Natural Learning

styles of homeschool, how to homeschool, unschooling

What style of homeschooling do you do?

How did you arrive at that style for your family?

Although we do lessons, in our family we still consider ourselves unschoolers or natural learners.
The kids call us Half Unschoolers.

My daughter is supremely allergic to lessons, direction, organization. But she still needs it and grudgingly accepts it as necessary. John needs it and thrives with it. It has been interesting trying to meet the needs of both of these opposing learning styles on a daily basis. Over these twelve years of homeschooling we have adjusted our sails about a hundred times until we hit on a freaky balancing act...that I often mess up.

I want to talk a bit about unschooling. Here in Australia a family is required to register with some sort of umbrella educational institution or to have a learning mentor-type person. I can't speak to that requirement; all I can speak to is what we do and how we do it.

Again, the kids are very different, so the things that they do in their day are different.

Elizabeth is a writer. So she does a great deal of reading and writing. She also has been working on basic life skills for independent living, banking and household finance, employment, driving, Aussie culture, accessing public transportation, using the internet to find essential information, personal coping skills and other tasks for greater emotional intelligence, and personal goal setting.

John loves all things science. He has enjoyed pursuing scientific knowledge from many different venues, exploring philosophical points of view, enjoying satire, and figuring out his own values, goals, and his own personal authentic sense of self.

Both of the kids appreciate a great deal of freedom to explore their own interests. I feel better having regular lessons. The lessons vary as time goes on and our materials are drawn from many different places. Here is a short list of the things that I can remember that we have done together this year.  (my memory is the pits so I know that I am missing things!)

• From The Great Courses we have done two courses together:  Biology:  The Science of Life and The World's Greatest Paintings. I also have a Physics lecture series from The Great Courses downloaded but we haven't gotten to it yet. 
• From Coursera we did Introduction to Mathematical Thinking.
• From Khan Academy we have used his many, many lectures, especially the geometry to accompany our Geometry book.
• Regularly we visit Classical Poetry Aloud to familiarize ourselves with the wonderful voice, span of topic, and beautiful language of really good poetry.
• TEDTalks has been an amazing resource for wonderful lectures of all kinds. On a terrible-weather day (which is rare here in Brisbane) we do a thing where each child chooses a lecture from TEDtalks for us to watch, then I choose one, and then we select one that appeals to everyone.
• We frequent a website called The Kids Should See This for excellent and interesting topics. We, honestly, never tire of browsing for new things to learn!
• From Amazon.com we have purchased textbooks for our use. I always recommend textbooks rather than homeschool-specific curriculum. The textbooks that we use are Geometry, Vocabulary from Classic Roots series, and a short stories book.
• We also have used several different useful websites for our lessons on logical fallacies. We try to learn a different logical fallacy every lesson day and we review each time we learn a new one.
• We have used many different resources for our biography project.  Each lesson day we learn about three different people:  an ancient, a middle, and a contemporary person.  Each lesson begins with a review of every single person we have learned about in past lessons.
• We use Youtube and Netflix for many different ongoing projects.
• The kids are working on video blogging our trip here in Australia.
• All travel here has involved the kids with considering all accommodations and plans, prices and comparing all pertinent information and how to make reasonable decisions. 
• Many chores.
• I often assign scavenger hunts for the kids where they take the camera in a given location and photograph essential stuff!

So yeah, that is some of the stuff we do even though we unschool. I don't push, I don't force it, we don't stress, I don't race through material. We just do it as we do it. With the exception of the biographies and our newest project of logical fallacies, we haven't done a single bit of this in weeks. For the most part we have a lessons day when a child requests it and that could be as often as three or four days a week.  Generally, though, it's more like a day or two.

Comments or questions?

WELCOME to all readers in China!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you enjoyed this post I recommend:  How to Homeschool
Or you may like reading:  Who is Who?
Or for further reading:  A Willingness to Learn