With 3 children left homeschooling I would say we are extremely relaxed in our approach. While I consider our methods to be unschooling because we are pretty far removed from the institutionalized, subject based, school-bell-driven techniques of the typical public school, others would say we are not. My understanding of the generally accepted definition of unschoolers is that there are no outside influences or requirements on what or how a certain child learns, but rather the adults are there as a support to help the child find resources to learn when and how and what the child chooses. While I am fascinated by this approach to education, it is not exactly what we do. We call ourselves 'almost unschoolers,' and have in fact had periods of time of varying lengths over the years when I would say we were true unschoolers. But we have settled pretty comfortably into a world where we make a few academic requirements of our kids and then allow them to be largely in charge of the rest of their education.
This hasn't always been our style. In fact the first book I read on real homeschooling methods was a classical homeschooling book. I tried a lot of what was in that book. Initially I spent a lot of time planning, I figured how many chapters from our history book we would need to read each week in order to finish it within the desired time frame. I was dedicated to making sure we covered all the traditional school subjects and we had a schedule that detailed when we would do our math and when science and when history and when writing. We read some great books together and we did some fun projects too, but I found myself feeling overwhelmed trying to fit it all in each week and frequently frustrated when we had to skip an art project or a hike again because we hadn't finished the planned history or science lesson.
A few things led to me slowly relaxing my control over when and what each of my children were learning. First, I constantly felt like we were running behind and trying to catch up with a schedule that I had inflicted upon us. At the same time, I was realizing that while one child was thriving with a schooling method that was heavy on reading and writing, others were floundering. My husband was also reminding me that school subjects were a creation of the school system that were more about making evaluating students convenient for educational institutions and were not, in fact, real. Science learning isn't actually separate from math learning and reading learning and so there really isn't any reason to teach them separately in different sessions during designated slots of time. And finally, my oldest two took college entrance exams and were tested on exactly two things: English and math.
Our shift away from a more traditional approach was not sudden, but each of these considerations led to a slow transition. I went from making lists of required reading to lists of books to choose from to not making any lists and just letting them read. I stopped insisting that at thirteen years old they start, and work sequentially through, a specific general science book, and just left the books on the shelves and let them take down whichever one interested them whenever. We did, in fact spend one full year as true unschoolers. One child became an expert on all things NASA. One built Rube Goldberg projects all over the house utilizing wooden train tracks and orange match box car race tracks and dominoes.
Two things made us step away from complete unschooling. We wanted them to be prepared for college entrance exams and felt that that required a more formal approach at least with math. But more importantly we felt that it was unrealistic to allow them to expect to never have to do anything not of their choosing. So we settled comfortably into our almost unschooling methods. We expect each of the kids to read, to write, and to practice math regularly. Not daily, because we are frequently out doing things, but regularly. They read anyway. I am usually ok with counting journaling and emailing as writing. Math is a little more formal as they each are expected to be working through khan academy. The rest of their learning is up to them. Though I do encourage them to be learning something. And The 'almost' part of almost unschooling gives us some leeway to crack down somewhat if we feel that the 17 year old is going to need to take SAT prep a little more seriously if he is to have any chance of reaching his own goals.
It is difficult though to separate school from family life and family life does have a few additional requirements that I don't consider to be academic, but do consider to be an essential part of their education: daily scripture study, church attendance, cooking, cleaning. Maybe my eleven year old has no interest in learning to clean a toilet but I still expect her to take her turn cleaning the bathroom. When Kris and I go on an afternoon walk and I leave behind instructions on how to finish dinner preparations or even ask someone to prepare a part of the meal on their own, it doesn't really matter a lot to me if they chose to learn to shred chicken or bake corn bread. One could even say that when we take everyone hiking in the mountains or send them to the park to play frisbee for a bit that we are making some of their learning choices for them. Again, calling ourselves almost unschoolers allows us to make these decisions and not feel as though we are betraying our educational philosophy.
Our home is not an academy of intense learning. Most days they do their scripture study and math and then spend an inordinate amount of time reading Harry Potter, or playing chess, or writing stories, or drawing, or tossing a football in the yard. But I noticed earlier this week that Liam is watching Crash Course biology. Fionn routinely uses all our note cards to take meticulous notes from stacks of library books. I resist the urge to take over and tell her how to take notes or what to do with them. She occasionally gives me a paper she has written and she can spout unusual facts about trees and snowflakes. I make book suggestions and sometimes they read the books I suggest. I read history out loud to them sometimes because I love history but I do not ask them to write anything or produce any proof of what they learned. We go hiking. Kris took Liam and Ronan on a tour of an airplane factory. They listen to and discuss the news and are way more politically aware than I was as a teenager. Occasionally someone will get seriously engaged in a topic. More often they sort of jump from one interesting thing to another. But this is working for us now and if we begin to feel that it is no longer serving us we will make the changes we think are right then.
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