“Unschooling” is a popular term that you’ll often hear in homeschooling circles, but you may be confused about what it means. In short, unschooling gives kids the freedom to make the whole world their classroom. By learning more about this method, you can determine whether unschooling is the right fit for your family.
Unschooling vs Child-led Learning
Many homeschool parents figure that unschooling and child-led learning are the same things, but that’s not the case. Child-led homeschoolers pay attention to their students’ interests and plan lessons and activities around those topics.
That’s different from the actual unschooling meaning. Unschooling homeschool involves less structure. As the homeschool teacher, you won’t plan lessons around your ideas or your kids’ interests. Instead, you’ll set your children free to experience the world. As they go about their play and explorations, they’re likely to acquire plenty of knowledge.
Unschooling Environments
At first glance, it may sound like unschooling is a hands-off approach to home education. That couldn’t be further from the truth. While the idea is for kids to experience learning naturally, your job is to create an environment in which that’s possible.
“Strewing” is a common term in unschooling circles. The idea involves leaving educational breadcrumbs around for your kids to discover. That could mean investing in math counters, magnifying glasses, watercolor paints and other tools that will get your kids’ wheels turning.
Books are another key piece of a rich unschooling environment. Kids who have access to a wide variety of engaging books have whole worlds at their fingertips. As an unschooler, you could display your top picks on a child-height shelf or a bedroom nightstand. Even better, you could give your students access to digital libraries with audiobooks and interactive tools that will bring their favorite stories to life.
Unschooling with Lightsail
Sometimes, even unschoolers need a little push to discover their new passions. Unschooling parents occasionally offer suggestions of topics that kids might want to explore.
LightSail can be the perfect complement for your unschooling lifestyle. By using the sharing feature, you can open your kids’ minds to all sorts of topics that they might never have thought to dig into on their own.
By sending your kids a LightSail video on reptiles, a timeline of developments in baseball, or a classic piece of poetry, you may inspire their next unschooling adventures.
Posted on 6.Jun.21 in Homeschool FAQ
