We teach children about giving consent over their bodies, and then force them into an education situation in which they have no consent over what happens to their minds. Then we become surprised when children push back. Children are not very vocal about disliking school, because they live in a world where school is on a pedestal. But that doesn’t mean that they are unhappy. Children react by their behaviour when school is not a good fit. When they are young, they act out in class. When older, they tune out in class. Finally, when they are old enough, they drop out. Yet, we still hold school a ..read more

One of the reasons I began unschooling was because I was homeschooling and diligently teaching my kids lessons that they didn’t remember the following week. After a few months, I questioned why I was wasting my time, voice, and energy planning activities, that were not “sticking.” Sure, I was checking off that I “covered” them on my homeschool facilitator’s outcome checklist, but the concepts were not in my children’s brains! Then I learned about how brains work. Young children’s brains prune connections all the time, to make room for more. Those connections that are not reinforced over years ..read more

Are homeschooled kids sheltered? No. Not at all. It is a question I hear all the time and it makes me roll my eyeballs. It is impossible to keep a child away from society their whole childhood. Kids are naturally curious and will seek out information, any way they can, made much more handy by the internet. Especially as teenagers, children want to learn about their world, and especially what is not in their world, and will actively obtain resources, information and education. When children have to go to a specific school building six hours a day, five days a week for twelve years of their life ..read more

“How will they learn the things they need to learn like Calculus?,” was a question posed to me the other day when I was explaining unschooling to a person at a BBQ. It was a good question, because we have a child who at the age of twenty, actually needed a mandatory high school Calculus course to pursue the university STEM program that he was interested in. He was the second child in our family of five that needed the course. Our child applied for a university program on March 1, and discovered this need in late February when he examined the program entrance requirements. It was a month too l ..read more

Let Kids Write Whenever They Want and Don’t Correct Them! Curriculum can be so darn intimidating! All those workbooks on grammar, sentence structure and punctuation seem to be calling on your guilt if you don’t buy them. Will unschooled kids learn grammar even if you don’t directly teach it? You bet! Are workbooks the best way to learn it? For most kids, a big NO! Kids learn to write by reading. We live in a world where children are exposed to language everywhere around them and see thousands of words and phrases every year. Kids see enough print in the course of their lives that they begin t ..read more

Can unschoolers go to college and university? Yes! They absolutely can if they want to. We have just attended our children’s fourth university convocation and now we have a Masters in the family. Our five children unschooled 8-12 years and received an excellent education by pursuing their interests, instead of attending institutional classroom schooling. Burnout, bullying, homework and lack of motivation is never a problem when children self-direct their primary and secondary education. Our family were unlimiters to screen time and we enjoyed all forms of learning whether it came from travel ..read more

“I will never let school interfere with my education.” -Mark Twain Definition: “School”  – an institution for educating children.  -Wikipedia.org Words matter in our society and the time has come where we all need to respect the uniqueness of parents teaching and their children learning in other environments apart from the institution we call “school.” Parents do not homeschool. They home educate. School is only one way to acquire an education. Home and community, and travel are other ways. Combining the term “school” with other forms of education such as “homeschool” is just plain ..read more

Home Education is Best Delivered to Young Children Through Interactive Activities Am I doing enough? That is the question I would ask myself and it’s the question many new and perspective home education parents worry about. They have experienced fighting with their kids to do school homework up to 3 hours a night and can’t imagine themselves fighting with their kids to do 6 hours of home-school work a day. Like many unschooling parents, we started off doing “school-at-home.” We tried to replicate the classroom in our home. We wanted to be sure to follow the grade-by-grade curriculum so that i ..read more

Children who are empowered to read what they want never lose reading skills over the summer Summer learning loss occurs only when kids are forced to absorb the system’s agenda and curriculum. Research shows that students regress and lose about one month of school instruction during a long summer holiday, and a study from Ohio State University found that test scores were no different for students on a year-round calendar. Year- round schools have only four weeks of summer vacation, and longer breaks during   the fall, Christmas, and spring holidays. (Cuthbertson, 2012) Reading compreh ..read more

Every homeschooler or unschooler parent has it happen to them. Their child wants to try out this mystery thing called “school.” My daughter wanted to try school in grades 3, 7, 9, 10 and 12. She went. I had to fight to get her in, but she registered. For a certain amount of time, she loved it. At 8 years old, she wanted to go to school so bad, that she got up on her own alarm, got dressed, made her sandwich, packed her backpack and came to my bedside (I was still sleeping) to nag me to drive her to school. What 8 year old does THAT? At the end of the period, or even partway through, school ha ..read more