Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Anyone Unschooling?

My son, who taught himself to read at 2 1/2 through unschooling, was mostly unschooled after attending half-day kindergarten. I did my best to let him follow his interests and this worked well in everything except math. He will admit that he would not do much math unless forced to do it even though when he was tested by an educational psychologist the month he turned seven and was able to answer math questions at 4th grade level by doing mental math. The educational psychologist said he thought he could have gone further but he refused to use paper and pencil. He has dysgraphia but it was undiagnosed at that time. He had learned what he knew by playing educational games online and without me telling him to do it. The educational psychologist told me that he was surprised that my son wrote the correct spelling of knight. He said most kids miss that one at that age. My son had to write out the spelling words and stopped when his hand started hurting--again because he has motor dysgraphia so the test did not really show how high his real grade level was in spelling. For him it was a test of endurance and we already knew that this was a problem. This kid loved words and played spelling games online. He later won a spelling bee at the local well and competed at state level and won another homeschool spelling bee but wouldn't compete again because he just didn't care about winning any more trophies. I can't understand why they don't test kids like mine with mild disabilities that affect endurance and strength on a computer to see what they really know. The educational psychologist did say later that he should be tested again but he would need to be tested over more than one session because of the fatigue issues but we could not afford it. Four years later our insurance would pay for for testing but only the cheapest testing done through a university and it was done all in one day even though I told them what the educational psychologist had said and even though my son complained about being very tired (it was mentioned in the neuropsychologist's report) and he hadn't had much sleep because of anxiety and he was getting a migraine. I decided we were not doing any more tests until he decides he is ready to take CLEP tests at a community college especially now that he is wearing a scoliosis brace that further affects his endurance. CLEP tests are done on a computer.

I don't think my son would have learned half as much as he knows if he had been forced to learn according to one curriculum and according to an arbitrary schedule that did not take into consideration his disability.

Because I knew my son could naturally spell really well I didn't need to have him spend time on spelling. I didn't need to make him read because he read all the time. I didn't need to make him do history or science or anything but math because he loved learning everything else and he could learn so much on the internet.

I did have him take a homeschool co-op writing composition class last year (7th grade year) because I wanted to make sure he learned to write well. The teacher let him type his work and he did really well in this class even though I had not really taught him much about language arts except for reading through the What Your X-grader Should Know books after we found one at a garage sale and he liked it. We are back to mostly unschooling again this year. He didn't want to take any classes this year because the brace he wears now is what they call "more aggressive" which means more painful. At home he can work around the pain and learning actually takes his mind off of it.

Math has been difficult because of the dysgraphia but recently I found that he learns better if I let him learn it on his own and do the problems on IXL and show me how he does it which is sometimes different from the way I learned because handwriting was not a problem for me. He found that if he used the Mac he could use the calculator and it automatically entered information on a notepad and this somehow helped enough that he didn't have to do as much writing to get the answers so he wasn't as frustrated about doing math but I am not sure if this would be considered unschooling because I make him do a certain amount of math but I let him figure out how to do it on his own. He teaches himself and he is able to do it quickly and accurately (IXL takes away points if you make mistakes) and it just works for him for now.