I would ask her questions a lot and she explained many of the challenges and perks of being a homeschooler. I thought it sounded like something I would consider, but I did not know if I had the confidence to follow through with it.  I started having children and researching homeschooling when my son was about 4 years old.  I found the state requirements of homeschooling and was able to get connected with some local homeschooling groups.  This is when I started to really learn about the homeschooling process.  In our state, children are not required to have a formal education until they are 7 years old.  However, most people are not aware of this.  All that is required of homeschoolers is keeping attendance records for 180 days after their child turns 7 years old or when they pull them out of public school.  We don't have to report anything, but simply keep a record in case anyone asks about it.  There were several resources and grade requirements listed on our state site, but these were all optional.  In our state, parents have complete educational freedom with their children.  I never knew this until I started to look into it.  I then started learning about all of the opportunities for homeschoolers in my community.  Kindergarten came around and we were sold.  Homeschooling was the path we chose.

At this point, I did not know many homeschoolers, so I just picked up random workbooks I would find and had my son sit down for a couple hours a day and work on these books I had for him.  He would be resistant a lot and did not seem to like them.  I met a few other homeschoolers, but my son just was not clicking with them and his interactions actually made his motivation to learn worse.  Plus, we did not have a lot of family support for our decision.  I was getting discouraged and then we decided to do a vacation to Florida and I got in touch with a college friend who I had not seen for probably 15 years.  She studied education in college and became a teacher, but then sort of went into a different direction because teaching was not a good job match for her.  She had homeschooled her children for a few years and introduced me to the concept of unschooling.  I had seen this term, but had no idea what it meant.  After that I started looking into unschooling and attended a park day after returning home and talked to some other homeschoolers about it and they referred me to some books.  I read them, but was not completely convinced this was the direction I wanted to go.  Then I came across the book 'Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything' on Amazon and it really made me think.  I then came up with a plan and decided to unschool and we have been doing this ever since and my son is now starting 2nd grade.  There are no longer power struggles or resistant. He's excited about learning and loves doing it.  I started my own homeschool group and my son now has a lot of friends that he has met through our group, ballet and going to the library.  I could not be happier with our decision.

Yes, homeschooling and unschooling are not for everyone.  However, it is a perfect match for me and my family and I am so glad we discovered it.  Feel free to follow my blog if you to have interest in learning more about how we use the unschooling philosophy in our lives by unschooling our way.