Unschooling

I checked out Cathy Duffy's Approaches to Learning from the library and have just started to look through it. She has a quiz for Approaches to Learning and it gives you a personalized score based on what homeschool approach may work best for you. I was actually quite surprised at my scores:

Traditional - 14%
Umbrella Program - 18%
Independent Study - 29%
Classical - 65%
Eclectic - 67%
Charlotte Mason - 87%
Unit Study - 91%
Unschooling - 91%

To be honest I haven't even really looked at Unit Study and am surprised Unschooling was so high (even though I grew up an unschooler.)

I was asked the other day on the Secular Homeschool forum if I was going to unschool my children. I think I got so caught up in looking at curriculum's that I hadn't looked deeply at my thoughts on unschooling. I am not even sure how people define unschooling these days.

The way our family did unschooling was that I would find a topic I was interested in and I would check out as many library books as I could on the subject. I would read and read and read until I moved on to another topic of interest. The only real sit down academics we did were math and my mom would just work on a few things with us at a time.

I remember deciding I wanted to learn cursive and my mom bought me a workbook at the grocery store. I taught myself how to write cursive in several days because by God I wanted to learn and so I taught myself!

We also took lessons in art, piano, violin, and french. My brother was a star athlete and I was a very good ballerina. We made lots of friends through our extracurricular activities and no one ever worried that we weren't socialized :)

We also spent hours playing outside and building forts. It was a wonderful childhood and I hope I can create a beautiful childhood like that for my children.