When I first heard the term “unschooling,” I thought it meant to take knowledge from the things around you without necessarily sitting down to study. As I have looked more into various ways of homeschooling, I’ve come to understand this term a bit more.
According to The Unschooling Handbook by Mary Griffith, “Unschooling… means learning what one wants, when one wants, in the way one wants, where one wants, for one’s own reasons.”
This was an eye-opener for me—to learn what you want to learn, when and how you want to learn it. Is this possible? Can you really do that? Yes … if you are given that opportunity.
Children are naturally curious. They come into the world wanting to learn about everything. A little toddler wanders around touching everything—that’s his way of learning about it. Children ask questions (sometimes not very appropriate questions) and that’s their way of learning. You don’t have to tell a child to learn—it’s something they are already doing, something they already seek after.
In addition to curiosity, children also have their own areas of interest. My oldest son loves anything having to do with electronics. It’s completely within reason that he could spend his time studying electronics, and grow up to be an electrician or a computer programmer. My daughter enjoys writing. She could spend her time learning grammar and plotting, and grow up to be an author.
When I think about providing my children opportunities to learn the things they want to learn, that makes me happy. Of course, I have no intention of letting them go without math if they want to be authors, or other similar oversights, but I love the idea of letting them learn it in the way they want to learn it. At home, you can be more flexible. You can incorporate their own learning styles.
I’m excited about all the things I’m discovering for myself as I look into unschooling, and I’ll continue to share those discoveries here.
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