Unschooling puts the decisions about what we will study into the hands of the children themselves. They have the desire and drive to learn, and God has filled this world with curriculum.
At the heart of our unschooling journey is the belief that children learn best when I am providing them with options in an environment geared toward learning, rather than force-feeding them information.
Compare unschooling to cooking. Say you have been cooking everything for the kids for a long time. Suddenly, you want them to cook (Unschool) for themselves. They won't, and you don't understand how they can eat Peanut Butter and Jelly for 6 weeks straight! (Play Nintendo and read comic books)
After a while, they figure out that you are not going to cook (teach them with curriculum) and they start cooking (learning) on their own. Soon, they are making gourmet meals, things you never thought they would! (Doing all kinds of educational things) And they won't even be thinking of it as learning. It will be something they want to do on their own.
Just the talking of day to day life gives us plenty of opportunities to help the children learn. Let those millions of questions they ask each day be the starting place for learning. Our children asked questions on the judicial system the other day, all from seeing a stop sign that someone had ran into, and it was bent over to the side. We talked about what bail is, the seriousness of crimes, and the appeal system. More social studies than is in a 4th grade textbook!
In it's purest form, unschooling is "child-led learning." In our family, it is a way of life. We use any resource we can find (much of it we find on the Internet) relating to any topic initiated by the children. And they have to ask if they want to use a workbook. Taking this approach has brought peace to our home and a true appreciation of the world around us.
When you start doing some of your homeschooling in an unschooling manner, I would recommend that you first let the children have 2-3 weeks, maybe even a month, of time to themselves. Let them explore. Let them have the time to determine what it is that they want to learn about. They are used to being "spoon fed" then information.
They are used to your telling them which pages of which textbook to do when. Give them the time to discover learning again.
Help the child to find out what it is that he is interested in learning more about. Is it a favorite book? Does the child have a favorite historical person? How about a favorite topic, does the child have something that he lives, eats and breathes for? What can you do to help him learn about the subject? Take him to the library. Take him on a nature trail. Take him to the museum. Help him to find more on the internet.
