Unschooling adventures

Since the holidays, my husband and I have made the decision that "typical" homeschooling was just not the answer for our 2e child. After lots of research and soul searching we realized that we have been unschooling him pretty much since birth...we just didn't know there was a name for it.

Unschoolers believe, "that the use of standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child. Instead, unschoolers typically allow children to learn through their natural life experiences, including game play, household responsibilities, and social interaction.....Unschoolers often claim that learning any specific subject is less important than learning how to learn..."

We have been facilitating his interests and explorations since birth and unschooling is the perfect match for his gifted/2e issues....so we are officially an unschooling family. He has explored and learned about topics that most kids don't touch on until the upper grades or later - binary numbers, dwarf planet criteria, weather systems. In our explorations we are hitting all the major subject areas of reading, math, history, science and even go into art and music among other areas. He just isn't sitting and doing a workbook and sit down lesson that usually separates all of these subjects out into boring capsules. He is learning real time situations where you can use specific math facts in order to help solve a problem instead of looking at useless math problems stuck in a workbook.

He really loves to play boardgames....but not the typical boardgames that 6 year olds like...his favorite is Monopoly and I think we have 3 different versions of it and he is RUTHLESS when he plays. So the other day, out of the blue he told me that he wanted to make his own monopoly game. He asked me to help with the writing and coloring and that he would come up with everything else. I believe we are the only people on the planet who have a Monopoly game that has a space for a Tickle Factory
and an Invisible Factory! For almost 2 hours, we worked together as he designed his own gameboard (complete with his own street names) and then came up with the costs for each property and their rents and then we proceeded to play his Monopoly game. He was SO incredibly proud of his accomplishment. So he followed his interest and in doing so he learned math, reading, writing, and art....and of course he beat me by a mile!

"You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself." -Galileo