Unschooling: Embarking on an Adventure!

I’m a planner, a serious planner. The kind of person who has lists for everything and gets excited about stationary! I like research and notes and neatness and am only comfortable when everything is written down…

So why we’ve decided to unschool I haven’t got a clue! The kids are fine with it, over the last few months we’ve become increasingly relaxed and they’re thriving. Steve’s incredibly relaxed about it all, its me thats the problem.

I mean, at the moment they’re playing outside (in shorts and vests, absolutely mad!) using a huge cushion and a very large stuffed duck as boats with golf clubs as oars and screaming and laughing at the top of their lungs. They’re having a whale of a time. They’re off sailing the seven seas, visiting fabulous countries that exist only in their own imagination.

So why does it keep popping into my head “they’ve not done any reading today” and “when was the last time we sat at the table and did some maths?” and since the children have become more relaxed its got worse not better! I’m a worrier by nature, and its making me more worried that I’m worrying about the children learning more and more independently.

I don’t know what it is… maybe its because we followed a curriculum, no matter how loosely we did it, perhaps that’s a difficult thing to break away from? I’m struggling to let go. I realise that I’ve got bogged down with the Charlotte Mason ‘curriculum’ patched together from different ideas but mainly Ambleside. I want to get back to her principles, I’d started to ignore them. Whatever happened to ‘Education is a Life’ and when did I forget what it really meant?

Her wonderful principles can be applied to any style of education, in my opinion… who needs the curriculum? Who needs the mountains of organisation, reams of paper or the stress? Especially when the kids are so happy doing their own thing.

Maybe I don’t feel needed, they’re working things out for themselves, with the absolute minimum amount of input from me. This is great! Very CM. After all “the brain is not an empty bucket to be filled but a living organ that, like the stomach, needs a good and varied diet in order to function properly”.

I have always seen myself as facilitator rather than teacher, don’t get me wrong. I’ve never stood in front of a blackboard, I’ve never lectured (well, not THAT much, LOL), I’ve never offered information that wasn’t asked for. But until recently they’ve always asked me, always. So I think I’m feeling a little left out. As an example, Niamh has developed this habit of just going off on her own, fiddling with something, drawing or playing, not a peep from her, this can go on for hours, a couple of days. She’s mulling something over, this is just her way, then quite out of the blue she’ll start discussing something that she’s seen or learned, something I’ll have completely forgot! She’s spent that ‘down time’ making her own connections with very little if any input from me.

Paddy I’ve noticed, only wants to learn through play at the moment. He’s using his imagination, we even had a fab ‘incident’ this morning about imaginative play. Niamh has a tendancy to be a tad bossy and she was telling him that he shouldn’t be doing voices for his cars “cos that’s stupid, cars don’t talk!” After our very breif conversation (I simply told her that imaginative play is fun and good for you, something I kick myself for, I’ll explain in a mo) she’s gone off, mulled it over and joined in using her cars to chat with his. When I asked her if she was having fun she said she was helping Paddy because imaginative play is good for his development, could I leave them to it please? LOL

She’d come up with this quite independently. This is where I kicked myself. “Never bring education down to the child’s level”. Always aim higher, stimulate and inspire them to go forward rather than keep them at a certain level until you deem them ready to move on, never presume that a child won’t understand what you’re talking about if you use big words. She obviously knows and understands these big words simply by picking up on conversations. And if they don’t know, they will ask, they have the confidence in me and Steve not to make them feel inadequate about what they don’t know.

That’s a great thing, of course it is. Something to be very proud of. So why am I still a worry wart? I actually stood in the kitchen an hour or so ago wringing my hands I felt so nervous!

This shouldn’t be coming as such a shock to the system! In a way, when I think back, we’ve always unschooled to a certain extent. The months where we spend time out on trips, walks and visits, just talking and letting the kids be, but then these were followed by the panic stricken weeks where “we have got to catch up! We’ve got to do this, this and this. Oh and that and that, can’t forget about that!!!!!”

Maybe its because we’ve now put a name to ‘it’. But I’m really really struggling to let go. I don’t know if a period of de-schooling (mainly for me!) would be in order before we ‘started’ un-schooling? I’m sure the two would pretty much flow into the other.

Or maybe this is a feeling of inadequacy? Have I been doing things the wrong way for my children? Does that make me a bad mum? I know it doesn’t, not really, we’ve all got to muddle along the best we can. But I like to be organised, I can’t stand change, I like being sure. What if this is the wrong thing? I see how happy the kids are, it can’t possibly be the wrong thing. Shut up nagging voice!

On the plus side however, I’ve noticed a change this morning. This morning I cleared out and recycled a heck of a lot of plans, notes and worksheets. We won’t be needing them. It was actually a bit like therapy! And then I sat and watched the kids, I sat and listened more intently than usual to Paddy telling me something. I listened to him telling me all the names of his cars and about their character traits, and for the first time I didn’t think that I should be encouraging him to sit with me and read a book. I actually paid more attention to what he was telling me and encouraged what he was doing. Not that I didn’t do this anyway, but today I actually sat back and took great pleasure in it rather than paying attention to that voice in the back of my mind whittling away at me. And, I think this is very very important, I’ve left Niamh completely alone, I haven’t nagged her once, though I do nag in an encouraging way, I realise now that I always went OUT OF MY WAY to inspire her. Wrong, wrong, wrong! She doesn’t need any external stimulation, she’s got more than enough inspiration of her own!

I think this is going to be a long journey for me, I’m having to re-evaluate the way I say and do things.