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Roxanne identifies their schooling as extreme unschooling.

 Yeah, what else can I tell ya? We unschool – extremely…I don’t plan things for them to do or try to push them too hard in any direction.

Unschooling, by most definitions, would not include a structured curriculum, or even an unstructured one. Roxanne’s strategy of not planning things for her boys or even pushing them towards something she thinks is important reflects an unschooling philosophy. She’s not building a curriculum of things that are important to her and adjusting it for her children’s interests like many other homeschoolers.

Roxanne has both shared her distrust of the educational authorities in Harrisburg and she has explained why she and her boys believe that most textbooks are outdated before they are even published. Roxanne reports Luke saying,

People who are often writing textbooks don’t know the subject they are writing about. They are basically anybody with a college degree, gets hired on a temporary basis to put this stuff together, they may or may not have any clue about the subject, and that’s how textbooks get so stupid. The thing too though, is he also knows that anything that has been printed out is already old news…If you’ve had time to make a textbook on it, it’s too late man, unless it’s on Ancient Rome.

Such beliefs could fuel an approach to learning that discards both textbooks and learning strategies such as Common Core. Therefore, the carefully arranged and balanced curricula used by schools would find no place in an unschooling home. Roxanne’s home is like that. Below she describes different ways that her boys learn.

First of all, when John comes home for dinner the question “What did you learn at school today?” is never asked. Instead Roxanne reports far-ranging conversations that astonish her. She is usually surprised at the things her sons are interested in and have learned.

There’s constant conversation instigated by the kids about everything from world politics, the history of Rome, the Mormon faith. I mean they stun me with the vast amounts of things that interest them and how they pick it up and remember huge amounts of information and can verbally dance circles around anybody.

She explains how their learning is like following threads of information. She tells a story about how Luke learns about foxes,

They’ll read a story about foxes. Luke will start looking into more about foxes, more about domesticating foxes, how they domesticate foxes, why they domesticate foxes, what are the problems with it, what could be the benefits. Then that might make him look up another animal that was bred to become different than it was…  So, it’s like this “following threads” that take them all over the place.

 Another way their threads work is Everett wanted to read Dracula because he could tell that a lot of things he had seen were spoofs of Dracula, so he felt that everything would be better if he understood Dracula. So, he read Dracula. And then he read Frankenstein, cause he’s like well obviously you gotta read Frankenstein or you’re not gonna get it. So, the things that motivate them take them to places that I wouldn’t expect.

One of their computers broke and when it was taken to be repaired Everett paid close attention.

Our computer broke. We went to the computer store…Everything the guy did to try and retrieve the data, Everett was watching and saying, what does that keystroke do? What does that key stroke do? What are you doing now? Do you mind if I ask you everything you’re doing…and the next morning Everett said, Well I stayed up till about four or five and I really looked, and I found about 10 ways we might have been able to retrieve the data, but I don’t think any of them are going to work in this situation?

 Roxanne believes when you don’t have to get up and go to school every morning and you’re not bogged down with learning things, like a language, that you will never use, that you can specialize and become good at things you are interested in.

 Video games are also important vehicles for learning.

I would say as far as what we actually use, video games are one or our most important ways of learning, and ways of expressing what they learn. An example being the game Civilization.

 Adopting an unschooling approach to learning fosters different attitudes and behaviors. Many homeschoolers set up their learning experiences in ways similar to school. They begin school at a certain time, walk through lessons prescribed by bought curriculums or home built ones, and end school at a certain time. The closer one adheres to an unschooling approach the difference seen between schooling and life diminishes; the accepted philosophy becomes that children learn all the time. Roxanne explains how she reports the ‘’days her kids have gone to school.”

Once a year, I have to turn in a portfolio, that has a calendar that shows they went to school a hundred and eighty days…which is malarkey. So, I look at the school calendar and x off all the days they would have gone to school. There is no on or off for us. They are always learning.

 My experiences homeschooling led me to much the conclusion that Roxanne arrived at. Children start off so curious and are such good learners when following their nose. I love the idea of life-long learners, and that we can learn about all kinds of things all the time. These ideas came to me as an adult and fed not only my thoughts and ideas about my children’s learning, but my own behaviors as an adult and my attitudes towards learning.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Traditional school learning is very driven by curriculum. I taught 4^th grade for eleven years and curriculum played a critical role in organizing and directing learning. So, in alternative educational situations, what role does curriculum play?

 J: Do you have a bought curriculum you use?

M: I don’t.

While Meghan says she doesn’t have a bought curriculum, meaning an overarching curriculum that dictates learning in all subjects, she does rely on a great variety of textbooks, reading programs, and classes both online and live. Among the homeschooling families I interviewed the role played by curriculum stretches from absolutely no curriculum at all to using a bought curriculum complete with texts, teacher manuals, CDs, lessons, assignments, grades etc.

The way Meghan organizes and directs the learning of her children is typical of many families in my study. Meghan uses a parent-built approach putting in what is important to parents, but able to be very flexible, creating individualized approaches for each child, depending on what they want and need.

Obviously, we set what they’re going to be learning and which years and whatever…

We kind of vary. I switch it up, year to year, based upon the kid and what I think that they would really be interested in learning.

 My fourth and second graders are doing science together. My older ones take advantage of some online classes…once a week a live class, and then they have their assignments the rest of the week.

In math, Meghan has found a program she likes,

I’ve done that the first seven years, and every year all I have to do is buy new math workbooks. But I have the teacher books, and I have the DVDs.

 In writing, however, they don’t use any curriculum. Writing is really her husband’s bailiwick and he is in charge and is very creative in his approach,

He’s a very outside the box thinker. His strength is writing. He loves writing so he just comes up with these off the wall projects…and he’ll incorporate history into them and you know all kinds of stuff…he’ll just tell them now this is the scope, and he’ll just go through several lessons of sitting down with them and going through it…in the end it’s amazing.

Meghan and her husband believe that communication is key in life, both speech and writing.

Speaking, writing, those are key in life. They open gateways. They open doors. They speak volumes.

They have used Landry Academy as a resource. It offers online courses at very reasonable prices, and Greg, their oldest, became very interested in the debate club opportunities. Public speaking is critical to communication and their children have been involved in a homeschool group where they give speeches.

While many parents don’t have the background and training of traditional teachers, they do have the benefit of a very small class size, knowing their ‘students’ very intimately, and being able to be as flexible as they need to. One example of their flexibility was when their second child seemed to be struggling. Academics came easily to their oldest child, but they sensed problems with their second child.

M: I mean the subjects have to get covered. But if we sense we’re losing like Gary last year. He’s very different from Greg, he’s a struggling learner. Somehow, he doesn’t process the way the average person processes information. So, his seventh-grade year we had to step back. Bruce told me, I sense problems here.  Gary didn’t have a free year, he had a repeating kind of year, where we just went over the same math concepts. Bruce worked with him on writing structure a bit more. He wrote essays on topics he liked. In history we made sure he chose something he really liked.

 J: And did that work for him?

 M: Yeah, oh yeah!!.  And he came back this year…he was just like a different person.

Bruce and Meghan felt like it was an answer to prayer.

Bruce and Meghan have many children and they have had a lot of practice planning what will happen each year in their homeschool. All their children have been homeschooled from beginning to end. In another post I will discuss their ideas of success and how their children have fared with this approach.

 

 

Photo by Thomas Young on Unsplash

Curriculum plays a varied and interesting role in Janna’s homeschooling story. When Janna began homeschooling her girls, she immediately purchased a structured online curriculum, Time for Learning.

It’s an online curriculum, but it’s private pay. It’s not through a Cyber School or anything like that. We did that the first year because I was worried about keeping track of everything too…It’s a full curriculum.

 I wanted something we could just use out of box, ‘out of computer’ [laughter]… I wasn’t really sure where Sacha was in terms of, I feel like she maybe wasn’t exactly at second grade, like maybe there were things that she needed to catch up on and also some things that maybe she was above…Their [Time for Learning] bill is that the curriculum adjusts for where you are. So, if you’re doing something on the computer and you’re making a lot of mistakes, then it will just automatically back you up.

Here she comments on the preponderance of religious curriculums.

The thing I liked about it, well it’s secular, which is a big thing for us; we are not homeschooling because of religious reasons, and we’re not a religious family. So that eliminates a bunch of homeschooling curriculum…We weeded out a lot, because I didn’t want to, I mean I know some people will just skip those parts or whatever, but I just didn’t want to be picking and choosing.

While Janna and her daughters loved the program, as the school year progressed their use of the program slowly diminished. They began doing their own writing and reading and math and didn’t need the curriculum. Their learning became more organic.

We loved it (online curriculum). We really did. The kids loved it. I loved it. It keeps track of everything for you and tells you exactly what they have done and haven’t done and so it’s like easy-peasy at the end of the year. And we probably would have continued with it, there wasn’t anything really negative about it. But I just decided that we, I, didn’t really need that anymore. We were using it less and less because we were doing other stuff more. We were doing more writing on our own. We were doing more reading on our own. We were doing more math stuff on our own, and I just decided I didn’t need it any more.

 Actually, we were talking this year about going back to it just for the math component, cause the kids really liked the math component on it, but it’s expensive to pay for the whole thing just to do math.

 So, yeah, it was really more that, that I just decided I wanted to be more interactive with them. And I was more comfortable, like I wasn’t as worried about the rubric anymore, about checking the boxes and I think I settled down and got more comfortable.

 Janna became less reliant on someone else telling her what her kids needed to learn and also, she wanted to be more personally involved in the homeschooling experience. However, she did target certain skills and subjects they were interested in and accessed or purchased certain programs, like Brave Writer for language arts and writing.

Love it (Brave Writer). It can be online, or it can be boxed. I just boxed it. I love it. I’m the kind, you know, I wrote a lot in school. I read a lot. I’m all about the reading and writing. And I just love the whole thing, and I really wanted us to do it because the spine of it is sharing books together and then doing some like copy work and short writing on the books. I just really loved the framework.

 I realized that nobody was going to come and tell me that my kids weren’t learning enough. After I got over kind of all of that, I realized that that’s like the beauty of all of this. And that’s like why we keep homeschooling is that it’s super fun. I mean I get to do all this cool stuff. Like history, I never was a history person really. I never really got a good grasp of it…Read all this stuff, learn all this stuff, all is fitting together in a way it didn’t fit together for me before.

The second year of homeschooling began.

At the beginning of the year… we did kind of what we’ve always done. Which is we do a little bit of everything. We do some book work, umm more math, writing, book work. They both had their classes that they took. Ruby is my science kid, so she took Franklin classes, Wagner institute classes. She does a science nature class at Aubrey down the road. That’s why we come here. And Sacha was doing art and that kind of stuff.

 Then Janna was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had surgery and was often sick from the treatment. What to do with the children? Janna’s father suggested that the girls go back to school because Janna was often unable to help them. Janna wanted to have them close by and they wanted to be with their mother.

In the spring I worried more about them having something. Not because I was worried about them academically. I always feel like you can catch up with that stuff. But I wanted them to have something that they could do in the house when I wasn’t feeling well. So, I signed them both up for Time for Learning (Online curriculum they used when they first started homeschooling.)

We used bits and pieces when they are wanting to do something and I’m not available. But for the spring it was really useful because that’s exactly what it is, especially for Ruby, she really had times when she needed … to have structure, wanting to learn things. I wasn’t as available, and it really was useful for us…so I’d get annoyed with why am I paying thirty bucks?!? But that’s how it changed in the spring. We definitely relied on it more. They used it more, and I think they did get a lot out of it.

Janna also used Khan Academy; it was a good fit for Ruby and it was free. Ruby was particularly interested in computer science and coding. She taught herself JavaScript through Khan Academy. Janna explained, “I mean I’m involved. I know that she’s doing it, but she knows more than I do at this point.”

Having her kids learn at home captured Janna’s imagination and pull her into a new way of life. She thrived on new ideas and wanted to be involved in family learning.

One of my homeschooling friends talks about strewing materials, and strewing ideas, and I just love it, like it gives me this little mental image, and I just love that idea…throw a bunch of stuff around, see what we love, what we don’t like, what’s interesting. What works? What doesn’t work? Oh, we tried to learn some math this way. That didn’t really work. Let’s try to learn something this way. I don’t know? But I just love that idea, like this whole different curriculum.

Once Janna was recovered from her cancer and life seemed to settle a little, Sacha learned about a new opportunity – a brick and mortar fine arts academy that combined with doing regular schooling through Cyber School. She quickly prepared an audition at the end of the summer and was accepted. Now life involved taking Sacha ‘to school’ two days a week, and then Sacha labored through Cyber School three days a week while Janna and Ruby carried on with their own particular brand of homeschooling. Sacha loved the fine arts brick and mortar classes.

There’s a theme for the year, they do all things art around that theme. Last year it was Women and Arts. So, they did dance, they did music, they did history, they did live performances, they did all kinds of stuff, awesome.

The Cyber School was very trying. Sacha found it to be very challenging and time-consuming. Even though they only did it for three days they were expected to complete five-days-worth of classes. The question of whether Sacha would continue in the program became moot because the family decided to move to New York because of dad’s job.

The family was challenged to build up their knowledge of a whole new state and environment in which to homeschool. The only curriculum reported to me after the move was that they use something called Build Your Library.

We’re using that as a kind of the frame, so I am changing some things. It purports itself to be an everything but math curriculum. It integrates history, literature, reading, writing, and history, and science. It integrates them together… It’s a five day a week curriculum to get through a year. And we don’t do curriculum five days a week, so I cut and paste.

I look forward to hearing from Janna each year. What new approach will they be trying this year?

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash