Unschooling
Have you ever learned something on accident? Maybe you were watching show to help with dinner and you ended up learning that eggs separate easier when they’re cold. Or maybe you learned that Istanbul was Constantinople through the song? That is unschooling, learning without a plan or purpose. Simply observing and participating in the world around you, and through natural human nature, you learn.
Unschooling was a popular homeschooling movement of education during the 1960 and 1970’s hippy movement in the US. It became popular during this time because it was considered the most natural ways to learn. It is free from structure and guidelines. And although this may work well for some, it goes against everything most of us were raised to know about education. But as homeschooling has become more popular and more excepted, so has this form of homeschooling.
The first thing you can do to get started unschooling and see if it is something that might work for you is try and replace one subject with less structure than you do now. Usually an extracurricular subject works best, because the fear of failure isn’t so high.
Let’s take Art for an example. Maybe you have been using a workbook on different mediums and getting around to the next lesson when you have had time. Or, if you’re more structured, you might actually have this scheduled into your lesson plans. Read the workbook from front to back, even if it’s just a bold type skim. Then take the different mediums and put them on a shelf. Maybe you’re a little interested in clay, get it out and see how it goes. Work with it and see if your child shows interest. If they want to get involved, let them, if they just want to watch, that’s fine too. Trust that your child will get what they need from using there own intuition.
After trying this is one are for a while, start having discussions with your child about that subject. Ask questions as if you know nothing about the subject and your child is the expert. You will very likely be surprised by the amount of knowledge you child has gained.
After you have gained confidence in this type of schooling, you might be ready to venture on to something as serious as math. An example of unschooling math is letting your child help count potatoes into a bag at the grocery store and moving into figuring out how much to items of different brands cost per ounce. An example of unschooling spelling is reading out loud, encouraging independent reading, and then journal writing. A child exposed to the same word spelled correctly over and over will almost always learn to spell it correctly.
But my final advice on learning to unschool and adding it into your homeschool lifestyle is live and involve your children. Daily, active living is the best education and way to unschool. Children will learn to do what you do and all the academic and practical skills involved in it when you include them as much as possible. And that is really what unschooling is all about.