Homeschooling or Communityschooling?

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!

Today was a stay at home day, but these are often rare with homeschooling.  This is hard to grasp for those who do not homeschool, but those who do will completely understand what I'm talking about.  I try to stay home two days a week, but that often does not happen.  Mondays, we have park days, but next week, Mondays will also include swim lessons for the older two children and soccer for my son.  Tuesdays are library days and once a month, my son will have a science class on Tuesdays and my daughter will be starting  ballet on Tuesdays starting next week.  Wednesday is usually a stay at home day, however, some families from our homeschool group are not able to go to park day on Monday, so they wanted to add an extra park day on Wednesdays.  This will probably start in a couple weeks.  Thursday is stay at home and clean the house day which I established in the Project Messy House blog.  However, my son will also have Cub Scouts on Thursdays, so it may not work out quite as planned.  Fridays are field trip and zoo days and my son will have his nature class once a month.  There are also occasional field trips that others will schedule that we will join from time to time.  This seems to happen about once a month.  Plus, we need to fit in knitting and crocheting somewhere with their grandmother.  So do we truly homeschool or would a better description be communityschooling?

Even though we are rarely home for our 'homeschooling', today we were home.  Unschooling at home is just learning from our home environment and following whatever inspires us to live and learn.  My 7 year old son is always inspired by collecting chicken eggs.  Today I also told him to feed the girls while he was doing this and for some reason, he opened their side door to their coop.  Luckily I went out and checked shortly afterward or some of our girls could have escaped as their door was swinging in the breeze.  That would have been some chaos in my day that I really did not need.  My 7 year old son collected 4 eggs today and noticed that it was one less than yesterday when he checked his data.  Aside from the chicken care, it was a beautiful day, so the children spent a lot of time outside playing.  I love looking out and watching my 7 year old son and his 4 year old sister happily swinging together.  My 7 year old son spent some time just gazing out into the woods and I could tell he was deep in thought.

As the day progressed, he spent a lot of time working on a 100 piece puzzle he got over labor day.  I figure this is a good problem solving activity for him to do and he was also counting how many puzzle pieces he had left, so he was using mathematical skills without even realizing it.  My daughter decided they were going to play with Play Doh, so they spent almost an hour being creative with Play Doh together. My son alternated between the puzzle and Play Doh for a period of time. The little 2 year old guy just played with his cars during this time.

We then decided to have reading time.  We collected a big pile of library books yesterday on library day and we sat and read all of them together.  My 7 year old son has never really enjoyed reading, so he mainly listened.  I encouraged him to try to read the book on his own, but he did not have interest in doing this.  My daughter is very different.  Whenever I read her a book, she has to read it.  She puts her own spin on it at this point since she is only four years old and does not technically know how to read yet, but with her enthusiasm, I could see her taking off with reading fairly soon since she enjoys it so much.

Then my son decided that he wanted to play around with the Starfall program which is a kindergarten/1st grade free reading and math site.  My son would be going into 2nd grade if he were in school, but he would be young for his grade.  We say he is in 2nd grade, but he still seems to be at 1st grade level with some things, such as reading and I do not see anything wrong with this.  One of the perks of unschooling is that children can learn at their own rate, so if one child is advanced, they can move through things more quickly while if one is a little slower or average, they can take their time.  My daughter also likes the Starfall Program.  The program is in between their age/grade levels since my daughter is preschool age and my son is 2nd grade age level, but they enjoy doing this together.  I noticed that my son was doing very well with the math at this point.  They usually play around with this program for about 2 hours.  My plan is to get my son his own computer next year and find as many educational internet sites as I can and put them under his favorites, so he can pick and choose what he wants to do.  I figure this will be a good way to encourage him to learn at his own rate and it gives him a sense of independence also as he is learning.  It will also prepare him for on-line college courses that he may take in the future.  I recently learned that there are community colleges available that offer on-line courses that will transfer to major universities that children can take as early as they want if they are able to keep up with the work load.  I figure I may start looking into this when my son is junior high age, around 12.  If he could get some prerequisite classes out of the way before starting college, that would be very beneficial for him. 

So this was our stay at home homeschool day.  These days are rare, but they are nice and relaxing and it gives the children a wonderful opportunity to be creative and learn at their own pace with very little pressure.  This is the most comfortable way to learn in my opinion.