An intro to unschooling

This weekend, I answered an e-mail inquiry from a friend of a friend. She has a couple of small kids and is researching homeschooling. My reply ended up being pretty all encompassing, so I thought I'd put it here, too, as a resource.

(Full disclosure: This is, of course, slightly edited from the version I sent her, because I can never just hit Publish Post without rereading and editing.)

Let me start by saying that I envy you your chance to avoid sending your kids to school. Our daughters went to elementary school until the middle of their 4th and 3rd grade years. Chloe had a significantly awful 1st grade year, during which time she had suicidal thoughts and wrote about hating herself. But we got through it and her 2nd grade year was better, and they are both dream students from an academic perspective, so our overall feeling was that they were doing okay. We were pretty unimpressed, though. They were in Everett's gifted program and still we were going, "Is this it?"

Then Chloe started showing some early warning of being unhappy again, and I started looking into homeschooling. There was no way I was going to put her or us through that again. We thought initially that MJ would stay in school, because she is very social and was happy with her friends. But after they had both been home for more than a month due to a combination of chicken pox and winter break, MJ said she wanted to stay home, too. They've been home ever since, and we haven't regretted it for one moment.

Well, we are coming up on six years of homeschooling. The girls are 16 and 14. And do you know what? We are still seeing the effects of that time they spent in school. Chloe is an instinctive mathematician who before school used to beg us to give her story problems to do. Then came the awful day when she came home from school and announced that she hated math. She is only now getting over her resistance to "formal" math (as opposed to real life math, which she does all the time).

As you might imagine, my strongest advice to you as parents of young children is "Don't send your kids to school." Any school, public or private, can lead to the kind of damage we've seen in our kids. We thought trying school would be a harmless experiment, something we could change our minds about if needed, but we did lasting harm to our kids' curiosity and natural joy in learning.

My strongest advice to you as new homeschoolers is to take it slow. There are as many ways to homeschool as there are kids. You do not need to (and should not, IMO) re-create school in your home. That will just make you the perpetrators of the damage. Instead, take advantage of the amazing flexibility that homeschooling offers. Learning can happen by being out in the world, interacting with it and contributing to it, instead of only by sitting at a table with papers and books.

Next, open your mind to the possibility that all those experts running our schools don't know everything about how kids learn, and they certainly don't know about *your kids*. You are the expert there. You know best how to engage your kids, what will intrigue them, and how to make learning fun and rewarding for them.

You can start now. Notice what makes your kids' eyes light up with interest and enthusiasm. That is your best starting place: that spark. Chloe provided us with our first example of how that spark opens the door to learning. It began with her Harry Potter-inspired interest in magic. We brought home an Eyewitness Book (wonderful books!) about the history of witchcraft, which interestingly enough turned out to be the history of the world. We took her (our 7 year old!) to an exhibition of medieval torture devices, things used at one time to force people to confess to being witches. She started reading books on Wicca, and ended up building an altar with her dad, measuring and cutting and using tools.

Lately, she is passionate about manga and anime. This has led her to learn a surprising (to me) amount of Japanese, study mythology, take up drawing, write stories, and so much more.

For MJ, it has always been about multimedia. She has the most amazing collection of music on her iPod, encompassing a huge range of styles, periods, and countries. She writes beautifully and has two fantasy novels under her belt. She uses movies and television as a powerful learning tool (in the process teaching me that TV is not the evil I once thought it was). And she has an eye for image and design that has led her to become a truly wonderful photographer.

Through all of this, they have been free to be themselves without the pressures to conform and perform that their schooled friends are experiencing. And our freedom from the school schedule has allowed us to be together, take trips, and participate in our homeschooling community in ways that have enriched our lives beyond our wildest imaginings.

And do you know what? Our experience is typical of the people who homeschool the way we do. It is purely child-led, with the parents as partners and facilitators and playmates, and it works. Throw out everything you've been told about kids needing to be taught. It's not true. They want to learn, they are driven to learn and explore, and if you let them, they will open up the world to you like it hasn't been since you were toddlers yourselves.

Here are some resources for you to check out:

BOOKS
- Anything and everything by John Holt, but especially "How Children Learn" (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=john+holt)

- Linda Dobson's "Homeschooling Book of Answers" (http://www.fun-books.com/authors/Linda_Dobson.htm) Good overview of a variety of homeschooling approaches. She is *not* related to James Dobson.

- Rue Kream's "Parenting a Free Child" (http://www.freechild.info/) I love, love, LOVE this book.

- Mary Griffith's "The Unschooling Handbook: How to use the whole world as your child's classroom" (http://www.amazon.com/Unschooling-Handbook-Whole-Childs-Classroom/dp/0761512764/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224967760&sr=1-1)

- David and Micki Colfax's "Homeschooling for Excellence" (http://www.amazon.com/Homeschooling-Excellence-David-Colfax/dp/0446389862)

- Cafi Cohen's "And What About College?" (http://books.google.com/books?id=xyYSHgAACAAJ&dq=Cafi+Cohen&source=an&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result)

- Grace Llewellyn's "Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to quit school and get a real life and education" (http://lowryhousepublishers.com/TeenageLiberationHandbook.htm) Not just for teens! Truly inspiring.

WEB SITES
- National Home Education Network http://www.nhen.org/
- Washington Homeschool Organization http://www.washhomeschool.org/
- Washington State's "Pink Book" - home ed regulations http://www.k12.wa.us/privateed/homebaseded/PinkBook/pinkbook.pdf
- Family Learning Organization http://www.familylearning.org/ Resources for meeting Washington's test and assessment requirements at home. We use the standardized test option because it's easy and my kids kind of enjoy it.
- Unschooling Pages http://www.sandradodd.com/unschooling Fabulous resource for the type of homeschooling we do.

MY BLOG
I've written a lot about our unschooling journey. These links will take you to most of it.
http://zombieprincess.blogspot.com/2008/05/thursday-13_15.html (Unschooling FAQ)http://zombieprincess.blogspot.com/search/label/unschooling
http://zombieprincess.blogspot.com/search/label/unschoolingtoday
http://zombieprincess.blogspot.com/search?q=socialization

CONFERENCES
Tooting my own horn a little because I'm speaking, but I strongly encourage you to come to the LIFE is Good Unschooling Conference in Vancouver next May. It is SO fun, and you will get to see for yourself the bright minds and strong relationships that unschooling fosters.

http://www.lifeisgoodconference.com/

Good Vibrations in San Diego next September is another terrific option! We're hoping to go to that, too.

OTHER
There are more Yahoo groups on homeschooling than you can count. For unschoolers locally, Eastside Unschoolers is pretty active and not limited to the Eastside. Sandra has other unschooling lists linked on this page of her site:
http://sandradodd.com/lists/other

And this one is new but very active:
http://familyrun.ning.com/

Well, this is probably more than you were after, so I'll wind down now. Let me know if you have any questions. Good luck, and enjoy yourselves! Homeschooling is supposed to be fun!

Ronnie