Part 2 - Reflections As We Enter Our Fifth Year

As we enter our fifth year of home schooling I am beginning to see clearly just how ingrained the ‘school mode’ is in all of us, well especially me. I thought I was doing a pretty good job with leaving school notions behind, why we’ve become so much more relaxed over the years. Often at times verging on the, oh my gosh, dare I say it, ‘unschooling’ mode of home education.

That’s not to say that I have felt my share of angst during those periods because my golly I have. It is though, always my children that show me time and time again that they are learning, regardless of whether we sit at a desk with an open book or we simply live life to the fullest. Living and learning and growing as it should be, not confined to a square room, sitting at desk for the best part of the day, being told what to do by a teacher who is told what to do by someone else, whether that be the right thing for the children or not.

However I have come to realise that complete letting go, total immersion in an unschooling life is not for us, any of us really. The kids do so much better when we have some kind of routine and structure to our day/week in place. So do I if truth be told, without some structure there are days that I simply forget I have children that I am supposed to be educating and just go about doing the things that I need or want to do.

Plus, low and behold I have found out that I am book/curriculum junkie, love searching for stuff and love finding things that work, really work for the kids.

So whilst we are very relaxed with how we ‘should’ be learning these days we do still use a good deal of structured curriculum. I do not allow us to become tied to it though. I always disregard the number of lessons and simply work at our own pace. I am not bothered by having to work out how many lessons of Math we will need to complete each week to ensure we finish by the end of the year.

My children move on to in their programs, when they are ready, if that is well before the year ends then so be it, if it is well after the year is over then that’s totally fine too. This also allows us to follow rabbit trails or even still, if we are ever a little bored with one of our programs we can simply do something else for a while. Because you know I will definitely have something here on my shelves to cover what is needed to be covered ;-)


Part 1 of the this can be found here.