Homeschool Monday – Adding a Bit More Un- to our Schooling

Right up front I want to admit that I’m not the biggest fan of school-at-home curricula. While Seton and Kolbe work well for many families, one look at those jam packed school schedules makes me break out in hives. Which means that for most of my 13 years homeschooling, I’ve written my own curricula.

Our usual school style hits all the requirements like math, grammar, and writing. We have text books and work books for those, and make it to the ends of them most years. For things like science and history, we follow a spine (textbook) and add in lots of planned activities along the way. We thrive in an educational environment that blends worksheets, discussions, and hands on activities. I make up syllabi every month, and we accomplish most of the things on that list.

Then we got to this year with its drama of sickness, appointments, and consultations; and I just knew that there was no way I could be the mastermind in charge of writing a year’s worth of studies for the four children still learning at home. I needed, for this one year at least, to let someone else be the brains behind this whole operation. Which meant that I started researching curriculum providers and praying.

I asked God again and again to show me what to do, but the more I read through the various lesson plans, the more stressed I became. I finally broke down and cried one night. I knew beyond a doubt that I couldn’t make these schedules work with the appointments we had to get to every week. I faced up to the fact that I needed to put them all in school.

The more I tried to resign myself to that idea, the more problems I saw with it. For instance, there was no way for Ella to  miss as many hours as she’d need to in order to see physical therapists, specialists, sub-specialists, etc without hitting the magic number that would mean an automatic summons to truancy court. We were a slam dunk for getting it excused, but it was just another layer of hassle that I didn’t need.

The longer I looked for a way to regiment our education along someone else’s schedule, the more convinced I became that I was running in the wrong direction. What we needed was not more to do, but less. We needed to become semi-unschoolers. We needed to lay aside schedules and charts, and embrace a more fluid conversational/explorational (is explorational a word?) style of education.

For the first time in years, I was scared by the direction we were taking. This was truly uncharted territory for me. Armed with only our math and religion texts, and the beginnings of a family tree, we began our unscripted school year earlier this month.

So far, it is going surprisingly well.

With our backwards history lessons as our guide, we have covered 9/11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, the bus boycotts, and are now heavily into World War II. We’ve read literature and interviewed family members about what they remember. My mother spoke movingly about seeing the Kennedy assassination on TV, and about the first day she saw a black child at her school. We’ve learned about the bombing missions run by one great-grandfather, and how another liberated a concentration camp.

All month, I’ve listened as my children really began to dig deeply into the history of both our family and the world. They cried when Anne Frank’s diary abruptly ended, and cheered when they saw Neil Armstrong on the moon. They thought Elvis’s dancing was weird, and that The Beatles needed haircuts. They began thinking about history as the stories of actual people.

Since the beginning of September, they’ve begun a giant timeline overlapping their ancestors’ lifespans with important events in human history (like the invention of automobiles and M&M’s), and been amazed at how much things can change during one man’s life.

The lesson we never expected to learn from all of this was how much they could learn if I let them take the lead. They ask all the questions they can imagine, and then go hunting for the answers. And while I still have to be there to guide them and keep them on task, this year has become about so much more than it would have been before we started to add a little more un- to our schooling.