Why We Unschool

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Why would anyone want to unschool? The reason why we unschool is we want to embrace the curiosity and enjoyment of learning that children naturally have.

Unschooling is a pretty “off the beaten track” kind of approach to educating your children.  Even within the homeschool community, it is not an overly common approach.

When we discovered unschooling, it was even less common. Or perhaps it just seemed that way because this was before Facebook. When we discovered unschooling, it was the era of forums and yahoo groups. It was not as easy as it is now to find like-minded people in your area.

I was very lucky to stumble upon the woman I did.

What would inspire someone to take this approach?

I understand that this approach to schooling, and to life, will not work for everyone. Unschooling can be a hard concept to grasp and sometimes even harder to implement. We have made many hard life decisions to be able to live and learn the way that we do. I wish you the best of luck to find the approach that works for your family.

This is just our reason for taking this direction on our learning journey. Perhaps they will resonate with you, perhaps they won’t. But this is our story as to why we unschool.

Are you an unschooler? Let me know in the comments!

It Just Felt Right

Have you ever learned about something new and felt deep down within your being, that it was right for you?

That’s how I feel about unschooling (or free learning).

When I first began to learn about unschooling, something clicked. Deep within my soul, I knew this is what I was destined to do. There was no hesitation as to whether this was a fit for us. I knew it was how I was supposed to approach education.

This is the main answer to the question of why we unschool – because it just felt right.

Embracing Moments

Another reason why we unschool is because we choose to embrace moments.

Way too often in this life, we are forced to rush. We rush from activity to activity. We rush through the grocery store. Rushing from point A to point B or rushing to finish something to move onto the next task. We rush to eat our food. We rush way too much.

I wanted an approach to schooling, and to life, that would allow us to slow down and embrace moments.

Part of the free learning approach is that learning can take as long as it needs to. We have been learning about outer space for almost 10 months now because the interest and passion remains. Some topics only take a few minutes to cover and others take months or perhaps even years. When we do not put restrictions on the time or place to end the learning process, we can fully embrace the process and enjoy it.

Each Child Is Unique

Unschooling focuses on a child led approach to learning.

If a child is interested in a certain topic, then learning revolves around that topic. As a mom of four, I frequently have to balance all of the different interests in the house.

I love that, as an unschooler, we can have many different topics to discuss all ongoing at the same time. There are times where everyone is on the same page. For many weeks, the enthusiasm to learn about space rubbed off from my eldest onto his little brothers. They were all very excited to learn about this topic. But then there are other times when one is researching sea turtles and the other is researching video game coding.

A lot of the time, in a traditional homeschool or public school, learning is centered around themes or unit studies. Everyone is learning about the same topic.

Instead of teaching my children about the topics that interest them, we learn how to research and learn about them ourselves. This allows us to all follow our individual passions.

Whether we are studying the stars or an airplane, or learning about sea turtles or complex coding languages…

The passion for topics aids the learning process and allows it to reach amazing heights.

This is why we unschool.