We have been unschooling going on our 4th year this year and it is the most amazing thing for our family. As an ex-teacher, it was the hardest thing for me to get used to...I was so used to by the book, completely planned out lessons, following the standards....but that was just not the best way my little guy learned.
He needs real world, hands-on lessons that have meaning - learning with a purpose. Workbooks were never a huge hit here, he said they were boring and didn't "mean" anything. But give him a problem about a bridge being able to only support so much weight and a truck having to make a delivery of steel beams that weighed x-amount each and asking him to calculate if the bridge could hold the truck's weight and he would do math problems like that all day long. Something that you would actually use in the world.
It does take some thinking instead of using a set curriculum and isn't for everyone....for example, DS8 out of the blue, formed a deep affection for Peregrine Falcons over the summer...so I did some searching and found several super cool activities(like researching and then building your own Peregrine scrape and eggs...or he did his own Excel spreadsheet graph with comparing a large variety of animal speeds he researched to a Peregrine's stoop dive), we found several Raptor Avian Centers in the state we have visited and then when he realized that the Peregrine actually go over part of our state on their yearly migration, we did some researching online and found that the Florida Keys are the best spot on the planet to watch huge numbers migrate....he then found that there was a scientific group that did a Migration HawkWatch study in the Keys in October and we wrote to ask the scientists if we could come camp for a week and help them spot/track/identify/record the raptors that migrate over the area ...they were so pleased a child was so interested that they are excited to have him come down to help. Our days are constantly filled with something revolving around a subject of interest...yesterday DS made his own map system on the computer where he mapped out the entire story line from the first 2 Geronimo Stilton Kingdom of Fantasy books then in the afternoon he researched weather data/graphs and using his weather/cloud books he identified cloud formations and wrote weather predictions in his weather journal he made.....so from one day to the next, I never really know what we are going to dive into but we are having a blast doing it :-)
