Unschooling

[freeindeed]

Really hoping this won't stir up a controversy, but I am currently reading The Unschooling Handbook. I have never seriously considered unschooling before, and I am only considering doing it with my youngest child (who is special needs: visually impaired, developmental delays, on autism spectrum.) She learns so well when I follow her lead, for example, she loves music & is now able to sing her ABC's, count to thirteen, and also sing her name & address--in addition to knowing the lyrics & tunes of countless numbers of songs. So I teach her everything with music. She does not like to sit still for activities, so I teach her things while she's swinging or while we're on the see-saw outside. She has certain toys that she fixates on, and if I try to give her a different toy (that I might want her to use in order to teach her a certain concept) she refuses to play with it at best or starts hitting her head b/c she's frustrated.) But if I use her current favorite toy--which right now is a dustpan--then she happily learns things & lets me manipulate her toy to teach her...such as "the dustpan is on your head, your belly, etc." or "the dustpan is in your left hand/right hand." So I'm thinking the key to teaching her is along the lines of unschooling. Any thoughts? Negative or positive? Please be nice.:)

[merry gardens]

The term "unschooling" means various things to various people. It sounds like you use child lead learning with flexibility to meet your dd's special circumstances while still paying attention to make sure she's learning appropriate matterials. It may not be "conventional" teaching, but it sounds like you're finding things that work to teach her.

 

I love including music with our learning. You might enjoy looking through a website called "Sing N Learn" for more ideas. http://www.singnlearn.org/khxc/ccp0-display/ste_about.html

 

edit: I noticed your daughter is only four. At that age, I'd use the term "pre-school", rather than "unschool". :)

Edited April 27, 2012 by merry gardens

[Ellie]

Well, I tend to be an unschooler, so I think it's a great idea.

 

Of course, to say that you're thinking of "teaching her" negates the concept of unschooling. An unschooler involves her children in real life and helps them to learn the things; she doesn't decide to teach them in an unschool-y manner, if you see the difference. :-)

[AngelaNYC]

Here's a blog post I wrote about unschooling a few years ago. I still hold to the philosophy as it's always been ideal for us:

 

Someone asked me about unschooling lately. My basic description is usually that it's a parent-facilitated and encouraged, yet child-led education with no parental academic agendas, expectations,or demands for their kids. The child's environment should be full and rich, with access to the resources they need which allow the development of knowledge, experience, and responsibility. The child is free to choose their own educational path, and this may include choosing to start your day with a schedule, subjects, and workbooks, to spending your day playing video and board games, or even to go (back) to school. Freedom of choice is the key. Kids need to own what they do.

 

But in order for unschooling to be effective, there has to be a real honest Trust that your kids will, in fact, learn everything they need to learn, when they need to learn it. This is where many parents have a hard time. Unschooling isn't something done sometimes, or with some subjects. It's a whole mindset revolving around this trust. Kids are hard-wired to be curious, creative, and diligent. Look at a preschooler. They have boundless energy and ask tons of questions and are so enthusiastic about life. Homeschoolers (and especially unschoolers) don't lose that as they grow older. School kids, on the other hand, do lose a lot of it, usually by around 8 years old - having your energy squelched, questions unanswered, a constant pressure to perform, and lack of adequate sleep, will do that to a kid.

 

Unschoolers learn because they truly want to learn. They go to college. They become productive adults. They love their lives. They are raised having choices. Their interests are respected and encouraged.

 

The concept of unschooling is a hard one to understand for many people. It is not un-parenting, it is not educational neglect, and it is certainly not a by-product of lazy parents. It is being in-tune enough with your kids to really know what they love, how they learn, what they want, and how to get it. It's filling your child's life with wonderful experiences, opportunities, and resources and letting them have the freedom to choose what they'd like to pursue further. It's your children being a part of the real outside world all the time.

[atara]

I think you should go with your gut! There is no rule that says what method you use must the way it is forever and ever. If you are considering, there must be a reason why you think it would fit for your, specific, particular child, whom you know better than anyone.

 

Unschooling philosophies towards children have TRANSFORMED the way I relate to my son. No matter what we do in the future, I love that I am a partner and mentor to my son. It completely clicked and was exactly what he needed.

[rafiki]

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[Jennifer-72]

You may find the book Just Give Him the Whale a helpful read if you can find it at the library. It is about using the special interests and fascinations that many ASD learners have to motivate and engage them in their learning.

[Walking-Iris]

I really like that book. It was really helpful when I first started on my homeschooling path. The one advice I would give would be to have some sort of schedule/routine in place. I was essentially unschooling with my ds who is on the spectrum and it really worked brilliantly when he was younger. But as he grew I found that I needed to inject some parent led activities and routines into our daily life. I do agree about trusting children, but in my experience allowing my spectrum child to follow his desires and leads would mean tv and computer games forever. Or endless drawing.

 

He is passionately interested in how animation works and movie effects etc but we do have to learn math and grammar. I just really found myself getting to a place where if I wanted to support my child in his young dreams to be an animator one day then he wasn't going to get there (if that continues to be his passion) if I didn't start to expect him to put in more effort to learn the three r's and then some. Now I would say we're still relaxed about a lot and I still follow their leads and interests, but I definitely have plans and goals that are my construction.

 

Spectrum children thrive on schedules and routines. And they sometimes need a lot of adult input to pull them out of their interests and rigid self imposed routines to start to learn and accomplish the things they really need to do to begin to thrive.

[Shellers]

I think you should go with your gut! There is no rule that says what method you use must the way it is forever and ever. If you are considering, there must be a reason why you think it would fit for your, specific, particular child, whom you know better than anyone.

 

:iagree::iagree:

[Pen]

Really hoping this won't stir up a controversy, but I am currently reading The Unschooling Handbook. I have never seriously considered unschooling before, and I am only considering doing it with my youngest child (who is special needs: visually impaired, developmental delays, on autism spectrum.) She learns so well when I follow her lead, for example, she loves music & is now able to sing her ABC's, count to thirteen, and also sing her name & address--in addition to knowing the lyrics & tunes of countless numbers of songs. So I teach her everything with music. She does not like to sit still for activities, so I teach her things while she's swinging or while we're on the see-saw outside. She has certain toys that she fixates on, and if I try to give her a different toy (that I might want her to use in order to teach her a certain concept) she refuses to play with it at best or starts hitting her head b/c she's frustrated.) But if I use her current favorite toy--which right now is a dustpan--then she happily learns things & lets me manipulate her toy to teach her...such as "the dustpan is on your head, your belly, etc." or "the dustpan is in your left hand/right hand." So I'm thinking the key to teaching her is along the lines of unschooling. Any thoughts? Negative or positive? Please be nice.:)

 

Unschooling is a very appealing idea, and I have met some families for whom it seems to work very well. I did not find it to work well for my child--at least not in the full sense of unschooling. Really, I have not found any system with a label to work well except maybe "eclectic". There are areas where following my son's leads for child led education works beautifully. But most particularly right in the areas where he has the most difficulties due to special needs, he has needed much more parent led schooling. As these get better, the child led approach can work better (for example, I let him go to a book fair on his own with some money to spend and whatever choices he made are now his reading materials...1 year ago that would not have been possible to do because he needed reading intervention, but now it is possible, and because they are now his choices he especially loves them. But when it was just hard and not yet at a level to be fun, I had to push him in reading-- which is, as I understand it, a sin in unschooling.)

 

You will need to feel your way along the path of your daughter's development. And be prepared to make adjustments according to what her needs are, which may, or may not, ever fit any methodology exactly or for very long.

[ljswriter]

We unschooled my DD (now 8) from age 3 until just before she turned 7. We joined a charter with the intention to remain unschoolers--the charter claimed they supported it. That wasn't strictly true. We soon found ourselves teaching to grade standards and prepping for standardized tests. Though she was the age for 2nd grade, I had to put her in 1st because her 3R's were so severely lacking.

 

She was MUCH happier as an unschooler, and there are times I wish we hadn't switched. To be fair, though, most of the issue was because the 3R's became mandatory the minute we joined the charter. A dyslexic/ dysgraphic/ dyscalculic wasn't going to be thrilled with the struggle, no matter what approach we used.

 

A few thoughts on unschooling, both in general and for a child with LD's:

 

1. I've heard it said that unschooling parents are taking the easy/lazy way out. I found the exact opposite to be true. There are no lesson plans or core standards to guide you in what to expect day to day. It's a very serendipitous existence, one where I had to be on constant alert for learning cues and respond with proper activities. That kind of spontaneous, whim-of-the-moment approach isn't everyone's cup of tea, to be sure. It was fun, but for those who crave organization and structure, it can be unsettling at best. I will admit I did "steer" learning at times by offering certain opportunities. If she ran with it, great. If not, I backed off.

 

2. The cornerstone of unschooling is the theory that a child's personal desire to learn a subject can greatly accelerate gaining and retaining that knowledge. Guess what happened 95% of the time I offered an activity involving the 3R's to my LD child? She automatically avoided them. I'm not sure that would have changed without a good deal of coercion and tears, whether we'd have joined the charter or not. If she had spontaneously decided to learn, in her case it would have come far later than recommended, and she'd still require intensive intervention. There might be evidence to suggest otherwise, but in our case, I'm not sure "unschooling" would best help her overcome her difficulties. Of course, the term has become a fairly wide umbrella. There's room in it for a variety of degrees of child-led learning.

 

That all said, it might be different in your case. Since you're going into unschooling already aware of your child's special needs, you might be able to cleverly tailor all their learning around strategies proven to help with LD's. But what if they balk? What if those strategies don't quite do the job? Do we then force certain subjects and interventions, and not others?

 

 

3. A parent has to REALLY be secure in themselves and the process to let it play out. After all, we homeschool in order to take the reins of education out of the hands of others and give our kids a better chance. Giving up those reins to our children is definitely not for the faint of heart, and especially hard when it seems weeks/months are going by when the kids are doing "nothing". Or if they seem to be falling farther and farther "behind" their peers in certain subjects. All homeschoolers deal with their share of comments from others. Unschoolers can face a whole new level of interrogation/guilt-slinging from pediatricians, family, and strangers-on-the street when Johnny isn't doing what Susie down the street can because he doesn't feel like it. And some of the worst interrogation and guilt can come right inside our heads, as we question our choice. (Of course, that's true of parenting, period.)

 

None of the above is meant to alarm/scare anyone out of unschooling. These are just things I wished I'd have known up front. Had I realized my child had LD's when I started, I still would have unschooled. I simply would have taken a different approach in steering the 3R's, both before and after joining the charter. Hindsight and all that.

[Walking-Iris]

A parent has to REALLY be secure in themselves and the process to let it play out. After all, we homeschool in order to take the reins of education out of the hands of others and give our kids a better chance. Giving up those reins to our children is definitely not for the faint of heart, and especially hard when it seems weeks/months are going by when the kids are doing "nothing". Or if they seem to be falling farther and farther "behind" their peers in certain subjects. All homeschoolers deal with their share of comments from others. Unschoolers can face a whole new level of interrogation/guilt-slinging from pediatricians, family, and strangers-on-the street when Johnny isn't doing what Susie down the street can because he doesn't feel like it. And some of the worst interrogation and guilt can come right inside our heads, as we question our choice. (Of course, that's true of parenting, period.)

 

None of the above is meant to alarm/scare anyone out of unschooling. These are just things I wished I'd have known up front. Had I realized my child had LD's when I started, I still would have unschooled. I simply would have taken a different approach in steering the 3R's, both before and after joining the charter. Hindsight and all that.

 

:iagree: I would add that this applies to ALL homeschoolers really.

[freeindeed]

:)Thank you all for the encouraging words and advice. I really feel that this is the best path for her. Today she sat down at her little table by herself & began working on stacking shapes onto pegs (a Melissa & Doug wooden toy.) I introduced the toy to her last week & she wasn't interested then, but today, when it was her choice, she enjoyed doing it. It really made my day!

[rafiki]

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