Homeschool Two “real world” examples of unschooling learning program

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What Unschooling Is and Is Not
Unschooling: what is it, what is it not, what can it look like? In this video, we’re going to be looking at all of those questions and hopefully providing answers that are going to be helpful to you if you’re interested in learning more about unschooling and perhaps even using the unschooling method and adopting the unschooling philosophy to your own homeschooling efforts there in your home and with your children. What I’d like to start off with is what unschooling is not. Unschooling gets a bad rap sometimes because, you know, people will just dismiss it. It doesn’t look like school, thus the name “unschooling.” It doesn’t look like school. Sometimes people say it was just an excuse to be lazy. I mean, you name it, there are some negative comments that are being made. But I don’t believe unschooling deserves those comments. Like anything, if a particular strategy is executed well, then it’s going to perform well. It’s going to serve the person well. When you can do many things poorly, that doesn’t mean what you’re doing is necessarily the wrong thing; it’s just you’re not doing it well. That can apply to anything. So unschooling is not just an excuse to not do anything. But unschooling really is a way—I would even say it’s a philosophy of learning—and that philosophy states that the child has innate desires and interest areas, and that your job as a parent is to identify those interest areas, which you likely already know, and then support your child’s learning by providing resources and guiding the your child in learning more about those interest areas.

Example 1: The Horse-Themed Learning Plan
So there’s no one way to do unschooling. There are many different ways to do or and follow an unschooling program. What I’d like to present to you today are two examples of unschooling. If you want to find out more information about unschooling, there are some more videos in this virtual open house page that talk about unschooling. One in particular is an interview that I have had with Judy Arnall of the Alberta Homeschool Association, whom I regard as an expert with unschooling. She’s written a fantastic book which I would strongly recommend, but please do start with watching that video and I think you’ll get some some more insights from that interview.

Again, with this video, I want to give you some some examples because we can talk about what it is, what it can look like, why it’s good, you know, all that’s important and necessary, but you may be saying, “I’m in, I’m really interested, what does it look like? What’s an example of unschooling?” Well, I want to give you two examples. The first is from my own experience with homeschooling my daughter, and I stumbled into unschooling as many people have, not because it was our plan A but because plan A wasn’t working. And so with me and my, with with my wife and with me, we started off plan A, making our home ed program look very school-like. Now I’m a teacher, I thought, “Oh, I’ve got this, I’ll make our basement into a little classroom and we’ll do things just like school.” So that meant having a math book, a science book, a social studies or history book, you know, and everything was in discrete, separated learning packages, if you will, and there was no unifying thread to what I was doing. Everything was just separate, you know, “this hour we’re doing math and next hour we’re doing science and next hour we’re doing this.” And that wasn’t working. After I don’t know, maybe a month or two, we realized that’s not really working very well. So plan B, what’s out there? At the time, I don’t think I realized what I was looking for was unschooling, but that’s really where we landed because my wife and I said, “Well, what is my daughter’s, what is our daughter’s interest area?” Well, it was horses. And so we thought, “Well, let’s build a learning plan around horses.” And we thought, “Well, okay, what does that look like?”

So we thought, “Well, what can we learn, what can we teach that’s centered on horses?” Well, we can teach anatomy. So we taught the horse anatomy. We taught the horse biological systems, you know, the skeletal system, the muscular system, the nervous system, and then we can compare those biological systems to perhaps the biological systems of another animal or of us humans, right? And then we looked at nutrition. What are the nutritional needs of a horse and where do those nutritional needs come from? That would be farming, and then if you if the interest was there to pursue farming, you could look at all kinds of things related to farming, the equipment and irrigation and crops and the water cycle, that you know, everything associated with getting those crops from seed to harvest. So lots you could do with that. And then we looked at farming that, and then we thought, “Well, what’s the role of the horse in farming?” Well, you have types of horses that are used for work, and then you have horses that are not used for work but they’re used for other uses. What are those other uses? So we have, you know, uses in military, uses for racing or luxury or sport, you know, those kind of things. Well then, if it’s sport, what what which sports use horses? You know, and you could explore that line of information. With military, if you’re interested in using or learning horses how horses were used in military, well, that opened up a lot of opportunity. You can learn all about the military uses of horses, the equipment that you that horses were used to pull or to be involved with and somehow, the weaponry that was used when you’re talking about horses in battle, whether it’s military or not. You can look at how horses expanded throughout the world, you know, “where did where did they start? Where where are the oldest remains of horses and what what what did a horse what’s the oldest remain remains of a horse? You know, what is it, what does it look like? Does it have any semblance to what horses are like today? How did they spread?” And then you get geography, you have history. If you want to look at not only history and geography, you could specialize in um, how are horses used throughout history.

Um, getting back to the breeds, the different types of horses, well, how do you have different breeds of a horse? You can get into genetics and and the DNA side of things and how do we even today use that knowledge of genetics to um, to affect certain breeds or even cross breed? Like, what does that even mean? So lots of areas to pursue there. With history, you can look at how horses were used in exploration. “How did horses get from, let’s say, Europe over to North America?” And well, if you’re looking at how horses got from point A to point B, you can look at the ways they got from point A to B. “How did they travel? If you’re talking about going over the ocean, you know, who paid for that travel or why were they included on the ships? Which ships?” You know, “again, who’s paying for it? Which king or which queen? Which empire was using horses and how are they using the horses?” Again, lots of history and geography, but it’s all based on horses. And then if you’re looking at the travel from point A to point B, you can look at, “well, how did the people, how did the explorers know how to get from point A to B?” Well, then you can look at the technology of the time, and oftentimes that technology relied on astronomy. So, you know, you can pursue astronomy and technology of the time.

And oftentimes people say, “Well, that’s all great, but what about math? What about grammar?” That’s really not a problem. The only limit is your creativity and and how you’re going to integrate the math and language arts into what you’re teaching. You know, with literature and grammar and spelling and vocabulary, you can integrate all those things into what you’re doing with unschooling. In this scenario, you can look at literature written about horses, and then of course, as you’re reading the literature, you can look at special words, vocabulary words. Your child can actually create his or her own vocabulary list that is based on the literature that he or she is reading based on um, on a horse theme. So you can have you can build vocabulary, you can make sure spelling is if that’s important to you, make sure those vocabulary words are spelled correctly. Um, grammar, you can look at how the sentence structure, if you, I mean, you can go deep if you want. If you’re talking about first grade, second grade, obviously you’re going to adapt what you’re doing to your child’s, you know, age and maturity and and other factors, but unschooling is is not limiting. You can get math in there. You can look at the technology of the day with learning how to navigate the seas, you know, with different instruments. Well, how did those instruments help? How did you use the instrument? Well, I bet you you needed some math to coordinate points from A to B and how to get to this place in that place. You could look at map skills, map reading skills, navigation skills. They obviously didn’t have GPS. So sometimes, uh, sure, you’re going to have just rote memory worked in. You’re going to have memory work, you know, you could memorize poetry based on forces or based on any topic that came up, but you can also use the math that you memorized in your application, right? So again, you’re not limited by what you do with unschooling. You can still do if you value memorizing those math tables, you can still do that, but you’re doing it with an eye on application. So your son or daughter doesn’t ever have to ask you, “When am I ever going to use this?” because you’re going to answer that question in the next thing that you do, right? So you’re always looking for application that is integrated in what your child’s interested in. So it just goes on and on. Literature, you find books written about horses or about anything that’s related to what you’re studying, but your child is is is um, is determining the topics and you’re there to guide that interest along a path, and that path oftentimes whines and sometimes makes sharp turns, but that’s amazingly good because it took a turn because your child got interested in something else. And so that interest is going here and it’s going to go back and forth. And so, uh, for us in our personal experience with that, again, around revolving around horses, as a parent I was I was really interested in the learning because I got excited about what we were learning because I was learning as well. I didn’t know a lot about all this anything to do with horses, and so it was fun, it was engaging, and it was motivating. So I got excited. So it was just a great experience, and we followed that unschooling approach for many, many years with great success. So I have a lot of good things to say about unschooling. So that’s one example of how unschooling can look.

Example 2: Alexander Hamilton
Let’s look at another example, and it’s a pretty recent example, and it’s from a mom or it’s from my emails back and forth with a mom whose son had hit a wall. Again, unschooling was a became plan B. So I just read the final sentence from this mom because she said, “So we are looking for alternatives for my for my kids. They are not meant to be in a brick and mortar school.” So again, unschooling is plan B, or at least I offered it as plan B, and so I started at the starting point, which is finding the interest area of the children, right, each child interest. So I said, “What’s I started with the son because that was her that was the one in most need of a solution.” So starting with the son, and I said, “What does your son really like? What’s his interest area?” And she emailed back and said, “Well, he’s actually interested in the life of Alexander Hamilton,” who was a political figure in the colonial times in the what’s now the United States. And so I said, “Great, let’s start with Alexander Hamilton.” So I just did a quick search with for Alexander Hamilton, I didn’t really know much about him, and so I learned a few quick facts about him. One was that he was one of the authors of the Federalist Papers. So I said to the mom, “Well, you should use the Federalist Papers,” and there’s there’s a lot I can say but I don’t want to go on and on in one video, but find out things about Alexander Hamilton. He was an author of the Federalist Paper, he was a military officer, he’s a British citizen, he’s an American politician, he had a so you can do a lot with the background, you know, biographies, primary documents, meaning documents that were written in his day, whether he wrote it or documents that would have been influential at the time. He could look at the politics of the day. You can get into geography in terms of where as a military person, “where did he fight? what were his roles? what were the military, over say, the technology of the day? what were the military weaponry that he would have used? which battles? what was he involved with? were they successful? how did he get from soldier to politician?” Then I learned and “why was he writing essays in the Federalist Papers and what impact did that have?” You can look at the history of the colonies at the time. “what significance did the Federalist Papers play in the formation of the of the um, what became the United States, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States?” right? All these primary documents. “how can you trace a lot of the key parts of those not only the documents but the events that led up to those documents being written inside? how are they influenced by the Federalist Papers? how are they influenced directly by Alexander Hamilton’s writing?” you know, “what did he do to promote those ideals as he as he recorded them in the Federalist Papers?” I found out that he had that famous duel with Aaron Burr. You can look at the history of duels. “why was that? why were duels socially and legally acceptable in their day?” That alone would be a very interesting study.

And so just on and on you can look at resources that are available for free, you know, YouTube has some great history channels like “Crash Course in History.” You can go to library. You can do a lot of things around Alexander Hamilton. You know, have your, for this situation, I encourage the son to learn a lot about the person and then as a parent to come alongside and also be learning with the son and finding other resources and asking questions of about Alexander Hamilton and encouraging the son to pursue the answers. And you can look at all kinds of ways, you know, but some people will say, “Well, how do you do math? how do you do this? how do you do that?” I would say especially in this situation, this is a plan B. This is a child who doesn’t want to keep going to school, wants to drop out. That math might just wait for a while, right? You don’t have to do everything all at once. Build that interest. You have to, you’re rebuilding, and so you build that interest to learn and you you just see where that interest comes up. You’ll it’ll be a very natural thing to see where math could play in or where science might come in, right? You just guide, you’re guiding and you’re looking for opportunity for all kinds of learning, but the child is is at the focus, I would say at the center of it all with his or her own interest areas and that’s what’s leading the learning. And you as a parent, I think again, your role changes from being a teacher, you know, a disseminator of information, to now being more of a guide and you’re encouraging your son or daughter in those interest areas and you’re seeing where where it goes. So those are two examples of unschooling that that I can offer you to you. Again, there are other experts out there who have way more to say on this, so please pursue it. There are Judy Arnall has many many videos in YouTube. So just type in her name, Judy Arnall, A-R-N-A-L-L, and then “unschooling” so to learn more about it. So many more resources out there on unschooling, but it’s a great way to learn. It’s a great philosophy about teaching and learning and hopefully this video has been helpful to you in that and explaining to you what what it could look like and what it did look like for me and for my family.

Conclusion
So again, thanks for watching and let me know if you have more questions about unschooling so hopefully I’ll hear from you soon. Thanks, bye.