Posts in category "unschooling" - page 3
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How Do Unschooled Children Learn?
The question that we often get asked when someone learns that we are unschooling is "How does your kid learn?". You see, in the case of home schooling there is at least a curriculum and everyone expects some teaching. They intuitively understand that home schooling means teaching subjects like Math, Science etc. What craziness is this unschooling where the kid is completely left to learn on their own?
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Rolling Ball Machine Construction
After building a doll house and disk drop board, my daughter had another idea for a cardboard project. This time she wanted to build a rolling ball machine. Again, as usual, I comply. I had no idea of what she had in mind. So I asked her to do a drawing and explain how the machine is supposed to work. She drew a spiral on paper, cut it out along the pencil drawing. Then, pointing at the dangling spiral, she said "that is what I want".
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Higher Education for Homeschooled Kids
Friends, family, and readers of my blog alike have all asked us this question -- what about your kid's higher education? Interestingly, given the COVID situation, several people have suddenly started showing interest in home schooling. More people have asked us about our experience or advice than before COVID. I am glad that more people are now interested in the topic. While unschooling or homeschooling sounds like a nice idea, there are so many questions in one's mind. One among them is about going back to traditional school/college or university if and when the kid chooses. But before going too far with the subject, lets understand legality of homeschooling or unschooling.
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Building A Disk Drop Game Board
In one of my previous posts, I was left wondering if toys have a place in unschooling. The argument was that the toys help develop creativity in the kid. On the other hand, why should we buy any toys if the kid is creative? They can build their own toys with nature. Well, I got a mild taste of the latter when my daughter proposed and help build a disk drop game board. For those unaware of a disk drop game, here is a picture of it.
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Should You Save For Kids Higher Education
You know my stance on saving for kid's education. Those who have read my blog or know me, understand that we are unschooling our kid. Most already know that I retired early. I guess early retirement and unschooled kid is probably not a common combination? Or may be it is just my feeling. Because, in this combination, one rarely plans to setup a corpus for kid's higher education. And yet many people ask why I haven't set aside a corpus for the kid.
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Do Kids Need Toys and Books in Unschooling
While unschooling is already the extreme end of the spectrum, it is not a thin line. There is a lot of variance. What seems like unschooling for one may still feel like home schooling for another. So it's all relative. How deep you want to go is all up to you. Consider this for example, some unschooling parents find any kind of books or toys to be a hindrance to creativity and learning. They prefer a fertile playground for children that is devoid of any man-made objects so children can learn the natural way. They prefer nature with trees and river and all the natural things one would find before the inventions and technology. While others may say books give knowledge while toys help in creativity. It is extremely hard to clearly demarcate where home schooling ends and unschooling begins in these cases.
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Is Unschooling for Everyone?
While we jumped ship and joined the unschooling camp, it may not be for everyone. Just like how early retirement is not applicable to everyone, so too is homeschooling or unschooling. While we still consider that we are at the early stage of our unschooling journey (although we have been unschooling for a couple of years now), I can already see a few "disadvantages" and "risks". I had to put those words in quotes because we don't see it as a disadvantage, or risk, but for some others it looks that way.
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How we went from Homeschooling to Unschooling?
I already talked about why we unschool our kid. And you also know that we did not start out that way. Like most parents, we started out with the idea of homeschooling and then eventually we are turning more and more into unschooling parents. The reasons are quite complex and we ourselves probably don't know the true story because it happened ever so slowly and we still are in the process of unschooling. Still learning that many things we are doing are not really unschooling, but a mix of home and unschooling. Seems like this unschooling things is more of a journey than an end goal.
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Our Unschooling Journey
Our journey towards unschooling was a bit haphazard and not a straight forward decision. In the initial years we were unclear whether we wanted to home school our kid or not. I have always wondered if I would have gained more knowledge and moved faster in life if I was home schooled. As a kid I used to complain that I wish I would not be forced to study all the subjects that we were taught in school. I asked my parents if there is a school where I can only study math, physics, chemistry and computers and nothing else. This was way back in 5th standard or so, when I was may be 10 or 11 years.
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Why Do We Unschool Our Kid?
You probably already know by now that we are unschooling our kid. Unschooling is the more extreme version of home schooling. Why did we take this bold step? A lot of people have been asking the same question. So I thought I should explain our thought process.
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