Coming full circle

After spending the past several years researching homeschooling philosophies, methods and curriculum I am back to embracing unschooloing. It has been a long journey of self exploration into my own feelings and concerns of being unschooled as a child. I had always looked at my experience through the eyes of an insecure child and now it was time for me to look at it through the eyes of an adult and parent.

How will I define "unschooling" for our family? I know how my parents did it, and I know how I lived it, but will it be the same? My parents were what is now called Radical Unschoolers (RU). I just found a wonderful forum for RU http://familyrun.ning.com/forum and it makes me smile that all the ideas supported in the RU community are what my parents did organically 28 years ago.

Will I call myself a RU? I don't know? From all the reading I have done on RU it seems that there is a box you have to fit into to be considered one. Don't flame me :-) I am sure this isn't always true, and it is probably my interpretation from the sites I have visited. I just want to do what is right for my children and occasionally what I need to do to keep myself healthy. If I was stronger and healthier I could make those sacrifices for my children but after 34 years I know I'm not. If I overdue it it's my children who are going to pay with a mommy in bed for a week.

We shall see how this new decision will change our course, but I am excited for the journey!

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.