I’m an unschooler.
I loved How Children Learn by John Holt, and will second the suggestion of The Teenage Liberation Handbook.
Basically I consider myself my son’s helper–whatever he’s interested in, I help him explore. He’s going to be 5 in June. Right now he loves video games, so I play video games with him. He loves computer games, board games, memory games… We play a lot of games!
I love Scholastic, also. The books are great, the prices are great, and I have been able to fill up his bookshelf for very little money.
Oh, another good book if The Homeschooling Book of Answers, by Linda Dobson.
I subscribe to different magazines for kids. I also subscribe to a club called Brighter Vision Learning Adventures. They send my son a workbook, a hardcover book, a craft, a game, and posters and stickers every month. My son loves these. I don’t make him do the workbooks, but he likes to open them up once in a while and work on things.
Thanks guys.
My daughter has been unschooled for three years. I can say without the least bit of hesitation that she can read. She can write with big girl letters too. 
Seriously, she’s thirteen and is an amazing writer (she’s writing a book for kids on the history of math), has read more classical literature than I can even name offhand, and right now she has decided to teach herself Russian…and has done a darned good job so far!
I know that it’s easy to just let go when you unschool. You have to be very careful to make sure your child really is learning. It’s not that easy when done properly but it has been worth it for us, because Laura did not do well at all in a regular classroom setting. Our first year I tried to do structured homeschooling by purchasing “grade level” textbooks. If we went by the recommended schedule she was bored. When I let her work at her own pace she shot through everything in about two months. (Except math, but that’s another story.) So I started letting her set her own pace and choose her own paths.
I feel for you concerning the non-Christian HS groups. I haven’t had much luck there either. I’ve been trying to get my daughter interested in the local Universalist church activities, but she’s happier with her own group of friends. She will be taking some classes next year though.
You’ll do a fine job homeschooling! Just be consistant and love your kids and trust yourself. Best of luck!
So, you homeschoolers out there–what do you do if your local library isn’t what you wish it would be? Ours has wonderful people and I am there a lot (I’m a librarian myself and do a little work for them), but the fact is that it’s a sad, woefully underfunded place that needs serious help which it will never receive.
The books I read all seem to recommend getting a lot of material at the library, an idea I agree with–and which is fine as long as we’re sticking with pretty classic, well-known reading. Our library has about 40 donated videos, and no music at all, however, so it would be hard to find educational videos or do music appreciation. Deeper research would be difficult, too (though not any worse than the public schoolers have it).
Thanks again to all who have posted. I’m giving this a one-time bump back to the top in the hopes that some folks who’ll be whiling away the Friday-afternoon blahs might jump in with their $.02 worth.
I’ve been reading posts here for a while, but it’s my first time posting, so I’ll just introduce myself really quickly. My name’s Jamie (and I’m a girl…that name always gets questioned), and I’m fourteen.
But anyways, I was just wondering about unschooling, specifically in Canada. I do all of my schoolwork (grade eight) at a much higher level, particularily reading and writing which are are a university-ish level, according to my test scores, etc. I was wondering about unschooling, because I’m going to high school next year and the idea of it really doesn’t thrill me.
I read a magazine article a little while ago about unschoolin, and I thought it sounded very interested, and like something I would want to learn more about. So if anyone can explain the basics of it to me, and if there’s anyone participating in it in any way in Canada, I would really appreciate it.
**Jamie
Genie:
We have a pretty good main library in town, but I have also been known to go to Bookstar and look through their books for hours. My daughter read the whole Matt Ridley Genome book at Bookstar last year. (of course NOW they have it at our library!) We have also played around with some of the workbooks they have for sale. If I can’t afford one, we’ll just take a looksy and talk about it
But the biggest reference tool is the one I’m looking at right now. The internet is such a wealth of information! Yesterday I watched Laura’s eyes light up as she got to the “good part” of Swift’s A Modest Proposal… I found it on a website along with many of my other old favorites. And today I used Calliope’s first link and poked around until I found a site with lyrics and music for folk songs. We spent about three hours singing those songs and reading the histories included. It’s so neat to see my little goth princess getting into Scarborough Fair and Greensleeves. 
And I haven’t had a problem with non-Christian based science either since I found the Bio 101 textbook with great links at the Maricopa site. Last year she used the FreeEdNet pre-Algebra class, working at her own pace so now she’s actually at her grade level in Math (a first for her).
There are sites where you can send off for educational freebies too. Last year we got two Women in Science videos, science posters, a CD and lesson plan on earth science, and a CD with a very large collection of e-texts. Just try a search on educational freebies.
Last but not least, we hit the thrift store. There is a fairly good one close to U of M where I’ve found used textbooks and older classics for a buck or two. We are using a college level Government book to supplement a middle school discard I found at the school I worked for last year. Speaking of discards, there is a rack at our library where we have found GREAT books that I guess aren’t in good enough shape to keep on the shelves. That’s how she started her Shakespeare collection. They are the small hardbacks, and they are old and yellowed, but she likes them.
WHAT kind of nonsense is this? You mean I cannot capitalize on my child’s athletic skills and mental superiority, thus funding my pathetic IRA and padding my retirement house with Litchsteins?
I mean, what is the point of being a parent if we cannot take advantage and exploit our own progeny?
Now, if you will excuse me it’s time for golf lessons for the kids.
That would be Lichtensteins. Or a reasonable facsmilie.
Anywhoo, I have been interested in homeschooling for awhile, but have decided against it for a number of reasons:
-
I have the attention span of a gnat. Apparently being able to focus is important.
-
My math skills would handicap my children greatly in life later on greater than I am handicapped now.
-
We would focus on All Trivia All The Time and my brilliant children would run around all their days ringing buzzers to answers. Whilst it would be fun, fun, fun , eventually, when they took their first job at some Mega-Conglomerate Inc, buzzing in in the middle of the CEO’s fillibuster might be a bad move.
-
I am not into Christian based thingies.
-
And I am not hippy enough for unschooling. (Read: I want them to lead productive lives in the future to support me in my old age.)
-
My kids need the social interaction of other people. (we are semi-quasi-sorta rural.)
-
Our schools here are pretty good. I just have to drive them as bussing is out of the question.
8.) I like the idea of teaching latin in the 3rd grade onward. Latin and game shows…what more do you really need in life?
Good luck.
Shirley, I’m sure you’re planning on doing this anyway, but why not supplement your kids’ education, if you don’t feel that homeschooling is a good choice? My favorite (though totally untested by me) book, The well-trained mind, has plenty of good ideas for that kind of thing too, including the Latin, which I’m starting to rethink. I do think it would be really neat, it’s just that there’s so much to do that I’m not sure it wouldn’t be Too Much.
I’m now going to pontificate on the whole ‘Christian-based thingies’ thing. Believe me, I sympathize with the feeling! Though we are in fact devout Christians, we are the Mormon flavor, which means that Fundamentalists basically consider us the devil. ‘Christian’ curricula are most likely not going to be a really comfortable fit for us; my only problem with public-school science is that there isn’t enough of it. I’m open to using materials from A Beka or other Christian publishers for language arts or math, as long as we get to have lots of conversations about where our beliefs differ.
However, in my looking around, I’ve gotten the feeling that there are many homeschoolers who aren’t doing a heavy-duty Fundamentalist thing, so I’m not really worried about being isolated there.
My own reasons for wanting to homeschool are not religious; we would be teaching out kids about our religion whether they go to public school or not. Our reasons are that we think it would be really neat, and that we could do better academically and interest-wise than the school. And one big advantage I see to homeschooling does have to do with religion; it would be great to be able to teach history and literature with religion in its proper place as a huge (and fascinating) influence on people and events. “This is what these people believed, these are some reasons why, and this is the effect it had.” In public school, you simply can’t do that, and it results IMO in some big blind spots. (I was particularly horrified in college to discover that I was the only person in my Medieval Lit class who knew anything about the stories in the Bible. Here we were, reading books with constant allusions to Eden, Passover, and all kinds of things, and no one realized! In an upper-division course at a major university! It was appalling.)
Anyway there’s my more-than-$0.02 for you!
Not to bump this yet again, but I ran across this today. For those who were asking about unschooling: www.unschooling.com
genie, I have thought about supplementing regular school with home schooling. I think it even has an offical name called *after schooling *.