The Educating Parent (merging Beverley Paine's Homeschool Australia and Unschool Australia)

Getting off the 'it's gotta look like school for it to be effective learning' trap AGAIN

by Samantha Johnson, 2022

Does anyone else find that they 'want' to be more of a formal/structured homeschooler... but that in reality, the entire family is happier, calmer, more vibrant and joyous when you take an Unschooling approach?

For my sons pre-K year we Unschooled. Then for kindergarten, we largely Unschooled. This year, which is Stage 1, I think my brain exploded or something because I decided we needed to be doing workbooks and online study and typing practice and for the life of me I have no idea why I thought we needed to do this because it SUCKS.

And we have been MISERABLE.

I feel like we're learning less than we ever have been before!

Why did I fall into this 'it's gotta look like school for it to be effective learning' trap?! I've been doing this for a couple of years now. I should know better! This morning, I realised this is just horrible for all of us.

We're in a very busy season of life and trying to add in bloody workbooks and unit study is wearing us all down.

I made a decision that for the rest of this term, we're reverting to the way we used to learn. Life-based, organic, and stress free.

And then I thought about the play we attended last week. The children's performance we're going to next Saturday. The homeschool excursion tomorrow we have with a local Aboriginal organisation. The science experiments we've working on making lemon volcanoes and homemade slime over the last week.

I thought about how we've done a huge amount of learning about wombats and marsupials because we started reading books about them last week.

And how as I wrote this, my kids are happily giggling together watching Bluey after we finished making some huge painted artworks and reading The 13-Storey Treehouse. ... but I had forgotten all of this was learning. Because we hadn't done Reading Eggs or used maths manipulatives.

I feel sooooooo much better now that I've just let myself sink back into the joy of Unschooling.

It is such a powerful, pleasurable way to learn. For all of us. I really hope I don't forget again.

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Beverley Paine with her children, and their home educated children, relaxing at home.

Together with the support of my family, my aim is to help parents educate their children in stress-free, nurturing environments. In addition to building and maintaing this website, I continue to create and manage local and national home educating networks, help to organise conferences and camps, as well as write for, edit and produce newsletters, resource directories and magazines. I am an active supporter of national, state, regional and local home education groups.