Unschooling? As in, they don't go to school?
I have loved all the 'back to school' pictures that have dominated my social media feed the past weeks. Eager children with shiny new backpacks filled with healthy snacks, brand new pencils and lots of motivation. Happy smiles and new beginnings everywhere. Most of the kids who were born around the time Sophie was born featured too and are in school now. Seeing that definitely made me re-evaluate the choices that we have made around her and her sister's education. In this blog I will talk about education and what we have decided on. The next blog is more practical as I will explain how we do 'school'.
"The life that you have must be so nice for kids, but where do they go to school?"
One of the most common questions that I need to answer both on social media as well as to people that we meet is the one about the education of our children. "The freedom to play all day is so nice, but how do you make sure that they will be at the right level once they go to school?"
The more I observe Sophie and Doris and watch them learn and grow, the more I am convinced that we don't need a special curriculum, many educational toys or a trained teacher to prepare them for 'real school'. What we do need is time, an inquisitive mind and Hartmut and me being available to answer and ask questions that will guide them through the process of learning.
One of the things we had to make a decision about when we decided to move here was about education. There is a small nursery school here in the village but, unfortunately, the main thing that the kids learn there is sitting still and parroting the teacher. I looked up different curriculums for preschools to start formal home schooling but for most of them you needed many materials that I knew would be unavailable for us or access to internet which was another problem. In my search I read about many theories for education and what that appealed a lot to me was the one called 'unschooling'. I don't like the name because it sounds as if you don't do school but all it really means is that our girls don't learn through school but from their own interests and daily life. Some days that means that all the girls do is cutting, drawing and glueing -practicing their fine motor skills because that's what they want to learn- while on other days we make worksheets for letters or talk about snakes, dinosaurs, building bridges or our solar system. It's usually something that happened that sparks their curiosity and out of that we all learn.
Kids are naturally inquisitive and will learn if they are put in the right environment. We really believe that, for now, it's more important how they learn than what they learn. We want to foster a love for learning, grow curious minds and equip them with strategies that will help the girls to find, assess and apply information and for that to work best you don't force feed them the information that a curriculum prescribes for that day, but go with the things they are naturally interested in.
With learning through life and the things they want to know about, they experience that learning is relevant and meaningful and it is amazing to see how many learning moments we can have in a day if you start to be aware about it.
School often teaches things that a child can do already or is not quite ready for as it is impossible to have 25 kids that are ripe for the exact same information at the exact same time. This sends a signal that learning is either unnessecary and boring or too difficult and really hard, either way it's not fun.
My favourite thing about unschooling is that we can tailor learning to the exact needs, likes and interests of our girls as they are the directors of learning. However, it doesn't mean that their wants and interests are at the centre of our universe and that we will drop whatever we are doing to cater to their needs. The learning and playing (which is actually the same thing if you ask me) still have to fit in our daily life and all the things we need to do to manage the lodge. And that is not a bad thing as it teaches the girls patience, and the fact that not everything revolves around them. Making learning happen requires creativity and patience from us and from them.
Children learn most, and best, when they can learn at their own pace. In school there are many set blocks of time for each activity and it is very possible that a child has done all the learning that that activity had for that child after 5 minutes or, that the real learning would only happen after an hour, long after the activity was forcefully finished and packed up to move on to the next. The first child will be very bored (I remember many hours of staring out of the window or tending to my woodlouse that I secretly kept in the drawer of my desk because I was done but the rest of the class wasn't) while for the second child the activity was just that; an activity to keep him busy but not one to learn from. We don't have time tables or schedules, the girls can take as long or as short as they need to learn which sometimes means that a worksheet that took an hour to draw (no electricity=no printer) is finished in two minutes while other days they (especially Sophie) is engrossed for hours with a map book and her compass.
What it all boils down to is that a love for learning is at the heart. I believe that it is much more important to know how to learn and derive information from a source and to know how to filter and assess corectness than what you learn. You can look up when Napoleon died and what the capital of Japan is but if you have never learned to love learning, you might never ask yourself that question.
One of the things that kids enjoy in a (pre)school is interacting with other children and sometimes I wonder if our kids are missing out on that front. I am so grateful that the girls have each other. They are absolutely inseparable, stick up for each other, finish each other's sentences and giggle about their own inside jokes. We would have never moved this remote if we only had one child. But do kids really learn that much from other children? Somewhere (I wish I could quote the source but it was a good one) I read that kids up to the age of five learn more about social interaction from watching and interacting with adults than from each other and that makes complete sense to me. My friend told me a heartbreaking story about her three year old child who was being teased about her healthy lunch box by other kids in her class. The result of this was that her daughter felt insecure about herself and did not want to eat at school anymore unless her mother gave her the same things as the other kids had. It made my friend doubt if school was the right place for her child or if teasing like that is just part of growing up. I am happy that my girls don't get all those social pressures yet, that they can explore who they are and what they want to do without all those voices telling them how they should dress, what they should eat and how they must behave. They will have the rest of their lifes to conform the social and cultural expectations and worry about their image. For now I don't think they miss out on interacting with other kids but that will probably change in the future which is one of the reasons that we won't live here forever.
Unschooling is certainly not the only way to learn, or even the best way to learn. There is no school or method that can cater for every child and the lifestyle of every family during all the stages of a childhood. At some point our girls will go to a formal school. What they want to learn now is still within the realm of what I know but guiding the girls through gaining knowledge about mathematics or grammer feels overwhelming and I don't think I am up for that. But for now it works. It teaches us all an attitude towards learning that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives.
In the next blog I will write more practically about what we learn, what we use to learn and how it works. If you want to learn more, I can recommend the following article: "Wheatley, K. F. (2009). Unschooling: A growing oasis for development and democracy". Please Google it, internet is too slow for me to post a link.)
"The life that you have must be so nice for kids, but where do they go to school?"
One of the most common questions that I need to answer both on social media as well as to people that we meet is the one about the education of our children. "The freedom to play all day is so nice, but how do you make sure that they will be at the right level once they go to school?"
The more I observe Sophie and Doris and watch them learn and grow, the more I am convinced that we don't need a special curriculum, many educational toys or a trained teacher to prepare them for 'real school'. What we do need is time, an inquisitive mind and Hartmut and me being available to answer and ask questions that will guide them through the process of learning.
One of the things we had to make a decision about when we decided to move here was about education. There is a small nursery school here in the village but, unfortunately, the main thing that the kids learn there is sitting still and parroting the teacher. I looked up different curriculums for preschools to start formal home schooling but for most of them you needed many materials that I knew would be unavailable for us or access to internet which was another problem. In my search I read about many theories for education and what that appealed a lot to me was the one called 'unschooling'. I don't like the name because it sounds as if you don't do school but all it really means is that our girls don't learn through school but from their own interests and daily life. Some days that means that all the girls do is cutting, drawing and glueing -practicing their fine motor skills because that's what they want to learn- while on other days we make worksheets for letters or talk about snakes, dinosaurs, building bridges or our solar system. It's usually something that happened that sparks their curiosity and out of that we all learn.
Kids are naturally inquisitive and will learn if they are put in the right environment. We really believe that, for now, it's more important how they learn than what they learn. We want to foster a love for learning, grow curious minds and equip them with strategies that will help the girls to find, assess and apply information and for that to work best you don't force feed them the information that a curriculum prescribes for that day, but go with the things they are naturally interested in.
With learning through life and the things they want to know about, they experience that learning is relevant and meaningful and it is amazing to see how many learning moments we can have in a day if you start to be aware about it.
School often teaches things that a child can do already or is not quite ready for as it is impossible to have 25 kids that are ripe for the exact same information at the exact same time. This sends a signal that learning is either unnessecary and boring or too difficult and really hard, either way it's not fun.
My favourite thing about unschooling is that we can tailor learning to the exact needs, likes and interests of our girls as they are the directors of learning. However, it doesn't mean that their wants and interests are at the centre of our universe and that we will drop whatever we are doing to cater to their needs. The learning and playing (which is actually the same thing if you ask me) still have to fit in our daily life and all the things we need to do to manage the lodge. And that is not a bad thing as it teaches the girls patience, and the fact that not everything revolves around them. Making learning happen requires creativity and patience from us and from them.
Children learn most, and best, when they can learn at their own pace. In school there are many set blocks of time for each activity and it is very possible that a child has done all the learning that that activity had for that child after 5 minutes or, that the real learning would only happen after an hour, long after the activity was forcefully finished and packed up to move on to the next. The first child will be very bored (I remember many hours of staring out of the window or tending to my woodlouse that I secretly kept in the drawer of my desk because I was done but the rest of the class wasn't) while for the second child the activity was just that; an activity to keep him busy but not one to learn from. We don't have time tables or schedules, the girls can take as long or as short as they need to learn which sometimes means that a worksheet that took an hour to draw (no electricity=no printer) is finished in two minutes while other days they (especially Sophie) is engrossed for hours with a map book and her compass.
What it all boils down to is that a love for learning is at the heart. I believe that it is much more important to know how to learn and derive information from a source and to know how to filter and assess corectness than what you learn. You can look up when Napoleon died and what the capital of Japan is but if you have never learned to love learning, you might never ask yourself that question.
One of the things that kids enjoy in a (pre)school is interacting with other children and sometimes I wonder if our kids are missing out on that front. I am so grateful that the girls have each other. They are absolutely inseparable, stick up for each other, finish each other's sentences and giggle about their own inside jokes. We would have never moved this remote if we only had one child. But do kids really learn that much from other children? Somewhere (I wish I could quote the source but it was a good one) I read that kids up to the age of five learn more about social interaction from watching and interacting with adults than from each other and that makes complete sense to me. My friend told me a heartbreaking story about her three year old child who was being teased about her healthy lunch box by other kids in her class. The result of this was that her daughter felt insecure about herself and did not want to eat at school anymore unless her mother gave her the same things as the other kids had. It made my friend doubt if school was the right place for her child or if teasing like that is just part of growing up. I am happy that my girls don't get all those social pressures yet, that they can explore who they are and what they want to do without all those voices telling them how they should dress, what they should eat and how they must behave. They will have the rest of their lifes to conform the social and cultural expectations and worry about their image. For now I don't think they miss out on interacting with other kids but that will probably change in the future which is one of the reasons that we won't live here forever.
Unschooling is certainly not the only way to learn, or even the best way to learn. There is no school or method that can cater for every child and the lifestyle of every family during all the stages of a childhood. At some point our girls will go to a formal school. What they want to learn now is still within the realm of what I know but guiding the girls through gaining knowledge about mathematics or grammer feels overwhelming and I don't think I am up for that. But for now it works. It teaches us all an attitude towards learning that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives.
In the next blog I will write more practically about what we learn, what we use to learn and how it works. If you want to learn more, I can recommend the following article: "Wheatley, K. F. (2009). Unschooling: A growing oasis for development and democracy". Please Google it, internet is too slow for me to post a link.)
