A Self Reliant Homeschooling Family Learning Forgotten Life Skills, Together.
If you told me 10 years ago that I would be homeschooling my kids I definitely would not have believed you. To be honest, I didn’t really get the point of it. Why would I want to try and wrangle my kids around the kitchen table and teach them an overwhelming amount of information, while getting frustrated that they weren’t always listening to me, and feeling stressed about falling behind the curriculum? Not to mention trying to teach them the subjects that I felt weak in and hated learning when I was a kid. All the while, my kids would be missing out on making friends at school… home schooled kids would surely be antisocial weirdos that couldn’t make it in the real world. Right?
Of course, my views changed dramatically over the years. When I first had kids and I was navigating the world with babies and toddlers, I was amongst the parents that couldn’t wait until their kids were in school full time. Sending my chaos loving kids off to school 5 days a week, for 8 hours a day, for FREE?! Yes please! Mental countdown, engaged.
Flashforward a couple years, when we made the big move from city to living off-grid in the country and I joined the local mom group. One of the moms there had 3 wonderful, curious, social, polite, older children. They were homeschooled and she had mentioned a term I had never heard before – Unschooling. Curious, I went home and googled it. The more I read about it, the more I fell in love with the concept. It just made so much sense.
Unschooling is a form of homeschooling wherein the student’s interests and natural curiosity serve as the guiding forces for their learning journey. Unlike traditional methods that rely on set curriculum, unschooling empowers children to pursue knowledge in a self-directed manner. This method trusts in the innate capacity of children to explore and absorb information autonomously, fostering a deep and personalised understanding of various subjects.
Every family that chooses to go down the unschooling road views it through a different lens. For us, we encourage a lot of free play for children, especially under the age of 7. After that, we introduce more focused time for basic skills such as reading, writing, and maths. Admittedly we should be spending more time on this, and will focus more on that in the near future. The kids all have workbooks available to them in these subjects as well as diaries/journals. There are plenty of learning opportunities and resources available, we just don’t have a strict schedule. We don’t have to learn about fractions at 9:30 on a Tuesday morning because the schedule says so, regardless if we’re ready to give/ receive the information. We look for teachable moments throughout the days and build on them. The kids also have chores and are expected to help with home maintenance. They follow their interests and do deep dives learning about subjects they are passionate about such as cooking, baking, gardening, woodworking, robotics, electronics, etc.
A big focus for our family is learning new skills together and having ample time to do that. I remember when I was a young child I legitimately thought that all adults knew everything and that children had to go to school to learn it and when I was done school I would know everything too. Of course I’ve come to realise that learning never ends and all humans should be striving to learn more. While it’s important to spend time learning the skills of the future – computers, coding, robotics, etc., it’s equally important that we focus on recovering the skills of the past that so many people have never been taught.
It is so important to learn alongside our children the old school life skills that will definitely come in handy in the near future. Humans have gotten so used to the convenience lifestyle, many wouldn’t know how to survive in a shit-hits-the-fan situation. Skills such as growing food, preserving food, cooking from scratch, creating a controlled fire, cooking over a fire, creating shelter, sewing, mending, etc. Things you don’t learn or spend enough time on in a typical public school setting…
We are all still learning, and definitely aren’t experts in any of these areas, but we are doing it as a family and would love it if you would follow along with us. Let’s learn together!