For me school was a chore to be finished with every other chore assigned to me for the day. Being one out of a family of five meant a lot of chores. And school was just one of them. Learning was never fun or interesting; you just had to do it and get a good grade or else! As I grew, college became the next chore and then followed by a degree college and so on. But when it came to my children I was really in two minds! Did I want my child to be the little robot I was? No fun, just study, study and study! And then someone told me about “unschooling!” Although I was reluctant to put my children into something that sounded so radical and could destroy their academic future, I decided to at least find out what it meant and here’s what I found.
Unschooling basically is a form of home schooling but with no set curriculum for the students. The curriculum is decided by your child’s interest; for example, my son is really into motor bikes and airplanes. Use this as a staring point to encourage interests in workings of a machine and then go on to link it to other interesting ideas to pique your child interest. Most children love to learn; you just have to find out what your child finds interesting and then leave a trail to the lesson you want to teach. Set the pace according to your child’s interest and vary the route slightly to keep the child interest on the topics on hand.
Every unschooled child has to have opportunities to develop differing interests. Make sure you have a whole lot of books, videos, puzzles, toys, kits, games, puzzles, music tapes, videos, music CDs, puppets, nature collections, scrap books etc and other cool things ready at hand for her to find interesting. A good place to find such a store house of knick knacks is at garage sales, yard sales, library clearance sales, and attic treasures. Take your child on regular outings to parks to observe nature if she’s interested in birds and nature. For boys you can take your child to the local garage to show how mechanics repair faulty cars and motor bikes. Plan your trips to museums, zoos, and art galleries to increase interests for both of you. Encourage reading books or developing a hobby kit. Don’t keep your child’s time fully structured but allow time for exploration and developing of a personality.
You can also develop interests which help you decide your schedule for the day. For example teaching math is really easy with unschooling. You don’t have to learn tables by heart as you can get math lessons from fractions of time, time related to cooking and division of time for cooking and baking counting the red M&M’s in the packet as compared to the total in the packet, tax is a percentages can be calculated at sales where 20% rebates are on, or at stores which knock off a percentage of your bill for a certain of your bill amount.
Frankly this sounds, much more interesting than struggling with multiplication tables!
