When you start this home-school journey,you may have a lot of ideas about how you want to teach, how you want your child/ren to learn, Curriculum choices, how your day, week,month etc will be. Once you have been in "it" for any length of time you will relise that for the most part you can throw all of your "ideas" out the window and you will do what works best for everyone involved. When we started out I had this little room set up, almost like a classroom. I had bought a book type curriculum and for the 1st year I tried to "school" the way I had imagined. In the end it did not work and I not only changed what curriculum I used but I changed where we,how &when we learned. This is how we ended up becoming a
Unschooling family :)
~> Contrary to how it sounds,
Unschooling is an active learning process, and not the passive, unstructured method that it sounds like. Unschoolers are homeschoolers who are focused more on the experimental process of learning and becoming educated, than with ´doing school´. The focus of unschooling is on the choices made by the individual child, dictated by interests, learning style, and personality type.
John Holt, one of the leaders of the unschooling philosophy said,
"Birds fly, fish swim, man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to motivate children into learning by wheedling, bribing or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and classroom (in our case, into their lives); give children as much help and guidance as they ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest."
