I always thought we couldn't claim the title unschoolers because we are natural homebodies! I'm not sure I want the label, it is just the learning style that resonates most with me, not necessarily my children, though!
I think I may have mentioned that I have the two greatest kids in the world (;-) and each child is completely unique, but they share some commonalities. Both intensely dislike being in crowds and my youngest is particularly slow to warm up in public situations (and with strangers). They are both intellectually inclined, big readers, and they both love computers.
For me unschooling is really about life learning and I have seen what a miraculous thing this is first hand. Truly, I feel that in order to learn from life, you have to get out there and join in the ruckus of real life!
There are museums to go to, painting in the park, working in the community garden, going to co-op for a foreign language or science and all of these things are available in spades.
In our particular case, my children don't want to participate in these types of events. So what is a fond proponent of unschooling to do?
Should I, would I, could I force my children to get out more? Unh unh. Not a chance. Not only would that violate our family principles (thank you Joyce Fetterol) but it simply wouldn't work! It wouldn't allow me to raise my children up "whole".
I went through every other option available to me, but I was most pleased when I came to the happy road of acceptance and logic.
The logical and obvious fact that my children are going to end up great, no matter what! My job is to observe, scaffold, listen, and, if I'm lucky, learn along with them.
So, we have taken a different path and worked on Howard Gardner's concept of scaffolding our children's interests in tandem with cooperative learning. So far, this has worked out well for us.
Since I don't force or coerce my children to learn anything, some unschooling schools of thought (ha ha) will permit us to call ourselves unschoolers, and therefore it is now up to me to name ourselves. Of course it really was all along!
What are your thoughts?
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