What is this blog about?
The purpose of this blog is to track and share our experiences as unschoolers. The unschooler definition that fits us most adequately is that we do our very best to allow our children the freedom to make their own decisions about most everything, including their “education”. They decide what, when and where they want to learn. If they are interested in something we provide resources to explore that topic as far as the child wants to go. We observe what they have learned by listening to them and noticing their new skills.
Being a great problem solver and always striving to challenge oneself is the best education that we can give our kids. They are learning to figure things out. We don’t sit them down and insist that they do worksheets or anything that they don’t want to do because that wouldn’t be effective. They learn best when they want to figure something out. So, as parents, it’s our job to provide opportunities for problem solving.
Unschooling doesn’t just happen during a certain time of day. It’s more about how our family interacts. We all work on coming up with solutions to problems and making rules so that the problem might be avoided next time. We refrain from implementing the “doing to” theories of B.F. Skinner (ie. if you do that then I will do this to you because you’re smaller and I’m more powerful) and try to “work with” our children to figure out why they’re doing that and to help them figure out alternatives that work for everyone involved (refer to the research of Alfie Kohn). This is allowing our children to use their intrinsic motivation to solve problems and to challenge themselves, instead of doing something to avoid punishment or to get a reward.
All this is about a million light years away from where we were a year ago. Please read my first post From There to Here for the beginning of our journey.
We hope to continue to be Unschoolers and add the element of the children attending a free school. The school we are looking forward to sending them to will probably be similiar to the Shenandoah Valley Community School www.svcs.us We believe that, in addition to learning with their family, the children will benefit greatly from learning with their peers. This idea came from schools that have been around for decades. Schools like Summerhill http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/ , Sudbury Valley School http://www.sudval.org/ and the Albany Free School http://www.albanyfreeschool.com/overview.shtml . Please go to these sites and read what they are all about so that you can have a better understanding of what we would like for our children and how it has been working for other kids for many years.
We hope that you enjoy our blog.
~Riesling and Cashel’s parents
