The Unschooling Handbook

A Great Book For Any Homeschooling Parent

            I have just started reading the book The Unschooling Handbook by Mary Griffith. I want to learn about the unschooling philosophy and methods. I feel it can really help me to understand how I can be the best teacher mom I can be and also allow the world and children to be the teacher.

Basically unschooling is a way to allow the child who is an individual the opportunity to learn what they love when they feel like learning it. Typically unschooling requires no special curriculum, testing and schedules. You simply live your life spend time with your children learn together, play together and just enjoying your life and family the education is a bonus.

The fact is you learn the best when you are into the subject you are learning and you can spend as much of your free time doing it as you like. A 10 year old unschooled child may love to learn about model air planes and he may love it so much that he spends many hours a day on the subject. He will build model air planes, read books about how they fly or how to build them from scratch. This will eventually lead to using math to measure wing spans, calculate speeds, etc..

A 13 year old unschooled girl may love baking and cooking so much that she reads about it, watches television programming about it, she may even cook and bake for the whole family most day of the week. This would also lead to math skills and much more who knows the child will lead their own mind. Education is not a problem because the child learns about the real world and all skills necessary to be a productive adult and then some!

I do like this concept and feel it is a key factor missing in education today, I would like to explore these ideas more and see how they can fit into my families home school experience.


The Unschooling Handbook