What Is Unschoooling?

I know you guys are probably like me, wondering what the heck unschooling is. Well let me brief you. ha ha.

Unschooling is a branch of home schooling, except without formal schooling. Unschooling teaches children by practical application instead or in addition to book studies. The children that my sister and I home school are ages 4 years to 9 years old. They do not do book studies at all.

They play games to learn what they need to learn such as math: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. English: reading, grammar, rules, spelling, sounds and phonics. The games are educational that they play every day and are called The Phonics Game for English and The Phonics math game too. In addition to those games our kids play Yahtzee- for their math and writing skills, boggle- for their spelling and writing, monopoly jr- for money learning, scrabble jr- for spelling, 'smath for more math and a few others.

In addition to all the games we were blessed enough by our mom's work Red Noland Cadillac with a cash register. They pay for their lunches with play money and each day one of the children takes turns being the "lunch lady." The children read to each other each day from a story of their own choice and help each other when they get stuck. They have learned that family, above all is essential.

The kids also have a ton of gym class, being that we live on 5 acres joined to our mom and dad's 5 acres. They have bikes, go carts, a monster sized trampoline, a two mile block to walk or ride around and my hubby is going to get them a 4 wheeler. Not to mention that we have dinner once a week at our mom and dad's and church once a week as well. We have gardens in front of our house as well as a larger one down at mom and dad's. It would be a miracle if our kids didn't go down to Mom and Dad's more than once a day. They are always down there.

Our kids do 3-4 hours a day of "school" and spend the rest of most of their days outside.

That, in a nutshell, is unschooling. We have our children enrolled in a private school so that we are not obligated by the state to get our children tested in conventional ways. With that said, you would be astounded by the amount of learning our children have undergone from taking them out of public school and unschooling them. It is an absolute miracle, but when you take the obligation of attending school, opening and reading worthless books, spending countless hours repeating the same boring information and replace it with an easy atmosphere, where a child's natural desire to learn and play go hand in hand, the children thrive.