Everyone I know who actually identifies themselves as an "unschooler" in real life is very very radical, much more radical than the most out-there Waldorf method I've ever seen. Like Kriston's example of the 10 year old who can't read... I have met a few of those. A few have landed in my classes after being unschooled until junior high and then plopped in public school. Ick.
But now that I'm learning more, "unschooling" the normal way seems to me more like what in teacher school we called "Child-centered learning". You throw them a tidbit and if it sticks, then you throw more. If not, then you try a different angle. So a child who may not get excited about math, may love cooking. You cook, convert recipes, weigh, make grocery lists and budgets, pricing, double recipes and then say "hey guess what, we did math." I only recently learned from Kriston's explanation that we are already unschoolers and are also learning on a line! (even though DS goes to "real" school...)
For example- he went through a period of an obsession with Tutenstein (on Discovery Kids). So I watched the episode with him, then took bits and made other projects. We mummified a chicken, studied human anatomy so we could talk about how to get those organs out and into jars, read Egyptian mythology, looked at maps and pictures of modern Egypt on the net. We did something that started from mummies every day for almost two months. When he was done, we moved on.
