The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [33]
Unschooling is learning through everyday life. Instead of a schedule with textbooks and formal lessons, unschooled children simply do the things that interest them. For homeschoolers who come to the idea while their children are still quite young, the idea is a natural: Any child who can learn to walk without formal instruction in stepping and standing and learn to talk without comprehensive formal lessons in grammar and syntax can certainly handle simpler skills like reading and arithmetic.
This laissez-faire approach is often misinterpreted as benign (or not so benign) neglect. But even the most extreme unschooler would agree that learning does not happen in a vacuum. Children learn to walk and talk because people around them walk and talk, and children want to be able to do the things they see their parents doing. Just as a child would not learn to speak a language he never heard spoken, he would not learn to read if he never saw the printed word or grown-ups reading.
But by observing adults and older children around him, a child gradually picks up skills that interest him. Often the process is nearly invisible: Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, your child simply does something he couldn’t do the day before. With skills like reading, the process is pretty visible: The child notices symbols, signs, logos, and letters and asks questions about sounds and meanings. He asks how to spell his own name and the names of his family and friends. He listens to stories read to him (often the same ones endlessly) and begins to pick out words he recognizes in the text. Eventually, he begins to read on his own, and his reading becomes rapid and fluent faster than seems possible. The whole process can take as little as a few months or happen more gradually over several years.
The process translates to other subjects as well. Unschooled kids learn arithmetic by using it: counting, cooking, shopping, budgeting, measuring, building. Writing comes, not from assigned essays or find-the-error exercises but from purposeful writing: thank-you notes, letters to relatives and pen pals, journals and diaries, stories, poems, essays—all kinds of writing. Many unschooling parents, looking back on their own school experiences with writing, find themselves astounded at the volume and quality of writing their children willingly produce on their own.
Interest sparked by such activities often leads a child to seek more information. Unschooling parents become experts at helping their children find resources for learning what they want to know. They find the best libraries with the most helpful librarians, museums with curators who love to share their knowledge, and business people willing to let kids learn what their businesses are like. Unschooling parents sometimes even find textbooks for their kids who’ve decided that’s the best way for them to learn what they want or need to know.
We live our lives. We go to the library often. We read to each other. I search out all manner of things I think my children might be interested in and leave them where they are accessible. When my children are curious about things, I help them find out what they want to know. The children decide what they will learn, though I expect their own decisions are shaped some by what they see to be important in our lives. Where I do have hopes or expectations for what they will learn, I try to make sure they see me putting that kind of knowledge to use. We’ve never had a formal lesson and don’t plan to, unless one of the children wants to.—Laura, Texas
I think it is really important for the parents or at least the homeschooling parent to set an example of interested learning. I can’t imagine expecting my kids to become interested and active in a wide variety of activities if I didn’t have a life. It also gives them the freedom to seek their own paths because I am not on top of them all the time—I am pursuing my own interests. Homeschooling