Anyone who has tried doing an unschooling journal for their kids learning will likely empathize with me when I say, "Ouch, my hand!" I have been doing a journal for the past couple of days and I can't believe how much I needed to write down. For those of you who unschool in a regulated area, I tip my hat to you! It is not easy to keep up with the learning going on when a child is left to pursue interests. I think we may have found our style! I'm hopeful anyway. I can't see doing a radical homeschooling style at this point but this is a start.
I understand that they are learning all of the time without curriculum, but I still would like to find a way to incorporate the important subjects through their interests somehow. The funny thing is that unschooling seems easy to most but when considering this aspect (making subjects fit with their interests) I can see the work and creativity involved on my part as the educational facilitator to bring in subjects in a way that the kids can learn through their intersts.
The only downfall from what I see is, like many other directions we've taken and decisions we've made, here we are AGAIN doing something that is not mainstream and usually misunderstood. We are attachment parents, long-term nursed, taught our babies sign language, decided to homeschool, this list goes on, and now we may be unschooling!? This is kind of funny!
“It is as true now as it was then that no matter what tests show, very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, nonschool parts of our lives.” ~ John Holt~ How Children Fail
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Michigan laws are not as strict, but I do keep a journal of what we do during the week. Not everyday I do it twice a week when we go to the library. I keep it just for myself and a list of things I think the kids would find fun to do as outings together and with friends.
Really? I thought that Michigan was more strict than here. It seemed like it when I read online about the laws there. In Ontario we are almost completely unrestricted. We have almost complete freedom until someone turns us in and someone comes to our home to investigate. So, here we'd keep track just in case.
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