Inside Out

I am a hands on, book reading, playing with my kids, getting dirty kind of homeschool mom. Inside. On the outside I'm a workbook using, flash card drilling, slip in fun if we have time kind of homeschool mom. And I hate her. She stifles my inner Linda Dobson.

My Kindergartner complained about doing school this week. Sad. I want my Kindergartner to WANT to do school. Actually, I don't want my Kindergartner to think she is doing school at all. I want to slip it in like they do with veggies in that book, "Deceptively Delicious." Really, if you think hard about how people learn, school should be fun! School should be done while reading and snuggling together on the couch preferably with hot cocoa (for them!) and coffee (for me!) in hand. School should be done on the floor playing games. It should be done in the kitchen, outside, in our community, at the library. Actually school shouldn't be "school" at all. School should be life. Real life. Doing, touching, seeing, experiencing, tasting, loving and enjoying this beautiful world God created for us to explore.

Yet time and time again I order curriculum and textbooks. Time and time again I think I've found the "one" - the Holy Grail of curriculum. And time and time again I'm left desiring more when I think of all that our school could be. Don't get me wrong, at the end of each day it feels pretty good to look over the assignment sheets and see all that we've "accomplished" that day. But I still feel unfulfilled...I feel like something's missing...I feel like there has to be more.

Throughout the evening I've had to unravel the reasons why it hasn't worked in the past. It being what some would call "unschooling". Sadly, all the failure can be blamed on me...it all comes back to me...I care what others think, I doubt myself and I, as an obsessive Type A, have an incessant need to organize, classify and structure everything. So how this usually goes is this - I make the decision to "unschool". I tell some unschooling friends that we're going to unschool (this makes it feel official ya know?). I try out the unschooling thing, "Hey kids...what are you interested in learning?" and 5 minutes later I'm thinking of ways to structure our unschool. Eventually I decide unit studies would be a better approach and sometime between trying to decide where to start and trying to design a unit I get overwhelmed and frustrated (usually characterized by hyperventlating and twitching). And I start scrambling for the box. This time I'm making some rules for myself. I like rules. I'm good with rules. I'm Type A remember?

Rule #1: Read. Read. Read. And extrapolate from those books. The learning opportunities are endless!

Rule #2: Answer their questions. And when I don't know the answers (which will be often), we'll utilize the library and the internet and research everything we don't understand (which will be a lot). It might take some prodding in the beginning, but eventually it'll all begin to flow.

Rule #3: Be accessible. Don't shoo the little's away. Keep them under foot. That's where they learn best.

So for the next week we're unschooling. One week. If we (ahem, I) fail, we'll be back inside the box one week from Monday.

Bree