Transitioning from homeschool to unschool

Beverley Paine, May 2024

I'd transition from homeschooling to unschooling gently if that's possible. Most of us are thoroughly conditioned to recognise what happens in classrooms as 'education' and 'learning' and to give all that up at once can be just as stressful as trying to do it...

I'd have spats where we would focus on doing some schooly stuff, working through a few pages in the year level workbooks, doing a traditional project (unit study), get real crafty or do some structured art or science.

This would usually be precipitated by my fear that we weren't doing enough, or wouldn't be approved for home ed renewal, or worrying that I wasn't good enough, especially if I'd been hanging out with people who were full on school-at-homers, or brilliant unschoolers, or friends who were still teaching in school, or impending visits from relatives, etc...
What I did was use the 'products' of these days and weeks as our 'samples' of how learning looks at our place, and over time it became obvious to me that even though the kids hadn't done much, if any, schooly type stuff in between things like their handwriting, punctuation, sentence structure, ability to calculate, etc had all improved. That got me thinking about how the kids were learning how to do it without the massive amounts of practice that kids in classrooms have to do.

I realised that kids learn in much the same way us adults do - by talking, watching, listening, doing, having a go (usually on our own until we feel relatively competent). We challenge ourselves to learn things we don't know how to do either driven by need or interest and we usually do it in a way that works for us, modifying methods or resources to suit. We observe others doing the same thing - either in person, or from reading about them, listening to podcasts or lectures, or watching how to videos.

I think it helps learning a bit about learning styles and preferences - I've written an e-book about how to tune into how your child learns (taken from my AHS presentation a couple of years ago).

We need to tread carefully when using a unit study or interest led approach to homeschooling with some children because the drive for autonomy is really strong and if we feel any kind of expectation that we must or should do something or learn something or be interested in something, that could be a real turn off.

Also, it helps to abandon our prejudices about what constitutes valuable learning - if our child is deep into Pokemon then Pokemon is where the learning is happening, and it can be difficult us to connect with that to work out what information and skills the child is naturally attaining.

Kids need to feel a sense of ownership about their learning, they don't want it taken over for the sake of 'education'. So if you do want to do a project (to help feel less lost with the whole homeschooling/unschooling thing pick a topic that the child has a passing or mild interest in. Strew activities and resources related to that. This includes initiating conversations, sharing interesting news items, perhaps visiting places or playing games related to that topic or skill.

The rest is translating what the child is doing into edu-speak - a skill I learned by reading the curriculum and translating it into everyday language (a difficult and challenging task at first!) But you don't have to do that now because AI does it for you. Learning Corner or even ChatGPT will answer questions - in detail - such as "what are the NSW syllabus outcomes when my child is playing Minecraft".