unschooling

I am on a journey away from standards and objectives into true and actual learning that will change my childrens lives. The more reading and reasearch I do the more I realize that I will most likely lead my family on the adventure of unschooling. I don't feel like there is a time or place when kids need to learn a certain thing and I desire to fuel learning. We are currently homeschooling preschool and I am working on a routine and daily/weekly schedule that will work with our lives and our priorities for learning.

I researched many different curriculum including Sonlight and A Beka (and others that I can't remember the names of at this time). I feel the only *perfect for my family* curriculum is going to be the one I create for them. The reason for buying a curriculum is to have a foundation to start with. I attempted to start from scratch and found myself overwhelmed by the wealth of information I found. The need for a starting point prompted me to find a curriculum I could align most with and use it as a foundation to grow on.

With this in mind, I have purchased the Oak Meadow preschool curriculum and I am so glad I did. It included the two books Heart of Learning and Learning Processes. It is serving as a guide for me to plan my curriculum. Oak Meadow is a Waldorf-inspired curriculum. There are many aspects of Waldorf that are very in tune with the structure of our family. I am also choosing to glean the best of Montessori and Reggio-Emilia. We are running a life-based preschool where we are learning by doing. We have a weekly museum day where we go to a different museum with a group of friends to explore and increase our experience base.

I realize that this type of homeschooling is not for everyone. I am still working out the kinks. I am not a big advocate of preschool at all. I don't think we'll start any sort of traditional schooling until age 6. However, I feel the need to learn, and I am using preschool as the time to find :my: identity as a homeschooling mama. I think all the information and things that my kids will learn as we are on this journey will be beneficial, but I also think they could get it later in life and do not need to have it now.

My biggest motivator and reason for trying to find some structure to our schooling and learning who I am in my new role is because I do not want to look back and feel that I schooled Jacob at a lesser degree than the other children because he was the child I learned. I desire that as we learn together, he still gets a top notch education. This is also the reason we are creating a homeschool co-op group this fall so that he has other kids to interact and learn from. As our family grows and we create the life we desire for our kids, the younger kids will have the older siblings for interaction. I feel that even though Jacob is my firstborn, he deserves a :sibling: environment and we are creating that with a few of his peers who have temperaments that complement Jacob.

Welcome to my unschooling, life learning journey :)